Jack Cheng takes a shot at defining The Slow Web:

Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease for the web-enabled products and services in our lives.

It’s a very interesting post where he also describes some of the web sites and apps that exemplify this movement. It reminds me of Clay Johnson’s call for healthier information diets.

(link via @retinart)

In Technology as Savior, J. D. Bentley tells a great story about flossing (yep, FLOSSING), and technology’s impact on our ability to take responsibility for our actions:

We eschew per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity out of lazi­ness with the expec­ta­tion that, some­how, “tech­nol­ogy” and “sci­ence” has — or will find — a way out, what­ever the cost.

The pull quote doesn’t do it justice, this is a post you have to read in its entirety.

This Skype Advertising Update reads like satire:

While on a 1:1 audio call, users will see content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences. So, you should think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about. Ultimately, we believe this will help make Skype a more engaging and useful place to have your conversations each and every day.

So, let me make sure I understand. Skype is worried that my conversations might not be “engaging” enough. So, instead of my daughter doing funny dances for her grandparents in the US, Skype will “generate fun interactivity” by prompting us to talk about “the brands that we care about”? Like, “Hey, how about that new Magnum ice cream flavor, eh?”

I don’t know how an idea like this manages to make it through even the mildest of corporate sanity checks.

Kyle Baxter has a very interesting viewpoint on yesterday’s WWDC announcements in Apple Bets it All On Siri and iCloud. He argues that this is all part of the continuing building blocks in Apple’s larger vision:

The new MacBook Pro really is the best notebook Appl’s ever shipped, but her’s the thing: their line-up as of 9:59 AM this morning was really, really good too. Appl’s hardware is getting to the point where it’s so good that it’s good enough for nearly everyone, so dramatic improvements like a retina display for Macs is a relatively minor improvement for users.

In the words of Clayton Christensen, these improvements are sustaining innovations, rather than disruptive. They’re filling in the holes in a very grand and mostly realized vision. iPhone, iPad and MacBook hardware are solid and so is iOS. What I think this tells us is that Siri and iCloud are integral to Appl’s future. If they don’t hit a grand slam with them, it’s going to be difficult to maintain their level of growth going into the future.

I fully agree with Kyle’s view on how important Siri and iCloud are to Apple (read the full post for his reasoning), but I would add a third product to that list: Passbook. Dan Frommer summed it up nicely:

On one hand, right now, it’s just an aggregation of your boarding passes, movie tickets, payment credentials, and loyalty cards. But it’s easy to see how Apple could go much deeper into payments and transactions in the future, if it wants to. With or without NFC.

I do have one semantic quibble with Kyle’s piece. He calls iCloud “disruptive technology”. I would argue that Dropbox is disruptive technology (“an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network, displacing an earlier technology”), whereas iCloud builds on that as sustaining technology (“[it] does not create new markets or value networks but rather only evolves existing ones with better value, allowing the firms within to compete against each other’s sustaining improvements”).

But whatever you call it, the conclusion remains the same: iCloud, Siri, and Passbook are Apple’s bets to ensure a long and prosperous reign at the top of computing.

Towards the end of Android Fragmentation Visualized, an article by OpenSignalMaps that analyzes 3,997 (!) distinct Android devices across different dimensions, comes this attempt at setting the world record for Silver-Lining Hunting:

One of the joys of developing for Android is you have no idea who’ll end up using your app.

Pardon my lack of eloquence, but, LOL! First, there’s the obvious logical fallacy: no-one knows who will end up using their apps, no matter what phone/platform they develop for1. Second, not knowing who will end up using your app is a bad thing. Most apps fail because they are unable to reach product/market fit. And one of the major reasons for not reaching product/market fit is not understanding your market — the people who will end up using your app.

The variety of resolutions visualized in the OpenSignalMaps post is staggering, and trying to spin it as anything but a nightmare for developers is commendable but misguided.

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1. User and market research can help you make educated guesses, but will only take you so far until you have a real product in the wild. ↩

In The Great Big Opportunity Matt Salisbury talks about subsidiarity — the idea that decisions are better made where they have immediate effect:

There has been a lot of talk about the advent of the “information age.” For the first time since the industrial revolution, we have experienced a real disruptive change in business context. The age of communication is now, but if you pay too much attention to the technology, you’ll miss what’s really happening.

What’s “really happening” is that we now have the chance to work like humans instead of machines.  Communication and information’s advance is restoring subsidiarity to our brave new world.

I like his conclusion:

Ultimately, the information age is not about the information. It’s about human dignity and happiness informing how, where, and why we work.

I’ve collected quite a few articles about Facebook in the period immediately preceding and following the IPO, so I thought I’d share them all in a single post. These are not primarily about the IPO and the issues surrounding that process. It’s a collection of interesting (and sometimes controversial) viewpoints about where Facebook is headed, and what that means for the wider web. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it’s always good to look at a variety of perspectives and then find a version of the story that you feel comfortable with.

The articles are listed in chronological order, starting with the oldest. Enjoy!

The economics of digital sharecropping:

Because Facebook’s content is created by its members, ARPU (Average Revenue Per Users) also tells us the monetary value of each member’s labor. If the average Facebook sharecropper were to be paid a revenue share for his or her work on the site, that member would make a buck and change every three months - about enough for one crappy cup of coffee. Needless to say, the amount is so small that Facebook members never think about it. The amounts only become economically interesting when, as I wrote earlier, you aggregate them on a massive scale.

I would argue, in fact, that while Facebook very much wants ARPU to grow steadily, it probably doesn’t want the number to get so large that it becomes a meaningful amount to its members. If that happened, members might start thinking about the cash value of their labor rather than just its attention value.

Back Off, Mark Zuckerberg!:

An appreciably abashed John Smith struggled to figure out how his reading habits had become public knowledge. After clicking on the Kardashian headline, he hadn’t clicked a Facebook ‘recommend’ button or anything. So why were all his Facebook friends being informed that while perusing the Huffington Post he’d surrendered to primordial yearnings?

Because at some point over the past year he had clicked a button without reading the fine print and thus had entered the world of “frictionless sharing.” In this world, if you’re on a website that permits frictionless sharing, every time you click on a headline, the site can report this behavior to your Facebook friends.

Facebook’s business model:

The good news for Facebook is there is a lot of room to target ads more effectively and put ads in more places. The bad news is that, if there is one consistent theme in both online and offline advertising, it’s that ads work dramatically better when consumers have purchasing intent. Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand ”“ they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends. You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.

Facebook vs. Twitter:

In the long run, people will trust Twitter more than they do Facebook. And when it comes to building a long-term, trusting relationship with its users, Twitter will take it slowly and steadily, and in doing so, could win the race.

How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked the Valley:

Zuckerberg and his crew have made a series of high-risk moves - five hacks that have changed Silicon Valley forever ”” that were far more daring than wearing a hoodie to an IPO roadshow.

The Facebook Fallacy:

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits.

After Facebook fails:

The distance between what tracking does and what users want, expect and intend is so extreme that backlash is inevitable. The only question is how much it will damage a business that is vulnerable in the first place.

There’s a Zucker Born Every Minute:

While playing on the audienc’s desire to get rich quick has often been enough to launch a tech stock into the stratosphere, it doesn’t seem to have been enough to help Facebook reach escape velocity. Why is that? Well, from a story perspective, we believe it’s because of an inherent dissonance between the gold rush mentality and the meaning of the brand.

Facebook was trying to tell both stories at the same time. The social network is about community and connectedness, while the public stock offering was all about getting rich quick. Of course, every successful brand has a human story and a money story living side by side. The question is, do the two stories complement each other in some interesting way, or do they cancel each other out?

I came across Piotr Czerski’s essay We, the Web Kids through a great collection of quotes on James Bridle’s site. It’s the kind of essay that I think everyone who does anything on the Internet should read. It’s a pitch-perfect collection of thoughts on what it means to live here, now, on the Internet. For example:

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not “˜surf’ and the internet to us is not a “˜plac’ or “˜virtual spac’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

His views on the idea that we don’t want to pay for things are also spot-on:

This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist, but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever.

I know I probably say this too much, but this is a must-read.

Jon Kolko goes on an full-scale assault against online advertising in a post for the Austin Center for Design called Advertising Is The Problem. I am no fan of the advertising model myself, but Jon paints a post-apocolyptically grim picture of what’s to come:

I’ve seen the future, and it’s awful. It’s The Shallows: In the future, you’ll only see the things that are most likely to get you to buy. Everywhere. All the time. It’s an internet of consumption, based on an algorithmic profile of everything you’ve done, and it’s constantly selling, selling, selling. It’s pervading into real life, through targeted and adaptable advertising on digital billboards, physical computing, mobility solutions, kiosks, digital product placement, taxi flat screens, in-flight entertainment, and on, and on. Ther’s no conversation. It’s not engaging. It’s consumptive. It’s mindless. And it’s happening all around us.

I am (slightly) less bleak on this topic — I think there is enough evidence of content creators selling their goods directly to their readers/listeners/viewers that we’ll start seeing a slow but steady shift away from traditional online advertising. See Chris Wolff’s The Facebook Fallacy for some commentary on that point, as well as a follow-up from Doc Searls called After Facebook fails, where he makes this statement against the traditional advertising model:

The simple fact is that we need to start equipping buyers with their own tools for connecting with sellers, and for engaging in respectful and productive ways. That is, to improve the ability of demand to drive supply, and not to constantly goose up supply to drive demand, and failing 99.x% of the time.

Ironically, Doc is one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which Jon Kolko uses to set up his own post.

Anyway, I think viewpoints like Jon’s are important — whether we agree with them or not. They force us to think about how we spend our time, and how we can contribute to preventing those negative visions of the future from occurring.

John Moltz is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers with his very nice web site. And he just wrote a thing about Windows 8 for Macworld where he really outdid himself. It’s hard to pick just one section to quote, so please, just go read Coming Attractions: Windows 8. A small taste:

Microsoft has declared Windows 8 a tablet operating system “without compromises” because it runs on tablets and desktops and toaster-fridges and can run desktop applications on any Intel-based hardware. Surely any operating system that has a matrix to let you know what features are available in which version can’t be compromised, right?

But running Windows 8, it often seems that what’s been compromised is your sanity.

I have such a weakness for snarky tech reporting.

(via The Loop)