Not surprising. Here are the facts.

On the day Apple became the #1 vendor of cell phones in the U.S. with 26%, All Things Digital put out the headline: “Android Surges… Apple Flat”.  Now when you’ve just eaten up a quarter of the market, it’s very hard to call you flat, but I’ll digress.  They are looking at OS shipments rather than product shipments.  From Apple’s point of view, the two are the same, and since Android isn’t a first-party OS, Apple gets the last laugh as the market leader. Still, it’s funny that the editor can call Apple “flat” on such a monumental day, especially when Android marketers are a half-dozen deep and Apple is just one company, with just one (or two) handset.   One thing ATD did get right is the fact that Blackberry is dying on the vine.

Another example is in the marching orders of the press corps towards treatment of the Android “family” of products (from a half-dozen different vendors) being treated as a single, monolithic anti-iphone. This depsite the fact that there are OEM features and major platform functionality differences on every handset.   Just compare an HTC to any phone with MotoBlur.  They really feel like entirely different products, but none in such a way that you can say yep this one is the “iPhone of Android devices”.

So I wonder if these journalistic tendencies are driven out of the desire to see Apple take a few bruisings now that they aren’t clawing at Microsoft from the bottom of the 32-bit barrel.

After reading Dave McClure’s post, subtitled “How to Take Down Facebook”, I think that, between all the f-bombs and Generation Z three-letter acronyms, Dave makes a few good points.  For example, Twitter is better for following famous people (to which I would counter, Facebook is better for enabling fame).

Dave wants to see Facebook become an enabler of more private communities.  To his burrito point, we could say that Facebook alerady does this through threaded, instant mail messaging.  We could also respond to his friend overload point that perhaps Dave doesn’t know how to manage his profile privacy settings, or that perhaps Dave should start a Fan Page and whittle down his friend relationships to the bare essentials.

Bottom line is, true intimacy in relationships cannot be fostered by an inorganic structure like Facebook, in my opinion.  Intimacy is about mutual experiences, not a mutual sounding board.  We all have telephones–does this make us more intimate in our relationships than when we’re together, shoulder-to-shoulder, or working on the same outcome as a team?  Hardly.  Facebook is merely a platform for communication, and while it plays a role in enabling quality relationships, it is certainly a subserviant role.

My advice to Dave McClure is, you probably don’t have 2000 actual friends, so fix it. Delete. Delete. Delete.

But to give up those synchronous connections on Facebook is to give up the influence that comes with having a large audience.  And herein lies the real challenge, if I can rephrase what Dave is saying here into something a little more succinct: Facebook is mediocre at protecting the privacy of celebrities, while Twitter is very good.

The effect of this can be seen in Facebook’s inability to provide more intimate connections, and in Twitter’s ability to prevent celebrities from having to spill anything more than they’d like to on their profile.

Once upon a time, iTunes had the opportunity to become “indyTunes“, and totally missed the boat.  Right now, MySpace is the MP3.com of the 2.0 era, offering indies more than Apple does in terms of self-service distribution and exposure.  With this rebooted MySpace, a very immersive, very commercialized, very polished experience is in order.  Same idea as iTunes, except that iTunes isn’t nearly as immersive as it could be. Problem one is DRM, which has stimied iTunes’ ability to become totally web-based.  Problem two is Steve, who wants so much control over the ecosystem that he’s not likely, in my opinion, to expand Ping to the wild wild web.

That said, I still think MySpace’s new look rock concert skin is just the veil for the real goods: an audience for Ping.  If Apple wants in on that action, they’re going to have to pick sides, and if Facebook is as snot-nosed as I’ve read regarding Steve, then MySpace might be ripe for the picking.

1 – The ratings for terrestrial FM radio still dwarf that of satellite stations, when you look at the local cumes, so while a Sat channel may have 650k listeners at a time, they may only have 15k in a particular local market.  Good for national advertisers; bad for community ones.  For this singular reason, FM isn’t going anywhere.

2 – It’s free to the listener, can be accomplished anonymously, and requires no subscription or membership.

3 – The digital terrestrial stream (ie. HD radio) is of excellent fidelity and provides a transport for digital (and even interactive) programming beyond what FM broadcasters are currently using, so there’s headroom below terrestrial’s technology ceiling.

4  – Terrestrial radio is more or less weatherproof. Sat radio isn’t.

Now, as to whether or not it should be mandatory–well that just sounds like a war between the recording lobby and the cell phone carriers.  I’m of the opinion that the FM broadcasters are generally in favor of it but hamstrung by the recording industry.

 ”…with the iPhone I now have Yahoo video to anyone running Windows XP versions or later of Yahoo Messenger (sorry, no Mac version yet) as Yahoo is taking advantage of the phone number…”

The nugget is in the parentheses.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the feature never translates to OS X because Yahoo has never really cared much about feature parity in Messenger on OS X. My guess is that they just view the market as being too small, too much of a subset of user requirements, that it isn’t worth their development dollars.  But the mobile device market–especially iOS–is  a whole different story. Lots more potential customers there.

And there’s a very good reason.  The reason is, more than ever, I don’t really have time to participate in the social structure of online talking heads, virtual centers of influence, and the goofiness and immaturity of online activism. I realized, as I entered into business for myself (my partner was bought out in 2008), that the continuum of online thought was consuming too much of my attention and energy for me to succeed in my business.  In other words, I would rather be a leader in the offline world than a follower in the online one.

Today’s GigaOm article about social change really turned my crank, because it illustrated the reasons why I’ve disappeared from “the scene” by asking the question I can’t answer to my own satisfaction: is social networking really doing anything positive?

While the geek world has been hyper-obsessing over the perceived need for social networking systems to be agents of, and even instigators of, social change, I’ve been living my life largely offline for the better part of a year.  As I return to Twitter, the blogosphere, and social networks, I’m convinced that the notions of activism and social change, while outwardly worshipped by those in wired society, are increasingly silly and self-serving.

If we’re looking for value in Twitter by desiring it to be a component of social change, then we are missing the point of activism, and we might have to confess that Twitter has less value than any of us previously could’ve imagined.  Twitter addresses an extremely marginal, mostly young, mostly left-of-center audience, and as such, has become an echo chamber for people who generally agree with each other on the important social and political issues of the day.  And when one’s ideas are not leaving the echo chamber, it’s not fair to say the echo chamber is serving those ideas in action.  Put conversely, activism is doing more for Twitter than Twitter is doing for activism.

While this is less true on Facebook, I still take issue with the amount of poorly-researched, instantly sensational garbage I see flying around on Facebook. Columbus Day provides many illustrations of this phenomenon.  For example, if somebody wanted to paint Christopher Columbus as a savagely racist, freewheeling thief whose mission was to destroy native western civilization, all that somebody would be required to do is post a movie quote spoken by a fictional Columbus in a Hollywood film, and attribute it to the real Columbus.  The echo chamber will do the rest of the work.  Never mind that, according to informed interpretation of the historical record, Chris was in fact an institutionally racist product of his mediterranean culture, a contractor to the Spanish government duty-bound more as a mercenary than a thief, and a commander whose mission was navigational in nature.  It was the men who followed Columbus, like Cortez, who were conquerors.

Yet on Twitter and Facebook, the hashtags tell quite a different story.

My response was no defense of Columbus, who certainly had his shortcomings.  But the insane, wildfire spread of exaggerated information, ignorance of context, and situationally selected facts is–probably–the biggest single problem with social networks.  Twitter and Facebook give rise to hysteric idiocy on never-before-seen levels. And while this may help activism in some respects–getting politicians elected, for example–hysteria does monumental harm to the continuum of social communication.

But who seriously wants to sit there and correct the record all the time?  I’d rather run my business than waste my time defending concepts I know to be mispresented but that I don’t otherwise care about, while being labeled a troll in the vacuum of critical thinking that is Twitter.  This is less true of Facebook, and less true of the blogosphere, but the same blood type flows through the veins of all three.

So does this mean that I myself would write off the value of social networking?

Naturally, as a business owner charged with a payroll of 5 and a community of clients, it occurs to me that I myself am an activist. I actively serve the interests of both my customers, employees, and self all at the same time. The mission of my business is to profit by creating excellent value that enriches my customers and helps them achieve their goals.

In this regard, I am serving my community. It is hard to think of a better way to help society at large than the performance of a valuable craft in a dutiful manner.  Keep in mind though that I don’t believe this out of a collectivist philosophy, but rather the idea that if I maintain my own household and make sure I am able to resolve my own challenges and  pay my own way, I am inadvertently but mandatorily helping society–by keeping my problems from becoming somebody else’s.   That, to me, is the ultimate activism.

And I don’t see how Twitter aides the ultimate activism. I really don’t.

One can learn a great deal about the manner in which Twitter effects the events of various social change narratives simply by fast-forwarding to the outcomes of those narratives.  The Iranian election was certainly no coups, but one has to wonder how much can really change in Iran’s executive branch, which still has a Hitler at the helm, with or without Twitter.  If the Iranian election hashtag is really Twitter’s social change calling card, then Twitter indeed has a long way to go.  Mahmoud is still the man, and I’m guessing he doesn’t give two turds about Twitter, despite the strenuous, well-meaning efforts of the younger, left-leaning, Iranian college kids who so despise his leadership.  Twitter may’ve elected Obama, but it won’t unsettle a thing in Iranian government… and at the end of the day, spreadsheeting the impotent Twitter effect against the delta of change in Iran just seems kind of, well, silly.

It’s like, “we had 4 trillion tweets on this day and 5 bazillion tweets on that day”, but looking back at the outcomes of the situation, we get the impression that Twitter’s presence didn’t matter much, and we respond, “Oh yeah? So what.”

The founders of Twitter also refer to the Haitian earthquake relief effort, stating that volumesque tweeting about text-message donations resulted in unprecedented fundraising for those affected by the quakes.  But taking that much credit for a campaign that was neither exclusive to Twitter nor to the events of the earthquakes, is more than a little dishonest.  It smacks of hype-ortunity.  Like libeling Christopher Columbus an overt, firsthand perpetrator of the trans-atlantic slave trade. People are saying these things, regardless of if they’re true, and they are getting traction with the misinformation.

This isn’t to say that Twitter is worthless, or should be censored, or any of that garbage. Twitter is a nifty platform for which the killer app has not yet arrived. If I figure it out, I’ll be sure to sell it to Silicon Valley.  In the meantime, Twitter is essentially IRC, but with free association enabling centers of influence rather than pre-established associations and presence limitations, which were the underpinnings of early Internet chat.  Is that progress?  Not sure yet.

The fact that nobody can adequately describe the activism value of Twitter maybe be a good indication that the activitism value of Twitter is in serious doubt.

There is measurable commercial value, though.

Twitter, and Facebook Pages, are all about horn-tooting.  Have you ever tooted a horn in an echo-chamber? Building communities of people who agree with a concept is a great way to build bigger communities of people who agree with that same concept.  It’s herd psychology, in a nutshell, and its effectiveness is conversely proportional to the amount of individual critical thinking within the targeted group.

The echo chamber silences critical discourse by penalizing and marginalizing disagreement, by burying well-documented dissent with volume, loudness, and frequency.  That’s why social networks are fantastic vessels for delivery of marketing messages.  That’s also why they suck for serious discourse and the development of human understanding.  It’s just too easy to get away with slanted and even passively malicious mass-messages that go unchecked. If you say something that’s popular, even if it’s untrue, the consequences of falsehood are drowned out inside the echo chamber. Online special interest communities have always functioned this way.

But Twitter is indeed popular, and its audience isn’t going anywhere any time soon, so there’s a conundrum: how can something so poor at empowering accuracy and truthfulness, be looked to as the creditor of so much social change by today’s young, wide-eyed activitists?  It’s really troubling.

What’s worse is the concept of social change itself has been transformed along with the emergence of collective networking tools.  Social change used to mean things that had a decidedly libertarian philosophy in common: individual rights and civil rights, empowerment, literacy, keeping the poor out of poverty by enabling them to provide value in society, providing for the needs of those who otherwise have no means of supporting themselves, like the mentally retarded, childrened orphaned by no fault of their own, and so forth.  These were issues whose causes and solutions, whether systemic or situational, were all under the same umbrella of social service, instituted by change agents like Mother Theresa, Rosa Parks, and many other unwitting heros of activism.

And that, I think, is the essence of my concern about characterizing Twitter as this great conduit for change to human existence. A good servant of humanity, like Mother Theresa, succeeded on an individual basis whether or not something like Twitter existed, or for that matter, whether or not a particular diocesan communique existed.  True service to people requires no megaphone, and requires no collective awareness of the service provided.  The most effective (and most numerous) heros produce in quiet, unrecognized on a large scale, without giving speeches, and without tooting horns. And that’s OK for them because they still see the fruit of their efforts, and they don’t care if people are shouting about how great their deeds are. For Twitter to have any effect on this truth would be impossible.

As far as Twitter being a tool to change people’s view of the world–well, we ought all be able to agree that Twitter is no better at advocating one set of values than it is at adovacting another set.

If people want to know how much Twitter has affected activism, I think that there’s your answer.

–T

Poppycock.  Listen, the judge is wrong.  And even if 90% of the world agreed, what American official is going to get caught with blood on his hands for extradition?  Let’s stop worrying about how we’re all going to have to behave different in this Orwellian digital future and just suffice to say the guy’s an uninformed moron who made a mistake.

This is all much ado about nothing. Can somebody back me up?

Today, the concern over “digital illiteracy” seems to be formulated with the same sense of alarmism that ought rightly be place on deep systemic problems like illiteracy and even drug addiction.  The argument is, how are people going to succeed in the “digital world” unless they’re armed with a digital skill set?  And to some extent, I agree.

But in true “where’s the outrage” form, I’ve got to chuckle at the Wall Street Journal’s rush to conclusion that the digital exuberance is the ultimate answer to questions of equality and opportunity. It’s truly laughable that so many people are upset over whether or not failing segments of society have access to broadband. Would broadband somehow make these groups of people more successful, or any more apt to flourish than those of us who already use 40 megabit pipes?

I doubt it.  The problem is, we have a poor system of establishing a desire to be self-reliant.  People aren’t necessarily born with the essential values of earning in mind. Take a look at the failure rate of Cleveland high school students if you disagree. In a world where every novelty is available cheaply due to Chinese workers who actually believe in the hallowed concept of value creation, American degenerates are able to coast along sucking at the nipple of mediocrity.

Let’s work on true literacy before we work on digital literacy.  We can play video games until we’re blue in the face and still have no idea how to make change at a cash register.

This book is focused on the key elements of telephony and the migration to VOIP – primarily as a cost saving measure. The first 2/3 of the book deal with the VOIP technology – as an adjunct to and eventual replacement for traditional (legacy) telephony. By the 2/3 point, the author is talking about cost analysis, benefits and justification.

I would more likely title this book “VOIP for management”. This is not a put-down or insult, as the book’s primary objective is to educate the mostly non-technical person on what VOIP is, and how it might best fit into an existing picture, and one moving forward.

Being primarily technical myself, this book was good as a preliminary introduction to a subject that I wasn’t familiar with – but I immediately moved on to the O’Reilly books on the subject – “Switching to VOIP” by Ted Wallingford and “Asterisk” (Leif Madsen, et al). Someone who is responsible for managing such a transition would find it much more useful than I did.

Also, Tech PRose was kind enough to add Signal Noise as a favorite telecom blog.

When I first read about it, it sounded great.  When I read that it was developed by ex-Diablo engineers, it was a must-download.  While there was some meager novelty in “owning” the local community college, the shimmer quickly faded, because nothing at all interesting occurred as a result.

Sadly, 48 hours later, I think I’m going to remove it.  It’s boring, and it plays just like one of those Zynga social games where you have to check in as often as possible in order to “level up”.  I just don’t have time for that.

Friend Mike at Chronic Dawgs put up a post last week about how Joshua Cribbs, the best football kick returner of all time, is feeling under-appreciated by his team, the Cleveland Browns.  To put it in perspective, Josh had four return touchdowns and nearly broke the all-time pro football record for all-purpose yards this season.  No small accomplishment.

So the guy’s a big deal.  Anyway, he makes about a million a year and was insulted by a contract modification offer the Browns made for 1.4 million a year.  (As an aside, I’d be pretty happy making half that if my job was to play a game and stay in top physical shape using the best gyms and trainers in the world, but I digress.)

The din around Cleveland surrounding Josh’s contract has been constant and obnoxious the last few weeks. It all started when the new team president Mike Holmgren came in and started hiring coaches.  Fans feel that management has turned their back on Cribbs and are ignoring his request for a contract (never mind he has three years left on his current one) while they build up the white-collar staff in preparation for next season.

It’s amazing how much Twitter action I’ve seen on this subject. People are tweeting, from as far away as Kuwait, using the #payjoshcribbs hash tag. There are Facebook fan pages called “Pay Josh”, and I myself have received 7 to 10 separate invitations to support Josh’s cause.  Of all the causes to worry about.

Yet public opinion doesn’t influence an NFL owner’s bank account. Just ask the Browns, who just put the finishing touches on their ninth losing season since returning as an expansion franchise.

Why, if Google were so afraid of wasteful business practices that they would pull out of their biggest growth market for content products, would they be involved in similarly valueless gambits?  Take things like GoogleVoice, Google Wave, the cloud, Android, and projects like that.  These aren’t profitable ventures for Google, but may indeed become so at some point, especially Android and Voice.  The point is, Google spends all kinds of money on things that make folks scratch their head because they believe there’s money to be made.

China is no different, except that something clear scared the balls off of Google in the process. Be it the communist secret police or a blackmail offer that would’ve been even more embarrassing to Google than the Chinese government-backed breach of Gmail they just revealed, SOMETHING scared Google away from the biggest treasure trove of the next decade.  And that something was big. Yet to believe TechCrunch’s assessment, you’d have to assume the move was purely profit-driven and not really borne of any moralistic decision.  Again, I tend to disagree.  Profit decision or not, at the end of the day, Google DID THE RIGHT THING.  Why is it so hard for all these young pay-per-post bloggers to understand we’re talking about brutal social communism?

So TechCrunch’s echoing of the silly notion that China is a bad market for Google because it’s just too hard for them—ahh, that’s justy a goofy idea.  Have you ever known Google to back down from a market fight? Me neither.  If you answer no, then TechCrunch advises you to “sit the hell down and shut the hell up”.  They should rename their web site BlowHard.

Somebody call Mike Arrington and hook his writers up with Critical Thinking 101 at the local community college.

…advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

What Google won’t say here, and I don’t know why, is this. Who besides the Chinese government has an unhealthy interest in the e-mail communications of Chinese human rights activists?  Those “third parties” Google mentioned were probably the Guoanbu and the MSS, two Chinese agencies that, if you’re a human rights activist (or a salvation-believing Christian), you do NOT want to mess with.

But Google is on the right track. Responding to China, saying they’re willing to shut down operations in China if the archaic Chinese governing class aren’t willing to cave on the issue of censorship, is a good move.  But why wait until now?  I was heartbroken when Google capitulated to China’s censorship demands in the name of the Almighty Buck.  I even chided Google as un-American.

So putting teeth behind this fiasco–great move.   I would advise the Obama Administration to take a cue from Google’s chief counsel, who wrote their official response, and grow some teeth of their own as Google has done.  Hillary Clinton’s response from the Department of State was neither as informed nor as smart.  In fact, I’d call it useless.

James Fallows adds that, at the end of the day, this decision doesn’t really hurt anybody except Google.  It doesn’t deal a real blow to China, in his opinion, because Chinese Internet consumers are, generally speaking, not going to work too hard to get around the government’s censorship.  As one Tweeter put it, it’s not Google withdrawing from China.  It’s China withdrawing from the world. To me, that means Google is finally, thankfully, just doing the right thing.

Mike Arrogantington has comented that RSS is “definitely dead” because Feedburner’s CEO is going to Twitter.  Perhaps this has less to do with the health of RSS and more to do with the fact that Feedburner just isn’t fashionable any more, while Twitter is considered sexy and curvy.  Sam Diaz, too, is going to get a nice paycheck.  Hey, if Twitter was throwing money at me, I’d probably say RSS was dead, too.

Yet Twitter’s greatest promise remains not as the solution for those seeking a chat application, a social networking tool, an authentication scheme, and certainly not as a content syndication standard, but rather as a platform for accomplishing all of the above.  My point is this:  RSS is for more than just update pinging (which is basically ALL Twitter brings to the table for a content publisher).

RSS also accomplishes the following:

1. RSS generally enforces accurate datelines. (Twitter is subject to whenever the tweet occured.)
2. RSS offers a basis in XML, making it an extensible transport for specialized content payloads. (Twitter relies on third-party interop for such, like Twitpic, say.)
3. RSS offers a more than 140 character limit per post.  (Twitter — well, this one should be self-explanatory.)
4. RSS has no features which increase the need for spam control techniques.  (Twitter — spend your days blocking followers who want to lead you back to porn sites and borrow your credit card number.)
5. With RSS, real syndication with content duplication is possible and there are many situations where this is necessary and beneficial. (With Twitter, you’re always parsing a linkback in order to find and syndicate content.)
6. RSS is an open, community-based standard that solves a well-defined problem. (Twitter is a private concern with no apparent motive other than audience building.)
7. RSS can be used on any server in the world capable of answering a get request. (Twitter only runs on Twitter’s servers.)
8. RSS doesn’t intrinsically encourage the posting of the silly, arbitrary, private details of one’s life; ie. it’s a publishing platform. (Twitter is a social platform.)
9. RSS is entirely anonymous. (Twitter client requests are identity-based.)
10. RSS is compatible with any authentication scheme the publisher desires.  (Twitter only authenticates Twitter users.)

Take William Shatner, for example.  Now here’s a guy whose charisma and silly selfless sense of humore could go vast distances on Twitter–much like M.C. Hammer (whose tweets are frequent and awesomely down-to-earth).  Yet the Shat only follows 4 people.

Why?

Well, because it’s not the Shat.  It’s one of his agency people.  I’d be surprised if the Shat and the majority of folks in his ilk even use a computer on a daily basis. 

If I sound let down, it’s because I am.  Guy Kawasaki tweeted a list of Hollywood elite on Twitter. Turns out most of them are merely professionally managed, third-person twits with no more personal touch than one of their attorneys or public relations experts.