After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

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Now is the Time to Quit Facebook

The number of people quitting Facebook is still small, but they are a vocal minority. Alicia Eler explores why they are leaving, shares the farewell stories of a few and explains why they felt a need to band together. Read Now is the Time to Quit Facebook to learn more about the “not on Facebook” movement.

Fabled Google Drive Won’t Be Another Dropbox

Some may be expecting the fabled Google Drive to compare closely to Apple’s iCloud or Dropbox, but Jon Mitchell explains why he expects the long rumored product to be a very different beast. Check out
Fabled Google Drive Won’t Be Another Dropbox to learn more.

The Price of Free: Path Uploads Entire Address Book To Its Servers

Path has gotten a great deal of attention because it has a great user experience, but this week it got some bad press over a privacy issue. You might not expect the app to upload your entire address book to it’s servers, but that’s exactly what one smart hacker discovered. Path has since apologized but there is a great deal of damage done. Is the price of a free app worth the loss of privacy? Learn more about Path’s privacy issue in The Price of Free: Path Uploads Entire Address Book To Its Servers.

From the comments:

Alan Langford – “The open source community has long distinguished between free as in no cost, and free as in freedom. One can expect that anything in the commercial sphere that comes at no monetary cost will do so by restricting one or more freedoms.”

Tiago Sartor – “There’s saying that goes like this: if something is free, then you are the product.”

More Top Posts:

First Glimpses of Office 15 Are Minus the Ribbon

As Microsoft adopts a new usage model with elements gleaned from the “Metro” style, will Office be moving away from the ribbon? The first clips of the new Office in action deliberately obfuscate the answer. More

Since 2009, Mobile Internet Usage Has Doubled Every Year

The growth of the mobile Web is on a steady rise. While pundits throw around words like “explosive” and “outrageous” the more precise word is probably “consistent.” According to analytics firm StatCounter, users accessing the Web through mobile devices has almost doubled every year since 2009. In its latest report, StatCounter says that global Internet usage through mobile devices rose to 8.5%, nearly doubling the 2011 figure of 4.3%. More

New iPhone, iPad and Android Apps for January 2012

2012 started with a flourish of new apps across iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The holiday season is the busiest time of year for app publishers but the follow up in January was equally impressive. That is a testament to the growing app ecosystem and the number of developers starting to program for mobile platforms. We take a look at some of our favorite new apps from last month below. More

Q&A: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley on What He’s Learning From Twitter and What’s Next

Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing. More

Iran Blocks HTTPS, Cutting Off Gmail, Yahoo and Other Major Sites

The Iranian government isn’t exactly known as a champion of free speech and access to information. Thus, it’s never shocking to hear about Internet censorship in the country, the state of which appears to be getting worse all the time.

Today, news surfaced that the country is blocking access to websites that use HTTPS. That means that a number of popular, secure websites like Google, Gmail, Yahoo and even online banking sites are inaccessible. More

Microsoft Looks For Ways To Use Kinect In Business Applications [UPDATED]

The company launched Kinect for Windows this month, which is the first Kinect sensor licensed for commercial use. Microsoft Dynamics, the company’s unit that develops enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications, is currently exploring business scenarios that could benefit from the use of Kinect technology. More

Facebook Bans Breast-Feeding Photos

Breasts. They’re complicated.

Facebook states that breast-feeding pictures are okie dokie, just as long as there’s no “exposed breast” that doesn’t feature the child actively nursing. In other words, if there’s no suckling, there’s no posting. Today breast-feeding activists are using Facebook to coordinate “nurse-ins” outside of of the company’s headquarters worldwide, including its homebase Menlo Park headquarters. More

ReadWriteWeb Channels

Enterprise

• The Online Ad Fails at the Super Bowl
• First Glimpses of Office 15 Are Minus the Ribbon
• Study: PDF May Be Creating More Paperwork Than It Saves

Mobile

• [Poll] Are the iPad 3 Rumors Underwhelming?
• [Interview] How Zynga Is Transforming Games With HTML5
• Microsoft Defines the New Mobile Business Experience on iPad

Cloud

Follow ReadWriteCloud on Twitter and join the ReadWriteCloud LinkedIn Group.

• Amazon Bucks Storage Trend: Drops S3 Pricing
• How to Become a Cloud Service Provider in About a Day: VMware
• The Disintegration of PaaS

ReadWriteWeb Community

You can find ReadWriteWeb in many places on the web, a few of which are below.

• ReadWriteWeb on Facebook
• ReadWriteWeb on Twitter
• Google+
• ReadWriteWeb on LinkedIn

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

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Covario Issues Annual Client Awards for SEO/SEM Success
ADOTAS
ADOTAS – Search engine marketing/SEO services provider Covario issued the results of its annual Sigma Awards yesterday, during the company's annual INFLECTIONPoint customer conference. Covario presents those awards to its clients who've demonstrated …
8 Search and Social Takeaways from Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2012Search Engine Watch

all 4 news articles »

View full post on SEO – Google News

The new policy takes effect on March 1. It’s mandatory for all Google users; there is no opt-out. Users’ privacy preferences are unchanged, but the new arrangement makes it easier for Google to bring user data across its services. Google is steaming ahead toward integrating search, email, YouTube, social and work, so it’s getting the legal ducks in a row to make the new Google one continuous experience.

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The new privacy policy replaces over 60 separate documents with just one that’s also easier to understand. The major change is to make clear that signed-in Google users should treat all Google services as unified, and that data from one can be shared with another.

The new terms of service explain the terminology Google uses in clear language, and it consolidates many of Google’s existing terms, so users don’t have to keep track of as much Googlese.

A few services, including Books, Chrome and Wallet, have industry-specific privacy laws, so those are keeping their own privacy notices.

There are no surprises here, but Google’s new policies will make it easier for Google to personalize content across services. These can be helpful, little things like spelling suggestions, life-savers like meeting reminders based on location or traffic conditions, or core pieces of Google’s business, like personalized ads across Google sites.

Google users should take a few minutes to peruse the new policies. You can see what data Google has about you via your Google Dashboard. If you’re unfamiliar with the ways Google uses its user data, check out its new Good to Know website.

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb

The new policy takes effect on March 1. Users’ privacy preferences are unchanged, but the new arrangement makes it easier for Google to bring user data across its services. Google is steaming ahead toward integrating search, email, YouTube, social and work, so it’s getting the legal ducks in a row to make the new Google one continuous experience.

Sponsor

The new privacy policy replaces over 60 separate documents with just one that’s also easier to understand. The major change is that it makes clear that signed-in Google users should treat all Google services as unified, and that data from one can be shared with another.

The new terms of service explain the terminology Google uses in clear language, and it consolidates many of Google’s existing terms, so users don’t have to keep track of as much Googlese.

A few services, including Books, Chrome and Wallet, have industry-specific privacy laws, so those are keeping their own privacy notices.

There are no surprises here, but Google’s new policies will make it easier for Google to personalize content across services. These can be helpful, little things like spelling suggestions, life-savers like meeting reminders based on location or traffic conditions, or core pieces of Google’s business, like personalized ads across Google sites.

Google users should take a few minutes to peruse the new policies. You can see what data Google has about you via your Google Dashboard. If you’re unfamiliar with the ways Google uses its user data, check out its new Good to Know website.

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb

Over the years, the complaints I’ve received from readers (we all receive some) center around the notion of bias – a tendency to interpret a story with the appearance of a certain slant or, perhaps more accurately, from an angle somewhat askew from the angle most others use in their interpretations. If a blog were truly by and about one person, then the appearance of bias would be impossible to avoid. Typically with publications, it is plurality that enables the reader to see the complete picture of subject matter. Plurality, for any organization, requires organization. And at a time when the Web publishing industry’s definition of what we do evolves faster than our ability to do it, organization has been difficult to achieve.

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A sea of one-man bands

What Richard was saying back in 2007 was something I believe we can still appreciate today: A great publication evolves beyond the voice of any one person. Specifically, his comment came in response to his own surprise at finding RWW placed #6 on the Techmeme Leaderboard. He cited RSS pioneer Dave Winer, who in May 2003 – in an effort for his readers to distinguish a blog from a wiki – defined a blog as something that is unedited.

“Assuming a Wiki is a weblog-like system that allows anyone to edit anything (I know some don’t) then a Wiki represents an interesting amalgam of many voices, not the unedited voice of a single person,” wrote Winer. “On my weblog no one can change what I wrote. In contrast, having written for professional publications, pros have to prepare for their writing being interfered with… Weblogs are unique in that only a weblog gives you a publication where your ideas can stand alone without interference. It gives the public writer a kind of relaxation not available in other forms. That might mean that in some sense the ‘quality’ of the writing is different, but I would not say lower, assuming the purpose of writing is to inform, not to impress.”

Thus the notion of freedom as “exemption from ever being edited” may have been born. Readers are developing a notion of blogs as self-service operations, minimally administered content management systems from which unaltered streams of observations are broadcast in their raw and unencumbered form.

Or as one reader put it to me in an e-mail last week, “No one wants to consume a ‘package’ of content any more. The Web and blogs in particular have freed us from all that… [You] reminded me of the old magazine editors I know who don’t like the Web because it has taken away their power to pretend they know what is best for the reader.”

In his October 2007 post, Richard also cited an October 2007 claim from prominent blogger Robert Scoble that the infusion of journalism was, in a way, poisoning the art of blogging, as evidenced by his estimate that only 12 of the 100 blogs on Techmeme’s leaderboard were single-person operations. “Most of the things on the list are now done by teams of journalists – that isn’t blogging anymore in my book,” Scoble had written. “TechCrunch just hired a professional journalist which is sort of funny cause when I started blogging I never expected blogging to become a business, just a way to share what was going on in my life.”

So perhaps in retrospect, one of the reasons why blogging has had such difficulty transitioning itself to a business model is because its leading practitioners had not expected it to be a business in the first place.

Last September, when the inevitable structural breakdown began between TechCrunch and its corporate parent, AOL, contributor M. G. Siegler defended the publication as a blog under the classic Winer definition, and in so doing, distinguished TechCrunch contributors from the body of practitioners called “journalists.”

“Journalists seem to think they can write about TechCrunch as if they’re looking in a mirror,” Siegler wrote. “That is to say, they think our operation runs in a similar manner to theirs and they use that as a jumping off point for misguided (but predictable) outrage… First and foremost, the concept of an ‘editor’ at TechCrunch is essentially just a title and nothing more. Generally speaking, neither Mike [Arrington] nor Erick [Schonfeld] (TC’s two ‘co-editors’) are overlords that dictate what everyone else covers. With a few exceptions (mainly for newer writers), no one person even reads posts by any other author before they are posted. Traditional journalists may be appalled to learn this. But this is a big key of why TechCrunch kicks their ass in tech coverage.”

Are we, or are we not, bloggers?

For those of you keeping score at home, ReadWriteWeb has slipped down the Techmeme Leaderboard to #41 in the four-plus years since MacManus rendered his initial assessment. The simple reason, I’ve tended to believe, was the same one I maintained in defending a different publication I used to manage: It’s not really a blog. “One thing hasn’t changed and hopefully never will – the best bloggers are passionate about the topics they write about, and they are informed and opinionated,” Richard wrote. “All the writers on ReadWriteWeb have those attributes. So even though we’re not a blog, we’re still bloggers.”

Fast-forward to last December, and ReadWriteWeb’s acquisition by SAY Media. At the time, SAY’s corporate blog trumpeted RWW as “one of the most popular and influential tech blogs in the world;” and Richard MacManus followed up by calling the publication he founded “one of the biggest blogs in the world.” He later added, “ReadWriteWeb is and always will be a team effort.”

The distinction matters because of that very phrase. Unlike a diary, a poem, a high school term paper, or any other one-person dissertation, a publication resulting from a team effort carries with it specific responsibilities. It must inform the public accurately, to the best of its ability. It should present a balanced and clear representation of the topics it covers. It should improve the lives and work of the people who read it.

Just as importantly, the law treats a publication differently because it is produced by a plurality.

Last November, a U.S. District Court judge in Oregon ruled that a blogger named Crystal Cox could not invoke the state’s Shield Laws for journalist protection in her defense in an anti-defamation case, stating specifically that one cannot proclaim herself a journalist the same way one can proclaim herself a blogger. In his opinion, Judge Marco Hernandez wrote:

Defendant cites no cases indicating that a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” is considered “media” for the purposes of applying a negligence standard in a defamation claim. Without any controlling or persuasive authority on the issue, I decline to conclude that defendant in this case is “media,” triggering the negligence standard.

Defendant fails to bring forth any evidence suggestive of her status as a journalist. For example, there is no evidence of (1) any education in journalism; (2) any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity; (3) proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest; (4) keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted; (5) mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources; (6) creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others; or (7) contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story. Without evidence of this nature, defendant is not “media.”

Judge Hernandez’ ruling triggered a measure of outrage, particularly at the notion that in this era of the 24-second news cycle, for someone to be recognized as a journalist, he or she must be associated with an established “media” organization. The EFF’s Matt Zimmerman and Trevor Timm wrote last month that laws should be changed to reflect an era where journalism is practiced by individuals with their own motivation and their own means.

“The proper approach to this question is to focus on what amounts to journalism, not who is a journalist,” Timm and Zimmerman wrote. “Journalism is not limited to a particular medium; instead, it focuses on whether someone is engaged in gathering information and disseminating it to the public. To the extent that laws are unclear or out of date – such as Oregon’s retraction statute which does not clearly include (or exclude) Internet journalism – legislatures should be encouraged to expansively update them to ensure the protection of individuals seeking to communicate information to the public.”

Of balance and choice

At one level, freedom from the burden of organization may be considered enablement, especially for practicing journalists who (like so many of us) have found themselves without a regular paycheck. But the moment we all become privateers, we journalists lose our capability to provide the one characteristic that readers continuously, adamantly, passionately, and rightly demand: balance.

A one-man show cannot be without bias; it is impossible. True, Web publishing has freed journalism from the stifling encumberments of bureaucracy. But it has not relieved journalists of the burden to contribute to a cohesive, complete, accurate picture of the world they cover; and no matter how many hyperlinks it can throw at the subject, the Web cannot substitute for coordination and organization. The editorial system provides journalism with the checks and balances it requires to fulfill its responsibility to the public for fairness and accuracy.

You can have freedom from bias or you can have freedom from oversight. You cannot have both.

Discuss

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So the browser is in no danger of disappearing. But as the Web expands into a delivery mechanism for all forms of applications and services, is a stand-alone, exclusive window into the Web, complete with bookmarks and toolbars and add-ons, truly the most sensible usage model for a system that may yet embrace all of computing? This is a question Mozilla began asking last summer, and whose answer remains inconclusive.

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Either the new form factor is here, or it’s not

As Mozilla Foundation Chair Mitchell Baker announced last July, “I think of apps as a new ‘form-factor’ for the Web.

“The browser is no longer the only way people access the Internet. People also use more focused ‘apps’ to do discrete tasks, and often feel a strong sense of attachment to the apps and the app model,” Baker wrote. “This is an exciting addition. Mozilla should embrace some aspects of the current app model in addition to the browser model.”

But Baker’s announcement points to an evolving, wiki-like document elsewhere on Mozilla’s Web site, the latest version of which seems far less willing to abandon the browser-centric Web as Baker’s original inspiration. “The next generation of innovation on the Web,” it reads, “will be anchored by a browser that is an honest broker committed to the interests of the individual user and developer, providing amazing experiences that match those offered by proprietary platforms; and user control and developer reach and freedom that is superior to proprietary platforms. As Firefox has transformed the browser landscape before, it must do so again.”

To that end, Stephen Horlander, who rearranged the contents of the browser for Mozilla Firefox version 4 in 2010, has been busy rearranging them yet again for a future version, as yet unnumbered. Under consideration is an adaptation of menus to include captioned tiles, like the home screen on an iPhone.

While this goes on, the organization has renewed its ongoing deal with Google for the next three years, which had been the principal source of the free Firefox browser’s revenue. The deal retains Google’s place as the search engine of choice in Firefox’s search box, while Google continues to develop the competing Chrome browser that doesn’t even have a search box – its text search capabilities are shared with the address bar.

Though the notion of Google Chrome as an OS for laptops and netbooks hasn’t yet caught on with consumers, it has succeeded thus far at advancing the vision of the browser as an environment for real-world work. It’s like a guiding star for the product line, a clear direction. So one should keep in mind how clever Google has been with its product strategy when assessing its motives behind extending its default search agreement with Mozilla: an agreement which presumes that for at least the next three years, Firefox will maintain a prominent window adornment called a search box. This while Microsoft, in establishing its bold, new direction for Windows 8, begins publishing an entirely window-less build of Internet Explorer 10, exploiting minimalist design ideas ironically pioneered by Mozilla’s Aza Raskin (who will, incidentally, have officially left Mozilla at the first of the year).

If Windows 8 succeeds in the PC and tablet markets in 2013, the browser that most users will find themselves using will, once again, be the one that users start by default. (As some users would say during the heyday of IE5, “Isn’t the Internet the one with the blue “e?”) On the other hand, if Windows 8 fails, then the healthy and growing tablet market will most likely be led by iOS, followed by Android – neither of which have proven fertile fields for Firefox to flourish.

Are Web apps not really the Web?

The rise of HTML5 has advanced the myth that applications run outside the browser are somehow “not the Web.” Thus users find themselves defending the sanctity of the browser-based environment without really knowing why.

To be the Web, RSS pioneer Dave Winer suggested in December, one has to provide links. “I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world,” Winer wrote, “it’s not even close to a replacement for the Web.” (This from the fellow who, ten years earlier, advocated an all-out defense of Java.)

Winer’s argument holds some water in that no network is truly viable without connections. The Web was originally conceived as a network of contextual connections between related topics; it gave rise to a delivery system, HTTP, which became ubiquitous thanks to the popularity of the browser. That ubiquity opened up a path for a new class of distributed applications that was not beholden to any one company’s or organization’s proprietary strategy.

If that class of apps is not really the Web, though, as Winer suggests, then the browser truly does have a place in our future – just a limited one. Articles with hyperlinks are nice, but their utility is limited. The role that Mitchell Baker foresees of an “honest broker” of functionality sounds less like a newsreader and more like an operating system.

For the browser to truly evolve – to fulfill all of Mozilla’s many goals and obligations simultaneously – it could conceivably become a kind of language platform. Think of an “inner iOS” or “inner Android” inside the operating system (I believe someone once coined the term “virtual machine”), within which the role of reading articles in a hyperlinked web falls to just one of many “apps.” And here, Google search may be featured prominently in accordance with the agreement.

To that end, however, Google may already be further along with its advent of Dart, a kind of “JavaScript++” that incorporates the full scope and object support features of Java while maintaining compatibility.

However, if we’re really considering HTTP as a kind of pipeline that enables end-to-end functionality, where the Web as we’ve come to know it is but one of many channels, then one could argue Microsoft is quite far along, at least with respect to its roadmap for Windows 8. The WinRT runtime would implant not a virtual machine subordinate to the OS, but a real machine that is a principal OS function, alongside its existing .NET Framework. Neither Google’s nor Microsoft’s development strategy is open to contribution from the community, like JavaScript. But the community has yet to reveal, or perhaps even coordinate, a counter-strategy – something which accelerates the evolution of the browser beyond yet another round of add-ons.

Can a browser be a reader?

HTML5 – the lingua franca du jour of the future Web – is already planning for a browser-less library, with its CSS Generated Content for Paged Media. This system envisions a Web without browsers alongside the Web with browsers, with the former being full of fine literature, long-form articles, and educational matter – a Web that speaks directly to the dreams of Dave Winer, full of links, references, and relationships.

But unlike a blog, and unlike the Web as it’s currently realized in browsers, W3C envisions more of a reader. “There is nothing in Web specifications that prevent browsers from adding a page-based mode today,” the draft reads. “However, most Web content is authored and styled with a continuous presentation in mind. This could change if it becomes possible to describe paged presentations in style sheets.”

For anyone who presumes that conventional browsers are the Web, the W3C effectively proves with the very drafting of this module for HTML5 that they are not. It foresees a Web beyond the browser, in a new and perhaps richer context, full of new research and discovery tools that simply don’t fit the old mold. While there are browser-based apps today for Amazon’s Kindle and other literary contexts, the books in that environment are worlds unto themselves, without any links in or out with which Winer may escape.

For Mozilla or anyone else to get ahead of the game at this point, perhaps it may be agreeable to concede that the Web, such as it has been, is only a segment of a broader, more functional, more usable realm of information.

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The Web was not designed to require identity or authentication for data to be accessed. Up to now, most consumers have not considered this a problem – at least, not the ones who found themselves staring at ReadWriteWeb when they were expecting Farmville. This will change.

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Too many protocols, too few sources

The one emerging fundamental truth from the Web as a technology is a strange, sideways corollary to Murphy’s Law: If a system can be gamed, it will. As the Web evolves, and as HTML5 is implemented by more organizations for delivering applications, the Web will come to rely more and more upon the very component it was designed from the beginning to intentionally dis-include: identity, the need for which is said by its earliest engineers to be contrary to the notion of openness.

The way the first Web services distinguished between individual users was by storing session data on client systems in the form of cookies. This system was largely distrusted and, like all such systems online, became the subject of considerable gaming and malicious abuse. Its eventual unreliability, coupled with the fact that a cookie was only meaningful to the service that created it, led to the need for a new standard for establishing trust between server and client – one that would be less ridiculous than SSL.

The rush to fulfill this need led to an over-abundance of competing protocols, and an even greater number of so-called federation mechanisms for enabling these protocols to cooperate with one another. Amid all the confusion, developers of the first wave of genuine cloud-based SaaS applications find themselves relying on the most abundant, readily available solution at the present time: a combination of OAuth 2.0 for enabling a channel for one authority to grant permissions to another, and an identity protocol such as OpenID for exchanging identity tokens over that authorized channel.

Taking advantage of this new reliance are the networks which have the most to gain from absorbing as much data as possible on users’ activities: Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. And in its forthcoming Windows 8, Microsoft will place its Windows Live ID front-and-center, making it the preferred password-based logon system for Windows-based PCs and tablets. This leads to a kind of tangled conundrum that only our modern society could have bumbled into: The problem of safeguarding access is effectively being outsourced to the very centralized sources that are the crux of the existing problems with privacy and user security.

Pairing identities with profiles

In a March 2011 session for the SXSW conference, Webroot security engineer James Reffell borrowed ReadWriteWeb’s own “facebook login” incident to illustrate the effects of identity centralization. When unknowing users stumbled onto RWW, many of them actually ended up logging onto the Facebook Connect service anyway, since FC is one of RWW’s identity providers. As a result, folks ended up associating themselves with Facebook as comment contributors to RWW, even though the comments they were contributing consisted mainly of cries for help.

What makes this data valuable for centralized ID providers is its ability to be aggregated and analyzed. This is why Facebook and other services are calling for a one-to-one relationship between users and activities, and for users’ online identities to be unique and, shall we say, unvarnished. Last November, the extent of Facebook’s efforts was revealed when Facebook changed novelist Salman Rushdie’s profile to use a different first name – the one that appears before “Salman” on his passport. Rushdie objected because folks wouldn’t recognize “Ahmed Rushdie” as the famous novelist – and accessibility by his readers was one of the whole points of adopting a Facebook identity in the first place.

What wasn’t determined was whether Facebook chose to look into Rushdie’s passport profile simply because he was Rushdie, or whether there’s a larger, ongoing process of checking everyone’s online handles against their passport names.

Whether he intended to game the system or not, TechCrunch contributor M.G. Siegler discovered yesterday that his Google + profile picture had been removed for having displayed the middle finger in a solo setting. The original, unaltered arrangement may be found on Siegler’s Twitter feed, which incidentally uses a nom de plume. Although the Google + terms of service do explicitly forbid the use of potentially offensive material, Siegler found it odd that Google would be actively policing the relative stances of its users’ hands. “In certain cultures, various hand gestures mean different things,” he wrote. “Is Google also going to delete my profile picture if I have my fingers up to my chin, for example?”

The odd coupling

The problem at hand is that Web apps developers are now entrusting the job of validating identities to services that have an interest in cleansing them. There are perfectly valid reasons why a social network provider would want to maintain both order and equanimity in its users’ profiles. There are equally valid reasons why whatever information is conveyed to a service trusted with validating individual accounts, should only include data that is directly accessible to the parties in the transactions to which those accounts pertain. These two sets of reasons are incompatible with one another at multiple points.

Yet de-coupling transaction accounting from identity provision disables the entire value proposition for social networks. In other words, if Facebook and others could not potentially monetize the data they were collecting from folks logging onto apps and blogs and stumbling onto strangely fortunate headline choices, they would have to find revenue elsewhere – perhaps from subscription fees, which at this point users are unwilling to consider.

In the meantime, there may be no immediate incentive for developers to build a more viable solution: a kind of personal portfolio service where Salman Rushdie’s name and M.G. Siegler’s middle finger remain untouched, but whose personal data is only used by them and the services and retailers of their choice for their own purposes. Need alone does not generate solutions, otherwise Web users (which include online bankers) would not have had to suffer with the dangers of SSL encryption for well over a decade now.

However, the longer we wait for a solution to materialize, the more opportunity we give for someone – intentionally or not – to exploit the problem.

Discuss

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Since its very inception, Microsoft’s business model has been about leverage. It uses its established foundation in one popular platform to extend another. The advance of the tablet form factor had been announced further ahead of time than Margaret Thatcher announced the surge on the Falklands. It’s not like Microsoft didn’t see this coming. But in 20/20 hindsight, it’s remarkable to see now how the company appears to have actively worked to thwart that advance, to slow it down, by introducing potential form factors that could deflect interest in tablets – for example, an embedded device that could reveal the weather forecast and present your e-mails, that could be sewn to one’s luggage.

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“What Am I?” Round 4

For over a decade, electronics manufacturers looked to Microsoft and Intel for leadership in defining what a handheld, functional form factor would be, because its marketability would need to be fueled by a desirable platform. Their first attempt, called “Origami,” was crude, ungainly, and powerless, even jumping the borderline into the territory of ridiculous; but then amazingly, their second and third attempts were no better.

A tablet PC was not as desirable as a tablet. Consumers were clearly demonstrating a preference for a device that did not remind them of everyday work. Connecting to their PC would be nice, but being another PC was not necessary. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Apple answered that calling almost completely. Just as more smartphones today resemble iPhones than BlackBerrys, more tablets today resemble iPads than PCs. Only recently has there been a tablet form factor that any plurality of manufacturers would want to promote as a top-shelf product.

Still, no single manufacturer – not even Apple – has sewn a common thread through every electronics form factor using a substance more solid than branding alone. While parts of the Windows Phone platform are indeed Windows, the two platforms are designed to run different software. The holy grail for Microsoft would be more than a common thread, but a bond of technology that seals the deal for both Windows Phone and Windows 8, creating the need for one out of the need for the other.

The challenges for Microsoft toward this end are these:

1. Making customers want this. The party that stands to benefit the most, and the soonest, from a convergence of “the two Windowses” is comprised of wireless carriers. Their support may be critical, because the massive investment manufacturers require to produce high-bandwidth touchscreen connectivity devices won’t be subsidized by consumers alone. Microsoft’s tying one Windows to the other may be the only factor that sparks carriers’ interest in investing in Windows Phone-capable devices, and in following Microsoft’s more carefully plotted hardware support strategy (letting Microsoft define what the phone should be). But that same value proposition is not obvious to the consumer, who has already divided “tablet” from “PC” in her mind, and so far is quite pleased with the result. And as long as the end customer demonstrates no desire, the carriers won’t generate it either.

2. Creating a common class of software. There is frankly not much software that can, or even should, scale up to fit the PC and then scale down to smartphone size and retain most of its functionality. There’s a way to play “Angry Birds” on a PC, but folks seem to have more fun holding it in their hands. Handheld games are fun because they are handheld. There’s a way to create .DOCX and . XLSX files on a smartphone, but it’s typically a waste of time trying to create an entire database with a mail-merge form on a plane. You can’t just scale software up or down and expect it to be as functional or as practical; anything that should scale must be redesigned for scalability. Redesigning everything to fit a hybridized platform is actually harder, and potentially less successful, than designing something completely new from the ground up.

3. Tying all devices to the same cloud. Conceivably, the most important common bond between devices bearing a Windows logo could be a Microsoft cloud-delivered service. At long last, Windows Live has a purpose that customers can easily embrace: Syncing media between devices is the most obvious and desirable cloud service. But if Microsoft transitions too much of its software into cloud-based services too soon, key components of Windows’ original value proposition would be put in play. For example, many home offices run Windows because they need to run the same Microsoft Office (i.e., not the Mac OS version) that’s in their workplaces. A fully capable Office suite in the cloud may (and most likely will) find itself challenged by other fully capable, cloud-based suites whose cross-platform nature will make Windows dependency seem like a handicap. And PC-centric applications deployed through Windows Azure are already finding themselves challenged by cross-platform apps deployed through Salesforce.com’s Heroku, and probably by new cloud players as well.

*Some assembly required.

So it’s amid these challenges that Microsoft is advancing Windows 8, whose first public beta may be expected in late February. Its value proposition is under construction, but it may be the best that Microsoft can do with what it has. There are asterisks all over its plan.

Windows 8 will run a new class of software*, that takes a cue from how tablets make software unlike the PC by being itself being unlike a PC. This class may (let’s not say “will” just yet, if only to be safe) be cross-platform*. You’ll still be able to run the existing software (on your PC), but what will make the new software desirable will be 1) its newness; 2) its use of a new and secure* common reference model for software; 3) its connectivity to a cloud* that connects all Windows-branded devices with yet another class of software*.

*The asterisks, of course, all mean, “To be determined (TBD).” It isn’t that Microsoft has this Apple-style curtain over these facts which it will eventually reveal in some gala premiere special with Mariah Carey and Boyz 2 Men. The painfully obvious fact is that no one at all really knows how this convergence will work, and the beta process will literally be a live dress rehearsal for all these ideas.

Microsoft is dictating terms with respect to specifications for Windows Phones, just the way it has done with specs for PCs that qualify to carry the Windows logo. To put itself in a position to do so, and to make the bargain worthwhile for carriers, it alludes to the promise of a common leverage point with the established PC platform, in which customers have already made significant investments. Windows could be more than just synchronized; it could be coordinated, providing what the company calls “the end-to-end experience.” But to make this promise, it has had to upend its entire development strategy for desktop computing, which is based around the .NET Framework upon which the Windows Azure cloud depends – and it’s that same cloud which must somehow tie together the common functions of Windows on PCs, tablet, smartphones, and conceivably HDTVs if they’re still in the mix.

Time warped

All this may make you ask, why didn’t I entitle this article, “Is Windows 8 too early?” The answer lies back with the failed unveiling of the Origami UMPC in 2006. Of all the bad ideas and feature omissions (such as connectivity being a future option) which ended up dooming Intel’s and Microsoft’s joint prototype, the fatal bullet may have been the first one fired anyway: From a distance, you could still see that the UMPC was made to run Windows XP. Not Vista, XP. If these companies had serious intentions on advancing a mobile platform, their failure to even make the attempt to court the industry that already had a lock on mobility – the wireless carriers – was no more clearly demonstrated than with XP on their mobile PC.

Microsoft’s entire business philosophy has been built around extending the PC. And when it ran up against a barrier beyond which the PC operating system and methodology could not be pushed, it pushed anyway. 2006 was Microsoft’s opportunity to reinvent the wheel to fit a new and bolder mechanism. The time for Metro-style apps and accessible cloud services and the minimalist design philosophy was six years ago. But instead of prototyping the Windows Phone that could bridge the two platforms back then when the world was ready for it, beating Apple to the punch, Microsoft spent all its resources and talent on building Zune – a single-function device whose only purpose was to take a bite out of the iPod.

Today, the iPod (with an “o”) isn’t even on anyone’s radar; it’s a relic. Like a greenhorn hunter, Microsoft aimed at where it thought the market was at the time, not where it was going. Windows 8 should have been Windows 6.

[Photo of Origami PC from CES 2006 by Wolfgang Gruener, TG Daily]

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We talk a lot, almost ad nauseum, about the “free and open Internet.” What we sometimes fail to take into account is that freedom has many… shall we say, facets, which cast different shades of light at different angles. From one angle, the story looks like this: The free Internet is threatened by the incursion of governments that would seek to suppress individual freedoms through the systematic restructuring of Web services, with the burden being placed on service providers to comply. But that’s not coming from Comm. McDowell, or from the opponents of SOPA legislation. It’s the new populist battle cry of Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister seeking once again to become President.

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The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the world’s principal standards maintenance organization for electronic communications, and has been so since 1865. Today, it is an agency of the United Nations. Not all that long ago, when the act of going online was largely a function of the telephone, it was ITU (and its predecessor, CCITT) that managed the multi-stakeholder process of standardizing signal processing with telephone modems. The syntax of today’s e-mail addresses, using the @ symbol, is a direct descendant of a CCITT standard. It is no minor player.

Last June 15 at U.N. Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the ITU’s Secretary-General, Hamadoun Toure, met with the Russian Prime Minister for what began as an innocuous photo-op. It’s at photo-ops like these where Putin (a man whose own publicists share photos of him fly fishing with his shirt off) likes to lob verbal grenades to see how long it takes them to go off. It was here that he lobbed a big one, and the blast hasn’t even really happened yet.

“We are thankful to you for the ideas that you have proposed for discussion,” Mr. Putin told Toure, according to the Russian government’s official English-language transcript. “One of them is establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union. If we are going to talk about the democratization of international relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and global control over such exchange. This is certainly a priority on the international agenda.”

“Global control” is Putin-ese for a kind of transparent, but centralized, governance system. For example, Russia’s proposed global nuclear nonproliferation regime, which is opened up for international cooperation but centralized around Russia, is called the Global Control System. It is the counterpart of former U.S. President George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order.”

In a live public forum last week, Mr. Putin gave another interesting hint about his vision for Internet governance. Asked what his government could do about the rise of objectionable content over the Web, Mr. Putin suggested that it is not government’s place to do anything about it directly. Instead, he argued, government should offer a proactive alternative. “There is only one way to confront [the problem],” Russian news service Publiciti translates him as saying. “That is by offering other options and solutions on the same platform, and by doing it much more creative and interesting.”

But because the Internet mirrors society now, he continued, law enforcement agencies should have as much jurisdiction in virtual society as they do in actual society, saying, “Culture or even incivility of what is going on, on the Internet, is the same what is happening on roads [in our cities]… Law enforcement agencies have to watch what is happening on the Internet, such as pedophilia and other problems.”

He’s not really wrong, in some ways, depending on how the light hits you. But Mr. Putin also leaves open the possibility of a kind of agency only a former Soviet bureaucrat could appreciate: a bureaucratic agency to reduce the spread of bureaucratic agencies. And that sent up red flags (with a little gold emblem in the corner) at Comm. McDowell’s office. As he noted in his speech two weeks ago:

Even though Internet-based technologies are improving billions of lives everywhere, some governments feel left out. They have formed impressive coalitions, and their efforts have progressed significantly. So merely saying “no” to any changes to the current structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition… Accordingly, we should encourage a dialogue among all interested parties and broaden the multi-stakeholder umbrella to find ways to address all reasonable concerns. As part of this conversation, we should underscore the tremendous benefits that the Internet has yielded for the developing world through the multi-stakeholder model. Upending the fundamentals of the multi-stakeholder model is likely to Balkanize the Internet at best, and suffocate it at worst. A top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without borders. No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make decisions in lightning-fast Internet time. Economic and political progress everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions inevitably would become politicized within a global regulatory body.

But proponents of ITU governance are touting the failure of the multi-stakeholder model – as represented by ICANN, the steward of the Internet’s domain hierarchy – by citing the recent, and much anticipated, chaos surrounding the opening up of the .XXX top-level domain. Now stakeholders whose livelihood depends on their being disassociated with pornography (for example, Penn State University) are just as much in the market for .XXX domain names as adult content publishers. And top-level domain registrars are going so far as to market those domains for non-adult publishers for that very purpose, even on television, with the tagline, “Get yours… before someone else does!”

It’s the infusion of Western commercialism and the corruption that capitalism brings forth… all over again.

In an historically replete and comprehensive overview of the subject recently posted to Cisco’s corporate blog, Geoff Huston, chief scientist with the Asia/Pacific Network Information Center, cites the dangers ahead if Putin and others continue their success at characterizing ICANN as a disaster:

There are still the lingering concerns that if ICANN, as a private-sector entity, were to once more explore positioning itself on the brink of imminent demise, the collective task of picking up the pieces and continuing to support the operation of the Internet is one that appears to have a very uncomfortable level of uncertainty. In addition, the perception of ICANN as an entity whose single purpose is to maintain an entrenched advantaged position of the United States and of U.S.-based enterprises in the global Internet has been widely promulgated. It is often portrayed that ICANN offers no viable mechanisms for other national or regional interests at a governmental level to alter this somewhat disturbing picture of international imbalance. Although other aspects of international activity fall under various political or trading frameworks, and national and regional interests and positions can be collectively considered and negotiated, critics of ICANN point out that the message ICANN sends to the rest of the world is that the United States is withholding the Internet from conventional international governance processes. Skeptical commentators interpret the U.S. administration’s use of ICANN as at best a delaying technique to gain time to further strengthen the position of U.S.-based enterprises across a lucrative global Internet market, aided and abetted by a compliant industry body that masquerades as an international standards organization.

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