How Facebook and Google+ Erode Our Options

Chris Poole, founder of 4Chan, explains why Facebook and Google+ are forcing us into boxes when it comes to our online identities:

“The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white,” Poole said. “Who you are online is who you are offline.” That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn’t work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that’s key to our creativity and self-expression. “It’s not ‘who you share with,’ it’s ‘who you share as,'” Poole told us. “Identity is prismatic.”

One of the biggest challenges for online social networks is to accurately convey the messy realities that make up our lives. So far, they’ve done an okay job, but there are many ways in which they could do better. Poole powerfully identifies one of them.

The Future of Apple

Matt Mullenwegg has some interesting thoughts about where Apple is heading. The one industry that I could not have possibly guessed? Cars:

Walk down the car stereo aisle in Best Buy and see what $800 gets you, or a $300 GPS from Garmin, vs an iPad or iPhone. The screens feel like a TI-92 calculator. The typography makes my eyes bleed. I find it morally reprehensible how bad these products are because it’s one of the areas of technology where a bad interface is most directly tied to injuries and deaths. Car folks are making their iPhone/iPod integrations better and better, which may be a glass of ice water in hell, but they’ll never make the jump to providing a beautiful marriage of media, search, and navigation that a great in-car experience needs.

To quote Dennis Reynolds, “That is some long-term shit.”

Steve Jobs Has Died

Man, this knocked the wind out of me in a way I did not anticipate. The world has lost a visionary. And I can’t help but think back to that story about how Jobs helped to bring hope to a secular world.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs. You changed the world in ways that will last for generations.

The New iPhone

After today’s eagerly anticipated announcements, I’m particularly impressed by the Siri integration. At this point, Siri is still in “beta” and you can tell the way Phil Schiller says it that the tech is not quite to the state of perfection that they’d like it to be at. But it’s what Siri represents that’s so thrilling: a future where we can interact with our computers using natural language.

We’re not there yet, but we will be one day. And as Apple is fond of doing, today it gave us a glimpse into the future.

Sam Harris on The Future of the Book

I enjoyed Sam Harris’s musings on the future of the publishing industry. But I do wish contemporary authors sounding the death knell of the printed word would pay more homage to the fact that it was traditional publishing that propelled them to digital stardom. Traditional publishing’s death may be painful, but it will also be relatively slow (at least, in internet years).

What Went Wrong with Kodak

David DiSalvo, on how Kodak failed to react to market forces in time:

The fall of the company that George Eastman built is perhaps the most salient commentary on the new economy in recent memory, and tells an unfortunate story about much of America’s industrial base. Monolithic, inflexible and unable to keep up with the shifts and turns of disruptive technology, once great companies like Kodak can’t survive without exhaustive restructuring. Hopefully, other U.S. companies have been watching and learning.

To Hear

A 29-year old woman who has been deaf for her entire life activates a cochlear implant and hears herself clearly for the very first time:

It is moving to see someone receive a gift that we all take for granted every day. Videos like this show us all how blessed we really are.

Why The Kindle Fire Won’t Disrupt the iPad

Horace Dediu lays out the case against the Kindle Fire as a low-end tablet disruption. In the long-term, I’m convinced that Dediu is correct, but I think there’s a significant possibility that the Fire is going to steal away some market share from the iPad in the short-term.

I posit that most people don’t need something that’s technologically cutting-edge to scratch that tablet itch. And if you give them a choice between a $200 tablet that can do most things they need, or a $500 that can do slightly more things, the choice will be pretty obvious.