Alex Wilhelm over at The Next Web had a good observation about this.

Here’s the real kicker: they are coming from the same people who have sold us utter crud for so long. Dang. They just, I don’t know, tried harder all of a sudden. It’s as if the engeineering teams at the various PC OEMs woke up one morning, and actually drank coffee for a change. “You know Ted, instead of shipping another round of crap, why don’t we make something that people will actually want to use?” I’m annoyed by this. I’m frustrated that we’ve been underserved and charged full price for so long. At least the drought is mostly over. As Microsoft crows here, the current crop of these ‘Ultrabooks’ are sexy and capable and, for the most part, competitively priced.

As I said on Google+ – nicely said Alex, nicely said.

When I was walking back from getting coffee for myself and my wife I found myself thinking about how we are getting so close to the year 2020 and how much I have seen happen in my world from when I was a kid in the 1960′s.

I have seen president’s assassinated, watched as man landed on the moon for the first time (on my 13th birthday to boot). I have seen students killed at Kent State as they protested for a better world and watched as the War Measures Act was enacted in Canada as a response to the FLQ uprising.

Then as I neared home carrying coffee I realized something. @020 is just around the corner and our world, our society hasn’t gotten any better. In fact it could be argued that it has gotten worse.

There is no Star Trek future beckoning us and chances are it never will be but instead driven into copyright and patent hell if our current technological mess is any indication. Any of the moral and social mores that may have guided a possible future reflective of Star Trek have left the building.

Where we shout words of encouragement to the warriors of the Arab Spring we look to our own changers of society and pummel them with derision. The middle-class backbone of the country has been smashed apart as corporations brag about how they pay lower taxes than the poor, and governments line up to give them even more breaks.

Our bright future is has become nothing but a tarnished figment of our hopes and dreams. Where once we dreamed of equality and believed the impossible was indeed possible we now live in a world of homelessness and watch as our dreams are foreclosed on.

Our global fisheries are at a never seen before breaking but yet we still find excuses to hunt whales and eat shark fin soup. Water has become a commodity that is controlled by cartels looking to extract their pound of flesh from the very substance of life. Food is genetically manipulated by companies that make it illegal for us to even own our own seeds.

When I was a kid in the 60′s I looked to the future of 2020 and believed that it would be a beautiful and different world. Now as an adult looking to 2020 as a fast approaching freight train I see nothing but desperation lying behind the eyes of people who are scared about what the morning will bring let alone 2020.

The future is coming fast and the dystopian future once relegated to the pages of science fiction has now become a tangible fact. The straw is getting heavy, the people in the trenches are beyond tired, and our society becomes even more fragmented.

So instead of reaching a bright future of incredible social wealth and knowledge we are all just doing the dog paddle hoping that we don’t end up drowning.

note: the title came from my wife when we talked about this.

There has been a shitload of discussion happening around the web when it comes to the Facebook announcement at their f8 developer conference. You know, the one where they have decided that you don’t need the rest of that silly web anymore because they are going to make your electronic womb all nice and cozy with a never ending steam of mental pablum from your vast world of friends.

As Ethan Kaplan said in a post – identity has now been externalized and it will reside on Facebook (that is also where I got the title for this post); and he is right, we are being convinced that in order to have any value we need to be connected to a world created by Facebook (and yes, the same can be said for Google+). It is only by letting them present our identity and life events to the world that they exist.

It is like that modern Internet saying – “pics or it didn’t happen” but in a Facebook world that gets transformed to – “if it isn’t posted, liked, commented on the it didn’t happen“. Over 700 million people; and growing, have been conned in to subjugating any sense of real life experiences of their own into living vicariously through the postings of a large percentage of people that they will never meet.

Toyota has recently come out with a series of ads that poke fun at this phenomena but rather than being in jest it does speak to a certain degree of truth.

There’s a popular term on the web that has been gaining speed as the old news media struggles to find ways to survive as the glut of information continues to steamroll forward – over them, around them. It’s called aggregation by some and curation by others but the gist is the same – becoming an authority by attempting to pick the best gems out of the information chaff.

This is part of what Facebook is doing – attempting to become the curator, aggregator, of our daily lives. They want us living within it pages. They want us to become so intertwined with their curation that they become the defacto holder of  the “story of your life”.

As Frederic Lardinois from Silicon Filter writes in a rant against this idea:

 What really matters is that Facebook now sees its missions are giving you the ability to “curate the story of your life.” Thanks to the new lightweight sharing features announced today, you can now quickly share (and bore your friends with) every article and book you read, every movie you watch on Neflix, every TV show you watch on Hulu, every book you read on your Kindle, every song you play on MOG or Spotify, and every picture of food you take on Foodspotting. Doesn’t that sound like a dream come true? Isn’t that “the story of your life?”

While Frederic says he can understand the reasoning behind what Facebook has done he also wonders if this time Facebook has stepped too far. Even Peter Yared in a post on VentureBeat wonders if Facebook has featured itself into a usage u-turn.

I hate to break it to Frederic and Peter but the chances that there will be any mass move away from Facebook because of these changes is next to nil, zip, nada. Sure some people who are concerned about privacy might jump the Facebook ship; even though it is really hard to do according to Nik Cubrilovic, but the fact is those people amount to a very small minority on Facebook.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard someone standing next to them in a line at the corner store or outside a grocery store that they’ll catch them later on Facebook. It has become a starting point for kids in their days and hang-outs for adults instead of getting together with those self-same people for a beer or a game of cards. Now we get virtual games of Farmville or some word game, all the while we are feeding the monstrosity that Facebook has become.

Just as people have been sucked into this information gathering machine so have businesses, and not just to the point of setting up so-called fan pages but if this post by Robert Scoble is any indication they are also doing it so that Facebook can host all their data.

First, a look at Color. Yes, this is the app that was Silicon Valley’s biggest startup “failure” in quite a while. But here it’s back and back in a HUGE way. I really am having fun with this app, which is totally integrated into Facebook and does a lot more than the old version (live video, for instance). Really amazing. Sign up for the beta at http://www.color.com/

Note how they are using Facebook’s platform to hold ALL data. This is a new move for Silicon Valley startups.

(emphasis mine)

No longer are startups looking to have long term control over their own data but are willingly handing it over to Facebook to care take.

Every second of the day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year Facebook is collecting data; and at the new forefront of this new data collection is this new passive sharing news ticker that displays everything, every, thing, that people you have friended are doing, not have done, but are doing. Just as their passive sharing news ticker will display everything you are doing.

From ReadWriteWeb:

These so-called “social apps” haven’t been widely launched yet, but you can get a sense of what they will do by adding a couple of brand new newspaper social apps to your Facebook profile: The Guardian’s app and one from Washington Post.

Be forewarned though, with these apps you’re automatically sending anything you read into your Facebook news feed. No “read” button. No clicking a “like” or “recommend” button. As soon as you click through to an article you are deemed to have “read” it and all of your Facebook friends and subscribers will hear about it. That could potentially cause you embarrassment and it will certainly add greatly to the noise of your Facebook experience.

Or as Dave Winer put it:

What clued me in was an article on ReadWriteWeb that says that just reading an article on their site may create an announcement on Facebook. Something like: “Bull Mancuso just read a tutorial explaining how to kill a member of another crime family.” Bull didn’t comment. He didn’t press a Like button. He just visited a web page. And an announcement was made on his behalf to everyone who follows him on Facebook. Not just his friends, because now they have subscribers, who can be total strangers.

So what is all this constant data collection for? What are you handing over your daily lives for?

The simple answer: to provide fodder for companies to be able to perform incredible product demographics. To be able to better tailor marketing campaigns. To be able to convince like never before that you can’t do without their products and make you feel like you are best friends with that company.

I joked once that the government never needed to worry about needing to create another huge Echelon project all they had to do is get a backdoor into Facebook and Twitter and that would provide them with all the intelligence they would ever need. With this new Facebook something like this has never been truer even though there are some that would scoff at the idea it makes perfect sense.

But really this is all moot because no matter what Facebook does going forward it will continue to grow and we will continue to keep feeding the beast and they know it. Until something totally new comes forward to replace this over-hyped social media world we are all being told is so important Facebook will continue to attract new users and old users will keep sucking up any changes Facebook makes regardless of whether they are detrimental to us or not.

But as Scott Fulton writes at ReadWriteWeb – Facebook is always on guard for that.

Facebook’s perceived value to businesses has nothing really to do with its being a social network. Thus, any competitor seeking to dethrone Facebook — whether from Google or elsewhere on the Web or from another planet — does not need to be a better social network. It just needs a better value proposition, which may be why Facebook revolutionizes itself every six months or so. It’s not just to shake out the cobwebs and incite revolution, but to pre-empt evolution from rendering permanent Facebook’s social status as the next AOL.

An interesting story showed up over at All Twitter about how a ghostwriter for a so-called social media and Internet marketing professional had been fired and then proceeded to out the “expert” on the self-same Twitter account after finding out that the password hadn’t been changed.

The “expert” in question is Mark Davidson who apparently has not one but three, or rather now two since the firing, ghostwriters for his Twitter account. Now with a bit of a disclaimer I have been following Mark Davidson on Twitter, and now Google+, for a long time but never clicked on the fact that it was ghostwriters populating his stream.

I don’t care so much that Mark got outed but rather the fact that the idea of using ghostwriters to populate your Twitter timeline with so-called social media gems of wisdom shows exactly how social media has become a joke.

Look, I don’t care if you are Lady Gaga, the President of the United States, or some dweeb who thinks they are the next greatest thing to hit social media, the fact that you think that using ghostwriters are acceptable shows that you don’t have a clue.

What it does show is that you have no problem lying to people and that everything you have to say is questionable. The very fact that you have no qualms in fooling people about who is actually should mark you as a snake oil salesman and splashes those people who do believe in social media with a great big black X; sort of the modern day Scarlett Letter.

They make a joke of a medium that is already suffering from an overload of self-proclaimed gurus and should be publicly pilloried – without mercy.

Contrary to the well known Chris Brogan post if you are using ghostwriters you are doing it wrong.

And you are an idiot.

Ya. Okay.

What dream world are you people living in?

Just because people use their real names, whether forced to or not, it doesn’t mean that they know how to be civil. Just check any thread of a conversation about politics, sex or any subject you want to pick and you will see some of the most uncivilized comments coming from people using their real names.

Real names are no guarantee that people will think before opening their mouths and showing how nasty, opinionated, and cruel. If anything I have found people who post anonymously or use pseudonyms have more couth and express themselves with more intelligence than their named counterparts.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt had what is really a typical example of this in a post today:

Yup, that real name thing sure makes the conversation a lot more civil.

image courtesy of The Next Web

The whole anonymous identities on the web argument is older than the web itself. I can remember fervent discussions on the subject back in the old BBS days and the talking points haven’t changed in the intervening years. The only problem now is that the wild west days of the Web are over and companies like Facebook and Google are making themselves the final arbiters of what an identity is on the web; and that is scary.

However that isn’t the argument that I want to look at here, at least not as a major point. What I do want to point out is that now more than ever we need to fight for the right to have more than just the Facebook and Google sanctioned identity when we do anything on the web, and possibly when we aren’t hooked into it directly.

Increasingly, as we continue to fall for this social media and social media branding game, we are finding that our real names are becoming a commodity and a signal flare as to what we are doing and what we are saying on the web. Between services such as Facebook and Google’s breadth of services like search and Google+ we are easier to find, and our actions easier to monitor.

Not only are we easier to find individually, but as social media continues to spread its tendrils through the corporate world we are finding that we are also becoming closely associated with the identity of the companies that we work for; and companies are noticing this.

While companies are well within their rights to monitor what goes on during working hours an increasing number of companies are beginning to monitor what their employees are doing on the web after work.

Lauren Fisher at The Next Web wrote today about this and it seems that up to 44% of companies that took part in a survey recently said that they monitor their employee’s actions during work and afterwards.

Where this gets even more interesting is that such a large proportion of companies have policies that cover use of social networks outside of the workplace as well. This is a difficult reality for many people and it’s an outcome of what’s private becoming public. Where once you used to leave work and have your private life to yourself, for many, that private life is now broadcast online, as you choose. For organisations however, this poses a risk if you are linked to your company in any way. Anything you say or do online could indirectly implicate your employer and you can understand the risk here.

While there are some who would call this an invasion of our private lives I can understand why companies are doing this. I might not agree but when you start down this yellow brick road of so-called transparency and your every action can have unforeseen consequences companies are put into a position where they have no choice but to monitor anyone connected to the company.

The problem that arises out of this is that suddenly we have no privacy. Our jobs, or our social standing in the community, and even personal relationships are potentially threatened by the slightest misstep that might not seem that bad but could be perceived as having negative connotations.

No longer do companies worry about your actions just during work hours, but thanks to the burgeoning influence of social media they believe that what you do while even in the privacy of your own home is something that they need to be concerned about.

I would suggest that rather than trying to do away with the whole idea of anonymity on the web we need to rush towards it. If companies have the power, and the desire, to monitor our actions on the regardless of whether we are at work or not; and decide our employment value based on that, then we need, no, we must be able to use the Web without that fear. The only way this can be done is by being able to create a second identity, a pseudonym, an anonymous identity.

The more our places of work can watch us the more likely we will begin to act not like who we really are but who we believe our companies want us to be.

We become a shadow of ourselves.

Anonymity is our only way that we can be ourselves – good or bad.

Well no sooner than I posted that, or at least very shortly afterwards I got a message on Twitter from Appinions, the group behind this idea, that gave me a link to what was apparently my profile on their service; which by the way I never signed up for.

So there you have it folks, your worst nightmare; or biggest laugh depending on your point of view. I am an influencer.

Thanks guys but I’m not really sure about your assessment but now if you’ll excuse me I am headed to the floor for a good laughing fit.

It seems that we have a new buzz phrase headed our way and it’s a doozy. Try this on for size:

IRM: Influencer Relationship Management.

Yup, you to can now manage influencer relationships, isn’t that grand?

This gem comes to us from Appinions and this is how they explain this gag inducing collection of nonsense words:

The first and vital step in IRM is to build a list of the influencers that are relevant to your organization or cause. Keep in mind, they don’t have to be fans of your product and/or service. Second, you connect with them and let them know who you are and let them use your service or product.

As influencers become more ingrained in our digital lives, they will inevitably be a greater interest in them from brands and agencies. The influencer is a huge step forward within the marketing and communications world, and IRM will become its own sustainable wing within the industry in the near future. It won’t be long until we see IRM experts and specialists pop up, just like we saw the advent of social media experts.

The sad part is they are right, we will probably start seeing this term pop up any time soon.

10, 9, 8, 7………

The latest incident of this is a post at ReadWriteWeb by Dan Rowinski where he was talking about the sale of Hulu and the implication of that sale on the future of the web. In the post he points to Canada as an indicator of what his fellow American can expect.

To be fair he is partly right but really for all the wrong reasoning.

Dan is right that if Americans want to see what their Internet future is like just look north; but it has nothing to do with Hulu but something that has already happened in the US. I am talking of course about the purchase of NBC by Comcast and the dangers of a carrier owning a major content producer.

You see in Canada this has already happened – on a wholesale level. Here’s a few simple facts:

• Bell Canada / Bell Media – owns the nation-wide CTV television network as well a national newspaper, The Globe and Mail.
• Rogers – one of Canada’s largest wireless and cable providers and owns a large number of cable television stations as well as the CityTV network of stations.
• Shaw Media – primarily a western Canada wireless, cable, and broadband provider. They also own the Global TV network as well as a large number of cable television stations.
• Cogeco – while it owns no television properties the company is one of Canada’s largest cable and broadband providers.

At this point there isn’t a national television network or major cable station that isn’t owned in whole or in part by a broadband or wireless provider. Every single one of those companies have a vested interest in a managed network to put it politely and this is why companies like Shaw are trying to hogtie Netflix and other streaming media companies by making their cable movie content not count against download caps.

When it comes to Dan’s post though the point he was trying to make was that carriers should be looking at buying content producers and that the consumer would win in the end.

Uhm.

Did you notice that last couple of words in the paragraph above – the one about download caps?

You see in Canada the only way you even could think about having an unlimited account is if you were lucky enough to have an existing account grandfathered in when all the providers started instituting bandwidth caps (I am one of the lucky one’s – so far). In other words there is no such thing as unlimited in the country and this has caused nothing but grief for companies like Netflix which has to lower the quality of service because of those bandwidth caps.

So, how is that benefiting the consumer – it’s not.Period.

To suggest that carriers should actively buy up the networks and that it’s good for the consumer is just a stupid assumption, when in fact all the evidence to the contrary.

Just look to Canada, and the exorbitant prices we are paying for a service that actively seeks out to provide a lesser quality service, unless of course it is the provider’s own content.

No sooner than some new social media slash social network slash circle jerk comes along and it is being proclaimed as the big, awesome, incredible, replacement for your blog.

Uhm, No.

I realize we are all pretty well lazy and always looking for easier ways to do things; and of course maintaining a blog with intelligent thought out discussions is such a horrendous chore than anything that makes expressing ourselves in a coherent manner easier is of course, the next great thing.

The fact is that things like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, and now Google+ are really cool services and for the vast majority of people they are indeed the perfect outlet for limited forms of creativity and make sharing things drop dead simple.

None of them however is a replacement for blogs no matter how much the social media digerati might want you to believe otherwise.

Sure they’re fine in most cases for short form quickie thoughts that you really don’t care if they live past the next page refresh but they do nothing to provide any in depth way for you to build a reputation around your identity. What you are doing though is providing these companies with a constant flow of your information which they then turn around and make money off of – not you making the money from your reputation but them.

I have no problem with these services doing that, up to a point, but they should never be the primary way that people can find out about you especially if you plan on, or currently make you living within the digital world.

Google+ is still in the very early days but already you have people say that Google’s new social media service is where we should be moving all our blogs. Give your head a shake, really.

More so than any of the other services out there Google makes incredible amounts of money from your actions and flow of information so why in the world would you be willing to hand even more control of your identity and reputation to Google by giving up the time and effort that has gone into building your own central point of contact and handing it all over to Google.

We heard the same stupid idea as Facebook grew with all the big bloggers talking about how the only way you could reach them would be through Facebook. That of course didn’t last for long just as the idea of using Posterous and Tumblr as our main points of contact never lasts for long as bloggers at some point head back to their own blogs.

Google+ is going to be a very interesting service as it grows and chances are at some point they will have some way for our blogs to becomes closely associated with our Google+ IDs but I’m sorry the idea that you can replace your blog with Google+ is dumb.