I don’t need that.

I can’t speak for others, but I’m no extrovert. No matter how many people I may be Facebook friends with, the reality is that I don’t maintain relations with that many people. What’s more, I’m not convinced that you regularly talk to each and every one of your 130 friends. I’m fairly certain that you have a much smaller circle of people you actually spend time with, and you friended the rest so you could have an easy point of contact with them on the off chance you needed it. Not so they could see how many points you got on the last game you played on Kongregate, or leaf through your embarrassing Pandora musical choices, or know when you’re out of the house.

So what do I need a social backbone for? Nothing. I certainly don’t want it to constantly increase the amount of information it deliberately leaks. And thus, I propose we move our social networking activity out of entities like Facebook, and into ones we control ourselves. I propose we decentralize social networking, since if sharing is the social norm, we’re perfectly capable of sharing only to whom we care about.

You see, we all have the power to make our own social networks. And I’m not talking about something like Ning–I’m talking about a little site that you only reveal to a few specifically chosen people, and no one else. That is, a tiny communication platform where you know everyone else there, and where, since the entire site is secret in the first place, there will never be the possibility of anyone seeing something you didn’t want them to see.

As it happens, I did just that about six months ago with a small group of friends, and it’s working beautifully. No, I won’t link it here–that would defeat the purpose! I will, however, explain how I did it, and how you can do the same. It’s really not hard at all, and can be done by anyone in their spare time. All you need is a WordPress blog and your friends.

The WordPress P2 Theme

I assume WordPress needs little introduction. If you don’t know what it is, it’s blog software. That’s really it. Except, it’s extremely easy to configure and use, it’s open source, and it’s malleable enough to shape into almost any kind of content management system you can imagine–from webcomics to artist portfolios to forums. We’re after something like the latter.

The P2 theme should look familiar to anyone who’s used Twitter. It’s got an entry box at the top for typing out a quick post or uploading or linking in pictures or videos, and below it aggregates all the recent posts and displays threaded comments under them. It even brings up other users’ posts and comments in real time as they get posted. And, unlike Twitter, there are no character limits (since, after all, it’s really just a blog).

That, to be honest, is really all there is to it. I won’t bore you with the details of how to set up a WordPress blog–if you want to do it yourself, it’s pretty easy to just go to wordpress.com and install the theme in the theme browser. It’s also not hard to set one up in your own web hosting, though that takes a bit more technical knowledge. (If you’ve already got a domain and webhosting set up, you can even install it in a subdirectory.)

So go out there and make one! And of course, no need to tell me about it. Unless I’m your friend and all.

Can you imagine a scenario where Apple releases a fully-fledged laptop locked down like the iPhone or iPad? A fully fledged computer on which the only way to install software is through Apple’s built in App Store?

To borrow an overused phrase, it’s more likely than you think.

Would you buy it? Would other people buy it?

Package management can be awesome

I’ve written about package management before. I believe that locking down a package manager such that the user can’t change the available software channels is unethical and flies in the face of years of innovation. We’ve always treated computers as though they were owned by their users, and I see the popularization of devices like the iPhone and iPad as a disturbing precedent. Might Apple be emboldened to try locking down full computers the same way?

We live in an age in which the technology is powerful enough to implement such a thing. Apple is certainly capable of running the servers necessary for supplying its users with all their software, and it would certainly be lucrative, given how successful the iPhone’s app store is and how much 3rd party pay software exists for Macs right now (which Apple would then be able to take a cut of the profits on). There is thus a clear financial incentive for Apple to set up such a system, and for developers to continue to target it (and submit to their harsh developer restrictions).

And let’s face it: such a system would be amazing for users who don’t care. They would enjoy Apple’s rigorous testing process for all their software, and thus enjoy machines that almost never become bogged down by slow or unstable apps. They’d have an easy way of finding and installing all the software they could ever want–even simpler than what they currently have on Macs, and that’s saying something–along with Apple’s approval of all of it, which carries all the quality control that their name has become synonymous with.

I can imagine other possible models. Maybe they’d offer people “simple” or “advanced” options when purchasing computers, the former being cheaper and locked down for the “I really don’t know how to use computers” crowd. Such a thing doesn’t seem like them though, given how well they’ve avoided fragmenting their product ecosystem. Or perhaps they’d simply release their own blessed way to jailbreak the system if a user cares enough.

Right, jailbreaking! Can’t you just jailbreak it?

A cursory glance at the history of the iPhone would make one all but certain that if Apple released such a system without offering a way to unlock it, their users would find a way (as they will undoubtedly with the iPad).

I find this scenario similarly unpleasant, for two reasons. One is that if your enjoyment of a machine depends on an unauthorized hack, you are entirely dependent on those hackers to keep it jailbroken the next time Apple pushes out a system update that invariably locks you down again–the ease of which is never a certainty. It’s a cat-and-mouse game that some users appear more than happy to play, but in the long run it definitely doesn’t seem worth the effort to me.

The other is that you’re ignoring the device’s biggest selling point. If a device is locked down, it’s locked down as a genuine means of quality control, which Apple has shown itself to be superb at. To my mind, jailbreaking an Apple device invalidates everything good about it–Apple’s assurance that you’re getting the best you can get.

This argument may seem self-contradictory–suddenly a device being locked down is a good thing? It’s important to remember that the reasons for locking down a device in the first place are, in order:

1. Making a cut off of lucrative third-party software sales.
2. Making sure that 3rd-party software enriches the platform rather than makes it look bad.
3. Making the system easy to use.
4. Making the system stable, secure and fast.

For most users, a locked down system is protection from systems they don’t care about knowing how to use, and from software that might harm their systems. To users who care about customization, it’s a heavy-handed restriction on something they want to use that just gets in their way. Users in the former category genuinely benefit from a locked down system, and users in the latter category don’t.

So how likely is it?

I’ve always felt that Apple’s primary market is the former category, and that’s why I think this scenario is so likely. It worries me, because I’ve always clung to the idealistic notion that someone who uses a computer has a responsibility to know how to make changes to how it functions. An Apple user might counter that all Apple’s lockdowns do is simplify the method for those changes so more people have access to them. I would counter that such a thing is worthless if more fine-grained customizability is lost in the process.

But then, I suppose that’s why I’m an Ubuntu user. I have the tools I need to change where my software is coming from, and I use them. I just wish more people noticed or cared.

This most recent change consists of a revamp for Facebook’s already-substantial privacy settings. This change didn’t actually affect anyone’s settings who didn’t tell it to; users were greeted with an unavoidable menu asking them if they wanted to keep their old settings or switch them to new, simplified privacy categories–the default of which in a number of them was “Everyone”.

This is, to be perfectly fair, not something I really have a problem with. While “Everyone” was preselected for some users (UPDATE: apparently not all, since for some at least, it was set to Original Settings), they gave you all the information you need to decide whether that was actually a good thing. Plus, I get why they’re doing it; they want all the data they have on their users to be available to search engines and marketers so they can monetize it, and so they can position themselves as the search result that people might want to come up on Google searches for their users’ names. Monetizing profile data without incurring the wrath of privacy advocates is something they’ve been doing for years through, among other things, their own targeted advertising network (the one that’s known for selling sex to men and weight loss to women), the ill-conceived and ill-fated Beacon, Facebook Connect, and the notorious ads that use friend connections to make it appear as though a user’s friends endorse a product.

Many of Facebook’s users tend to forget that Facebook is neither free nor intended as a public service. They’re in the game to make money, and the data they’ve amassed on their users is worth a fortune to the right people. With that in mind, I don’t really blame them for encouraging their users to make their profile data public. (As long as, y’know, they’re not doing anything shady on the side in complete violation of their privacy policy.)

On the other hand, I imagine many of their users neither take the time to learn about how far their profile data can go nor care about the issue, and might very well absently click their way through the menu without thinking about what “Everyone” actually means. Frankly, I have little sympathy for those users, but the EFF disagrees. I would be quite interested in statistics on how many users actually changed their settings to Everyone as a result of this menu–those would presumably be the ones who just didn’t want to be bothered and thought “yeah, whatever”.

It just goes to show: as always, there is no replacement for a smart user. Internet companies will monetize however they can. It’s up to users to decide where they want their data to go, or if they even care.

Edited: Fixed a minor typo. Also, I’ve received reports that Everyone wasn’t always preselected, which is quite significant for the “yeah, whatever” cases.

No matter how secure your system is, there’s never a replacement for a well-educated user who knows to at least be wary of untrusted software packages. While a smart security framework can make a user pause before making a mistake, it’s ultimately still at the user’s mercy. (Though having such a system in place is certainly much better than not having one, or providing a false sense of security.) A Linux user who joyfully installs every package offered is really in no safer a position than… well, the majority of Windows users.

Maybe he just doesn’t want to. Maybe he just wants to go back to the good old days when a news establishment couldn’t be challenged by people working in their basements. Or maybe he genuinely does believe he can completely block off the WSJ’s content with a pay wall and have people actually pay for something they’ve always gotten for free and could just as easily continue to get for free from elsewhere.

But for better or worse, the Internet is here to stay. He’d be better off, y’know, innovating. Instead of shouting about pay walls and blocking his sources of traffic and trying to force his competitors to do the same thing to avoid losing his readership over it.

By the way, traditional news companies can innovate. The New York Times is doing an excellent job of this, even releasing public APIs for other developers making mashups from their content! The BBC even released an open source Javascript library for other web developers to benefit from their work!

But if Rupert Murdoch wants to try to wish away the Internet, I’ve no problem with that. I’ll just keep reading the NYTimes, giving them advertising revenue and link traffic. I might even buy a subscription. Maybe even through TimesReader, which runs on all platforms where Adobe AIR does.