Evan Rudowski: Web Transplant

Who Decides What You View?

In today's New York Times Magazine, Jeffrey Rosen asks who decides what content we can view over the Internet.

Increasingly it's Google, with its vast and global search engine reach as well as its dominance of online video via YouTube.

Somewhat disconcertingly, we learn that the first line of arbitration at YouTube is a corps of twenty-somethings who rule on individual requests to find certain videos unacceptable. If it gets too tricky for them, they bump it upstairs to Google headquarters where a cadre of lapsed journalists-cum-attorneys try to strike a thoughtful balance between local law and free speech.

Not so easy when the laws vary so much from country to country and when the volume of content is increasing nearly exponentially. Even the Google-istas admit their current model is unsustainable.

And what happens if Google and other companies choose in the future to weight their decisions more in favor of commercial considerations than free speech objectives?

Worth reading.

A Big Warning Sign for Apple

When I wrote last November about my experience with my cracked MacBook, I already knew I wasn't alone. A simple web search found dozens of defective MacBooks with the identical defect to mine, and the photos to prove it. It was clear, MacBooks were cracking like crazy.

After my blog post, I had the shell of my MacBook replaced at the Apple Store in London, only to see it crack again, in exactly the same places, less than a month later. So back again I went to the Apple Store, to have all the parts replaced a second time.

What a disappointment. The MacBook I had dreamed for so long about getting turned out to be a rotten Apple. It works fine (and always has) as long as I don't mind the chassis peeling away like bark from a tree. I now have the thing armor-plated, with a hard plastic shell snapped onto it, a keyboard cover, and padding over the wrist rests. When I close the lid I first lay down a delicate little chamois cloth to cushion it. I do all but give my MacBook a kiss as I open and close it, in hopes it will not fall apart.

My plaintive cry of grief in my November blog post attracted some serious traffic, especially for my modest blog. But I was wondering when an uber-blogger might take up the cry. And now someone has. Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch, asks the same question -- why are so many Apple products falling to pieces?

Judging from the more than 200 responses to Mike's post, a lot of people are wondering the same thing. Apple, are you listening? Your stellar reputation for making wonderful things is at risk. A groundswell is building.

This reminds me of the Dell episode several years ago, in which influential blogger Jeff Jarvis rounded on the hapless company, and the floodgates opened. The vitriol unleashed against Dell was hugely damaging. They eventually recovered, by listening better.

Is Apple the next Dell? Apple has so much goodwill amongst its supporters (myself included, in spite of my experience), that I think they can recover. But their reputation is so good, they have much further to fall.

The first step in curing a problem is admitting you have one. So, Apple, own up to the quality issues. Admit it, apologize for it, and fix it. We'll all be on your side if you do. If not, what a momentum-killer.

Congratulations -- It's a Tweet!

Recently I received a message via FriendFeed, broadcast by a friendly associate, someone who is highly successful, liked and respected -- and deservedly so. To paraphrase, it said that he was in the delivery room, using a wireless connection, and the baby was on its way.

What a funny world we live in. I hadn’t known he was an expectant parent (we’re not that close, and we’re separated by thousands of miles). Now I know. And I’m happy for him.

Of course, in my daily information flow, or lifestream if you prefer, my friend’s headline carried just as much weight as news of the latest presidential poll rankings; the impeding Beijing Olympics; invoices I needed to pay at work; and the 15:43 train I needed to be sure to catch. They all flowed equally across my screen, carried by one of the many tools I have installed for sending chunks of information this way and that. These tools do not discriminate; they do not care what it is they’re sending. Making sense of it is up to me.

Arguably the birth of a baby is most important of all of these bits of information. But in the old days, given the extent of my acquaintance with this person, I might have learned of the blessed event closer to the child’s first birthday. Which is just about where it should be in my list of personal priorities (with no offense intended to my distant friend).

But we all live in public now, to paraphrase another friendly old acquaintance, Josh Harris, who realized this earlier than most of us. And this made me wonder what my friend’s partner, who was presumably in the delivery room groaning while he was tweeting, would have made of this.

I asked my one-person focus group, my wife, who in her deprived existence does not tweet, or twhirl, or jabber, or tumble or twitter (in the old days people were institutionalized for doing such things, especially all at once). She assumed that my acquaintance must have been joking. She made it very clear that should we ever find ourselves in the delivery room again (however unlikely), I’d best not be sending messages out until her work was done.

For all I know, my friend’s spouse may be an executive at one of these services. But my wife is not. Therefore, here are some tweets you will surely never receive from me:

 “Wife is ovulating – wish me luck dudes”

“Never mind – she wants to finish that New Yorker article first”

“Still in the delivery room – everybody tweet her to push!”

“Wow - the afterbirth is nearly as big as the baby -- see photos on Flickr"

Way Cuil?

The new search engine Cuil launched yesterday and Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb wonders how Cuil managed to get so much publicity so quickly.

I tried Cuil (by searching for myself of course) and found that while it was visually pleasing, the results were not as accurate as I would have wanted -- some older items were ranked higher than newer ones, and their association of images with results summaries was somewhat off -- for example there is a thumbnail of a very attractive redheaded woman next to the summary of one of my blog posts, and one of Winston Churchill next to another.

Now I like redheaded women, and I like Winston Churchill, but as far as I am aware neither have been referred to in my blog. So unless Cuil knows me better than I know myself, they have some tweaking to do. To be fair, it's still early days for Cuil and they surely will improve.

The reason Cuil has been met with so much anticipation, and so much hype, should be worrying to Google. What it suggests is not that Cuil is so cool but rather that people are starting to look for what's next. The days of Google as the rising underdog are over. They're the establishment now. Since everybody loves an underdog, we're all looking for the next one.

The isn't to say that Google is losing its relevance, or its edge -- but maybe a bit of its place in our hearts.

Ed Bott Misses the Mark

Ed Bott blogged last week about a pay site for programmers that frequently shows up in Google search results and irritates him and others because they find themselves at a pay wall when they click through to results. His somewhat heavy-handed solution? To ask Google to remove all pay sites from its index.

Of course there are many subscription websites that provide very useful knowledge and expertise to their communities. There are many sites worth paying for because they provide unique, actionable and valuable information, frequently updated, from trusted sources. We know because at SubHub we provide the publishing platform for many of these sites and we see the communities that have grown around them.

There is no reason why these sites should not be findable via Google for those who would find them relevant. If Google were to remove them from its index then Google itself would be providing an incomplete picture of available information sources, and would be failing at its mission of indexing all of the world’s information — not just all of the world’s free information.

What is interesting is that despite the complaints Botts' commenters seem to have about the specific site in question, many of the comments then go on to explain how to game the system using caching or blocking of cookies in order to get the information from the site for free. So it’s not that the information is not valuable, it’s that some people don’t want to pay for it.

I will leave it to others to comment on the ethics of doing this, but it strikes me as a bit dubious. If you don’t believe in paying for the information, fine, but don’t steal it. Many of Botts' readers seem to be programmers who presumably would object if someone swiped their intellectual property — their code — so why would they be comfortable swiping someone else’s intellectual property — their content?

What they seem to be saying is that they agree the content on the pay site is indeed valuable to them professionally, but they are too cheap to pay for it. Which does not lead to the conclusion that Google should remove such sites from its index, but rather that pay sites use solutions that do not make it quite so easy to get at the paid content.

A Friend in Need is Friended Indeed

I had worked with Joe years ago and always assumed he generally liked me, so you can imagine how I felt when I sent him my friend request, only to receive no response.

I could see his friends list, and on it were other mutual friends. He had friended them, so why not me?

Perhaps he didn’t really like me as much as I had assumed. Might this be his way of telling me? Well then, maybe I didn’t like him so much either, I reckoned.

But what if he wasn’t well? Surely if he were well, he would have friended me. Maybe there was a death in his family. Or perhaps he was just busy?

I couldn’t know. At least he could have updated his status message.

I was left feeling confused, and maybe a little bit slighted. Joe was very popular, and if he didn’t want to friend me, maybe I wasn’t worthy. But who was he to judge me?

I wondered if I should reach out to Joe. I sent him a message, but he didn’t reply.

My friend AW had a similarly perplexing online networking experience. At an alumni reunion for the blue-chip consulting firm where she once had worked, an ex-colleague confronted her.

“What’s the deal with you on LinkedIn?” he challenged her. “Why are you hiding your contact list? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”

AW was perplexed. Was she obligated to open her contact list to anyone who might like to troll it looking for leads? Wasn’t it reasonable for her to keep her contact list private? This bloke didn’t think so. In his mind, AW wasn’t playing by the business-networking rulebook, and he was offended.

I’ve apparently offended people too. I was once approached by a business acquaintance who requested that I write a personal recommendation that could be added to his LinkedIn profile.

The problem was that I had never worked with the guy. I think we had met a few times when I was at Excite Europe. On this basis, he wanted my personal recommendation.

If meeting me is all it takes to get my personal recommendation, that’s a pretty low standard. I told him why I was uncomfortable with his request, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He actually tried to convince me that we had indeed worked together – although the best he could manage was to throw around the name of some mutual acquaintance.

We went back and forth on this for several days, as though his persistence would be enough to force me to admit to some sort of repressed memory of our having worked together. It was a bit like the satanic child-molestation cases of the 1980s, when entire communities became convinced, in spite of the lack of evidence, that nursery school teachers were ritually abusing their children.

This guy was the Mrs. David Letterman of business networking, always lurking around every corner. I was connected to everyone in the world through him. He was a social networking whore. Being linked through him was useless, since everyone else was too. With him, it was quantity, not quality. Every new contact was another notch in his belt.

After our bizarre debate over whether or not we actually had worked together, I finally got disgusted enough to drop my would-be colleague from my contact list – the only time I’ve ever done that. Checking his profile, he already had hundreds of personal recommendations anyway – so either my memory is really faulty or lots of other people are as indiscriminate as him. With hundreds of recommendations already, why did he work so hard to wring one more out of me?

Not long ago I saw this same person quoted in the newspaper, boasting about how he actually had hired people to manage his online networking presence – apparently too vast to handle by himself. Which leads me to wonder – had I even been arguing with him at all, or just with one of his paid impersonators? I guess I’ll never know.

Back to Joe. About a week ago, he finally friended me, along with about 150 other people. “Sorry,” he said meekly. “I had so many friend requests I was overwhelmed, so I just sat on them.”

Joe had suffered from social networking paralysis. But all that mattered to me was that he had clicked a link and thus validated me as his friend.

It’s true that in the old days it was never necessary to validate friends electronically. But I didn’t care. I felt like Sally Field clutching her Oscar: “He likes me,” I told myself. “He really, really likes me.”

Why Oh Why, Apple of My Eye?

When my Dell laptop finally gave up the ghost, I took the opportunity to switch back to the Mac. I had last used the Mac regularly back in 1993, in grad school at NYU, when it was a vertical box with a grey-toned monochrome monitor and a little smiley computer icon that greeted the user at start-up.

I had never lost my affection for the Mac, but we drifted apart from each other as Windows captured the business user market and I, unfortunately, was a business user. We lost touch, the Mac and I, but I never forgot her.

Recently with the switch to the Intel chip, the Mac had finally become viable for business. And with the advent of Windows Vista, which would have essentially required me to learn a new operating system anyway, I figured I might as well re-learn the best operating system – the Mac, OS X version.

So it was with some amount of delight when my Dell finally died, and after a failed if half-hearted effort to resuscitate it, I marched purposefully to the local Apple reseller (in the process almost slamming headlong into the actor Nicholas Cage, who was walking backwards out of an expensive jewelry shop here in Bath, where he had recently added another fancy home to his collection).

So simple, the Mac – just a few elegant choices to make: white or black (I chose white); MacBook or Pro; size of screen – and soon I was a proud owner. Finally we were reunited. Mac and me, together again. We hadn’t seen each other since grad school, and we had a lot of catching up to do.

But the honeymoon was brief. After a few days of carefree, pleasure, the little warning signs began to appear. The mouse pad button stuck and felt crunchy when I tapped it. The palmrests began to turn yellowish – leading me to question my personal hygiene and sending me off compulsively handwashing throughout the day.

The comma key popped off – quite irritating as I am a major consumer of commas (had it been the tilde key I might not have minded as much).

A crack appeared on the hinge for the screen lid. And then, one evening as I was typing away, I felt a little fluttering beneath my right palm, as if there were a Post-It note slapped down beneath. But it wasn’t a piece of paper; it was actually the plastic casing of my MacBook, which had fractured and a piece of which was now flapping loose.

Things were not going well for the Mac and me. Clearly it was time to receive some tender loving AppleCare. But this was when I finally understood what was happening. Apple, my long lost computer love, now brought back into my eager embrace, was not ready to love me back.

Maybe she had been told too many times how beautiful and sleek she was, but Apple was not ready to hear that she was not so lovely. She coldly turned her back on me. My cries for attention were rebuffed.

An attempt to visit the Genius Bar taught me that true genius was, truly, unattainable. At the Apple Store on Regent Street in London, I was told that walk-ins could not see the Geniuses (somewhat in contradiction to the concept of a bar, as a friend pointed out). I could make an appointment on the web, but no more than 48 hours in advance; but anyway all of the appointments were taken. However, if I tried every hour on the hour, some appointments might become available.

Now it could be argued that I am on the internet a bit too much, but even I am not online enough to keep trying to make a reservation at the Genius Bar every hour until I get one. And besides, I had not made that kind of effort to reserve a booking of any kind since the last time the Grateful Dead rolled into town, and that was far more rewarding.

Calling my local authorized Apple service provider (Farpoint, on Walcot Street in Bath) was no more effective, with every telephone menu option resulting in a recording asking me to leave a number for a callback (come to think of it, I do remember wondering who was ever going to answer the endlessly ringing telephone the last time I was in their shop). Do I need to add that there never was a callback?

Oh Apple, my dear Apple, why hast thou forsaken me?

Finally it was my business partner who hit upon a solution. Having learned by now how to most effectively deploy a loudmouthed American, he suggested that I march into the Apple Store, plop my rapidly decaying MacBook down on the table alongside the shiny showroom models, and insist on staying until my problem was addressed.

Business Partner later claimed he wasn’t serious about this (typical British reticence I think), but being highly susceptible to suggestion I took his advice and soon found myself on the selling floor of the Apple Store on Regent Street, loudly pointing out the multiple visible defects on my MacBook, and attracting the attention of many nearby shoppers (except for the man sleeping, standing up, next to me).

For good effect, I had the AppleDefects.com page, with its frowning-apple parody logo, and its many photos of prematurely decrepit MacBooks remarkably similar to mine, prominently displayed on my screen.

I was being so uncool there in the Apple Store – the coolest retail environment anywhere. These cool young Apple guys in their t-shirts, ready to be so coolly helpful, confronted by a loud, paunchy, middle-aged American in a suit. Man, I was sucking the cool right out of the place.

Needless to say, I soon had my appointment – so next week I will have the privilege of an audience (of up to 20 minutes, I have been forewarned) with a Genius, a cool Genius no doubt, who will sagely diagnose my problem and propose a solution. This solution, I have been further warned, stands a good likelihood of requiring me to leave my MacBook overnight, or even for several days.

It almost makes me feel nostalgic for Dell – a company that was just as uncool as I am, but which would at least send somebody geeky to my premises to fix my computer, leaving me in continued, uninterrupted operation.

Apple will eventually fix my problem, I am sure. But they will take my MacBook from me, and I will miss her, and I will pine for her. I will be left with an aching emptiness. And then after a few days of loneliness, they will return her to me, clean and with a shiny new face, and I will be grateful. I will take her back. And I will still love my MacBook, because I am a forgiving soul and I still want to love her, and I need her. But I will never forget how she broke my heart.

Advice for Facebook: Sit Tight

OpenSocial's been getting so much coverage, you'd think it was world-changing. Presidential candidates don't get as much coverage for their initiatives as Google gets when it announces an API. I've heard more about OpenSocial than I have about the recent turmoil in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

OpenSocial won't change much for the end user. Facebook is the leader because it has presented a clean, well-organized environment that leaves users in control. People feel comfortable there and so do their friends. An API isn't going to cause them to go anywhere else.

If anything, OpenSocial may introduce a sameness that makes it harder for one social network to distinguish itself from another. If I can toss a sheep at my friend equally easy on Bebo, MySpace or even LinkedIn, then really what's the difference?

This may be the big OpenSocial time-bomb for its participating companies. Will OpenSocial end up being like the European Union, with standards set from Brussels, blurring the borders and unique identities of the participating nation-states?

Of course, where there are fuzzy borders, there are security challenges. The early reports of privacy hacks make OpenSocial look initially shaky. Facebook's primary asset is the privacy and control it offers to its members, along with its clean interface, and to date this hasn't been visibly compromised.

OpenSocial is great for developers. They can easily build for multiple social networks using one set of protocols. But really, if they need to use a second set of protocols for Facebook, what's the big deal? Facebook has a large enough audience to make this well worthwhile. Don't expect to see anyone soon announcing they are dropping support for the Facebook platform.

Comparisons between Facebook and AOL's old Rainman architecture are misleading. Rainman was complex and cumbersome, and using it required training. It was a proprietary advantage for AOL at a time when the content development tools elsewhere were primitive. It became less relevant when the capabilities of web development tools caught up.

By contrast, Facebook's architecture is so easy that a 13-year-old can write an application after school. This is not a high barrier. Those who attempt to contrast the sunny openness of OpenSocial with the supposed bleak darkness of Facebook's closed architecture are being disingenuous.

It's no surprise that every major social network other than Facebook has piled on to join OpenSocial. They are all so focused on Facebook as their major threat, they would sign up for anything that offered the promise of weakening their powerful rival. Affiliating with OpenSocial is also a great way for a second-tier player to be seen to be joining the big leagues, standing alongside Google and the other big names. Who would pass up that opportunity?

If I were Facebook, I'd like my position right now. With the launch of OpenSocial, it's even more clear that there's Facebook, and everyone else. OpenSocial represents safety in numbers, or circling the wagons perhaps. In either case, Facebook looks strongest. If I were Facebook, I'd remain aloof.

Disclaimer: One of my former bosses at Excite, David Sze, is a venture capital investor in Facebook via his firm, Greylock. One of my other former bosses at Excite, Joe Kraus, leads Google's OpenSocial initiative. I have other friends and colleagues at both companies.
   

Tags: OpenSocial, Facebook, Google