In Path 2.0.6, released to the App Store today, you are prompted to opt in or out of sharing your phone’s contacts with our servers in order to find your friends and family on Path. If you accept and later decide you would like to revoke this access, please send an email to service@path.com and we will promptly see to it that your contact information is removed.

That’s the right thing to do. They did make a mistake—a mistake, it’s worth pointing out, that I think most applications with this sort of feature probably also make—by not requesting permission first. I don’t have a problem with a service I trust uploading my contacts for that purpose, but doing it without notifying me, let alone asking my permission, doesn’t engender trust.

What they’re doing now does. My view is Path was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and while that doesn’t excuse a mistake, it does mean that when they say they screwed up, they’re sorry, and they’re fixing it, there’s no reason not to accept it.

Well done, Path, for doing the right thing.

Goodbye, Twitter for iPad.

You can watch it on the AppleTV by selecting “iTunes Live” from the Internet menu. It’s worth pointing out that isn’t an option right now, so Apple will be adding it to the list—which means Apple has the ability to add new options to the AppleTV on the fly without issuing updates. That’s certainly a nice capability to have if you want to stream other events—like, say, sporting events.

It can figure out: is that sequence of dates and dollar figures likely to be an asset price? Or is it the amount of lemonade that people bought? It uses some heuristics based on seeing to what extent this looks like [random data] and to what extent it looks like independent samples to guess whether it’s actually an asset price — and given that it thinks it’s an asset price, it will go ahead and figure out a growth rate summary.

When Apple introduced the iPhone 4S, and Siri along with it, I wrote that I was most excited about Siri because it was a large step toward a time when all the world’s data is easily searchable and comparable. I wrote:

Let’s use Microsoft as an example again. Right now, if I wanted to see their operating profit as a percentage of sales from 1995-2005, I would need to find their financial statements, locate the data contained in them, and make the calculations myself. If I wanted to do anything useful, I would have to import it into a spreadsheet application (most likely by hand). Rather than doing this myself, though, I could just ask a future version of Siri for Microsoft’s operating margin between 1995 and 2005, and it would return that data to me in a table and chart.

Then I can ask it to compare Microsoft’s operating margin over that period compared to Hewlett-Packard’s, Dell’s and Apple’s.

Wolfram Alpha is getting there. We’re not very far away, and that’s a very big deal. The web has made access to data mostly free and accessible to everyone, but finding the right data is still a terribly hard thing to do. You have to manipulate a search engine to narrow its results down to what you want, physically look through pages and pages of links, and then—once you find the data you need—convert it into a usable format. That’s an incredible waste of time and deterrent to good research and real innovation. Where Wolfram Alpha is heading is where there’s none of that, because the service does it for you.

They’re one of the most exciting companies today.

So, if tripling the size of the social network to 3,000,000,000 users is not going to be enough to justify its valuation with its current revenue per user, there is only one strategic direction for Facebook to go. It needs to generate more revenue per user. A lot more.

Dead-on. By going public, Facebook will be under more pressure to increase the amount of revenue they generate from each user, and for good reason: even if every human being alive used Facebook, they still wouldn’t make very much revenue. They have no choice but to make more money per user.

Madrigal speculates they’ll increase how many adverts users see and push Facebook Payments. I think that’s right, but it’s only a part of it. I think Facebook wants to be the web platform, the platform that the rest of the web (and real-world businesses) are built on top of. By graphing how the world’s social relationships connect, and by allowing/pushing individuals to share more about themselves and what they do, they could be the most important advertising, public relations and consumer research channel for companies that’s ever existed, and the only platform software developers need to be on.

The latter might be a bit surprising, but imagine if a large portion of Facebook’s 850 million users sign up for Facebook Payments. If Facebook built something which allowed their third-party applications to run on actual devices, and not just the web, wouldn’t that be a great platform to develop for (financially)? Apple’s App Store has been successful for developers because Apple built it on top of the iTunes Music Store, which had tens of millions of people’s credit card information already stored, so purchasing a new application was as easy as buying a song. In March, Apple said they had 200 million iTunes customers with credit cards on file. There’s no reason why Facebook couldn’t equal, or surpass, that number.

So, that’s my bet. Facebook will, at some point in the next few years, no longer be just a social network where people also happen to play games. Facebook will instead be an all-encompassing platform where you can purchase (HTML5-based) applications to run on your mobile devices, purchase goods from other companies, and for companies to “connect” with you. They want to be the platform for the web, the utility people, companies and organizations use to find, communicate with and sell to their customers.

(Via Marco Arment.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.