His main point is that current social networks mistakenly dump everyone you know into a giant bucket, called “friends”, and that this is completely unlike anyone’s social network in the real world. Not only is this as ill-advised as inviting everyone you know (work friends, drinking buddies, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends) to a single party, but it’s also wrong in that most people in most people’s networks would not even be described by them as friends – many are co-workers, alumni of the same high school etc. Nevertheless this is where we are today. The workaround for this situation is to take on the onerous work of maintaining separate identities online. The non-workaround is to say the-hell-with-it, and realize after you’ve spent a year fruitlessly looking for work that you still have an album of photos in your Facebook account of you throwing up on other people at parties.

There are of course a lot of cantankerous old people and conspiracy theorists (I’m looking at you Maya) who realize this model is pretty messed up, which is why four NYU students were able to raise $200,000 in funding on KickStarter to start building a new social network that would give users control of their own personal information rather than hosting it on a 3rd party like Facebook, or broadcasting it to the entire world like Twitter.

But I think businesses should be equally concerned with rushing into advertising and marketing in the messy and relatively untargeted world of current social networks and on the Internet at large, and should also be throwing some of their weight behind a better alternative. Companies may have the same or greater difficulties maintaining separate identities for their products online, especially if they appeal to different and perhaps conflicting market segments.

And, as Paul points out in his presentation, recommendations from “strong ties” are an order of magnitude more effective than those from people who are further removed. Marketing via social networks today is perhaps closer to leveraging the circle of trust, but there is a whole new level to take it to which will benefit both consumers and businesses. Everyone down from the Unilevers and P&G’s of the world should be considering (and possibly investing in) new models that protect individual privacy and support real relationships over click-to-friend relationships. The days of 10,000 “friends” are numbered.

I highly recommend reading the entire Paul Adams presentation if you have any interest in such things (which is likely if you’ve read this far):
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

Both of the images below are from the presentation.

The (broken) model of current social networking sites






The real-world model of relationships proposed by Adams

1. When I am logged in to Twitter (website) I can’t tell which user I’m logged in as without going back to the home page

2. When I want to follow someone, there is no easy way to choose which account I am following from. This goes for all the clients I have seen as well as the site. Instead you need to log in as the user, and then follow. If you’re using the website, this means go to Twitter, then go home to see which user I’m currently logged in as ( due to issue above ) and THEN follow

That said I hardly consider myself an advanced user. Anyone have suggestions to resolve these issues? Or additional issues to post?

1. Email filters don’t work, or don’t migrate at least. All the filters I have set up to separate mailing list messages from messages I NEED to read don’t function, or haven’t come over via .Mac (trial) so everything ends up in the inbox

2. Email search doesn’t work beyond a certain point. If it’s not in the first 50 messages then you can click “search on the server” aka wait, wait, wait…

3. I can’t see two things at the at same time. Want to take information from a spreadsheet and put it into a web application, or reference a document to write an email? Not going to happen.

4. Typing on screen works, but, for me at least, there are too many errors to not make it somewhat grueling. There’s an evident solution for this one – get a keyboard.

5. The obvious – some applications aren’t all that useable for what you need to do or don’t exist. I do a lot of my work in Fireworks designing mockups or final software graphics. Can’t easily do this with the existing software and not sure I’ll ever be able to do it with my fingers.

All in all, I have been pleasantly surprised by how useful the iPad is in a pinch, and that some of my biggest issues could probably be resolved by Apple without too much difficulty. The portability is great – definitely preferable to carrying a laptop everywhere. If your job consists of a lot of email, meetings, and document writing and review, it’s a pretty serviceable alternative. Once you need to do some more complicated work, like programming or graphic design, it’s not so much of a solution, at least not now, for my work ( software design ).

So the good news is it can do work in a bind. I wouldn’t buy it for this purpose, but it’s a plus. For me, the killer app is Instapaper, if you have a commute where you can read, but having a laptop backup is gravy.

People have mentioned the speed of responsiveness vs other apps, but another good advantage is that it responds to a much lighter touch than sketchbook at least ( which, to be fair, is designed for drawing rag her than note taking ).

Wondering if anyone knows of a tool to convert PDF drawings to text if words are detected?Pairing that with penultimate would make for a pretty nice notes-to-text workflow. If you know, please post to comments…

I happen to have the perfect site for this store.

Anyone going over the Brooklyn Bridge is deposited onto Adams Street, which runs straight into what is arguably the nicest area of downtown Brooklyn, between the restaurant row Smith Street and its lesser-known parallel sibling, Court St, which also has restaurants and shops aplenty. Adams dead-ends into Atlantic immediately between these two streets, and facing that dead end is a huge, block-sized empty lot.

Construction on this lot has been stalled for close to three years, so I can only imagine the developer must not have any money to continue the project, and would be willing to part with the property for a very reasonable sum, considering they must have been representing themselves as insolvent to the borough of Brooklyn to get away with doing nothing for so long.

Apple could build a store here, probably with room to spare for a nice surrounding park or plaza, and it would be the first thing a lot of people coming to Brooklyn would see. And there are a LOT of people coming to Brooklyn nowadays. Check the guidebooks – they all recommend walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, and it seems like a lot of them have not much idea about what to do after they get there. Putting an Apple store there would be great for Brooklynites as well as out-of-towers, since locals already come to that part of Brooklyn for the restaurants as well as Trader Joe’s and other stores, and have easy access via the local subway hubs at Borough Hall and Atlantic.

(thanks to Tony Haro for finding this)

Thought I’d post it because I had a hard time tracking it down.

Since they have been dissected here and there by all kinds of tech pundits, many coming down on one side or the other, I won’t bother with examining the individual points of the essay, or discussing who is “right” and who is “wrong”.

I think it’s more interesting to look at what one might be able to tell by reading between the lines.

#1 – Apple is prepared to dump Adobe

The first thing we can infer is that Apple is apparently not afraid of any repercussions by Adobe, and doesn’t mind throwing whatever partnership was in place into possible jeopardy, including Adobe’s development of software for the Mac.

What that says to me is that Apple believes it can (or will) replace all of that software, and/or that a lot of it will cease to be relevant within the next 18 months or maybe a bit longer. I say 18 months because that’s generally Adobe’s development cycle for their suites, and interestingly enough this announcement is timed just as the release of CS5, the latest (and first fully Cocoa-ported) version, is about to become available. This could be because Apple does in fact intend to replace the key components of what Adobe offers, or that they think the whole OS landscape will change enough to make software like Adobe’s irrelevant, or that they just don’t think it is that valuable compared to what other developers can offer – or a combination of all three.

Apple already has video editing covered, and Aperture covers a lot of the functionality of Photoshop. As I mentioned in an earlier article, I think there’s a good chance we could see Apple produce an HTML5 authoring application, which would overlap with Flash and perhaps Dreamweaver as well. That would leave Apple with only Illustrator to replace.

Or, let’s say Apple believes strongly enough that the world is going mobile and multi-touch that they are planning to shift their whole OS effort in that direction. Maybe they are in a position where all of Adobe’s current software will then be obsolete if not rewritten by Adobe. And maybe Adobe has already made it clear they have no intention of porting to keep up with another Apple OS transition.

OR, let’s say Apple has just looked around at the software landscape and would just as soon nurse some promising new software into dominance as continue to deal with Adobe – Pixelmator over Photoshop, Lineform over Illustrator, and Coda, Espresso or Flux over Dreamweaver. At some point it would seem that a full rewrite/rethink is in order by Adobe. Maybe in Steve Jobs’ opinion, that point has been reached.

#2 – Apple wants Flash gone off more than just its own mobile platforms

The second thing we can take from the letter is that Apple apparently has a vested interest in undermining Flash, not just keeping it off their platforms. I don’t remember Steve Jobs writing an open letter about why floppy discs were no good. Apple just decided to go without it and moved on. The open letter means Apple wants it gone, not just unsupported on their mobile platforms.

As I’ve mentioned before, I believe this is about control of the video marketplace, not about the OS, although ultimately video may be enough of a part of the OS experience that this is splitting hairs. If content publishers everywhere are streaming their video using Flash, then Apple, and others, will be forced to deal with Flash. There have been signs aplenty that Apple may have something big up its sleeve related to video (front and back cameras on iphone, giant server farm in North Carolina, etc), and I believe whatever it is will probably go off a lot smoother if Flash is not the defacto means of video consumption for consumers.

#3 – There’s something we don’t know

The third item we can assume based on the letter is that something has to have gone on behind the scenes here between Apple and Adobe that is not public knowledge at this point. It may be just that a combination of Apple treading on Adobe’s feet with Aperture and Final Cut Pro finally got to Adobe, or that Apple asked Adobe to yet again make a change to whatever OS shift they have planned next and Adobe said no. It’s very hard to believe that this shot was fired out of the blue, as Adobe would have us believe.

Adobe at one point was surprisingly forthright with sharing a vision of the future in which Flash ran on every device and made the OS irrelevant. The mobile market was key to this strategy. With Microsoft also recently coming down on Apple’s side, it seems perhaps both major OS makers have finally decided to cut Flash off at the knees. While I think Adobe will and should fight against this, I hope they don’t completely bet the farm on Flash at this point. Adobe should have a strong future with or without Flash – hopefully they are not so hell-bent on world domination via Flash that they let their core strength of making tools for designers and other content creators wither. Regardless of what is going on with Apple, I think Adobe is at an inflection point where they may need to choose which is more important – Adobe’s future as an OS challenger and enterprise software provider (embodied in initiatives like Flash as a platform, Acrobat and Omniture), or its future as the pre-eminent maker of design tools.

Here’s why I think there’s a good chance we could see an app from Apple to author HTML5 content that ends up being competitive with Flash.

1. They own enough of the necessary technology pieces to make this happen. They have Motion, Dashcode, iWeb, and iDVD, which all intersect with Flash in some sense and the pieces could be put together to make a pretty nice HTML5 authoring tool for building ads and certain kinds of websites. They’re not going to actually smush all these apps together, but they can take what they know from having developed or worked on each of these and leverage it to make a professional tool that includes the necessary functionality.

2. There is a pro version of all of the iLife apps now EXCEPT iWeb. iPhoto has Aperture, iMovie has Final Cut Pro, and Garageband has Logic. iDVD also has nothing, but iDVD is no longer featured prominently on the iLife page, no doubt because in a few years iDVD may as well be i8TrackTape for all the relevance it will have to the marketplace. Having a professional web tool will round out their suite of professional apps for content creation, and provide a path from consumer to prosumer and beyond with each one of the iLife applications.

3. There are no tools (that I know of at least) to author equivalent experiences to Flash using HTML5. Whatever Apple’s reasons to focus on expunging Flash from their platforms, the movement will not happen without at least one serious creative tool that allows users to create similar experiences. (Why they want Flash to go away is a story for another post, and there have been a lot – the most credible posts IMO are linked to at the bottom of this article.)

4. Apple has said that they will initially handle all ad production for iAd, and then open it up. What will drive this switchover to agencies producing the kind of “engaging and emotive” content Steve Job deems worthy of advertising on the iPhone and iPad? A burning interest in learning to code HTML5 amongst the international art director set? I think not – probably a tool provided by Apple.

4 1/2. This is half a reason because I’m unconvinced that Apple cares about the format at all, but if the iTunes LP is to live on, it desperately needs an authoring tool. ( Speculation has been that it was a bone thrown to labels worried about single sales replacing album sales, and the fact that it does not seem to work at all on the iPad certainly lends some credence to it not being the apple of Apple’s eye. )

5. For a company that wants to own the creative professional market, as Apple seems to want to, they can only leave out the web for so long. For professional photographers, filmmakers and music producers (and those who aspire to be these people), the web is more and more the key means to present their work, and an export to iWeb will not cut it – not to mention all the web designers and interactive designers making brand new creative content for the web.

There are probably a few other reasons people could come up with. The market is hardly unassailable. There are a few monolithic web development applications that are growing long in the tooth, and a number of promising smaller applications that handle some aspect of web development well, and have a long list of additions forthcoming, with limited resources to get there. None of them are likely to have full support for HTML5 at the top of the list, and Adobe, the most likely contender to be able to build something substantial, has a vested interest in not doing so, for fear of helping to upset the Flash egg-cart.

So, I would not be at all surprised to see Apple introducing a new creative tool by the end of the year, outputting HTML5 and JS, including support for animation, vector graphics using the canvas tag, and certainly video. They will build it just in time to start to transition out of the ad building business themselves (which could be a beta period for the tool) and provide agencies with the means to stop building content for Flash, to follow up on the reasons for doing so they have already begun to circulate.

After all, if they’re not going to build it, I’m not sure who is, and if no one builds it then Flash isn’t going anywhere.

PS: Addendum – the two reasons I think are the most likely behind Apple’s Flash-hating: preventing Adobe from owning the video market, and preventing Adobe from locking down their iPhone/iPad platform by generating too large a percentage of the content. There are also some merits to the it-performs-badly-on-Mac argument about the Flash player, but I think Apple has been too vehement for that to be the only issue.

PPS: I’m sure they will give it a better name than iWeb Pro.

As I poked around I was noticing Ten One Design because of their Pogo drawing styluses, and found myself thinking that Apple will probably not bother with pressure-sensitivity for a LONG time, because it is too expensive for what is mostly a consumer machine. Then I thought to myself – well, if the iPad has a wireless chip, why can it not pick up the pressure sensitivity data from a stylus equipped to broadcast it? Thinking about it a little more, it seems like it would probably require multi-tasking in the iPhone OS, to run the application to collect this data and relay it to the system.

If you look at Pogo’s site, you see “We can’t wait to show you our new iPad stuff! It starts with Pogo Sketch, but there’s a lot more coming.” And they already have this app, Inklet, that lets you draw with pressure-sensitivity on a laptop trackpad (http://tenonedesign.com/inklet.php). It lets you use your finger at this point, so it’s apparently not transmitting wirelessly, but it is another app running, and does not work on the iPhone/iPod OS as a result. You have to figure they are working on something at this point (and you have to wonder why someone else couldn’t maybe go one better with wireless bluetooth or other data transmission from a pressure-sensitive stylus on a not pressure-sensitive tablet).

Should be interesting to see what’s coming. Seems a fair bet that Inklet for iPad would be on the shortlist for Ten One for a multi-tasking iPhone OS. And others will be able to possibly go one better. I would be at least a little nervous if I were Wacom (and probably already working on moving my technology to the pen…).

Had two great iPhone moments tonight courtesy of Google that make me hope Apple will consider the repercussions before trying to replicate functionality inhouse.

The first was just orienting myself coming out of the subway – I was able to use streetview to do a 360 of the street and figure out which way to go by locating a landmark on one side of the street (an American flag, as it turns out). This is probably old news to many, but in New York, I was surprised to have the street view photo completely up to date with current reality. It really was a step away from having it overlaid on your vision.

The second was more remarkable, maybe just in coincidental timeliness. I literally opened the iPhone Maps application to check my route home, had it default to bus as a means of travel, and show me a bus was coming in two minutes. It was wrong only in that I looked over my shoulder and the bus was just pulling up across the street. I caught it just in time and saved myself probably 30 minutes or more getting home. It seemed like magic.

So – Apple, I’m a huge fan, and yes, we all know Google is evil despite their denials, but are you really going to drive around and take all these photos and stay up to date with NYC bus schedules yourself? Personally I imagine the Cupertino + SF service becoming impeccable and the NYC and other regional services taking a nose dive if Apple displaces Google and provides mapping itself.

I can just see the email response now from Steve Jobs: No big deal. Take a cab. Steve