news

“iCloud Backup”

“iCloud Backup”:

It wouldn’t be the first time a technology expert lacked empathy for a customer, or made bad assumptions about what would be fast and easy for the customer to do on his own — especially when deciding to perform an easy, predictable, cure-all “restore”.2

And the iPad wasn’t the first personal computer, nor will it be the last, that we all proclaimed to be finally easy enough for everyone to use. Sure, it’s easy to use when everything’s working and time stands still, but that’s about as useful as when a developer says, “It worked on my machine.”

We, all of us in technology, can do better than this. And we have a long way to go.

[Yeah. lots of truth here, and not just for grandparents. Context is king, and most people have none.]

Source: Marco.org

Whose Estimates?

Whose Estimates?:

The question we all want answered is how strong demand is for the iPhone 5. We don’t know that yet. All we know so far is that Apple produced 5 million of them in time for delivery last Friday and they sold all of them. There might be millions of additional pending pre-orders. (Including mine.)

[The news game continues to be a self referential pile of suck.]

Source: Daring Fireball

To Map Or Not To Map

To Map Or Not To Map:

However, for Google that makes all its money from advertising, being able to harvest spatiotemporal user data to triangulate purchasing intent must be priceless.

Every time an iOS user interacts with Google Maps, directly or through other apps that use its API, Google gets extremely useful data that soothe its search and advertising pangs, tens of millions of times a day around the globe. For Google (and now Apple) maps are an input modality to discover user intent, perhaps only rivaled by command line search and social network affinity graphs.

But direct financial contribution is not the most important rationale for Google Maps on iOS. One of the key reasons why Google has better data than Apple is the fact that for many years users of Google Maps have been sending corrections to Google, which has improved its accuracy significantly. So by not submitting Google Maps to the App Store, Google would not only give up a very significant portion of its mobile revenue, but more importantly, it would self-induce a debilitating data-blindness on the world’s most lucrative mobile ecosystem.

[And has been asked many times, why is this data not open? Why can’t we all share this to our collective good?]

Source: counternotions

Browsers should have been cars. Instead they’re shopping carts.

Browsers should have been cars. Instead they’re shopping carts.:

Google once aspired to give us access to “all the world’s information”, which suggests a library. But the library-building job is now up to Archive.org. Instead, Google now personalizes the living shit out of its search results. One reason, of course, is to give us better search results. But the other is to maximize the likelihood that we’ll click on an ad. But neither is served well by whatever it is that Google thinks it knows about us. Nor will it ever be, so long as we are driven, rather than driving.

I think what’s happened in recent years is that users searching for stuff have been stampeded by sellers searching for users. I know Googlers will bristle at that characterization, but that’s what it appears to have become, way too much of the time.

But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that browsers are antique vehicles.

See, we need to drive, and browsers aren’t cars. They’re shopping carts that shape-shift with every site we visit. They are optimized for being inside websites, not for driving outside them, or between them. In fact, we can hardly imagine the Net or the Web as a space that’s larger than the sites in it. But we need to do that if we’re going to start designing means of self-transport that transcend the limitations of browsing and browsers.

[Brilliantly put. As usual form Doc.]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

★ Amazon’s Play

★ Amazon’s Play:

Om Malik argues that Bezos is the inheritor to Steve Jobs’s crown. I agree. Not because Bezos has copied anything Jobs did, but because he has not. What he’s done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.

[Why is it so hard for folks to remember this? Making customers happy is all there is.]

Source: Daring Fireball

A quick bit of BS skewering

A quick bit of BS skewering:

Either own what you said, accept both the reaction and the consequences of what you say, or stop saying things that only an asshole would say. To paraphrase Randy Millholland, for someone who doesn’t thrive on controversy, you seem to say some shitty things about people a lot.

Either way, for the love of christ, stop crying that people are thinking unkind things about you when you say things about them that are kind of shitty. If being thought of as an asshole bothers you, stop being one.

Really.

[If nothing else, it’s to the point.]

Source: bynkii.com

New media, old sense of entitlement

New media, old sense of entitlement:

But here’s what I’d suggest you really not do, if you want to actually look like the professional: don’t rise up from your throne and bellow, “How dare you, you little insignificant blogger, question the credibility of someone who was the editor-in-chief of Engadget! Guards, off with their heads!” Because when you do that, then you’re not the professional. You’re the petty asshole. I know it’s a subtle difference—both words start with “p” and all—but it’s important, trust me.

By the way, neither Gruber nor Arment use WordPress. That’s a pretty trivial thing to note, but it just seems to me that a professional journalist would have taken the couple seconds necessary to check.

Just saying.

[The cycle of entitlement is infinite.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

The only issue that matters

The only issue that matters:

The main thing to expect, in the short term — the next few dozen or hundreds of years — is rising sea levels, which will move coastlines far inland for much of the world, change ecosystems pretty much everywhere, and alter the way the whole food web works.

Here in the U.S., neither major political party has paid much attention to this. On the whole the Republicans are skeptical about it. The Democrats care about it, but don’t want to make a big issue of it. The White House has nice things to say, but has to reconcile present economic growth imperatives with the need to save the planet from ourselves in the long run.

I’m not going to tell you how to vote, or how I’m going to vote, because I don’t want this to be about that. What I’m talking about here is evolution, not election. That’s the issue. Can we evolve to be symbiotic with the rest of the species on Earth? Or will we remain a plague?

Politics is for seasons. Evolution is inevitable. One way or another.

[It is an unbelievable mess we’re making. As I kid I read Heinlein’s line that the meek will inherit the earth… because everyone will have left because of planetary depletion, overcrowding, etc. and found it cute. We’re a long way from being able to colonize another planet so this isn’t looking quite so amusing anymore. And of course, since this is exactly the kind of news no one is interested in hearing, no Party will discuss it. We’re such children.]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Doc Searls Weblog · Will the carriers body-snatch the Net with HTML5?

Doc Searls Weblog · Will the carriers body-snatch the Net with HTML5?:

It’s at least clear that TV is the elephant in the snake of the Net’s time. It is moving off the air and over the top of cable and telephony. Still, the Internet is sold as a service already by cablecos and telcos that hate the thought of remaining a “dumb pipe.”

If things go the way Crossey expects, the Net’s carriers will likely expand Net service offerings in ways that fracture the Net into pieces, each with hard-wired dependencies on the carrier. The result will be the biggest body-snatch in the history of business. Standing where the Net used to be won’t be Telco 2.o, but TV 2.o, with lots of marketing gravy. (Think of all that jive the “big data” pushers are saying about “delivering personalized experiences.”)

So, rather than having the greatest marketplace ever created, we’ll have a set of entertainment and marketing services, available only from phone and cable companies, working only on devices they sell or sanction: basically the worst scenario imagined by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. We’ll still have some of the Net’s huge open marketplace, but far less of it than would would have been possible if what ran on the pipes were structurally separated from the pipes themselves.

I see little reason for hope here. Big Business and Big Government, enemies in the theater of politics, are in fact completely aligned around the wishes of Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, Verizon and Hollywood. People like me have been remarkably ineffective in advocating for the free and open Internet and its importance for the free and open marketplace, as well as a free and open society. On letting the Net slide into the clutches of its enemies there is no daylight between Obama and Romney, because it’s a non-issue for both of them. Just like it’s a non-issue for most of us.

Hope I’m wrong. And I’d be glad to hear arguments to the contrary. I’m a born optimist, and I try to keep an open mind. But I’m not feeling good about this thing right now.

[Sounds grim.]

If You Think Obama’s First Term Was Bad, Imagine a Second – Bloomberg

If You Think Obama’s First Term Was Bad, Imagine a Second – Bloomberg:

In other words, after winning he will lecture Republicans about how their positions are insincere and adopted purely for political reasons; he will insist that his existing positions are already a compromise with them; and he will try to govern unilaterally. These tactics seem unlikely to produce the desired results. Obama has, after all, adopted all of them, and they haven’t worked.

If the public renders a split verdict — returning Obama to the presidency and giving Republicans more power in Congress — both parties will insist that it’s the other that needs to “listen to the American people.” The choice before those people is looking more and more like one between Romney and a unified Republican government, or Obama and four more years that look a lot like the last two.

[And this is the mess I referred to earlier.]