Category: Technology

Here are a couple of videos from Google about privacy.   The first talks about how information collection can work and why it is done.  The second demos features in web history which make it a little less scary.  I wish the videos were a little more casual and less corporate, but they do demonstrate Google is working to ensure privacy and what features are available to you.

I’ve written about Facebook before – I think it’s a great site.  And its growth has been phenomenal!  Kudos to the team there.

But, there is no doubt that Facebook benefits from being trendy & cool.  Unfortunately, trendiness and coolness are things that easily wane.  What happens when all the teenagers move to BiterBook or the next social-platform of the day?

Certainly everyone remembers that 10 years ago, www.netscape.com was the #1 destination on the planet.  And of course we all remember how hot Friendster was.

Obviously, I have no idea where Facebook will be in 5 years.  But, for any valuation measured in billions, you’d be crazy to invest.  Unless they’ve got staggering revenues, the risk of never seeing Facebook, or any company built on short term trendiness, return that much is just too high.

It would be interesting to see if AOL generated more than $4.2B in profits from the Netscape acquisition.  I don’t know.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege to work with the fine folks at Rojo for a short bit of time.  They were interested in driving blog reading forward.  They were acquired by SixApart in Sept 2006.  Almost one year to the day later, Rojo’s CEO, Chris Alden, was promoted to the CEO spot at SixApart. 

Chris did great things at Rojo and I’m sure will be a positive force at SixApart too.

Zimbra was bought by Yahoo!

Yahoo! has bought other web-based email pioneers including Stata Labs (Bloomba) and Oddpost.

When you tell a friend a secret, you trust that they can responsibly own that information.   You know that your friend won’t give away your secret today, tomorrow, next year, or in 10 years.  You know this because you trust their character.  Character is not volatile-  you can generally count on it.

But, when you trust a company to hold your secrets, what are you relying on?  What is the character of a company that makes it worthy of your trust?  Unlike an individual, the character of a company can change over time.  CEOs come and go.  Economic success can wane.  Political pressures can ease or tighten.  Laws are written.  Public sentiment changes.  How can you know that the company you trust your password, profile, credit card number, email, contacts, etc will not change over time?  You can’t.

Online service providers (companies) are aggregators of secrets.  In order to pry a secret away from your trusted friend, the government would need it badly – they’d be specifically looking for you and talking to your friend.  This is costly and takes effort.  But, when large companies like Yahoo and MSN can hold lots of secrets, the desire by the government (or hackers) to tap into that pool of secrets is much much higher.  Worse, the executives that control the companies are not required to protect your information.  They don’t know you – and they never personally promised you anything.  Behind layers of legalese, EULAs, privacy policies and lawyers, they can reasonably justify that giving away your secrets was the right thing to do.  And the reasons for giving the information away may be based on laws that haven’t even been written yet.  Or laws written in countries you’ve never even traveled to.

Lastly, data never forgets.  Unlike your friend, who forgets, or can at least credibly say, “I don’t remember”, companies that collect data have no such fallback.  If it’s on a disk or a tape, anywhere, it cannot be ignored.  Ever.   If someone interrogated your friend, he could provide context about the secret which could significantly change the value of the secret.  But, when taking data from a company, context around that data may or may not be there.  Who will provide the context to explain your secrets?  Nobody.

I thought this was a funny article.  Worried about your stock price plummeting?  Change the ticker symbol so investors won’t know what to sell!

I upgraded to Vista about 2 weeks ago.  I had to, because uninstalling Visual Studio 2005 left my computer unusable.  It locked up the mouse and had to be periodically rebooted.

Vista is really great.  I wouldn’t recommend it for business yet, because its mostly frivolous glamour and glitz.  But, for home use, it is just awesome!

Here is my top-10 likes:

1) It boots twice as fast as XP.

2) It runs faster than XP.

3) The UI looks beautiful, even though I don’t have the fancy glass due to my cheap video card.

4) Hibernate actually works!

5) User switching is fast and painless; it finally works!

6) The built in search on the start menu really makes finding programs easy.

7) Multi-language packs (Vista Ultimate only) work well.  We switch between English and Japanese profiles easily.  No more needing to maintain two computers for this!

8) Chess Titans is cool

9) Built in parental controls are great.  Finally, I can actually monitor what the kids do, rather than just telling them I can.

10) The task manager has finally been updated to keep units in MB rather than KB.

As a testimony to how much I like Vista – consider this.  I’ve been using 2 monitors for a couple of years now.  I like 2 monitors.  But, Vista can’t grok my two NVidia cards.  It only can use one or the other.  So, despite being confined back into the world of the improverished single-screeners, I still like Vista.  I’m going to keep Vista and only curse Microsoft a couple of times when I buy my new video card (not NVidia).

I’ve been playing with Facebook a little this week.  I know, I’m very late on this.  The idea of social networks still gives me the shivers.  Putting your picture on the net?  You’d have to be an exhibitionist to do that, right?  I guess I was schooled in a different era.

Anyway, Facebook is actually pretty neat.  I’ve been surprised how with only 3-4 contacts of my own, just a little bit of activity has somehow brought me onto the radar for a number of people.  One is a fellow from college that I haven’t spoken to for over 10 years, another is a gal from high school that I haven’t spoken to for almost 20, and then there have been several other contacts from folks I know recently.  All in all, I have to say that Facebook made these connections quite effortless, professional, and even kinda cool.  I’m seriously considering posting a picture now.

But Facebook really kind of makes my jaw drop with it’s inefficiency.  The fact that Facebook (or myspace, I suppose) exist, is simply due to the complete and total failure of email. 

First, lets look at the inefficiency.  Each time someone sends me a message on Facebook, Facebook sends me an email.  The email looks something like:

Jennifer added you as a friend on Facebook.  We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, friends with Jennifer.

To confirm this friend request, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?reqs.php

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

___
Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to: http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Upon reading this nicely done email, you have to go login to a whole another system to see whats up with Jennifer, engage with Facebook, etc.  It all makes total sense except that Jennifer could have just sent me an email!

Unfortunately for SMTP again, email just isn’t cutting today’s communications.  Today we need:
– Photos (duh)
– Seamless integration with chat
– Public address books (e.g. friends)
– Security around public/private information
– Online/presence information
– This is a stupid list – its so obvious.

Ironically, what makes SMTP great is that its a fantastically distributed system, with no central database of email.  Its this same decentralized control which makes it completely impossible to upgrade and add features to.  So instead, a whole generation of techies are shifting their communications into a centralized, single-vendor repository.

This can’t go on forever – how many myspace, orkut, facebook, etc accounts are we going to have to maintain to connect with our various friends?  This stuff is going to interconnect sooner or later.  And you’ll probably be able to send and receive legacy email too.  Once it does – do we finally have a modern email solution?

Perhaps this is how we replace SMTP.

UPDATE:  I turned off all email notifications from facebook.  It’s just annoying to get an email which says, “you have email, click here, login, and spend 25 seconds reading it over here”, or “xxx jumped through a hoop, click here to see the picture”.  I don’t want to “click here”.  Send me email.