Archive for April, 2010
Did you even know Facebook has unilaterally decided to share all your data with anyone it pleases?
Facebook has kept remarkably quiet about its latest move in a recent series designed to stealthily remove what it had previously scrupulously stood for: respect for data its users have chosen to share on it with friends they know in real life, confident that this information would not be shared with the world at large. A change in policy announced last week allows Facebook to share all your date with anyone they please. It’s still possible to opt out of this if you know where to go to do it. But it’s unlikely that Facebook will stop here in its attempt to sell its users’ data in a bid to increase its valuation even further on the back of its users’ privacy.
Steve ignores the cloud at his peril: Why I chose Google Apps over MobileMe as a server for my email, contact and calendar data
MobileMe felt like deliverance from evil after tinkering with Microsoft Exchange—but it has irritating issues of its own that Apple, which isn’t interested in delivering a credible cloud package, has done nothing to redress. Google Apps, which was only usable for email when I switched to MobileMe in 2008, has quietly improved the reliability and power of its data server systems and made them totally compliant with the Mac, iPhone and iPad. I’ve now switched to Google Apps servers for everything, except for contacts, for the time being, because they’re still in beta and can only be synced with the iPhone via Microsoft Exchange, which produces rather haphazard results. Email uses IMAP and calendar event sync via CalDAV.
The welcome trend away from anonymous posting on the Internet
The recent case of an Ohio judge locked in a dispute with a local newspaper over an anonymous comment posted on its website using her email address has given a vivid illustration of how the shift to contributing content to the Internet under your own name has radically changed the nature of interaction on the Web since it started in the middle of the last decade and gathered pace between 2007 and 2009, powerfully assisted by the emergence of Facebook, a notably proponent of being transparent about your identity, in the social network sector. Content quality, on balance is improved immeasurably if people are prepared to stand up for they are saying. Does this mean people will comment less? Probably. Does it matter all that much? I don’t think so. So long as Mr Zuckerberg doesn’t kill my privacy, its still possible to share content with selected audiences, but not everyone, on Facebook, while a public blog, and content one posts to third-party sites, reflects views one is happy to own up to.
Dear Apple, I don’t want an iPad: I want a 1TB MacBook Air
I haven’t yet had an iPad in my hands. But I don’t need to handle one to know that I don’t like it at all. It’s symptomatic of everything I don’t like about the ‘new’ Apple: as David Pogue points out in his excellent New York Times review, the device is ‘patently absurd’ from a tecchie’s point of view; and conversely, it’s a delight for non-tecchies. The question now is whether Apple will desert the tecchie segment altogether. Tecchies are the trend-setters and the consumer will eventually suffer if those that create content for him have nowhere to go to.