January 2010
Steve Jobs Blasts Adobe, Flash, and Google
Jobs answered questions at One Infinite Loop to Apple employees, and had this to say about Adobe:
- John Abell, Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra is ‘Bullshit,’ Adobe Is Lazy: Apple’s Steve Jobs
They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does...
Machiavelli's Mistake
Samuel Bowles, from Santa Fe Institute and University of Siena, presented a series of lectures in recent weeks at Yale (The Castle Lectures, Yale University, January 2010) which I missed completely.
This morning’s NY Times mentioned his lectures in an article about the ‘mood’ of the economy:
- Roberty Shiller, Stuck In Nuetral? Reset The Mood
According to the Bureau of...
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Droplr Drops Into My Workflow
I use bit.ly as a part of one of my most regular workflows: posting links to /Message posts onto Twitter. [disclosure: bit.ly is a client, and I have a financial interest in the company.] bit.ly is optimized for exactly that sort of URL publishing (or link journalism) and the statistical tallying of references and clicks. Here’s my bit.ly account display:
So, as a part of my...
Why Are There So Few OS's On Personal Computers?
My ‘track’ in graduate school while studying computer science was programming laguages and operating systems. And I learned dozens of languages — Lisp, C, C++, Pascal, and so on. I taught ‘History Of Programming Languages’ for a few semesters, too. I even invented my own version of C called Modular C.
Along the way, I also studied a roughly equal number of...
Has The iPad 'Future Shocked' The Techies?
Fraser Spiers says the techies yowling about the iPad are suffering future shock — a new world outside of their ability to make sense of it.
- Fraser Spiers, Future Shock
The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the...
VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and...
I stumbled upon this term via a twitter mention: VUCA, standing for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
- Wikipedia VUCA is an acronym used to describe or reflect on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations. The common usage of the term VUCA began in the late 1990s and derives from military vocabulary and has been subsequently...
The End Of Voice Minutes
The biggest impact of the iPad may be the end of ‘voice minutes’ versus ‘data minutes’ on phones, followinf the announcement that Apple will allow VoIP applications on iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch:
via LA Times
Apple announced Wednesday that iPad owners will be able to purchase monthly 3G plans for the device, which is quite a bit larger than a normal cellular phone,...
Word Of The Day: Reality Mining
- Nathan Eagle
Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening...
Sociality Displacing Privacy
Via @bchudakov, I came across a great piece on the shift from privacy to publicy. First time I had seen my neologism ‘publicy’ used without definition. And, then, there is a quote of me defining it, but still it was an odd feeling:
- Tim Leberecht, Privacy Is Over. Here Comes Sociality
Privacy (from the Latin ‘privatus,’ according to Wikipedia: “separated from the rest, deprived...
Social Business O'Reilly Webcast: Josh Ross,...
A few weeks back, Josh Ross moderated an O’Reilly Webcast with Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), Peter Kim (Dachis Group), and me. I think it was pretty interesting.
Jolicloud Social Stream
Jolicloud is a Linux-derived OS for netbooks, and one of the features is a social stream:
The Social Stream
Jolicloud is the first OS to provide an activity stream that lets you visualize in a snap the beat pulse of all your friends and web applications.
When will the Mac OS and iTunes support the social dimension in a serious way?
Will The iPad Cause The Return Of Long-Format...
- New At Pentagram, Five Ways the iPad Will Change Magazine Design
Pentagram’s Luke Hayman, designer of, among others, Time, New York, and Travel + Leisure, was asked how this new format would change the world of magazines and came up with five ways off the top of his head.
Editors have been telling us for years that people won’t read long stories online. Yet they will read 1,000-page novels...
Casualties Of The iPad Revolution
I thought I would start chronicling the likely fallout from the iPad introduction.
The obvious and first crater from the iPad carpet bombing is the Kindle and other eReaders: Poof!
There may be a place for low-cost reader software on dumber devices, like phones, but dedicated appliances like the Kindle will likely collapse just like other digital music devices did once the iPod came ...
The iPad Has An Evil Sword Form?
Alex Payne and a number of others are worried that the iPad is evil, in some interesting ways.
- Alex Payne
For years, me and thousands of other techies have been wondering what comes after the Personal Computer as we’ve known it. Yesterday, in Apple’s iPad, we caught a glimpse. If I had to pick one predominant emotion in reaction, it would be “disturbed”.
The iPad is an attractive,...
Hitler Hates The iPad
It was inevitable that someone would create a Hilter parody video about the iPad:
- Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch
So what exactly does Hitler have against the iPad?
“The iPad won’t support multitasking”
“They didn’t give it a camera, fine. But it’s on AT&T! How am I supposed to use their crappy network?”
“eBooks? If I wanted eBooks, I’d buy a Kindle.”
“It could have single-handedly...
No Time For iPad
I am going to start catgorizing the various themes that are appearing from techies arguing about how the iPad is going to fail. Here’s what I will call the ‘No Time For iPad’ claim:
- Stan Schroeder, Mashable
Check out your schedule. What do you do during the day? I spend at least 9-10 hours in front of my computer, working (if I were working on any other job, I still...
iGlasses Coming?
In a week when we are all learning to say iPad, we might also start practicing ‘iGlasses’. Apple’s got patents on augmented reality goggles:
- Apple See-Through Augmented Reality HMD Glasses
The January issue of Mac Life sports a fauxtograph of possible Apple augmented reality HMD glasses. It’s hard to know how much of this article is based on concept, but Apple working...
Views, Not Tabs, Please
The world of social business applications seem stuck in the last decade, with an information silo model built front and center in their products.
Here’s an example from Huddle.
This tool offers tasks, whiteboards, files, and so on, all as separate information silos. The approach means that if you want to mess with a particular task or file that has scrolled off the...
iPad Is A Game Changer
Like the iPhone, the iPad is really a vessel, a tool, a 1.5-pound sack of potential. It may become many things. It may change an industry or two, or it may not. It may introduce a new category — something between phone and laptop — or it may not. And anyone who claims to know what will happen will wind up looking like a fool.
- David Pogue
David, you are paid the big bucks to actually...
“He cracked the code. The laptop is dead.”
– John Markoff, regarding Steve Jobs and the iPad
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iPad "Just A Really Big iPod Touch"
“I think this will appeal to the Apple acolytes, but this is essentially just a really big iPod Touch.”
- Charles Golvin, Forrester via New York Times
I wonder if Golvin will ever live these words down.
Information Foraging
I am interviewing Tim Young today, the first in a series for Social Business Edge. I found this quote of his:
- via Louis Gray, Streams May Impact E-mail, But Won’t Kill It Any Time Soon
“Information foraging is core to our human psychology,” Young said. “It is the energy source for our minds. We hunt and gather for information to understand and adapt to our world....
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Time Is The New Space: Moments, Not Memos
In some recent writings and presentations, I have explored the topic ‘Time Is The New Space’:
from 10 Minute Sprint from 140 Characters Conference: Social Business
We are not sharing space online, although it the conventional wisdom says we are. We are sharing time. Time has become a shared resource.
Our time is increasingly not our own, in a good way, as we move into a streamed...
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Moving /Message To Squarespace, Part I: More...
It turns out that moving my blog — on a tech basis — from Typepad to Squarespace has gone fairly well, and that the majority of hiccups along the way were operator error: my bad, in other words. Other headaches were more like pot holes: you just have to drive around them. And there have been no big showstoppers, largely thanks to the care taken by the Squarespace team in the...
Brand New www.stoweboyd.com
I have been using Squarespace for a number of websites recently, and so I have decided to rehost www/stoweboyd.com there. In principle, I have imported all my posts from Typepad (which has apprently worked, although there is some clean up to do), and all the old URLs are supposed to work, once the gears complete grinding.
I have plans for new community oriented features, like the ‘Open ...
Sarcmark?
This is what we really need. For those who want to make sure their sarcasm is recognized for what it is, Sarcasm Inc., a Michigan company, has developed the “SarcMark” to identify sarcastic comments in e-mail and text messages.
“Never again be misunderstood! Never again waste a good sarcastic line on someone who doesn’t get it!” the company said on its Web site. It offered such examples...
John Chambers on Socializing Cisco... And Himself
Adam Bryant interviewed John Chambers recently, and the talk showed how important it is for leaders to adopt new tools if the company is going to move ahead:
Q. How has your leadership style evolved over time?
A. I’m a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that’s the style of the past. Today’s world requires a ...
3 Reasons Why Social Media is Killing Search
Social Recommendations
When news breaks we are turning to search engines less and less. We are turning to each other and the real time results of social networks more and more. For breaking news I know that I’ll find a relevant link on Twitter and an outdated news story on Google. I only see one reason this trend will stop (which I’ll get to in my last point).
[…]
Lack of Search...
Metacuration? Controlled Serendipity? Active...
- Nick Bilton, ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web
Another purveyor of fine content is Maria Popova, who calls this curating “controlled serendipity,” explaining that she filters interesting links to thousands of strangers out of her thirst for curiosity.
Mrs. Popova uses a meticulously curated feed of Web sites and Twitter followers to find each day’s pot of gold. She said, “I...
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Geononymity, Geoprivacy, and Geopublicy
Andrew Hyde is the newest (but not the only, or last) to drop out of the social geolocation wave:
Yesterday I checked in for my last time. I’m done. No more BrightKite, FourSquare or Gowalla. I was an early user on all three of the services, and am quitting cold turkey.
But why? (and why would anyone care…)
Well, why anyone would care can only be pointed to me just being a point of data as...
How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of...
Tremendously fascinating study by the Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism, details the news reporting in Baltimore during a certain week. Aside from looking at the distribution and number of the news stories created and how they were circulated online, the study reveals that different media pint different worlds:
Yet the quantity of stories produced does not tell everything about their...
NYTimes Goes Freemium
The New York Times has confirmed that it will be moving to a fee-based, ‘metered’ model on its website in 2011. For those of us in the tech industry, we will immediately recognize this as the ‘freemium’ business model, which is used by many web service businesses, like Flickr and Basecamp. People get a basic account for free, but have to move up to premium,...
Thomas Friedman on John Hagel's Knowledge Flows
John Hagel, the noted business writer and management consultant argues in his recently released “Shift Index” that we’re in the midst of “The Big Shift.” We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an ...
Fred Wilson on New York Is For Startups
Why is New York City a good place for startups?
I think New York is a very entrepreneurial city first and foremost and I think it always has been—going back to when it was originally settled. There’s always been a trading mentality in this town, a merchant mentality in this town and it’s always been ethnically diverse. People from all over the world have settled here.
Are...
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Completely Connected
The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the...
Joining 90:10
I am happy to announce that I will be working with 90:10, a confederation of brilliant advisors and consultants, led by my old friend David Cushman
Stowe Boyd joins 90:10
The 90:10 Group is delighted to announce global social tools authority Stowe Boyd as the latest addition to its consulting network: a constellation of stars with unparalleled knowledge and expertise.
via...
Facebook Wants To Be Twitter, Part II
This evening Facebook began testing what appears to be their version of Twitter’s retweet feature: “via”. On any article shared by your friend, you can click on “Share” and when you post the article to your profile, Facebook will now automatically say who the article came from. While the “via” content only currently works on shared articles, I’d assume that this feature would be extended to...
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Disaster Microsyntax: Project EPIC, Tweak The...
A number of folks working with Project Epic are scrambling to devise a workable microsyntax to help with disaster relief in Haiti.
Project EPIC has a larger charter, but this Haitian response is directly in its area of focus, for sure:
Project EPIC, which launched in September 2009, is supported by a $2.8M grant from the US National Science Foundation. It is multi-disciplinary,...
Social Business Innovation Awards
My friend David Cushman has announced a series of Social Business Awards, to recognize the best and most innovative social tools and their application:
Social business innovation: Efficiency and tranformation through the use of social tools.
We have the best set of tools in history for people to find each other and act together to create and improve on the things that matter to...
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Muhammad Yunus and 'Social Business'
The term ‘social business’ has several meanings. Nobel laureate Mohammed Yunus and others within the non-profit and charitable sector use it in this sense:
A social business is a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective. The profits are used to expand the company’s reach and improve the product/service.
via Wikipedia
It seems that this term is...
Why? (The King Of Love) Is Dead - Nina Simone
Once upon this planet Earth, Lived a man of humble birth, Preaching love and freedom For his fellow man.
He was dreaming of the day Peace would come to Earth to stay, And he spread this message All across the land.
“Turn the other cheek,” he’d plead. “Love thy neighbor,” was his creed. Pain, humiliation, death he did not dread. With his bible at his side, From his foes he did not...
Highest Recent Postranked Posts
I have been fooling with Postrank, and finding it a very useful way to gauge the impact that my /Message posts are having. I wish the follwong table was the result of javascript, but I manually pulled posts ranked 7.0 or higher from 17 August 2009.
Social Does Not Mean Gregarious / January 15, 2010 @ 11:09AM Defining Social Business / January 14, 2010 @ 12:34PM The False Question Of Attention...
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Cristóbal Conde on The Social Business
Although he never uses the term, Cristobal Conde really understands the nature of the social business, starting with the individual, the use of social tools, and the new role of management:
This interview with Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Dan Neville/The New York Times
Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus...
Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 11:44 AM
The Reviewing Stand Snarky piece about people writing reviews online
Cell Fu
Cognitive psychologists, neurologists and other researchers are beginning to study the impact of constant multitasking, whether behind a desk or the wheel or on foot. It might stand to reason that someone looking at a phone to read a message would misstep, but the researchers are finding that just talking on a phone takes its own considerable toll on cognition and awareness.
Sometimes, ...
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Seeing The World Through Risk-Colored Glasses
The proliferation of consumer-based social networking throughout enterprise organizations is creating a significant amount of security risk that needs to be better understood and carefully managed before it’s too late, according to the results of a global study commissined by Cisco, which revealed a widespread and growing need for more policies, processes and IT architecture.
The study, which...
Tumblr Has A New Dashboard
After several weeks of parsing through your feedback and making adjustments, the new Dashboard nav is up!
Just two things to note:
To fix the issue with unnecessary unread counts on blogs you’re already following, we now only show unread counts for private blogs.
We’re about to totally overhaul the Directory, along with the Activity page and Tumblarity which power it. In preparation, we’ve...
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Google Calendar Widget: A Small Touch
I had never noticed this before, so I am assuming it is the outcome of my enabling the Google Calendar widget inside of Gmail. I was looking at an email from someone, and the widget (I believe) displayed an upcoming appointment with that same person. Very helpful.
Strange that the reverse isn’t the case: When looking at a Google calendar entry, it would be equally helpful to see a...
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Social Does Not Mean Gregarious
There’s an old-saying among marketers: “Good marketing won’t save a bad business.” Entrepreneurs and small business owners are starting to realize that the same is true for the tools and tactics of social media: Social media will not make you a social business.
So marketers are starting to adjust. They have decided to first teach you how to be a social business. Companies have been formed to...
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Thinking Outside The Head: The Structure of DNA,...
I am reading Richard Ogle’s Smart World, and I am strongly moved by his notion of idea-spaces: the premise that we rely on external systems and collections of cross-correlated ideas to help us think. In effect, Ogle argues, we can’t really think without them. We can’t think mathematically without Arabic numerals, or productively reason about most things without...
