kb101

For what the future holds, we need look no further than the über-Netizens of the world, the South Koreans. If you want to get on Cyworld (30% of the population, 90% of the 20somethings according to Crunchbase), you send in a copy of your national ID card, your home address, phone, etc. and wait to be approved for an account, after which you may post on the site.

I still think there is a hugely underserved market in the social space, comprised of people like me, who don't want an extension of their real life identity to follow them around online. Hacker News is full of people I don't know, but interactions with all these people I don't know are plenty effective at pulling me back into the site.

Don't know about best, but www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html is pretty cool. It is what it says, fast. No graphics, clean web interface, runs quick on anything, including crappy old hardware or phones. Opera recently bought them so if you run Opera on your phone it is especially nice. Very reliable, hardly ever down and on the rare occasions it goes down it's usually back up within minutes. You can hook up pretty much any client you like, of course. And they don't read your mail to serve you ads.

Wow, what a blast of fresh air, reading this. I miss the old Internet, when Aunt Sally still couldn't figure it out and certainly would be horrified to find her birthday party photos posted on it, much less would she even conceive of going and posting them herself under her real name.

Why does online marketing have to be built around maintenance of a database of people's Real Identities® ? If it's a page full of comments about guitars, stick a Stratocaster ad on it and be done. The Internet was supposed to be about freedom and personal expression. I used to scoff at things like Second Life and people on BBSes with ridiculously fake avatars, but now we have the horrors of everyday life invading and taking over the "virtual" space, which is less and less virtual every day. Even the visual and auditory carnage of MySpace was preferable to the cookie-cutter sameness of Facebook, helpfully tracking your every single move before you even think to make it, and broadcasting the mundane minutiae of everyday existence to all your "friends".

I used to love Google when it first came out, it beat the pants off Alta Vista and it was a fantastic way to extract cool links from the vastness of the 'net. Now people log on to +1 each other on all the right topics and say all the right things and fit themselves into all the right pigeonholes. What if you want to go online not to maintain your identity as it is now, but to explore new ones? What if you need more than one identity? What if the whole notion of "identity" is something you find burdensome and ultimately repugnant? Well then, there must be something wrong with you and you must have something ghastly and awful to hide.

So yeah, fuck those guys.

Selling data is not the problem; the problem is the emerging social norm whereby letting data about your life be aggregated and mined proves you are a trustworthy person. We are already at the stage where simply not having a social networking presence makes you suspect.

Eric Schmidt's "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" and Randi Zuckerberg's "I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away" are some choice quotes that should give anyone pause.

"Go ahead, sell my data" doesn't bother me. "How come you aren't putting yourself out there and letting your data be sold like the rest of us" bothers me.

It is definitely noteworthy that the N9 and the N8, both examples of excellent hardware running competitive software, have basically been sandbagged by Nokia.

Contrast this with RIM, who just released a slew of stop-gap phones until QNX (BBX) is ready... but they still are promoting the hell out of those phones and are getting decent sales, keeping the company viable. And those aren't even world-beating phones.

Meantime, the N8 with its pentaband radio and Zeiss camera, and the N9 showing off the best of Meego, get no promotion at all... really does make you wonder. Microsoft-hatred might indeed be a disease, but Nokia threw out Symbian and Meego for an OS that is (for all its positive reviews) unproven.

Symbian Belle and Meego are definitely competitive options and offer a lot. Any tech site (engadget etc.) reviewing the N9 basically wound up mourning the premature death of Meego and wondering what might have been. In the case of the N8, the common assessment was it was stellar hardware with an OS that was almost there... well I think Belle pushed it over that line to being something competitive.

This is the same madness that Apotheker brought to HP, trashing established businesses just because they weren't sexy enough and then immediately trying to import the business model of the last company he worked at. I don't think Elop is a mole but he definitely has yet to do anything except destroy value at Nokia.

So running on a treadmill going so fast you can barely keep up actually makes you smarter? Great, quit my corporate job for nothing.

In fairness to the author, I don't think this was intended as an "Apple is evil" post, though using the term "trojan horse" makes for great linkbait.

I don't see that this is that far-fetched. Considering how many other mobile phones have adopted features that debuted on the iPhone, it isn't much of a stretch to imagine a startup designed to allow you opt in to location-based discounts that are cued in part by your voice memos or location check-ins. Apple might not be the one to do it, but it is definitely a tempting revenue stream... if the database knows that 250 people who have "wife's shoes" on their reminder list are currently within walking/driving distance of the local mall, why not? Google already reads your email to serve up ads.

This kind of thing is why I don't have have a facebook page, a gmail account, or a smarter phone than a Blackberry. I love technology and software, always want to have the latest and greatest, but my data has to stay mine, and I can remember who to buy shoes for well enough on my own. But I also realize that makes me a minority and an oddity. Most people don't care if their phone knows everything about them, and they would probably be happy to have it remind them to buy flowers for 25% off on the way back from the bar.

Me too, that is one mean-ass dinosaur. Don't mess with the T-Rex spawned from the untamed imagination of a four year old.

This is a great concept... I think where it could differentiate itself is by aggregating posts by topic. If I'm searching some topic on the web, I often come across blogs that are out of date or orphaned, and they might provide me with some of the information or links I am looking for, but not all.

If Postary lets me find several such blogs on its site, organized into blog threads by topic, then it fills a need on both sides: the author gets to broadcast to the web without the pressure of maintaining a blog site or Twitter feed, etc... and the reader is able to find information or commentary on a topic of interest.

It could be almost like a message board, instead of thread topics there are topics (several of which might apply to any given Postary post) and instead of responses to that topic, a threaded view of Postary posts. The threaded view would be composed on-the-fly and would vary depending on what you search for.

To make it more interesting and engaging, each Postary could have the option of being maintained as a blog if the writer so wished... and further, each Postary could allow comments from readers.

So you could post your thoughts about Haskell the day you discover and get really excited by it; and that could be tagged under topics like Haskell, programming philosophy, programming tips, etc. If somebody searched Postary for Haskell, they would see your post along with all others on the same topic, plus comments, plus follow-on posts (if any) by the same author. Threads could be auto-composed based on any number of criteria (newest first, most-responded-to first, etc.)

In this way, the site could serve both the "web archaeology" and "latest and greatest info" niches of search, and could create a lighter, less pressured form of engagement with authors and readers. Isolated, sporadic posting by authors could be organized into a coherent, constantly-updated site on any number of topics.

This post reads more like the author trying to come to terms with his own tortured, confrontational, win/lose outlook on running a company. It also reads like a case of passive/aggressive venting on a portfolio company CEO who is driving him nuts, or the aggregate of several such cases.

In any case, this is not useful advice. And patently untrue. When the chips are down, people do care, and people help out, if you explain the challenges you are facing and the odds you are up against. Not least of all, "your mama".

The article also strikes me as a misinterpretation of the quote and the exchange between owner and coach. I would read it differently... the coach is at his wits end, calls the owner for advice, and the owner doesn't merely say "nobody cares"! He says "just coach your team". Meaning, don't worry about all the things you thought you were going to do (with the team roster you thought you had) and just hang in there, stick to your core strength (coaching) and do your best to make it work.

No wonder the author has anguished posts on his blog like "What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology" wherein we read such gems of wisdom as "It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown." Not really. The first rule is relax, don't take yourself so damn seriously. Actually, there are no rules. Isn't that why you became CEO?

People infected with attitudes like this suck all the life and joy out of doing business. It's not all about people standing around yelling "no excuses! yo' mama don't care!" at each other. Carrying around excess psychological freight like this only slows you down, makes you hate yourself and the industry, etc. If there are problems, you deal with them. Often times, solving problems means figuring out the parameters of the difficulty, putting all the resources you can against the problem, and then going and finding the right people who care to help you out with the rest.

"Technological progress should cause increasing economic inequality" is a bold statement. Presumably, increasing productivity for everyone is one of the signal benefits of technological progress. If we accept that as true, then why can we not say that technological progress is agnostic as far as economic inequality is concerned?

Many of the arguments about economic inequality in this thread seem to be predicated on the notion that we are talking about comparing salaries or car brands. Don't be jealous of your neighbor for having a higher salary or a better car, and why should he have to give up more of his money via taxes just to enhance your lifestyle... seems to be the gist.

But income inequality is rooted in the question not of does your neighbor have more goodies, but how do we divide the spoils of our shared enterprise. If you and your neighbor are partners in the same firm, and you are working your ass off so that he can ride around in a Benz, things are a little different.

It is interesting to observe that when this argument is couched in terms immediately relevant to most of the posters here, the response on HN is quite different. I.e. "I have a great business idea, I just need someone to code it for 1% of the business equity". There are markedly fewer posters defending this notion, or condemning the hacker who wants a bigger share as exhibiting some kind of perverse socialist urge toward income redistribution, than there are posters in this thread defending the same notion expanded to society as a whole.

1) A unified, coherent design language and user experience for the site. This would really make Yahoo stand out, as even Google is clunky with this ("more" and "even more"). As it stands currently, it's too visually cluttered and hard to navigate. Example: I used to use Babelfish a lot, but trying to browse to it from the front page is well-nigh impossible. Another thought: sort the list of Yahoo sub-sites by popularity instead of alphabetically. It's fine to have umpty million different sub-sites, but they need to be coherently organized and findable. Yahoo really needs a first-class UI, even more than Google or Bing do, because Yahoo actually is a portal, and a portal is different things to different people. It needs to be cleanly navigable and this includes cleaning up the 1990s looking My Yahoo.

2) Back to basics: search. As soon as possible, get rid of the Bing mess and get back to being a premier search provider. Type nearly any topic into any search engine and you get a Wikipedia page first thing. If I type "hacker" into Yahoo, out of the top ten results, there are five junky results: 2 Wikipedia pages, one Answers.com page, one Dictionary.com page, and one WordIQ page. If I want to get a definition or an encyclopedia page, I can go to those sites. Web search is supposed to pull up awesome cool links from the web, not the standard junk pages that have shallow content and are not hard to find. Even Google is getting infested with these kind of crap results. Nowadays, if I find an awesome link it is typically via a site like HN or somebody's blog, but I remember the days when I used to love going to Google and digging up fresh new links that were interesting.

3) Social is still "ripe for disruption" as they say. The flurry of interest around Google+ is evidence of this. People want more control, and more privacy, and a greater ability to differentiate their online identities without any one identity compromising the other. Eric Schmidt's response to this is "well if you have something to hide blah blah blah" but it's not about having something to hide. It's about the fundamental human need to interact differently in different social and economic settings. Maybe the guy who works as a cube jockey in some corporate wasteland needs to have his LinkedIn profile for trying to make it to the next level, but what about his sideline trying to network his way into a graphic design job? Maybe he needs a couple of profiles and wouldn't like to have to use his real name on either. Innovative approaches to allowing flexibility and growth on social sites (isn't that what the web is supposed to be about?) instead of locking people into one idea that they damn well better stick their RealName(tm) on... that is an area where Yahoo could step in and fill a void. Particularly if it was done right, and done in a way to leverage their existing myriad of user bases across the niche sites.

4) Quality. (Echoes of Steve Jobs and his quest for the perfect shade of yellow in an icon.) An enterprise-wide push for quality would help. Instead of being meh at 100 things, Yahoo could easily be awesome at those same 100 things. They already have the infrastructure in place, they just need to clean house and remodel. (This kind of ties back to point 1.) Flickr is a prime example. It's big, it's a brand name, it has a loyal user base, but it isn't awesome. It needs to be awesome.

5) Develop an identity. If the preceding four steps are done right, this will follow. Google's identity is "search plus a bunch of other crazy shit, and they have really cool offices to work at" right now. It works for them because search (advertising) makes them so much freaking money. But it's not really a coherent identity. Yahoo's identity could easily be "the coolest web portal with the best links". If Yahoo became synonymous with premium quality, they would be unstoppable.

If the concern is the journalistic integrity of a tech news blog whose founder also funds certain startups likely to wind up in the tech news... one way would be to make those investments subject to an NDA I suppose. None of the blog writers would know which companies were or were not funded by the founder's fund.

Or a news blackout could be imposed on that blog for any companies funded by the founder's VC firm. I suppose the news blackout would be an imperfect solution, since presumably reportage on any competitors to the portfolio companies could be viewed as suspect.

Even if Mr. Siegler insists that the tech blog where he works is a cool place founded by a cool guy, that does not address the perception of the blog from the outside. If there is any perception at all of potential bias, then both the VC fund and the tech blog suffer an erosion of perceived integrity (regardless of whether or not that is actually the case).

Independence is a tricky thing. I think maybe if TechCrunch were not part of AoL, then they could potentially pull off this balancing act. They have enough momentum now that readership won't evaporate overnight, and a few blog posts critical of portfolio companies or complimentary to competitor companies would re-establish their credibility. But a big corporate parent is not going to like that kind of the seat-of-the-pants approach to managing risk. Doubtless somewhere in the bowels of AoL somebody is running the numbers of what would happen if somebody sued along the way, and not liking what they see.

As for Mr. Siegler ranting about his employer on a blog they own, that strikes me as a classic CLM. Big ol' corporations really really tend to hate it when someone down on the front lines starts to think they're irreplaceable and they can do as they please, just because they've taken a lot of bullets and led a few charges over their little piece of the battlefront. A better approach would have been to tactfully address all of the issues he addressed, in the interest of informing the readers, and with the same goal of trying to gin up reader support. But he could have mentioned that he really appreciates the resources at his disposal thanks to the AoL acquisition, and he believes that TechCrunch adds value to the parent firm primarily due to its unique editorial independence policies, etc. As it reads now, he comes off as churlish. Nobody likes to have f-bombs hurled at them, not even dull gray corporate types in upper management. It really burns when those f-bombs are lobbed by someone on the payroll.

IMHO, if Mr. Siegler truly wants to help his boss keep his job, his best move now would be to pull that little rant pronto, and edit it to be a lot more polite and respectful to AoL, throw in some mea culpas about getting wound up too soon, etc. and then re-state his case in terms that corporate can understand and appreciate. AoL might be a bunch of assholes, but they are the assholes that cut his check.

While all the above points are true, there is a big difference between picking up the phone to call someone in 1950 and posting an update on a social networking site in 2011.

I would submit that there are two factors that make the difference: 1) laws regulating the service in question and 2) ease of data aggregation / mining.

In both cases there are barriers to interception & analysis of communication that effectively provide or used to provide a certain level of expected privacy and anonymity. Of course no communication is 100% secure and of course anything can be intercepted, but how hard is that to do?

In 1950 if you wanted to get pictures of someone's house, learn the names of their known associates, find out what books they own, what magazines they read, what opinions they have, their work history, their goals, their aspirations, which of their relatives they are closest to, etc. etc. -- your work would have been cut out for you. It would involve physical trips to places like courthouses, time and effort in taking pictures, developing film, driving around, possibly snooping where you shouldn't, asking lots of people lots of questions, and so on.

Now all that is out there with a few mouse clicks and not only is that the case, it is rapidly becoming the social norm that it should be out there and if it isn't, as Mr. Schmidt says, then you must have something to hide.

The genie of cheap, accessible, centralized data storage and data mining is out of the bottle. At least with email there is some sort of legal precedent to treat communications as privileged. With social networks and the like, users give up their rights to the commercial entity that provides the service. And as others have pointed out, rolling your own services is not an attractive alternative.

Agreed, the network layer can be intercepted, but the network layer either has to be hacked into or somebody in law enforcement has to leave a data trail regarding the interception. At the service layer, it is becoming assumed that you give up all rights to your data, and this is something whose repercussions have yet to be fully felt.

It seems that both the straight dope and ask-a-physicist links describe the effects as something similar to having eight giant mountains on Earth whose summits make up the points of a cube. This led me to wonder, what if we consider the case where the Earth is exactly the same (geologically) as it is now, but in the future we put up eight giant towers whose tops describe those summit points? Assuming a supermaterial has been discovered whose properties allow for an extremely light structure with enormous compression strength relative to its weight, like aerogel ( http://bashinginminds.com/2010/01/23/playing-with-nasas-soli... ) but even aerogel-ier. What would that be like?

Is it then too far-fetched to imagine that some freak process of nature or other might conceivably allow for the creation of a bizarre planet with an immensely dense spherical core and a lighter mantle and crust that take on the shape of a cube externally? Nature is not averse to giving us cubes, after all: http://www.gemstoneslist.com/pyrite.html