Here’s a roundup of some interesting stories published recently on generativity, tethered devices, and as always, the iPhone.
Generative Irrelevancy. Tim Sturgill considers Google’s video touting Chrome OS. He worries that it may be the “final nail…in the generative coffin,” but he also sees the virtue of moving beyond traditional OSes. See also JZ’s take [...]

Three great articles with themes and variations on FOI ideas:
Joe Hewitt, Facebook’s iPhone app developer, has quit developing for the iPhone because he is “philosophically opposed” to Apple’s review policies and their tight control over their platform. But instead of hitching his wagon to Android or some other mobile platform, he’s decided to focus [...]

Those of you who follow Professor Zittrain’s work know that he’s been writing and thinking about ubiquitous human computing for the last several months. Another name for it might be distributed human computing: the phenomenon of disaggregating a task into component pieces and then parceling them out around the world. Perhaps the [...]

Most readers of this blog probably use several Google products; my rough count is that I use about 15. Privacy advocates have been understandably concerned about having so much information stored by one company.
In partial response to these concerns, Google created the Google dashboard, a site that tells you which Google apps you use [...]

There are many reasons to worry about cloud computing.  Data stored in the cloud can be difficult to extract for you, yet all too easy to demand by government.  Applications running the cloud can mean new gatekeepers between you and code you might want to run. (And in discussing these issues, people don’t even agree [...]

Professor Zittrain has spent time on this blog and elsewhere discussing the future of cloud computing. One of his frequent suggestions is that it should be easier to move data within the cloud, so we don’t all get locked into a certain photo storage system, or spreadsheet provider, or what have you. It seems that [...]

Thanks for all the great comments (here, and in replies directly to JZ on FB and Twitter) on why Facebook apps haven’t taken off the way, say, iPhone apps have. I thought I’d try to summarize some of the dominant themes to think about whether the problem is inherent or created by Facebook itself.
1. [...]

A little behind the times, but here’s the update on the Google Voice story. Apple and Google both responded to the FCC’s letter; Apple’s reply is here and Google’s is here.
So what did we learn? On the upside, we learned a lot about the approval processes for both the iPhone and Android phones; [...]

In the book, JZ discussed why it is that even tech-savvy, cautious users can’t avoid malware:
[S]urfing the World Wide Web often entails accepting and running new code. The Web was designed to seamlessly integrate material from disparate sources: a single Web page can draw from hundreds of different sources on the fly, not only through [...]

Apple has long been killing apps—sometimes inexplicably, sometimes because they compete with other Apple products (Podcaster), and sometimes because they compete with AT&T’s exclusive deal (Netshare). This week brings another example of killing an app because it competes with AT&T, and the tech world is disgusted, outraged, and furious—even the New York Times noticed. [...]