jr conlin's ink stained banana

Me: (reading alert off of my phone) Huh, quake off of San Francisco a few minutes ago. Looks like it was a three pointer,

John: (sitting next to me) What, did you feel it?

…

Why yes, it was a lateral movement quake with a thrust vector of .01, brown shoes and from it's stance, hailed from Cotsgold on the Hampshire.

Excellent deduction, Watson, but you failed to note the fact that the quake had a limp! Mwah-ha-ha!

i really like the folks i work with…

John Battelle recently pondered:

But the question stayed with me – What is the essence of "the Web," or "The Internet"? Does Apple's approach to the world we've built together over these past 15 years qualify as part of the Web? i've argued in the past that it does not. But perhaps i'm being too dismissive. Perhaps, after 15 years of noise, and dirt, and half steps, perhaps we all really want the Web packaged and delivered to us in neat Apps, ready for consumption.

It's an interesting question, but one that's a bit too narrowly focused. In truth, Apple is merely trying to do the same thing that Facebook and AOL have tried to do. They want to be the Internet.

Not part of it, they want to be it.

Sure, they may use bits of it, and may even duplicate things that look a lot like stuff you see on the web, but ultimately, they don't want you anywhere near the web. They want you where they can control you, feed you what they want, when they want it. They want you dependent on them because that's where all your friends/peers/celebrities are. This may sound hyperbolic, but it pretty much lays out exactly the way things were before the web.

Consider the pre-web days of Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie and the like. The web was a dirty place you had to work at to get to. If you were lucky, you might have gotten a way to send an email to someone on another service, but again, you usually had to work at it. That's because you were worth more to them playing in their sandboxes than you were playing somewhere else (even when you were ponying up bucks to use them).

It's still true today. Facebook doesn't want you wandering off, so they've either duplicated things you might want elsewhere or made it so that the only place you can get things is on their service. That's not how the web is supposed to work, and is a huge step backwards. Thing is, most folks don't care. i've said that i consider Facebook a "roach motel of information". Stuff goes in easily, but never comes out. Open Graph is merely taking that one more step, and i have no doubt what-so-ever that it's Facebook's goal to sweeten "search" results with folks that swallowed the blue pill. (It does mean that search results are going to be heavily gamed in facebook by commercial interests rather than academic ones, but that's not important to facebook.)

i'm fairly sure Apple is playing a similar game, only their's is App based. Apps, that only run on their OS on their devices, under their strict control. They introduce things that work in that world alone and discourage you from going elsewhere. (Heck, a great example is the fact that the only supported emulator for iPhone developers only runs on Apple equipment. It's not possible to release a VM image folks could use?)

i'm also fairly certain that any company that reaches a particular level of user engagement will pull the same sort of crap. Google has to a certain extent with the development of Docs, Base, and similar things, but i will admit they're being a bit better than many in also allowing you to take your data and leave.

Ultimately, the web is open, and as such, can't do things like cut off facebook or other groups that don't want to play fair. That's not what the web is. Still, it's the open web's responsibility to do the same thing that it did when folks were using Prodigy, GEnie and Compuserve. Make the open web so much more compelling than what's available in the closed web.

Right now, we're not doing a really good job of it.

We need to fix that.

i am a bit disappointed by FourSquare.

http://foursquare.com/venue/0xBEEF is not a butchery.
http://foursquare.com/venue/0xFFFF is not a terminus.
http://foursquare.com/venue/0xDEAD is not a funeral home.

i expected better.

Still, we have a while to go before we hit venue 3,737,844,653, but i expect it to go somewhere better.

i like my in-laws.

They're charming, wholesome folk from North West Connecticut. He worked in a factory most of his life. She worked in a pharmacy. They were born, raised, lived and will most likely die in the same small town, surrounded by the same people they have know most of their lives.

So, naturally, i like to perform experiments on them.

Recently, i've heard a fair bit of discussion talking about how the prototypical techno-phobe "Mom" is horribly wrong. Moms are pretty darn tech-savvy. Heck, there are plenty of Grandma's that are equally versed in the digital realms and are the first to tell you. My inlaws, however, are not those people.

They are quite content to passively consume media from the Big Three Networks, because they always have done that. They might watch a few shows on the cable, but the most daring they'd stray is watching Food Network. i've asked them questions about the shows they've just finished watched they couldn't answer like "Where was that restaurant?" or "So, what was the lead characters name again?" i don't really want this to sound derogatory, but they have the intellectual curiousity of a bottle of aspirin. Right now, my wife is explaining to her parents the concept of on-line TV guides. They are far from stupid. It's just that they have little to no interest in technology or advancement.

So, whenever i try to gauge if a given technology is simple and "mainstream" enough, i immediately think of them. It's not simple unless they can understand it. It's not useful until they think it's valuable. When i slam the iPad as being incomplete, they're the ones i have in mind (my answer may change once it's possible to create and print mailing labels from an iPad). Of course, they would still need a keyboard, mouse and a stand so they can keep it on the computer desk.

They have a laptop with a 7 hour battery that they brought with them so i could set it up. When they wanted to check their email, they asked to use my wife's computer.

What's important to realize is that there are a LOT of folks that are exactly like this. It's not an age thing either, since i have younger cousins who are like this. We are a nation of 300,000,000, and a planet of 7,000,000,000. Only one in ten people in the US are Netflix subscribers. Only about one in seventeen people on the planet has a Facebook account. As far under the bleeding edge as we all may be, there's an equal if not greater population of folks that are not. Even 40 years into this, we're still pioneers.

[wild cheering]

Thank you! Thank you all! What a great night this is for America!

[more cheering]

It is with great honor and pride that i accept this position which i have been tirelessly spending vast sums of money to acquire!

[Cheers!]

i'll have you know that just prior to coming out to speak to you, i received a gracious call from my opponent conceding this election.

[Lots of cheering]

And though i spent the last five months telling you that he eats babies and regularly worships satan, i accepted his courteous offer before telling him that i was the one who slit his dog's throat last Tuesday.

[a bit less Cheering]

Let's face it, i slung more mud at that bozo than BP's pumped into the well. Heck, the past few weeks? i was just making crap up. You can't imagine the kind of glee i felt watching that maroon trying to calmly discuss why his grandmother was not smuggling Mexicans north in a hot air balloon during World War II. Honestly, there are jukeboxes that are harder to play. But that's not what we're here to talk about tonight! No, tonight we talk about the future!

[Ok, the cheering is back]

A future where you realize that you elected me on groundless promises that had you stayed awake for ten minutes in civics would have shown as impossible!

[And, the cheering is a bit less again]

A future where i will come to the stark realization that politics means other people, and i get to live out the repeated failings of countless others who have held this office ahead of me.

[clapping]

People You hated. People you wanted out so that you could get this fresh face in charge. People who wouldn't think twice about condemning your neighborhood for a strip bar if it got them that much closer to a more powerful position or at least a decent kick back.

[POST EFX:insert clapping here]

And furthermore, a future where you realize that the slim number of my policies that have the best chance of actually passing are the ones you skipped over because they were boring. Policies like cutting funding for community programs, infrastructure, and permit oversight. So i wouldn't park anything better than a Pinto under any trees in the area.

[a random cough]

So thank you, one and all! Your votes mean the world to me. Not as much as the money i'll be getting from lobbyists and future speaking engagements, but it's sweet how the puppies come back after you kick them. Oh, wait, no that comes next week.

[ ]

Thank you and God Bless America!