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A non-threatening social network

Facebook is scaring people right now. The latest round of announcements at their annual conference is reaffirming suspicions that participating on Facebook is prone to leak sensitive personal information to potentially any site you visit. There is really no need for this delicate dance of zero-login, cookie-based triage. There are already two battle-tested protocols for distributed logins: OAuth and OpenID. These have matured to a point that they take just a few clicks if you are already signed in on your provider's site.

I have a different vision than Facebook, and I am executing that with MixNote. There is not a constant threat of your data falling into the wrong hands, because you control it, and this is transparent to you. Your identity won't follow you around the web; rather you may choose to reveal certain aspects of yourself to only parties you trust. At any time, you can fine tune the privacy level of a portion of your data. And you can grant access to apps to write data on your behalf, but only at a level you feel comfortable. Eventually, this could be done with OAuth, so that an app could prompt you, asking for some permission, but in early development, MixNote will require manually setting a special tag on some object.

I have other concepts to share in the future about this unorthodox, but incredibly powerful site. If you can't wait, visit MixNote, and try the demo. Yes, I realize it's a pastebin, but with a little imagination it is already a lot more, and this will be all the more true at a later stage of development. Email me if you have any questions, or wait for my next blog post.

Apple iPad initial thoughts

Good pricing with 6 models and $30 per month 3G. Kudos on making their own processor. Quite surprising that Apple didn't need any help from Texas Instruments or Nvidia. As with the iPhone, there is no multi-tasking, which really helps performance. The 1 Ghz CPU could probably keep a few things running, but it really depends on the RAM. How much RAM does it have? I'd guess 1 or 2 GB. I predict a software revision down the road that allows you to run a few iPhone size apps side by side. Edit: The worst part here is the web browser doesn't have tabs. I have been using tabs for about 6 years, and can't imagine browsing without them. Leaving out tabs is inexcusable, and a deal breaker for most users. Not sure if a video camera will come in a hardware revision or a peripheral.


The resolution is 1024 by 768. Not wide screen or high definition (although the pixel density is plenty). So most new videos will not fill the entire screen unless cropped. Of course, there is a huge back catalog of 4:3 television shows that fit perfectly (and actually look lame with black bars on the sides on our wide screen monitors and televisions). The ratio is probably nice in portrait mode for reading books and other text. Speaking of reading, there are e-books and a dedicated New York Times browser. Steve Jobs mentioned they're using some standard book format. Not sure if that is rich enough. I'm hoping to see HTML5 take off and for some sort of magazine or newspaper style of website to emerge, similar to all the websites optimized for iPhone that have popped up.

Let's hope that gaming will be epic. Given that the device will sell well, I can see a few friends laying their iPads on a table and doing some interesting LAN gaming, such as real time strategy.

Anyway, these are just my initial thoughts. Even if it's just a big iPhone, this is definitely a shakeup in in the computer landscape.

Lurch

Wisdom teeth are gone, which restores my health and mind. The PAX video game convention was fun again, with another impressive batch of indie Xbox games and a swell Jonathan Coulton / Paul and Storm concert. Second year of college starts in two weeks. My startup idea is remains ever-present in my mind since the start of 2009, but I have sadly neglected to work on it. I have been watching the web churn this summer, amusing me to no end. Off the top of my head:

  • Friendfeed halts.
    • Acquired by Facebook. The site remains up for now, but development has all but ended. It breaks my heart and other fans of the service. Friendfeed set a new bar in social networking, one that I hope to see reached again in open source form.
    • Developers are swept up in Tornado, a Python web server and framework just released.
    • The real time search engine has frequent outages.
  • Twitter is uninteresting, underpowered, and over-hyped, but admittedly a great marketing tool.
  • Facebook dominates, but still feels closed. Facebook Pages and apps are a poor imitation of the web. Kudos, though, on adding search and tagging.
  • OAuth is beating OpenID. I don't have numbers, but Twitter's support is a large factor. Facebook Connect must be stopped.
  • Yahoo search did seppuku, losing developer respect. Yahoo can no longer be distinguished from AOL.
  • Google is busy as ever.
    • Wave looms, threatening email itself and any network that does not integrate it.
    • PubSubHubbub nicely hedges the real time strategy. Once it has fully caught on, you could use a feed aggregator to have a real time stream of your dealings across on the web.
    • Google Voice and Android picking up users and hardware (more excited about Nokia's Maemo, though).
    • Chromium gets online bookmark storage, themes, extensions, a Mac version, and an upcoming OS. If it's good enough, we won't need Android.
  • Major comment systems are pulling in remote comments now. Disqus deftly used the BackType API for this feature, while JS-Kit came up with a similar offering.
  • CrowdFusion shows potential. 
  • Posterous gets themes, cementing its main feature set: email input, social output, and now personalization.

So there is no shortage of avenues to communicate. Smartphones and laptops connected to wi-fi and 3G turn the tables. It's now disconnecting that takes effort. I look forward to remaining connected and seeing where this whole internet thing goes. Thank you, Posterous, for the generous hosting. I don't intend on messing with Blogger, Wordpress, nor Tumblr again. Also, major respect to all programmers innovating on the web.