Stowe Boyd

iPhone at the turning point?

The same 24 hour period that has Mike Arrington swearing off iPhone has George Colony suggesting that the iPhone will be a Blackberry killer.

The technoweenie avant garde gripes about iPhone — based on spotty and inconsistent coverage from AT&T, flashless camera, Apple’s AppStore misdeeds, and lack of access to other VoIP solutions — are based on a comparison with a hypothetical device managed by illusory and benevolent organizations: the land of make believe. Colony simply compares the iPhone to Blackberry and makes the obvious conclusion: once they have the integration with Outlook/Exchange, that’s that:

[via George F. Colony’s Blog: The Counterintuitive CEO: Goodbye Blackberry]

If you’re the typical CEO, you are carrying a Blackberry. But not for long. Once the iPhone is able, in a corporate setting, to replicate all aspects of Outlook (email, calendar, notes, and tasks) with high security, the iPhone floodgates will open and you will have a new device. Here’s why:

1) User interface. Despite the annoyance of the glass keyboard, the iPhone interface is faster, more intuitive, more flexible, and more versatile. You can do more, with more content, less instruction, and faster speed.

2) Applications. iPhone has a massive head start in the battle for applications. It’s possible that your company already has an iPhone application in the market — servicing your customers. Don’t you wish you could see it? And there may already be applications available that will make your job easier — I predict that corporate dashboards for CEOs will be a small but influential segment of the iPhone apps portfolio. In some markets, it’s changing how customers connect to companies — here’s an example around mobile banking. The application revolution has begun — and it’s not on Blackberry.

3) iPhone will soon be available from more cell services providers — starting first in Europe. Once the device breaks out of its AT&T cage, the multiplier effect will kick in — and the flood waters will rise fast.

I agree with many of Arrington’s peeves, on the other hand:

[from I Quit The iPhone]

I have loved the iPhone, but now I am quitting the iPhone.

This is not an easy decision.

I was there in January 2007 when it was announced and I bought the first iPhone as soon as it was available. I happily bought the iPhone 3G a year later. I’ve proudly yelled “I Am A Member Of The Cult Of iPhone.” I’ve been an unabashed cheerleader for the device to all who’ll listen. And I’ve scoffed at developers who said they’d abandon the platform.

But I’m not going to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS. Instead, I’m abandoning the iPhone and AT&T. I will grudgingly pay the $175 AT&T termination fee and then I will move on to another device.

What finally put me over the edge? It wasn’t the routinely dropped calls, something you can only truly understand once you have owned an iPhone (and which drove my friend Om Malik to bail). I’ve lived with that for two years. It’s not the lack of AT&T coverage at home. I’ve lived with that for two years, too. It certainly isn’t the lack of a physical keyboard, that has never bothered me. No, what finally put me over the edge is the Google Voice debacle.

Arrington wants to take advantage of a long list of cool features built into Google Voice, and is pissed that Apple and AT&T are blocking the service on the phone. Arguably, Apple and AT&T could make the case that Google is potentially their worst nightmare — developing Android, and now Google Voice — is a direct run at the center of their phone strategies.

Mike wants to demote AT&T to being a ‘dumb pipe’ on which he will run Google VoIP services, and to turn the iPhone into ‘just another handset’. But Apple is trying to build a revolutionary mobile infrastructure in which iPhone is one major component, and not just selling handsets with ‘who cares what software’ running on it.

So Arrington is peeved that Apple and AT&T are resisting commoditization, and using all the powers at their command to do so. Mike says if Apple will coerce AT&T to support Google Voice, he will switch back to using the handset. Apple will not go down that road. They will open up to support more than one cell network, at some point, or maybe build their own, if they have to compete with Google. But I don’t think Mike will be switching back to iPhone anytime soon.

Meanwhile, millions of Blackberry users will sign up, cheerfully, and move into the 21st century.

Hootsuite has announced support for microsyntax to support the identity of individuals sharing the same Twitter account. They are calling the convention a ‘sig’, like ‘signature’, as in the email signatures that are in wide use.

The convention is simple: a user indicates their identity by using their initials at the end of a tweet, preceded by the carat character (‘^’). For example:

The quick brown fox didn’t jump ^SB

A company might list the various contributors to a corporate Twitter account on the Twitter profile’s bio field, so that others can associate a name with a ‘sig’.

As Hootsuite states in a post at their website:

Sigs are especially useful if multiple people tweet for a particular brand profile. They create organizational accountability and help manage workflow. A sig allows one to know who sent a tweet and when it was sent. Inclusion of sigs also values transparency, a high-value attribute on the Internet. Conversation becomes more natural when customers know who they’re talking to.

I completely agree.

And I guess that it is understandable that Hootsuite is reluctant to acknowledge that the ‘sig’ has been in wide use for some time, only called a ‘cotag’, since that older term is closely tied to the brand of CoTweet, Hootsuite’s direct competitor, the folks that originally proposed that useful convention.

We’ll have to see what name sticks for this useful bit of microsyntax. I bet that ‘sig’ will have more allure to the average Twitterhead, since ‘cotag’ doesn’t really suggest what it is for. But we’ll have to see.

However, I think that Hootsuite could have simply acknowledged that CoTweet had introduced a tremendously useful microsyntactic convention, which might be better called a ‘sig’, and that they were now supporting it. Oh, and by the way, it would be nice if you let us all know who, specifically, is the author of your blog posts. A great place for a sig, perhaps?

If you thought that the announcement of Barnes & Noble’s partnership with Plastic Logic might lead to a more benevolent alternative to Amazon, A look over the terms of use for the existing eReader (which works on my iPhone) suggests they retain much of the same rights that Amazon has.

For example, their control of digital media makes “ebooks” unlike books in that they can’t be loaned or sold:

[via Barnes&Noble.com Terms and Conditions of Use - Barnes&Noble.]

XII. DIGITAL CONTENT

Barnes & Noble.com offers Users the ability to purchase or download digital content, such as eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers, digital journals and other periodicals, blogs, and other digital content as determined by Barnes & Noble.com from time to time from and through the Barnes & Noble.com Site (individually and collectively, “Digital Content”). Barnes & Noble.com grants you a limited, nonexclusive, revocable license to access and make personal, non-commercial use of the Digital Content in accordance with these Terms of Use.

Users may generally browse, preview, or search Digital Content without having to purchase or download the Digital Content. In order to be able to download and/or purchase Digital Content, a User must first open a Barnes & Noble.com account; provide valid credit card information and the User’s billing address to Barnes & Noble.com; and install Barnes & Noble’s eReader software application (the “Barnes & Noble eReader Software”) onto their computer or electronic reading device(s). At the time of installation, Barnes & Noble grants User a non-exclusive, revocable license to download and make personal, non-commercial use of the Barnes & Noble eReader Software solely for the purpose of downloading, purchasing, accessing, reading and using Digital Content, all subject to the terms of the Barnes & Noble eReader Software End User License Agreement.

You must register your computer or electronic reading device(s) with Barnes & Noble.com prior to downloading any Digital Content. Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right to automatically update, modify and/or reinstall the Barnes & Noble eReader Software. The Barnes & Noble eReader Software is subject to restriction and/or revocation for security purposes or other purposes as determined by Barnes & Noble.com.

There may be separate end user license agreements you may need to accept in connection with specific hardware or software you may use to interact with the Barnes & Noble eReader Software. Your failure to accept and agree to the terms of those agreements may prevent, restrict and/or limit your ability to use the Barnes & Noble eReader Software.

Your purchased Digital Content will be stored in, or accessible from, your eBooks Library on the Barnes & Noble.com Site. You can access your eBooks Library by signing into your Barnes & Noble.com account. You may also transfer the Digital Content from your eBooks Library to other electronic devices that you own. You may not transfer the Digital Content from one electronic reading device to another without maintaining the applicable digital rights management solution for that Digital Content. You may not bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent any of the security features, special rules or other applications that protect the Digital Content.

Digital Content is only available for purchase by Users with a credit card that has a United States billing address. By opening a Barnes & Noble.com account for Digital Content, you represent and warrant to Barnes & Noble.com that you reside in the United States and that you are capable of entering a contract under the laws of the United States.

Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right to modify or discontinue the offering of any Digital Content at any time. If a unit of Digital Content becomes unavailable prior to download but after purchase, your sole and exclusive remedy is the refund of the purchase price paid for such Digital Content.

You may not (i) modify, alter, duplicate, reproduce, copy, distribute copies of, disassemble, reverse engineer, emulate, decompile, or tamper with the Barnes & Noble eReader Software or Digital Content; (ii) create derivative works from or of the Barnes & Noble eReader Software or Digital Content; (iii) bypass, modify, tamper, defeat or circumvent any of the security components, special rules or other applications that protect the Barnes & Noble eReader Software or Digital Content; (iv) use any robot, spider, data miner, crawler, scraper or other automated means to access or index the Digital Content or any portion thereof, including but not limited to any metadata associated with the Digital Content; or (v) rent, loan, lease, sublicense, transfer, network, reproduce, display, distribute, or otherwise make any of the Digital Content available to any third party.

And B&N attempt to force all users into dispute resolution and to block users’ rights to class action, which (as I explained in an earlier post today) does not stand up in today’s courts:

XVIII. DISPUTE RESOLUTION
Any claim or controversy at law or equity that arises out of the Terms of Use, the Barnes & Noble.com Site or any Barnes & Noble.com Service (each a “Claim”), shall be resolved through binding arbitration conducted by telephone, online or based solely upon written submissions where no in-person appearance is required. In such cases, the arbitration shall be administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules (including without limitation the Supplementary Procedures for Consumer-Related Disputes, if applicable), and judgment on the award rendered by the arbitrator(s) may be entered in any court having jurisdiction thereof.

Alternatively, at Barnes & Noble.com’s sole option, a Claim (including Claims for injunctive or other equitable relief) may be adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction located in New York County, New York.

Any Claim shall be arbitrated or litigated, as the case may be, on an individual basis and shall not be consolidated with any Claim of any other party whether through class action proceedings, class arbitration proceedings or otherwise.

You are solely responsible for your interactions with other Users. Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right, but has no obligation, to become involved in any way with disputes between you and other Users.

Each of the parties hereby knowingly, voluntarily and intentionally waives any right it may have to a trial by jury in respect of any litigation (including but not limited to any claims, counterclaims, cross-claims, or third party claims) arising out of, under or in connection with these Terms of Use. Further, each party hereto certifies that no representative or agent of either party has represented, expressly or otherwise, that such party would not in the event of such litigation, seek to enforce this waiver of right to jury trial provision. Each of the parties acknowledges that this section is a material inducement for the other party entering into these Terms of Use.

This is not a law blog, and I am no lawyer. However, the recent flap about Amazon’s dekindling of Orwell’s works led me to dig into the Kindle license agreement looking for loopholes.

I said at the time that Amazon was headed for court:

So, a close reading by a law-savvy lay person suggests that Amazon never stated that it had the rights to dekindle books or other materials once legally purchased or acquired through a subscription. In fact, Amazon never mentions that dekindling is possible.

While they do assert the rights to change all the terms of the agreement at will, it is unlikely that a court would support the notion that they could delete legally purchased materials, and especially users’ annotations, which are clearly owned freely by the users.

So, the likelihood is that Amazon will offer some settlement to those who were harmed by this. I am betting hundreds of dollars per person. And those who lost extensive notes are likely to be able to claim higher damages.

A number of others (like those interviewed by IW writer Thomas Claburn, and various commenters to my earlier posts) pointed out that the terms that state that the consumers only option was arbitration. I thought this was a travesty.

Peter Friedman, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Detroit Mercy Law School, has dug up recent court cases that indicate that in recent months, various US Courts have ruled that arbitration clauses and various bars to class relief are unsupportable. His examples include various consumer cases with phone companies, Dell, Blockbuster, and others. His conclusion:

GUEST-POST | Part Two: The Emergence in the Last Month of an Express Judicial Recognition that Arbitration Clauses Barring Class Relief in Consumer Agreements Are Void by Peter Friedman]

Contract law should not be a means of enforcing performance of actions whose legitimate purposes are being perverted in a particular deal. The purpose of arbitration is not to be a procedural snare to trap a party into a situation in which he can get no feasible remedy for a legal wrong; its purpose is to promote efficient dispute resolution. Courts finally, in the last month, are making this point explicit. No doubt these issues will continue to be litigated in the immediate future; already, at least one firm has announced that it will be filing a class action against Amazon for breach of the Kindle end user license agreement in connection with Amazon’s recall of 1984 and Animal Farm. More importantly, the U.S. Supreme Court, toward the end of its recent term, has agreed to hear Stolt-Nielsen S.A., et al. v. AnimalFeeds International Corp., in which the Court will decide “[w]hether imposing class arbitration on parties whose arbitration clauses are silent on that issue is consistent with the Federal Arbitration Act.”

Courts are acting in legitimate ways when they require disputes to be resolved in ways that provide relief for and deterrence of wrongdoing. Institutions that administer arbitrations are beginning to recognize the problems as well. This month, the National Arbitration Forum (“NAF”) has entered into a consent decree, settling a suit brought by the Minnesota Attorney General, pursuant to which the NAF has agreed to refrain from arbitrating consumer transactions altogether. And the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) has voluntarily imposed a moratorium on the administration of debt collection arbitration programs in all consumer transaction cases. It is time for legislatures to step in as well.

So, as I hoped, Amazon will be heading for court based on a class action suit, unless it settles with those damaged by their recent actions. And user agreements everywhere will likely have to be rewritten without the arbitration verbiage and the attempts to bar class action.

Open Money: Trailer from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.

I have signed up to contribute to Internet Evolutions ThinkerNet (they relaxed the thinking part especially for me), and rather than trying to boil the ocean, and attempt to describe everything that is happening, though, I thought I would explore one corner of the rapidly expanding Web, a corner I am increasingly finding myself working in: The Twitter Ecology.

You’d have to have been living in an ice cave in Antarctica to have missed the fooforaw about Twitter. A ‘microblogging’ service — supporting the publishing of 140 character messages from users to those that are ‘following’ them — Twitter has become the center of a rapidly expanding network of software companies that are capitalizing on Twitter’s open APIs and growing user base (now measured in the tens of millions) to create new and innovative tools. Ev Williams, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, recently estimates that there are over 11,000 announced or fielded application integrating with Twitter.

Some of these add-ons are clients, applications that run on PCs, phones, or via Web and intended to provide a better user experience than the native web UI provided by Twitter itself. Some are media-oriented services, that allow users to quickly publish photos, video, or audio through their Twitter stream. Other mine information streaming through the Twittosphere to be accessed in new and different ways, and still represent specialized communities that meet and mix within Twitter but need higher levels of support as well. And there are new and different sorts of apps being tied to Twitter that I haven’t even encountered yet.

Over the next weeks, I will be interviewing visionaries, entrepreneurs, and observers of this fledgling marketplace (pun intended), to try to triangulate on its direction and shape, and to try determine what sort of impact will this market have on the Web as a whole. To do so, I plan to interview a wide range of people, including John Borthwick, of Betaworks; Howard Lindzon, of StockTwits; Iain Dodswoth, of Tweetdeck; Chris Messina, the inventor of hashtags; and many, many others, including some that are less likely to buy into the dream of microstreaming’s promise.

No matter what else I hear in these interviews, I anticipate learning a great deal about how the leading Twitter entrepreneurs view the changing world, and what they are doing to lead that change, not to follow.

I added a background image, Turned on “next event”, and displaying several other timezones’ current time. Check out Labs for these and other new features.

I have been talking a lot about what I am calling Twitter appliances, by which I mean tools that listen to our streams and take actions based on what we say. I contrast these with applications, where we have to go and tell the tools what to do.

Microsyntax plays a big role in my thinking about Twitter appliances. For example, geoslash (like the tweet “I will be in /New York City, NY: November 17-19/ for the #Whoozis conference”) is an obvious way that geolocationally inclined tools could pick up information about my comings and goings. All they would have to do is overhear my intentions, and capture them.

So I envision a new crop of tools that eavesdrop to do much of their work.

Take the example of online invitation services. Imagine that I want to initiate an event, a get together with a a small number of friends this evening, or something much more elaborate a few weeks away.

I could create an event by an extension to the geoslash microsyntax that would indicate not only a location and a date, but a time and a name to refer to the event, which might look like this:

stoweboyd: @twinvite @gregarious @gravity7 come to the “Karaoke Party” /Mint, 1942 Market St, San Francisco CA: Nov 27, 8-10pm/

The geoslash provides location and time information to the proxy for Twinvite, called @twinvite. But the introduction of a preceding name for the event in quotes allows a listening event appliance to put a name to the event. Since this is the first time I have referred to “Karaoke Party” the appliance would figure out that this is a new event, to be called “Karaoke Party”. It could also keep track of who I invited.

I might invite other folks to the event later, always remembering to include @twinvite in the tweets:

stoweboyd: @rachelannyes please come to “Karaoke Party” tonight! @twinvite

@gregarious might have forgotten the time and place for the party, but just remembered the karaoke aspect, so he could query the proxy:

gregarious: d twinvite karaoke

and the appliance could send him a private message back with the information about the party: location, time, and who’s coming.

Because the appliance is keeping track of who’s coming, anyone could use the appliance to send all a message to all those planning to attend, by using the name as an alias for the group of people coming:

stoweboyd: @twinvite @”Karaoke Party” looks like I will be arriving around 8pm, folks. See you!

Obviously, an application like the hypothetical Twinvite could would still provide a more conventional interface, as well, where users could browse to specific event pages, be provided with a list of events in some location or to which they have been invited. However, I predict that as people spend more time using specialized clients for Twitter, the natural tendency will be to provide more of these appliance characteristics, so that tool interaction will become intermixed with communication with other people, as in these examples.

(Anyone interested in implementing an event appliance with this sort of user interaction might want to contact me. I have other ideas about it, as well. And, amazingly, I was able to get the www.twinvite.com domain this morning, as well.)

I got pulled into a conversation about marking sponsored tweets in some obvious way, and the result is posted at Microsyntax.org: Sponsored Posts Microsyntax: AD Better Than #ad.

A tactical sale of the Symbian professional services unit to Accenture speaks volumes about the changing fortunes of that old school cell phone OS, and Nokia’s need to revamp itself:

[via Nokia Dumps Symbian Services Unit by Olga Kharif]

On July 17, Nokia announced it will sell its Symbian professional services unit to Accenture. The division provides engineering consulting and product development services to mobile phone manufacturers, chip makers and wireless service providers that develop products based on Symbian software for mobile phones. This software is the most widely used in smartphones today, but it’s been fast losing ground to rivals such as Android.

And iPhone, of course.

Cell phones are rapidly morphing into mobile computing devices, and the emergence of solutions like iPhone and Android have literally changed everything.

If Nokia is to have a place in this brave new world, they can’t tie themselves to a sinking technology like Symbian.

But what place will they have? They fumbled the future with the rise of new mobile devices — simply calling their handsets mobile computers didn’t actually make them seem like more than phones. They missed touch, and big screens, and really deep integration into the web.

They are the leading producer of cell phones in the world, but at one point GM was the largest producer of automobiles. Like GM, they are confronted with a span and scope issue: should they pour their time and money into a few niches and build highly differentiated products? Or should they continue to have many product lines, leveraging production scale and common platform components?

GM is going to be down to Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC Trucks before too long, selling off or closing down a long list of brands.

Could Nokia specialize at the high end, like the very best camera phones? (I talked to them about a line with interchangeable high quality lenses, but they haven’t gone there.) There is certainly a growth area there, and they have invested heavily in services for social sharing of images and videos.

Or should they focus on the low-end, and become the Toyota or Honda?

Or develop breakthroughs in modular phones, where people can roll their own, upgrading different elements of the phone independently of the others?

At any rate, I think they need to pick and focus, or they will find their future defined by the choices that others make.

I finally found the Kindle license agreement, via an InformationWeek piece, and wondered if there was anything in it that suggested that they have users’ acceptance of the right to dekindle materials.

Here it is, with my annotations embedded in square brackets.

Amazon Kindle: License Agreement and Terms of Use

Last updated: February 9, 2009

THIS IS AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU AND AMAZON DIGITAL SERVICES, INC. (WITH ITS AFFILIATES, “AMAZON” OR “WE”). PLEASE READ THIS LICENSE AGREEMENT AND TERMS OF USE, AND ALL RULES AND POLICIES FOR THE KINDLE DEVICE AND SERVICES RELATED TO THE DEVICE (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ANY RULES OR USAGE PROVISIONS SPECIFIED ON THE AMAZON.COM WEBSITE OR THE KINDLE STORE, AND THE AMAZON.COM PRIVACY NOTICE LOCATED AT WWW.AMAZON.COM/PRIVACY (COLLECTIVELY, THIS “AGREEMENT”) BEFORE USING THE KINDLE DEVICE. BY USING THE KINDLE DEVICE, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, YOU MAY RETURN THE KINDLE DEVICE AND ASSOCIATED SOFTWARE (WITH ALL ORIGINAL PACKAGING) WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS OF PURCHASE FOR A REFUND OF ITS PURCHASE PRICE IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE KINDLE RETURN POLICY.

1. The Device and Related Services

2. Wireless Connectivity

3. Digital Content

4. Software

5. General

1. The Device and Related Services

The Kindle Device (the “Device”) is a portable electronic reading device that utilizes wireless connectivity to enable users to shop for, download, browse, and read books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other materials, all subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement. The “Service” means the wireless connectivity, provision of digital content, software and support, and other services and support that Amazon provides Device users.

2. Wireless Connectivity

General. Amazon provides wireless connectivity free of charge to you for certain content shopping and downloading services on your Device. You may be charged a fee for wireless connectivity for your use of other wireless services on your Device, such as Web browsing and downloading of personal files, should you elect to use those services. We will maintain a list of current fees for such services in the Kindle Store. Amazon reserves the right to discontinue wireless connectivity at any time or to otherwise change the terms for wireless connectivity at any time, including, but not limited to (a) limiting the number and size of data files that may be transferred using wireless connectivity and (b) changing the amount and terms applicable for wireless connectivity charges.

Coverage and Service Interruptions. You acknowledge that if your Device is located in any area without applicable wireless connectivity, you may not be able to use some or all elements of the wireless services. We are not responsible for the unavailability of wireless service or any interruptions of wireless connectivity.

Your Conduct. You agree you will use the wireless connectivity provided by Amazon only in connection with Services Amazon provides for the Device. You may not use the wireless connectivity for any other purpose.

[Note that Amazon does not say that they will limit themselves to using the wireless connectivity for ‘only these purposes’.]

3. Digital Content

The Kindle Store. The Kindle Store enables you to download, display and use on your Device a variety of digitized electronic content, such as books, subscriptions to magazines, newspapers, journals and other periodicals, blogs, RSS feeds, and other digital content, as determined by Amazon from time to time (individually and collectively, “Digital Content”).

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

[Grants the rights to users to have a permanent copy of materials paid for. Hmmm. That seems unequivocal.]

Restrictions. Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

[This is where the materials are clearly not ‘owned’ in the conventional sense, since anything I own I should be able to sell, rent, trade, etc.]

Subscriptions. The following applies with respect to Digital Content made available to you on a subscription basis, including, but not limited to, electronic newspapers, magazines, journals and other periodicals (collectively, “Periodicals”): (i) you may request cancellation of your subscription by following the cancellation instructions in the Kindle Store; (ii) we may terminate a subscription at our discretion without notice, for example, if a Periodical is no longer available; (iii) if we terminate a subscription in advance of the end of its term, we will give you a prorated refund; (iv) we reserve the right to change subscription terms and fees from time to time, effective as of the beginning of the next term; and (v) taxes may apply to subscription fees and will be added if applicable.

[Hmmm. By one interpretation of events Amazon was treating the books they dekindled as being subscriptions. But this doesn’t say anything about deleting old copies.]

4. Software

Definitions. The following terms apply to the Device and to (a) all software (and the media on which such software is distributed) of Amazon or third parties that is pre-installed on the Device at time of purchase or that Amazon provides as updates/upgrades to the pre-installed software (collectively, the “Device Software”), unless you agree to other terms as part of an update/upgrade process; and (b) any printed, on-line or other electronic documentation for such software (the “Documentation”). As used in this Agreement, “Software” means, collectively, the Device Software and Documentation.

Use of the Device Software. You may use the Device Software only on the Device. You may not separate any individual component of the Device Software for use on another device or computer, may not transfer it for use on another device or use it, or any portion of it, over a network and may not sell, rent, lease, lend, distribute or sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Software in whole or in part.

No Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, Disassembly or Circumvention. You may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, modify, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the Device or the Software, whether in whole or in part, create any derivative works from or of the Software, or bypass, modify, defeat or tamper with or circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Device or Software or any mechanisms operatively linked to the Software, including, but not limited to, augmenting or substituting any digital rights management functionality of the Device or Software.

Automatic Updates. In order to keep your Software up-to-date, Amazon may automatically provide your Device with updates/upgrades to the Software.

Export Regulations. You agree to comply with all export and re-export restrictions and regulations of the Department of Commerce and other United States agencies and authorities, and not to transfer, or encourage, assist or authorize the transfer of the Software to a prohibited country or otherwise in violation of any such restrictions or regulations.

Government End Users. The Software is a “Commercial item” as that term is defined at 48 C.F.R. § 2.101, consisting of “Commercial Computer Software” and “Commercial Computer Software Documentation,” as such terms are used in 48 C.F.R. §12.212 or 48 C.F.R. § 227.7202, as applicable. Consistent with these provisions, the Software is being licensed to U.S. Government end users (a) only as a Commercial item and (b) with only those rights as are granted to all other end users pursuant to the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

5. General

No Illegal Use and Reservation of Rights. You may not use the Device, the Service or the Digital Content for any illegal purpose. You acknowledge that the sale of the Device to you does not transfer to you title to or ownership of any intellectual property rights of Amazon or its suppliers. All of the Software is licensed, not sold, and such license is non-exclusive.

[They stipulate that the Kindle user does not acquire intellectual property rights of materials they buy, or of the software,and the software is only licensed not sold to the user. In this way Amazon has the right to decommission the software so that a user can’t read their books?]

Information Received. The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service. Information we receive is subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice.

[They mention ‘annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings’ that users can make in their materials, and note that they can be backed up. Nowhere do they suggest that such annotations can be deleted by Amazon, as happened with the dekindling incident.]

Patents. The Device and/or methods used in association with the Device may be covered by one or more patents or pending patent applications.

Changes to Service. Amazon reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service at any time, and Amazon will not be liable to you should it exercise such right.

[The big squiggle paragragh: they can change anything at any time, and Amazon is not liable to the users if it does so. My sense is that this in unenforceable, since the basic premise of the service is that customers are buying permanent — although limited — rights to the enjoyment of the books they purchase and own.]

Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees. Amazon’s failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.

[Not applicable, since the dekindled users were not failing to comply with the agreement, or at least Amazon has not claimed they have.]

Disclaimer of Warranties. YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT USE OF THE SERVICE, DEVICE, DIGITAL CONTENT AND SOFTWARE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. EXCEPT FOR THE ONE-YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY, THE SERVICE, DEVICE, DIGITAL CONTENT AND SOFTWARE ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND AND AMAZON AND ITS SUPPLIERS AND LICENSORS DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, QUIET ENJOYMENT AND NON-INFRINGEMENT OF THIRD-PARTY RIGHTS. NO ORAL OR WRITTEN INFORMATION OR ADVICE GIVEN BY AMAZON OR AN AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE OF AMAZON SHALL CREATE A WARRANTY. THE LAWS OF CERTAIN JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE DISCLAIMER OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES. IF THESE LAWS APPLY TO YOU, SOME OR ALL OF THE ABOVE DISCLAIMERS, EXCLUSIONS OR LIMITATIONS MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU, AND YOU MAY HAVE ADDITIONAL RIGHTS.

Limitation of Liability. TO THE EXTENT NOT PROHIBITED BY LAW, NEITHER AMAZON NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR LICENSORS SHALL BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES FOR BREACH OF ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY, BREACH OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY RELATED TO THE SERVICE, DEVICE, DIGITAL CONTENT OR SOFTWARE, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ANY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA OR USE OF THE DEVICE OR SOFTWARE OR ANY ASSOCIATED PRODUCT, EVEN IF AMAZON HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. IN ANY CASE, AMAZON’S AGGREGATE LIABILITY UNDER THIS AGREEMENT SHALL BE LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT ACTUALLY PAID FOR THE DEVICE. THE LAWS OF CERTAIN JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES. IF THESE LAWS APPLY TO YOU, SOME OR ALL OF THE ABOVE EXCLUSIONS OR LIMITATIONS MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU, AND YOU MAY HAVE ADDITIONAL RIGHTS.

Washington Law Applies. The laws of the state of Washington, without regard to principles of conflict of laws, will govern this Agreement and any dispute of any sort that might arise between you and Amazon.

Disputes. ANY DISPUTE ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING IN ANYWAY TO THIS AGREEMENT SHALL BE SUBMITTED TO CONFIDENTIAL ARBITRATION IN SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, EXCEPT THAT, TO THE EXTENT YOU HAVE IN ANY MANNER VIOLATED OR THREATENED TO VIOLATE AMAZON’S INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS, AMAZON MAY SEEK INJUNCTIVE OR OTHER APPROPRIATE RELIEF IN ANY STATE OR FEDERAL COURT IN THE STATE OF WASHINGTON, AND YOU CONSENT TO EXCLUSIVE JURISDICTION AND VENUE IN SUCH COURTS. The arbitrator’s award shall be binding and may be entered as a judgment in any court of competent jurisdiction. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, no arbitration under this Agreement shall be joined to an arbitration involving any other party subject to this Agreement, whether through class arbitration proceedings or otherwise.

Severability. If any term or condition of this Agreement shall be deemed invalid, void, or for any reason unenforceable, that part shall be deemed severable and shall not affect the validity and enforceability of any remaining term or condition.

Amendment. Amazon reserves the right to amend any of the terms of this Agreement at its sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the Kindle Store or the Amazon.com website. Your continued use of the Device and Software after the effective date of any such amendment shall be deemed your agreement to be bound by such amendment.

[More weaseling]

Contact Information. For communications concerning this Agreement, you may contact Amazon by writing to Amazon.com, Attn: Legal Department, 1200 12th Avenue South, Suite 1200, Seattle, WA, 98144-2734.

So, a close reading by a law-savvy lay person suggests that Amazon never stated that it had the rights to dekindle books or other materials once legally purchased or acquired through a subscription. In fact, Amazon never mentions that dekindling is possible.

While they do assert the rights to change all the terms of the agreement at will, it is unlikely that a court would support the notion that they could delete legally purchased materials, and especially users’ annotations, which are clearly owned freely by the users.

So, the likelihood is that Amazon will offer some settlement to those who were harmed by this. I am betting hundreds of dollars per person. And those who lost extensive notes are likely to be able to claim higher damages.

This is an enormous mess for Bezos and Amazon, and the license agreement is not going to protect them from their misdeeds.

The various folks interviewed by IW writer Thomas Claburn are more measured, and suggest that Amazon may have more rights than I do. We’ll see.

In defence of Techcrunch and Michael Arrington - Telegraph Blogs.

No, rather than turning this into a debate about Arrington’s (lack of) ethics, I’m more interested in what it tells us about our prurient interest in Internet start-ups like Twitter. The real story in this non-story is the convergence of pop and tech culture. The level of hysteria greeting this intimate yet generally worthless information about Twitter speaks to the way in which technology start-ups have become the hottest celebrities in an America starved for sexy success stories. Technology gossip publications like Techcrunch and Gawker feed this prurience, publishing more and more intimate details about the private lives of prominent entrepreneurs. Guys like Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone are the new rock stars of the early 21st century and they are receiving the same kind of obsessionally intimate coverage from the media that was once reserved for kings of pop like Michael Jackson or Elvis.

We get the media that we deserve. In defence of Arrington who, I suspect, would be honoured by the epithet of William Randolph Hearst 2.0, he only decided to post this material on the Internet because - like publishers of sensational news or pornography - he knew that people would want to read it. It’s the same with the senior editors at Random House who decided to publish Accidental Billionaires, the aggressively marketed new “non-fiction” book by Ben Mezrich which claims to be “a tale of sex, money, genuis and betrayal” about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t hear anyone in the media calling for the resignation of Random House executives because Accidental Billionaires makes all sorts of unproven and quite possibly untrue assertions about Zuckerberg’s private affairs. But just as we are prurient about the intimate details of Twitter’s business practices, so we are also a little bit too keen to know the intimate details of Zuckerberg’s sex life.

Yes, the Twitter data was stolen and Arrington’s self-interested decision to publish some of it certainly doesn’t elevate him into the Woodward and Bernstein of the electronic age. But if you don’t approve of what he did, then don’t read Techcrunch.

I was reading at the Zemanta blog about new ways to use that company’s technologies, and I saw the following story:

The story is about Net News Daily’s use of Zemanta. Fine. At the bottom the Zemanta guys are using their own technology to search for related stories, which would be fine if they were other stories about Zemanta use, or how Net News Daily and perhaps other media sites are using tools to help them. But instead we see three stories from Net News Daily on unrelated topics. (I thought the one entitled Site Update might have mentioned Zemanta, but it doesn’t.)

This is why I am not generally using tools like this: they would have to work to the point where I don’t have to monitor if the results are good or not, because otherwise it just creates make work for me.

In an amazingly Orwellian twist, Amazon has dekindled George Orwell’s works — 1984 and Animal Farm — from Kindle “owners” worldwide. David Pogue gets the inherent wrongness involved, but doesn’t go far enough into this post-industrial accident, perhaps:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
1984A screen shot from Amazon.com The MobileReference edition of the novel, “Nineteen Eighty-four,” by George Orwell that was deleted from Kindle e-book readers by Amazon.com.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

But actually its not like that at all, since it would a/ require hundreds of thousands of thieves to break into hundreds of thousands of homes, physically, and then b/ find, and ultimately c/ steal the books. This is logisitically impossible, and even if it were possible, it couldn’t be done by one person hitting the delete key on some queen bee server at Amazon. And, of course, d/ this would be a felony, or better, a hundred thousand felonies.

Amazon sort of explains their so-called thinking:

[from Mysterious George Orwell refunds - kindle Discussion Forum]

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.

Since when does pulling a title from a digital store lead to it disappearing from the shelves of those that bought it in the past?

If Amazon markets the Kindle device and the digital content it delivers as a rental service, well, fine. And if the “owners” of these devices go along with it, cool.

But the reality is somewhat more sinister, since the marketing hype is that Kindle is ‘your library’, which is generally conceived of as comprising the books I possess, not the ones I get from the library:

[from Amazon Website]

Carry Your Library in 10.2 Ounces

Holds Over 1,500 Books

The ultimate travel companion, Kindle weighs 10.2 ounces and holds more than 1,500 books. No longer pick and choose which books fit in your carry-on. Now you can always have your entire library with you.

Automatic Library Backup: Download Your Books Anytime for Free

A copy of every book you purchased from the Kindle Store is backed up online at Amazon.com in case you ever need to download it again. You can wirelessly re-download books for free any time. This allows you to make room for new titles on your Kindle, knowing that Amazon is storing your personal library of Kindle books. We even back up your last page read and annotations, so you’ll never lose those, either. Think of it as a bookshelf in your attic—even though you don’t see it, you know your books are there.

Unless, of course, Amazon hits the kill switch.

In a way, we shouldn’t be too surprised at the newest infraction of our e-dreams about the Kindle. After all, we’ve known from the start that Amazon’s approach to digital books is all about money, not high fidelity allegiance to the nature of books. You can’t loan a Kindle book to a friend, for example, or sell one. It interrupts all the wonderful social fabric that surrounds books and reading.

And, this was their choice, of course. No book “buyer” ever said, “Please free me of the distractions of loaning my books to others: what a bother!” No one ever said they’d like to buy a book they cannot sell.

You can make a case that Amazon had no choice, that the publishers wouldn’t go along otherwise. This is just digital music and Apple’s iTunes all over again. Although I don’t recall Apple ever deleting my Massive Attack discography. And, unlike Kindle, iTunes allows me to bring in my own digital content: I can rip music from CDs, and those tracks are unencrypted. And iTunes at least allows me to share even my encrypted music with five computers — like my family or close friends. Not a great social model there, but it’s at least something.

Amazon’s world is hermetically sealed by comparison.

What does this say about our rights? Can we sign away implied rights but agreeing to the small print of megacompanies’ terms of use agreements? Apparently we can, at least until someone — please? — sues Amazon for this action.

And, since they have gone ahead and built this dekindling doomsday device, couldn’t a repressive government use it to degauss questionable books? It goes beyond censorship, to the undoing of history. Our past purchases of books are erased.

A Cheney granted the Messianic control that he desires might have deleted every Paul Krugman or John Rawls book in existence. Or the Chinese politburo — in a future China, bursting with Kindles — might delete or block the sale of millions of titles. Would Amazon go along with that?

This is mere conjecture, I grant you. But tools like this have a way of being used, just as Google and Yahoo have worked with the Chinese government in the past, to block searches and track keywords.

The brightest light can make the deepest shadow, and just so, the Web and its myriad shiny objects form a Gahan Wilson silhouette, casting a spectre of frightening possibilities. What Pogue and other take as irony — the dekindling of Orwell — portends a darker future than they might want to consider.

The world, or perhaps more narrowly, America, is uptight about sex. Well, at least most are. Paul Begala recently quipped, on Bill Maher’s Real Time,

I’m a Catholic. We’re taught that sex is a dirty, vile, disgusting act that you save for the one you truly love.

That sums things up pretty neatly for most folks. There is an extremely narrow set of behaviors that dignify sex, in general, and they revolve around love, marriage, and procreation. Outside of those dotted lines, sex is questionable and in some of its more elaborate or open manifestations is considered immoral, perhaps illegal, and certainly unsavory.

However, there is a growing acceptance among many people — of all ages, backgrounds, and origins — that sex is as basic to living as eating or sleeping, once religious mumbo jumbo is dispelled, and now that the social stigma associated with being unambiguously sexual is beginning to diminish. A more Scandivanian attitude, that seems to be slowly spreading in the US.

This mindset is increasingly being referred to as “sex positive”. Personally, I wish people would call it ‘Polynesian’ since that is a prettier word, and less like Kinsey terminology.

Still, we are living in a world of extremes. An openly sex-positive bisexual woman in San Francisco might be fairly open about her sexual attitude within her circle of similarly open friends, but more discrete in her circle of business contacts, and much more reserved when visiting her grandparents back in Des Moines. The limitations of time, space, and social circles provides a significant degree of security.

My good friend, Sam Lawrence and his co-founder, April Donato, have launched a new web service called Blackbox Republic (www.blackboxrepublic.com) which is aimed squarely at creating a social space online for sex-positive adults. My immediate reaction when I heard it was, well, positive. This is a community that is likely to have specific needs that will be underserved by other solutions, specifically the eHarmony and other dating services, geared toward the American dream of finding Mr or Ms Right, and promptly getting married. Similarly, “swinger” oriented websites that are oriented toward blatant sexual hookups are not really geared toward the sorts of privacy and interaction that sex positives might desire.

Gabriel García Márquez once wrote “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” Times change, and what aspects of our lives we make public or keep secret may shift, but there needs to be a way to gradually let others in on what we keep private from most, and a way to keep some things secret from a judgmental world.

And what do Lawrence and Donato plan for Blackbox Republic? First of all, a careful approach to letting folks become involved, and a graduated way for people to learn about each other and to slowly share more details of their identity and interests. As users join, they gain a limited access to the site, being able to see various public aspects of what is going on there. To gain access to more private information, users will have to be vouched for by other established users, and in some cases, invited to join a group: either people known outside of Blackbox Republic, or people that have become connected through the service. In a similar fashion, people who engage in behaviors that anger others can be unvouched for, leading to expulsion from the community. This approach seems to me to apply sensible social policies in an organic way to police the shared space.

Blackbox Republic is about living a sex positive life, so that means, as a general rule, that people would like to take their online activities offline into “meatspace”. So, BR will be supporting a range of mechanisms to support that, including support for anonymity, so that people can meet without disclosing their complete identity and without having to share phone numbers, email addresses, or twitter accounts. In essence, BR will act as a trusted intermediary, brokering various sorts of communication — between individuals or groups of people — so that meetups and dates can take place in a safe way.

I have not used the service yet, so I can’t speak to its UX. More on that to follow.

A final word or two: I have looked over various other posts regarding Blackbox, and I was happy to see that people are generally evenhanded. The tech community is somewhat less repressed than the greater world, I guess.

Except Ben Kepes, who writes at Cloud Ave:

As I said to the Twitterverse this afternoon, “Would anyone (especially peeps like @jeffnolan and @rww) be even mentioning Blackbox Republic if Sam Lawrence wasn’t involved? I think not” – to his credit Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb replied saying that; “Niche social network raises $1m, charges $25/mo & hits privacy hard? Yes I’d cover that!” – an argument that despite my respect for both Marshall and ReadWriteWeb I’m not really buying seeing as how many well funded start-ups aren’t being covered by the mainstream blogs – need an example? How about youcalc that, despite nearly $4 million in funding, is yet to be covered in depth anywhere than on CloudAve.

Um, why wouldn’t someone cover it, Ben? Oh, it’s about ***sex***.

Dennis Howlett says the obvious and then recants:

When I saw the pre-briefing links I kinda went: ‘OK, so Sam’s finally gone over the edge and is developing a sophisticated porn site dressed up to look cool.’ Nothing could be further from the truth although the first community Sam and April are leading is something about which they’re both passionate – which helps – and will get attention. What is this about and why should you care?

[…]

Sam and April are definitely onto something here. The technology allows it but it would be darned hard to replicate the community element without having genuinely passionate people leading the charge. That’s what makes this first iteration so compelling. Some will still take one look and shrug. But since our human connectedness is something that frequently drives our choices, would it not be better to make those somewhere that is safe rather than the bazaar that is Facebook? I think so.

Oliver Marks hits this one right on the head, as usual:

If you’re ‘textually active’ online looking for relationships on social networking and dating sites, finally you have a new option. Despite all the hoopla around the brave new world of Facebook, match.com et al, it’s actually the same old industrial scale meat market for most people. As the chart above and the brief video below show, online dating isn’t performing for people.

Sam Lawrence, the brilliant marketer who did so much to raise Jive Software’s profile during the launch and growth of their Clearspace (now ‘Social Business 3.0′) software as their CMO is launching an exciting new venture today, this time as CEO.

‘Black Box Republic‘ is a new consumer oriented company ‘focused on reinventing the online relationship market’ which is emerging from stealth mode today and which also appears to have particularly good timing.

The word SEX is immensely complex and personal but the reality is we are all seeking intimacy at various stages of our lives, either overtly through dating services or socially, or covertly by hoping that meeting friends of our friends will turn up someone with whom sparks will fly - with whom ’sex will happen’ to use Black Box Republic’s line.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is ambivalent:

Blackbox Republic argues that the transaction-focused dating site market is unfulfilling for millions of people around the world.

He and co-founder April Donato just completed a 50 city tour around the US and have stories to tell about waitresses at roadside cafes crying out that a site like Blackbox is just what they’ve been looking for. If you’re familiar, and comfortable with, the phrase “sex positive” then Blackbox might be the site for you, too. I have very mixed feelings about the service, but it sure is interesting.

[…]

If this sounds like over-privileged, care-free, irresponsible promiscuity to you - then you’re probably not in the target market. (I’m not.) Many people will likely appreciate some of the site’s features, like the fact that new users are unable to view profiles of anyone but other new users until they are “vouched for” by an established user.

By which I take it that Marshall thinks it is over-privileged, care-free, irresponsible promiscuity, or maybe my logical parsing is flawed. Remember, sex is “dirty, vile, and disgusting” after all, folks, unless sanctified by marriage or monogamy.

Jeff Nolan seems to get it:

I will admit that when Sam first pinged me about this I thought it was an elaborate prank… “a social network for the ‘ sex positive‘ community?” what my first reaction followed quickly by “is it a porn thing?” and then “okay this must be a prank and I’d better play along so as not to give him the satisfaction of punking me”. It is, it’s not, and it definitely isn’t a prank and the reason why I am telling this story is to get it out in the open because I am sure that I was not alone in my reaction nor will Sam not have to answer those questions going forward.

There are two independent threads that recently converged for me that explain why I am so intrigued by what Sam is doing. I joined the board of SpectrumDNA largely because of my belief in the white label social network for affinity groups, PlanetTagger. Jim Banister, the CEO and inspirational founder, and I had a bunch of conversations about the concept of social nicheworking as a compliment to what Facebook, Myspace and the other generalized network are doing. Let me be clear, social nicheworking is not the opposite of social networking, it’s just a more specialized variant that offers tremendous value to affinity groups, and this is what Sam is doing with Blackbox Republic. Facebook Connect comes to mind as legitimate evidence supporting the notion that these two ends of the spectrum compliment each other rather than compete.

[…]

Where message boards stop social networks begin, not because of the much talked about social graph but because, very simply, we want to connect not just with people but people like us. Community sponsors, whether in the form of actual economic sponsors like media entities or organizers like the folks who put on Burning Man, want to have a community that enriches the experience rather than tries to shoehorn it into a grab bag of features with limited branding opportunity and no content programming capabilities.

This gets to the second epiphany that I had recently, a conversation with Kevin Marks about overlapping public spaces. Who we are in our woodworking community is the same person we are in the Indian motorcycle community and that is the same person we are in our kindergarten parents community, yet the experience in each of these communities is fundamentally different even if some of the participants overlap. At it’s core, we want to belong to publics of our peers but in each community instance we define our peers differently while defining ourselves the same.

Social nicheworking is at it’s core about overlapping public spaces and a rich community experience as a function of the community participants having a lot of control over how the community behaves, both technically and socially. While you may disregard Blackbox as some kooky sex community thing, the underlying concepts that Sam is tapping are exceptionally powerful and will define the next generation of social networking experiences that emerge more broadly across the industry of providers doing this stuff and more importantly among the communities embracing them. The community platforms will be at the core of go to market strategies for brand advertisers and service providers who want to tap into the economic potential that every affinity group possesses, and technology providers are going to have to provide services that are intrinsically connected with content, whether syndicated or user generated.

I love the idea of multiple “publics” that comprise our various worlds in the world, and the nicheworking angle of Blackbox Republic: social tools fail if they lose the natural controls that come from organic social scale. Facebook and Twitter involve an unfettered public space, like traipsing along in a gigantic plaza. But for many social interactions, a living room or the back room at a bar is a better scale.

For deep social interactions, small is the new big, and Blackbox Republic seems rooted on that reality.

I have been making some changes in the blogging tools I use, so I thought I would spell out what I am using and why.

Typepad

I am still involved in long form, slow twitch blogging, like this post. I had thought that I would be migrating all my blogging to Tumblr, because of their once-innovative social sharing model. However, Typepad has recently unveiled a new version of their blogging platform which is a different take on new forms of blog sociality(see Typepad 2.0: Ready For The Next Phase), so I have decided to stay with Typepad for the forseeable future.

Tumblr

Note that I say ‘once-innovative’ regarding Tumblr’s platform, because what once made it a standout is becoming the standard model for social sharing tools. Users of these social tools can follow one another via the open sharing or asymmetric sharing model, made commonplace by Twitter and other. Tumblr is — in particular — a cool place for imagery, but the other sorts of posts are managed in a so-so fashion, and it is a terrible solution for text-based blogging.

Here’s an example. Using Tumblr to write about a NY Times story is incredibly painful. Although the tool provides a bookmarklet, it just doesn’t work right. Lets say I select three paragraphs in a news article. I click the bookmarklet, and the result is a pending quote — one of the post types in Tumblr — where the text I selected is treated as a qoute, in one editable field, and the link is another editable field. First problem, the paragraph breaks are deleted. And if I change the post type to a text post the link is lost. Knowing these snags will happen, I have learned to copy the text I want to include in my post, and then after using the bookmarklet, I pasts the paragraphs into the editable field under the link. I then selct that entire field, and copy it. Then I change the post type to text, and paste my link plus text over the text Tumble has created, which lacks paragraph marks. Then I save it, and go edit it at Tumblr.

You might say, “Yikes! Why use the bookmarklet at all?” The reason is that this is the only place that Tumblr allows you to change the type of a post, and it is the quickest way to do it, despite all the steps, now that I am adept at it.

But the other headaches mount: If I use anything but the most basic HTML, Tumblr looses the abiility to treat blank lines as paragraph markers. So If I use a blockquote, I will also have to use HTNL paragraph breaks throughout.

I have developed workarounds, but such gyrations are a pain in the ass. Repeated complaints to support have not led to any results, so I am contemplating a move away from Tumblr, bit by bit.

First thing I will drop will be link posting, which I have been doing at Tumblr for months. I was sort of using Tumblr to post my photo stream, but I am dropping that for Mobypicture (see below). And of course, I have discoved that there is no way to export anything from Tumblr. It turns out that Mars Edit interfaces with Tumblr, so there is a way to export posts, and repost them elsewhere, although it is a bit laborious.

Amplify

Cringely (in NY Times) suggests that Google has no interest in becoming the browser and OS of choice, since most people use Windows and IE, where most Google searches originate. Is he smoking something?

Op-Ed Contributor - Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me - NYTimes.com.

The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success. Chrome products are given away, so they bring in no revenue for Google, and they don’t even provide a better search or advertising experience for their users, the company admits. So why does Google even bother?

That’s like McDonalds saying it has no incentive to displace home cooking because most people decide to eat McDonalds when at home. The two don’t line up.

Google has every incentive to move search — and other functionality — out of Microsoft products and into Google products. In particular, the future of coordinated work — where Google Apps are pointed — is closely linked there. Maybe Cringely can’t think past a time when Windows and IE are the shiznat, and companies are moving past the pre-web underpinnings of today’s OS’s.

But he doesn’t even suggest that search might change shape, and Google wants to be the one doing it.

They say that generals are always prepared to fight the last war, and Cringely sounds like someone ready to diagram how the last era’s war might play out again, with Microsoft having the dominant position on the desktop. But when the field has changed, and there is no desktop, what then?

I followed a mention in some online journal, back at the end of June, to an online whatzis called The Dollar ReDe$ign Project. The man behind it is Richard Smith, a brand strategy consultant, whose work is showcased at ThinkCreateBelieve.com, whose company is The Extent Or Measure Of A Surface, and whose main blog is The Daily Blend.

He’s been interviewed all over, most recently on Fox, who pronounced it “the neweset internet craze.”

Richard’s deep motivation was to help restart the economy, and the means? Redesigning our money, and rebranding it, to shift our thinking and to help the little bits of paper in our pockets act as a sort of social catalyst for change. He set up the project in the form of a contest, and received dozens of truly wonderful designs.

Kyle Thompson won the contest with this design, who wrote ““I sought inspiration in numerous areas of American culture and history, and eventually decided to focus on the philosophers and political thinkers (i.e. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, among others) who inspired the Founding Fathers. I chose this for several reasons, the most important being that I feel that a new system of US currency should be hopeful and positive, while simultaneously reminding citizens and the world at large of the ideals on which the United States was originally founded.”

Runners-up included these:

• Istvan Banyai

  

• Nate Castiglione

  

• and Gabriel Eid

  

I had a chance to interview Richard last week, just after he had announced the winning five designs in the contest.

Highlights:

• Several of the designs — like those of Eid and Banyai — included bar codes, suggesting the interface between digital and physical money. But they didn’e write about that aspect in their submissions. It must have seemed just another design consideration to the designers, and they proceeded without an elaborate use-case analysis.
• Richard pointed out that paper money has become a convenience, not a necessity, at least for the banked and credited. (for the unbanked, paper money and other commodities, like cell minutes, remain more important than credit or debit.)
• Richard likened money as being like a business card, although one that you can exchange for goods.
• The old and now odd iconography of US money — the masonic symbols and so on — is antique if not out-of-whack with what we stand for now, and the design of the money — all one color, all one size — argue for at least a facelift. Richard suggest that redesigning it would have a transformative impact on the country, and “would give people hope”.
• We discussed the costs: revamping all the money scanners in metro stations, for example. But this is marginal relative to the value that he perceives could be realized. Richard pointed out that many countries in the Eurozone switched over, with equivalent costs. Richard suggests that these costs could be part of the stimulus package.

I hope that all those coming here and reading this will sign the petition, and support this project. To date, Obama’s administration has not paid much attention, but if enough of us keep howling about this, maybe they’ll think about it.

The Future Of Money series is sponsored in part by Neo.org

A recent analysis by Sysomos of Twitter data leads to some amazing conclusions:

[via Sysomos | In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World]

Over the past few months, Twitter has experienced explosive growth, attracting celebrity users such as Oprah, and a growing mountain of media and blog coverage. Sysomos Inc., one of the world’s leading social media analytics companies, conducted an extensive study to document Twitter’s growth and how people are using it. After analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, we discovered that:

* 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.

* 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day

* 21% of users have never posted a Tweet

* 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.

* 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity

* New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009

* More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.

* There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)

* Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

“We wanted to take an extensive snapshot of Twitter that goes far beyond anything done to document Twitter’s use, growth and demographics,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ co-founder and chief executive. “While Twitter’s growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity. Our study, based on the most comprehensive dataset of Twitter users, provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in getting in-depth details about Twitter.”

To discuss this report on Twitter, use the hashtag #sysomossurvey or copy us @sysomos. Visit the appendix for complete list of graphs. For more Twitter analysis studies by Sysomos, see the right-side navigation bar with a list of related articles.

One in five users have never tweeted? I believe that 5% account for 75%: the true Twitterheads.

The thing that strikes me is the a/ rapid growth in 2009, and the b/ shift in in demographics toward younger people. Maybe the MySpace defectors really are showing up at Twitter.

Everyone is all spun up to the point of having their heads explode about Chrome OS.

This is being cast in a very obvious way: an attack on Microsoft whose future remains tightly linked to Windows.

But what is happening here is the first foray into a new generation of user experience, and unltimately, a new paradigm for the Web, more than for the desktop.

Way back in October 2007, Jasons Calacanis tried to brand something Web 3.0, and I responded with this:

[via /Message: Jason Calacanis on Web 3.0]

Personally, I feel the vague lineaments of something beyond Web 2.0, and they involve some fairly radical steps. Imagine a Web without browsers. Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That’s what Web 3.0 will be, but I bet we will call it something else.

Paradoxically, Google (or whoever) building a new operating system for edge devices (all our PCs, laptops, netbooks, handhelds, cell phones) that is predicated on the Web existing as the primary model of interaction and information access and storage will spell the end of the browser as we know it.

Think how odd it is to have a bazillion apps that we run on our desktops, but a single porthole to the web? A porthole that has to do a mazillion things?

If we rethink the operating environment for edge devices under the assumption that they will (nearly) always be connected to the Web, then a single swiss army knife tool to access everything online is a dumb approach. Instead, build browserish capabilities into the OS so that developers are free to construct all sorts of different and specialized apps, relying on common services for caching, messaging, and so on.

Yes, Microsft will be the ox first gored by this, but so will Apple — whose OS is still stuck in the 90’s, although much much better than Windows, lord knows — as well as Linux and all the old school phone OS’s.

It will all rapidly shift into a very different world. We will all be reformatting our hard drives in the near future, and never looking back.