Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet*.

*Or football.

Today however Fantastical surprised me. I was scheduling in a transatlantic Skype chat and rather than re-interpret the time that had been decided by email from GMT to EST myself I impulsively typed it in as ’8:30 pm GMT’. And the timezone difference was accounted for. Snazzy.

Context:

KNUI Maps Demo from Ravi Srinivas Ranganathan on Vimeo.

The work was done in C# and Javascript, and used the Kinect SDK.

Supported operations include: * Pan left, right, down, up * Zoom in, out * toggle gesture detection * Voice detection to jump to predetermined locations/landmarks

Given that it was made for a hackday, it’s clearly a pretty rough project. Some simple and obvious extensions of the project would be to use an online voice transcription API to allow verbal searches for arbitrary locations (it currently uses local transcription, which is limited to detecting hardcoded phrases in this simple implementation), and to allow panning and zooming based on the activation of visible zones through hand hovering (instead of the full body gestures you see being performed in the video).

Still… with just those simple fixes, this would make a decent tool for world-exploration for a couch dweller.

And with some rather small advances in the underlying technology, mostly in processing speed and skeletal fidelity, we’d easily be able to make a ‘Minority Report’ style world browsing product. (And without those pesky gloves.)

The IBM of the 80s ceded the throne to Microsoft of the 90s. But Microsoft, has for various reasons, the most obvious of which are the loss of market share and the vast measures of philanthropy by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, lost most if not all of the stigma carried by the term.*

How about Google?

Google hasn’t really picked up the title even though during its meteoric rise when people certainly expected it to. As many ‘don’t be evil’ jokes as we’ll all continue to make, and as much as the company is clearly using rather personal statistics about all of us to serve the best ads, Google’s outspoken liberal standards and visible philanthropic division have prevented it from slipping into karmic disrepute.

Well, Apple then?

The uncertainty surrounding distribution via the App Store which prevailed until rather recently certainly didn’t put them in great standing with some of their own community’s developers. You also can’t really argue that they pulled the rug out from underneath a significant minority again with the new rules about in-app purchases. Nevertheless, the App Store is their platform and being the good capitalists that we as Americans** are, we do empathize. Similarly, Apple isn’t exactly the most philanthropic company, but it is after all their money that they have the right to chose to spend as they want. Let’s be clear, from most consumers’ perspective Apple is great. Sure their products are pricey, but you’re paying for the Genius Bar support. Anyway, we’d all pay extra for the stylish cutting edge. We all want to be part of pushing the fold, and the company that brought the mp3 player and the smart phone out of geeky obscurity and to the mass (premium) market, and pulled the whole concept of tablets back from the horrific legacy of pen computing*** deserves its swath of credit in doing that.

Apple aims to make, and rarely fails at making, great encapsulated products. They do it because Jobs wants to, they do it because they like the products they make, and lastly but most importantly, they do it because it is what consumers want. ‘Easy’ beats everything, even ‘Free’. This customer orientation keeps them off the Evil Empire throne even as they make life hard for members of their developer community, and even as their empire takes over.

Oh, right. It’s Facebook. No?

Well, they’ve done some skeezy stuff. No one would really disagree with that there’s a strong case for the argument that Facebook is a net detriment to society. We’re really still just entering the era of truly universal social networking, and already our notion of privacy has taken a huge hit. While I certainly don’t think that this is inherently a bad thing, there are many people who do. Either way, there are clear negative repercussions in the realm of relationships and other notable domains outside of the obvious projection of bullying to the cyber-realm of the integration of social networking into our lives. But still, the benefits may well outweigh the costs, and we won’t be able to see the full picture until at least a generation from now, and anyway, how much of this is really Facebook’s fault? Social networking has been progressing for more than a decade. Facebook was just best when it mattered.

Facebook also probably outshines Google when it comes to monetizing your personal information. But do we care? It depends on who ‘we’ is of course. Lots of people just want to use Facebook and don’t give half a thought to the fact that Facebook also wants to use them. Others are more conservative, and that may end up being great for them, but for now they’re in the minority and (admittedly, far from the outside****) their gains seem to be mainly an intangible feel-good factor. In the end, we just don’t yet know if Facebook is ‘evil’, if the concepts it is built upon are detrimental, or if the small amounts of friction to it that society exerts will dissipate or increase over time. Even if it earns that checkmark, its dominance is at least currently restricted to a domain that is very different to that of the IBMs and Microsofts of yesteryear.

No matter how much of social networking is their monopoly it’s at least dubious to give them the same ‘Evil Empire’ title.

So we’re past evil?

If it isn’t any these guys, I’d argue that the title doesn’t really belong to anyone. And I’d credit this to the growth of the web. I just don’t think you can be a company that is as brazenly monopolistic in an age where information spreads as fast, and perhaps more importantly to as many people, as it now does.

I mark the beginning of the end around the moment that public outcry led Microsoft to chose to remove their revenue generating smart tags from the final release of IE6, and when IE6′s selective P3P support which would have blocked DoubleClick‘s cookies by default but made Microsoft’s servers privy to the cross-domain information, was scaled back. At this point in time, not only had enough of the public had become passionate about technology that they were interested in speaking out against these slightly abstract injustices, but also the web as we now know it was in its blossoming stages and in democratizing the prevalent public voice, taking the world by storm.

Of course these two events were both related to Internet Explorer, so maybe I’m not giving the US’s anti-trust action enough credit in sparking the change. That said, I do truly believe that it speaks volumes to the power of the enfranchised public voice that it has been a decade without the world seeing a similar case or anointing a new Evil Empire.

Endnotes:

• * disclaimer: I’ll be working for MSFT this summer. (Wow, that was weird to have to do. It’s like I’m in the real world.)
• ** OK, so full disclosure: My paternal half is Swedish, and we all know they’re basically communists.
• *** Not that you couldn’t do rather cool things with pen computing. And I did love my Palm Tungsten T, but styluses prevailed as a result of two negative things: interaction with old touch screens being crap, and companies attempting to shove too desktop functionality in a handheld machine. And yes, I know hindsight is easy.
• **** I am well aware that I am slowly tending towards the controversial state that is radical transparency, at least within social media.

Calacanis thinks Bitcoin could take off. Why would it succeed where other digital currencies have failed? Because it is totally decentralized.

The math seems good. The idea is about as interesting as they get. The potential ramifications are tremendous. But is the general population interested? Even if they are, is there not a chance that no matter how good, a fiat currency upheld by algorithm would be generally less respected than one maintained by the government? The general populace is neither mathematician or computer scientist, nor cypherpunk.

But let’s assume it works and gains some critical mass to become a viable platform for everyday transactions, then I wonder, would the cypherpunk-libertarian-anarchist’s wet dream of the replacement of government by Assassination Politics stand a chance of occurring? After all, who wouldn’t want to see an overarching mematic skynet striking down those who had angered the masses? (Me.) I think the notion of Assassination Politics coming to fruition and still being restricted to those who had broken some sort of libertarian ideal is farcical to its very core.

The AP thought experiment reeks of a libertarian underestimation of the bounds of human empathy to me. Not that if I had been through what Jim Bell has as a result of my principles I wouldn’t want the status quo to undergo upheaval, but in a lot of ways, and despite many of their goals that I truly believe are noble, the world of the cypherpunks is a self propagating echo chamber. Do I discount the notion that they might genuinely be the visionaries experiencing the inevitable initial resistance to the new frontier? Not at all.

But I am also far from convinced that their new frontier is as far reaching as they believe, that it would be a net good, that it is inevitable, or that anyone actually has the smarts to predict it.

‎- pre-enlightment: post reddit photos and links to people/your profile without worry. - the modern era: re-post from reddit and go out of way to credit to avoid criticism. give concise crit. to ensure others do the same. - the post-reddit reform era: get over yourself. re-post when you see fit. don’t credit reddit, because you know everyone knows where it’s from and you still thought it worth the re-post. be happy.

I’m going to formalize it a bit.

The question is: when discussing material originating from a vast and near universal trove of content, do you have to credit it’s origins? It’s meant to be the polite and correct thing to do, but when you’re crediting ‘reddit’ as opposed to a reddit account (that there’s no chance you’d remember and is very likely not to be attributable to a physical person anyway), or the originating source of the content (that, again, you aren’t going to remember even if the item in mind isn’t an unsourced picture of a kitten), is it actually worth a damn anyway? Not really. You’re crediting reddit because you’re giving the person you are interacting with credit for probably knowing about reddit too, and you’re worried that they’ll rub your unoriginality back in your face.

This is stifling to conversation. If you have something you think is worth talking about, have the damn pride to be unapologetic about it.

And don’t delude yourself. Everyone reads reddit.

My issue with shorteners is their unnecessary use. Twitter for mac is my pet peeve culprit. It’s view of this tweet is simply the string ‘http://t.co/1vdl3Tx’. Even the web interface currently shortens the visible url to ‘kottke.org/11/04/your-tas…’. Even though the regular URL, ‘http://kottke.org/11/04/your-taste-is-why-your-own-work-disappoints-you’, falls well within the 140 limit!

But shouldn’t I be giving more context to random links I drop? Well not really, your service doesn’t let me define the link text to give context, and when if you’d left the damn thing alone it would have said enough in itself!

Webmasters spend a significant amount of time crafting good, understandable, URL schemas. So don’t shorten my damn links if you don’t have to.

Dropbox gives users the ability to store their files online – which in itself is not a new concept; cloud backup services have existed for a long time. What has made Dropbox a market-altering product is its simplicity of design. Whereas previously existing offsite storage products offered some combination of a proprietary frontend for handling more advanced features and an FTP client for choosing what to back up, Dropbox aims for its general use case to be invisible. Through deep integration with the operating system Dropbox offers its service primarily through a regular appearing folder in one’s file system. Users simply move their files into the folder as they would any other and the folder is mirrored on dropbox.com, and as an identical ‘Dropbox folder’ by any other device the user has connected to the service.

A user can make a file sync to all of their machines with Dropbox as simply as if they were using a USB stick. The process is simple whether enacted by a power user in a terminal or a computer novice in a GUI. Decades of user experience work has gone into making the core task of moving files around on a computer as friendly as possible, so instead of reinventing it for the cloud Dropbox simply piggy backs on the existing technologies that every computer user is familiar with. This makes Dropbox more user friendly than more complicated competing services such as MobileMe.

Dropbox occupies two main niches, file sharing and backing up data. The ability to use one’s Dropbox folder as a USB stick is the core attraction of the service in the file-sharing domain as it allows for syncing files among devices in a more seamless way than has ever been previously implemented. Dropbox also lets users easily share files with each other. Cloud syncing on its own makes Dropbox attractive as a tool for backing up data, and Dropbox also stores old versions of changed files for 30 days. These simple approaches taken to solving the common problems of making one’s workspace follow them and of backing up one’s data, combined with the practice of offering a genuinely valuable free version of the software and a rewards scheme offering more free storage for inviting other users has encouraged widespread adoption in its own right. More importantly it has encouraged software developers to rely on Dropbox’s service to offer some cloud features, or even to build their service on top of Dropbox’s. This is Dropbox’s true genius.

By creating a service that is perceived to be reliable, free, easy, and already widespread, and by opening up its API to developers, Dropbox has made itself the de facto way to add simple ‘cloud services’ to any application. Well-known products such a 1Password and QuickOffice, as well as a plethora of note taking, bookmark syncing and media management applications[1] now rely on their users having Dropbox accounts to use their cross device syncing functionality.

The long fancied age of full-on cloud computing via a technology like Chrome OS may or may not ever come to fruition, but Dropbox doesn’t need it to become a reality in order to integrate more fully into users’ workflows. More and more users are adapting to working with multiple devices, in many cases not all of which are designed to work together. I am an Android user who also owns an iPad. The two devices do not share data well. Dropbox allows services I use on both to work seamlessly, allowing me, for example, to edit my documents in QuickOffice no matter which device I happen to have with me.

It is difficult to ascertain the effect that Dropbox has had on its competitive space, as cloud storage is too amorphous to consider as a whole. Apple’s MobileMe, for example, is a subscription service that appears to be in the midst of closing down. It facilitates specific Apple-centric syncing functionality and allows users to store their files online. Given that it competes significantly with other products including the Google Apps suite, crediting its closure fully to Dropbox is at best premature, but Dropbox’s creation certainly muted some of its thunder. It is certainly the case that Dropbox has placed an effective lower bound on how much free space a cloud storage system must offer to be competitive. Competing products Mozy and SugarSync both now offer similar amounts of data storage for free plans.

Staying true to the strategy of keeping the user facing service simple, reliable, and blatantly useful, and the developer facing API accessible, will allow Dropbox to continue growing as more users are driven to it through its software tie ins. As existing free users see more of their services storing valuable data on it, they will become more likely to upgrade to a paid service. In the meantime, Dropbox will continue to work to better identify duplicate data to drive down storage costs, and perhaps once it has enough funding, migrate off of Amazon’s S3 service. There is also a strong incentive for Dropbox to work towards OEM deals to have their software preinstalled on operating systems. Given their reputation of offering a useful service at no charge, there are strong incentives for PC manufacturers to bundle their software.

Dropbox is also likely to work towards enhancing its web interface. By making uploaded media streamable on dropbox.com, the company could easily incentivize its users to upgrade to paid plans in order to store large files online for convenient media consumption. As this enhancement would not change the desktop experience, it would not betray the hitherto successful simplicity paradigm. While clearly a difficult balancing act with simplicity, the more dropbox can support functionality usually associated with the desktop in its web interface or through partnerships with existing web services such as Google Docs, the better suited it will be to the continuing shift towards webcentric computing.

In the long term, if fast enough Internet to allow for the speedy download of the full content of one’s computer ever becomes widespread, Dropbox will be particularly well placed to serve this market. Its existence creates the infrastructure required for one’s whole workspace setup to be loaded to any machine one which one is working. Even in the more direct future, the movement towards the use of smaller self-standing ‘apps’ will allow users to store their most often used programs and possibly even their current states on Dropbox’s servers for easy loading when working at a new terminal.

I’m rather interested to find out what exactly Microsoft’s employee blogging policies are and how they’re regarded and enforced. Not that I write here particularly much. But it’s probably even relevant to the commentary section of the website. And Twitter, especially since my account is public. I wonder if there are even different guidelines for Facebook and other walled gardens. I doubt it.