Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to investors in Facebook’s IPO filing solidified how they think about the world:

People sharing more – even if just with their close friends or families – creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

Facebook’s goal is to increase how much people “share” their information, to create a more “open” world where people are more connected. It’d be easy to quip that of course they want this, because it’s good business for them, but I don’t think that’s the way causation flows here. I’ve no doubt they believe that. And that’s the problem with it.

To do this, Facebook sees themselves as a sort of utility which connects the world and that everything is built on top of. Everything else—applications, games, services—should be built upon Facebook, because they are the one place you can go to get access not only to nearly every individual, but also to their personal information (metadata, if you’d like), and their relationship with every other individual. Facebook is a utility which allows you to tap into what they like to call the social graph, or the network map of societies.

My issue is with the idea of an “open” society, where people make most of their information public. Zuckerberg believes this society is superior, because the world will also be more honest and transparent, and we will be able to learn from differing perspectives. Perhaps. But as I argued in September 2010, an open society begins to breakdown the barrier between the private and public. In an open society, sharing becomes a part of the doing itself. If you’re seeing a movie, you post about it, along with who’s there with you; if you’re listening to a band, you let Spotify post it for you; if you’re eating dinner at a new, really cool restaurant, you haven’t really been there until you check-in.

Once the sharing is a part of the doing, you no longer consider whether to do something in the isolation of whether you want to do it. When sharing is a part of the package, you also consider how whatever it is you’re doing will reflect on you. You’ll consider what the general public’s, or your network’s, standards are for it. In that piece, I wrote:

To exist as individuals, we depend on private space to think and experiment without judgment by the public, and to judge the public by our standards. It is only within this space that we can define who we are as separate individuals from the greater society we exist in.

As that space decreases—as we begin sharing more and more of our interests, desires, hopes, fears, goals and what we are doing at any given moment—these factors, uniquely ours, will increasingly become the public’s. They will become the public’s to judge, compare, laude or criticize, and decreasingly our own characteristics, thoughts and beliefs. Rather than judge the outside world based on their own standards, individuals would judge themselves by the public’s standards. Individuals would be outsiders to themselves, looking in and measuring by everyone else’s standards.

That sounds hyperbolic, I admit. But I don’t think it is. As the amount we share increases, we begin to internalize the “public’s” standards next to our own, and at some point, it’s difficult to separate the two. Rather than creating a world filled with more diversity and variety and different perspectives, we create a networked groupthink, where heretics—diversity—is immediately found, criticized, and repressed.

You could argue that people should be stronger-willed and thicker-skinned. Maybe that’s so, and maybe that’s possible, when your identity is already formed. But imagine growing up in this open world, trying to figure out exactly who you are. Social pressure to conform on adolescents growing up in a pre-Internet world was already terribly high, so imagine trying to find new music, books, ideas and hobbies where you not only can share everything you do, but you’re expected to. Forming your identity requires experimentation with a variety of different things, seeing what you like and what you don’t, and that’s something which is inherently private, because you really aren’t sure yet what it is you like. But when that’s public, the overwhelming pressure will be to go along with whatever happens to be the social trend at that moment, to protect yourself from public ridicule. And not sharing isn’t much of an option, either, when the social norm is to share.

Shawn Blanc, in Stephen Hackett’s interview with him:

There certainly has been a noticeable rise of good writing and broadcasting talent within the tech- and design-centric spheres, and I think part of it has been because the whole scene is begging to mature a bit. Writers like John Gruber and podcasters like Dan Benjamin have gone from being lone wolfs to standard bearers. Because of their commitment to high standards and exceptional work in tech writing and podcasting others have grown to appreciate that type of quality, and have used it as a standard in their own work.

I never thought about it that way, but Shawn’s absolutely right. John Gruber, Dan Benjamin, Marco Arment, Horace Dediu, all of these people are setting a very high standard for this community, and it’s not just in the level of professionalism they show in their work: it’s also how much they care about what they do and take pride in it. If you read Daring Fireball, listen to Dan’s shows on 5by5, or use Instapaper, there’s no doubt they really love to do what they’re doing.

Longform, the website that collects really good articles that are too good to read in the browser, just released Longform for iPad. This app looks awesome.

It not only has the articles they collect, but also a number of great magazines, like Fast Company and Foreign Policy, and it stores articles for offline reading, too.

Marco Arment talked about the app economy on NPR’s Planet Money. I loved this comment:

When the market is that big of everybody that uses the Internet, any little differentiator can get you enough of a customer base to support yourself and a few other people.

Marco says that the ease of purchasing applications on iOS—and the number of users who do purchase applications—means that running a relatively small business is possible, which wasn’t really true on the web just a few years ago.

It seems obvious, but it’s a very big deal that a multitude of people can create businesses that do very niche things and be successful, without worrying about getting big. They can just focus on making their product better for their very specific customer base, and make enough money to support themselves comfortably.

I argued a year ago that this is important, too, because it allows a number of businesses doing similar things to co-exist. When a market’s economics force businesses to take a majority market share to survive—depend on getting big—they necessarily preclude other businesses from surviving in that market, too. This is true of most advertising-supported businesses, because making decent money from advertising requires significant scale. But for paid-for applications, you don’t need that scale. You just need a loyal group of customers who pay and tell other people about your application.

That allows a much more diverse and unique market to develop, because developers are (relatively) free to experiment. Markets that depend on advertising should become relatively homogeneous while markets where customers pay for the products should be relatively more diverse.

Tom Vanderbilt on the autonomous car:

Levandowski has a point. I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.

We are undoubtedly moving toward cars that drive themselves without any human input. Autonomous cars sort of symbolize new technology that, on the one hand, excites me because of the possibilities, the efficiency gains, the open parking spaces, the safety, the sheer excitement of creating a car which can drive itself—but it also worries me, because I wonder how that changes society and who we are.

A society where most everyone uses autonomous cars is also a society where being able to drive a car is a lot like being able to ride a horse—a quaint, cute skill to have. It’s a society where we may no longer enjoy driving down highway one through Big Sur, or along an empty desert highway at night, because most people may not even own a car, and if they do, they certainly aren’t driving it themselves. They’re passengers, distracted by other things like iPhones or iPads or Kindles or whatever else they’re playing with, because taking a car is now just free time.

I suppose it’s a bit odd to find pleasure in driving a few thousand pound piece of gasoline-burning metal, itself operated by computers, along a mountain or desert road and deriving some kind of relaxation or even meditation in it. Of course, the car itself was a huge technological change which completely upset the norms which came before it and, I’m sure, led to similar fears about what that change meant. And of course, as things change, we’ll adapt, and find new ways to enjoy ourselves.

Yet there’s also something utterly serene about driving down an empty desert road at night, perfectly awake and aware. It’s one of the few things left in our lives where we aren’t constantly bombarded by text messages, alerts, status updates, the urge to see what’s going on in the world, and where, because we aren’t bombarded by it and we must be focused on operating the car, we are actually left alone to think. That is freeing, and that is worth protecting. And so while change might be a natural part of life, it’s also true that we should try to protect that. Not protect driving in particular, but make time for those kinds of moments, and create ways for them to exist, even when we could be checking Twitter while our cars drive themselves.

Nick Bradbury on “frictionless sharing”:

Because in the past the user only had to decide whether to share something they just read, but now they have to think about every single article before they even read it. If I read this article, then everyone will know I read it, and do I really want people to know I read it?

That creates more friction, not less.

And it also highlights a rather profound implication with Facebook’s vision for the world, where we are “open”—allow Facebook to record and broadcast—about most everything we do: when we share everything we do, we don’t decide what we want to do based just on whether we want to do it or not, but also on how it will reflect on us in public. What will reading this article say about me? Listening to this band?

Instead of just doing things, experimenting, discovering, we think about our image. Good luck discovering what it is you like and don’t like—who you are—in public.

(Via Brent Simmons.)

Chris Martucci on United States v. Jones:

So it is unfair to say that Scalia overemphasizes trespassing. His argument is more subtle. To suggest that he overemphasizes physical intrusion would be to make the same mistake the lower court makes, i.e., to assume that a test used in one particular case is the only test.

Speaking of killing Hollywood, Moonbot Studios, the group which made The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, was nominated for an Oscar for the short film.

The Atlantic had a great profile piece about them last November.

I love Moonbot, because they’re not only taking advantage of new mediums, but they’re making beautiful art and telling great stories. It’s inspiring to see a group doing such incredible work.

Paul Graham wants to hasten Hollywood’s demise:

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

While it’s almost certain Hollywood’s relevance will decline, I don’t think it’s going to be any one thing that replaces it. It’s going to be a lot of little things—games, amalgamations of books and videos, small shows and movies created by small groups and distributed online—that end up doing it.

What’s fascinating is how wide-open everything is. It wasn’t long ago that television and movies held most of people’s attention, but that’s no longer true. The web broke down that wall, and I don’t think it’ll ever go up again. Now our attention is spread over a wider range of things, and that’s an opportunity for smaller scale projects to be successful.

You don’t need to have the resources of a movie studio to make a great film (and Hollywood is doing a very poor job of making good films with the resources they have, anyway), and what I hope we see is a better way for small groups to make films, distribute them online, and make money doing so.

Seth Godin on how to become untrusted as a writer by using your influence as currency with others:

The problem occurs when the trading of favors become mercenary, when alert individuals start manipulating the system for personal gain. Suddenly, every favor is suspect, measured and not at all generous. Suddenly all the likes and links and blurbs become nothing but currency, not the honest appraisals of people we can trust. It means that bystanders have trouble telling the difference between honest approval and the mere mutual shilling of traded favors.

This kind of writing is only valuable insofar as it’s honest. That’s the most important part. Without it, it’s worthless.

Apple announced three things today: textbooks for iPad, a new iTunes U app for teachers to manage classes and for taking them, and a free iBooks authoring application for the Mac.

I’m going to talk about the iTunes U app and textbooks, but I do want to say that this is incredibly exciting. Apple is trying to re-make education, and it’s very clear that this is something that means a lot to them. This isn’t just another business opportunity—it’s a chance to do something great and improve people’s lives. Apple is the only company with the platform, resources and passion to completely change how we learn in school, and they recognize it. What they announced today is the best example of why Apple is different than every other consumer electronics company. Their goal is not to make and sell devices. Their goal is to make the world better, and however cliché that sounds, that really is their goal.

iTunes U

Before, iTunes U was a section on the iTunes store with lectures from various schools and organizations across the world. Now, iTunes U is also an iOS application with direct access to those materials—and also a place for managing courses. Teachers can upload their class’s syllabus, books, handouts (documents, presentations, PDFs, web links), quizzes, assignments and media, and it’s all organized into a single place for students. Students can also take notes for each class within it, but the feature-set is so basic I don’t see this being very important.

But being able to manage classes within a single application is a big deal, both for K-12 and college students. When I was a kid, what I struggled with most was keeping track of all of the assignments and handouts from each class. Papers would get buried at the bottom of my backpack or I would lose them altogether. That’s not only bad for the student, but it’s also bad for the teacher, because they have to keep copies of every handout around for students who lose it and deal with students who aren’t prepared for class because they didn’t complete their assignment or didn’t bring it. If they’re using the iTunes U application, teachers and students won’t have to worry about it, because everything will always be on their iPad.

That’s less of an issue for college students, of course, but having each class’s presentations and materials with you at all times, able to look something up or study, is incredibly convenient.

The bigger picture for iTunes U is Apple’s created a very convincing way for people to take classes online. We can take classes online now, but it’s a terrible experience at many schools. Students still need to buy textbooks, and the class is managed through something like Blackboard or Moodle, which are rather bad. Because the experience is so bad, online classes tend to be something people suffer through for the credit, rather than something engaging that they learn from.

iTunes U could change that, because it’s actually nice to use. Everything is in one place and well-organized. It’s hard to overstate how important that is for a student: because everything is in one place and they know how to use it, there’s much less mental overhead for figuring out what they’re supposed to do. They just do it. That’s especially important when you’re taking a course online, because whether the student does their studying and assignments depends on their motivation to do so.

Textbooks

The new iBooks application includes digital textbooks, with books from McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. These aren’t static books, either—they’re what you’d get if you combined an Inkling textbook’s capabilities with Push Pop Press’s UI concepts. Textbooks can include video, Keynote presentations, 3D images, interactive images (for example, you can inspect different parts of a cell membrane) and chapter reviews.

Those interactive elements are important, because textbooks can more effectively convey certain types of information that’s difficult to do on a static page, but what’s most important is how good the reading experience is, and how easy it is to take notes. We’ve had digital textbooks for a while on the desktop, but they were never very good for those two reasons: they were difficult to read and take notes with. After using one of Apple’s new textbooks, though, they nailed it. Text is clear and, well, easy to read. Taking notes and highlighting text is easier in iBooks than it is in a real book; to highlight something, you just slide your finger from where you want the highlight to start to where you want it to end, and to making a note is just as easy.

iBooks also has a study cards feature, which takes the textbook’s glossary and highlighted items and turns them into flash cards, and it works really well. It’s a perfect example of what makes digital textbooks so convincing.

And textbooks are $14.99 each, or less. $14.99. Fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. Less than a night at the movie theatre. I’ve paid $250 for a single textbook before. $14.99 is what’s known as a big deal.

This isn’t exciting because Apple’s the first company to create worthwhile digital textbooks. That honor goes to Inkling. It’s exciting because Apple’s the only company that is in a position to completely change how we learn, and iBooks certainly has the power to do so. For the first time ever, elementary and high school students will be able to replace twenty pounds of books with a one-and-a-half pound device. They won’t need to decide between bringing a textbook home for homework and a backpack that strains their back. They won’t have to worry about forgetting a book. It’ll all be in a paper-sized computer that they can carry with them everywhere they go.

Brad Plumer has a great overview of SOPA and PIPA and why they’re so dangerous. Here’s one reason:

The bills allow sites to be taken down without legal oversight. As Public Knowledge has pointed out, one little-noticed provision in both PIPA and SOPA would grant Internet service providers broad immunity if they voluntarily block perfectly innocent users or Web sites from the Internet. Copyright holders like the movie and record industries could draw up sweeping lists of sites they didn’t like (even sites that should be protected under fair use) and pressure Internet service providers to take action. As long as the providers could claim they were acting “in good faith,” those sites and users could be blocked without any oversight by the courts — all because Hollywood was feeling a bit vindictive.

Aaron Mahnke:

I stepped in from of the thermostat and waved my hand in front of it. Instantly it came to life, and presented me with a speech bubble that said, as best as I can remember, that “Away Mode has been activated. Press to continue.” I pressed the face of the thermostat and instantly the heat kicked on, bringing the room back to the desired temperature. Crisis averted.

Why was our thermostat set on “away mode”? Because every Sunday morning my family happens to be out of the house for a couple of hours. And our thermostat had learned that by watching us. See, we have a Nest thermostat.

How awesome is it that Nest is getting us excited about a thermostat?

Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom released a few details about their plan for how to do advertising:

“I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry have joined Instagram.

“They’re sharing pictures of products and the message of their brands. That shows we’re at the beginning of what will come with brands,” he said.

As Marco points out, this likely means they’ll insert photos from companies—advertisements—in our timelines. I’m not sure how they’ll do it otherwise.

This could be an interesting form of advertisement, if advertisers use it as such—rather than show straight print-like adverts, they could use it to tell stories about their products. Audi could use it to take well-done photos of their cars in use, ones that fit with Instagram’s purpose, to convey a more general feel of what Audi is to viewers, rather than simply try to convey specific information (e.g., “best-in-class safety!”). Of course, other forms of advertisements could be used in more interesting ways—print adverts in particular—but they tend not to be.

Advertisements could be done in an interesting and effective way, but not only is it likely advertisers won’t use it as such, but the entire concept walks a fine line. Delivering ads within someone’s timeline—a stream of photos from users the user decided to follow, and thus is inherently private—will likely end up feeling invasive. I wonder, too, if Instagram will target ads to users. What personal information do they have to target ads? And if they don’t, that makes the venture a lot less likely to be successful.

William Gibson:

The idea that all this stuff is potentially grist for your mill has been very liberating. This process of cultural mongrelization seems to be what postmodernism is all about. The result is a generation of people (some of whom are artists) whose tastes are wildly eclectic- people who are hip to punk music and Mozart, who rent these terrible horror and SF videos from the 7-11 one night and then invite you to a mud wrestling match or a poetry reading the next. If you’re a writer, the trick is to keep your eyes and ears open well enough to let all this in but also, somehow, to recognize intuitively what you should let emerge in your work, how effective something might be in a specific context. I know I don’t have a sense of writing as being divided up into different compartments, and I don’t separate literature from the other arts. Fiction, television, music, film- all provide material in the form of images and phrases and codes that creep into my writing in ways both deliberate and unconscious.

I’m not sure when this interview was conducted, but this couldn’t be more relevant today.