- Dropbox Ran Afoul of Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines: So What?
Last week, a number of developers reported that Apple was rejecting iOS applications that used Dropbox, a popular cloud file storage and backup system. An initial thread on the Dropbox developers’ forum has led to a outpouring of tech news full of hyperbolic claims. However, none of this reporting has covered the real problem – Apple is now more concerned about protecting its business model than serving its users or its developers. Read more »
- Help pioneer Casebook: The Next Generation
We at the H2O project are seeking a full-time Project Manager. H2O is an online platform for textbook development and distribution, currently in a pilot stage. H2O is based on the open source model – instead of locking down materials in formalized textbooks, we believe that course books can be free (as in free speech) for everyone to access and, equally important, build upon.
Using H2O, professors can freely pull together materials for a course by selecting cases, editing those cases to the sections that are most relevant, and grouping them into readings. Once the materials are assembled, they can be copied in part or in whole by other interested faculty and then edited further. H2O has been successfully piloted in JZ’s 1L Torts class, and will be rolling out further over the coming year.
H2O’s project manager will play a leading role in shepherding H2O into its next phase, which will focus on developing new materials and incorporating additional features, in order to expand the platform beyond its law school roots.
H2O is a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Harvard Law School library. The Project Manager will be housed at the HLS Library and work in close collaboration with lead members of the Library Innovation Lab team; he/she will also work closely with the Berkman Center and current H2O teams. More info and job posting here.
- Meme patrol: “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
I participated in the Berkman Center’s fascinating HyperPublic symposium in the summer of 2011. When moderating a panel I invoked the aphorism that “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” It’s a way of encapsulating the idea that online free services usually make money by extracting lots of data from users — and then selling that data, or using it for targeted availability of those users for advertising, to advertisers. In that sense, the advertisers are the clients, and the users enjoying free content are what’s being sold. (Of course, sometimes that happens even when the user pays.)
I didn’t coin the phrase, and since it was featured (and attributed to me!) in wordsmith.org’s wildly popular “word a day” as a thought for the day accompanying the word “enceinte” — I sought to nail down its provenance.
The first use of the quote that we can find is as a comment within the famed MetaFilter community in August 2010. The user’s name is blue_beetle, who might be someone named Andrew Lewis. It’s entirely possible I saw it there, as MeFi is one of my five favorite sites on the Web.
Similar sentiments (whether drawn from that source or independently invented) have been expressed by Bruce Schneier in October 2010 and by Douglas Rushkoff in September ’11.
The phrase “you’re the product” also apparently appeared in a 1986 speech by President Reagan about the drug war.
Just say know.
–KA and JZ
- OS X Mountain Lion and Gatekeeper
This week, Apple announced that it was moving to a new, faster OS X operating system development cycle, starting with the release of Mountain Lion next summer. It previewed a number of features for the OS, and released some parts in beta.
Mountain Lion is slated to include a feature called Gatekeeper as part of the security and privacy settings. Gatekeeper allows administrators (those with full privileges on a Mac) to limit the applications that can run on the Mac. They can choose among allowing apps downloaded from the Mac App Store only, or apps from outside the Store so long as they are digitally signed to Apple’s satisfaction by their developers, or apps from anywhere. (The latter has been the way both Mac and Windows PCs have worked, for better or worse, since the introduction of the Apple II in 1977.) Read more »
- GPS-based Insurance Rates: The Devil is in the (Data) Details
A British insurance company called Motaquote has teamed up with TomTom, the GPS manufacturer to offer insurance prices based on data gathered by GPS. Fair Pay Insurance, Motaquote’s new program, is an opt-in insurance pricing scheme where drivers will get a free GPS unit in return for potentially lower (but possibly higher) premiums. The GPS unit will provide all the traditional navigational services as well as warn drivers when they corner too sharply or brake too hard. Read more »
September 27th, 2009 at 7:01 pm (#)
98% of everything on the Internet is on the spectrum between boring and infuriating.
September 27th, 2009 at 7:06 pm (#)
Maybe because everyone figured out that they were storing all the data and selling it to marketing firms – or that the ACLU could set up an app to see things on your friends’ walls (!) and show how unsecure they are? Maybe because we have really shoddy privacy protections in the US?
Facebook wants to instrumentalize everything and sell our private info to the highest bidder. People suspect that maybe the apps they choose or what they say in (say the quizzes) is someday going to come back to haunt them. The Beacon fiasco destroyed any hope for Facebook to be seen as non-invasive…even after backing out it was shown (on wired?) that they were still retrieving data and selling it.
That’s their right, I guess, for a free service (if they are up front about it) but the fact is no one trusts FB and especially not the 3rd party apps that are basically data-mining.
Apple apps, at least, just feel like software.
September 27th, 2009 at 7:43 pm (#)
The problem is twofold:
(1) Facebook, as a development platform, is constantly changing and hardly elegant. Making apps for it is hardly easy. This difficulty is one of the reasons for the second part of the problem:
(2) It’s easier to get growth and usage of your app by clever marketing tricks on the various communication channels (notifications, requests, invites, etc.) than it is to build quality apps.
You can more than double your install rate if you change a button from small and blue to big, shiny, and pink. The market forces literally force mediocrity.
September 27th, 2009 at 9:08 pm (#)
Here’s a free 18 week “iPhone Application Programming” course I’ve posted to the open World University & School – like Wikipedia with MIT OCW – from Stanford http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Courses. Does anyone know of any online courses that show you how to write a FB app?
September 27th, 2009 at 11:47 pm (#)
I suspect some part of it might have been that apps on the iPhone are like apps on a PC – we expect that the apps (and their motherships) will only know what we the users tell them about ourselves. In contrast, on Facebook, the app (and its owners) are tied right into our entire digital persona. The big advantage of an app on Facebook is its ability to leverage the social network; but that same feature may also be a big liability in that many users are no doubt concerned about an app that seems to “know” too much about its user.
September 28th, 2009 at 12:41 pm (#)
I have always had an aversion to Facebook apps – for a number of reasons. Probably the one that effected me the most in my decisions to ignore them is that they made my Facebook page really cluttered. They were difficult to move around, made my organization scheme uglier – you had to wait for them to upload. And they didn’t seem like part of the essential Facebook experience, which I would describe as twofold: one, sharing information about yourself (in contact information, lists of things you like, and photos) and two, sending short messages to other people. Applications are superfulous to this experience and if they are not completely convenient, they don’t feel like an important part of the service, and I then have no motivation to spend my time with them.
September 28th, 2009 at 6:11 pm (#)
From my observations, Facebook is moving toward a platform untethered from the site itself. Hence, it would make more sense for them to partner more closely with developers and existing web services through Facebook connect — leveraging their most important asset, the community — rather than narrowing their reach an ecosystem of apps that orbit their own site.
Hopefully, they’ve learned from newspapers (arguably the first failed social network) in recognizing it’s not the real estate they own but the community.
September 28th, 2009 at 9:30 pm (#)
Might applications’ success and functionality depend on the relative openness of the iPhone OS or FB codes, as well as ease of writing programs for them? Both have large user bases … Does anyone know of an online course to write FB apps, that we could post to World Univ & Sch similar to the free, Stanford “iPhone App Programming” course here: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Courses?
Also, many of the iPhone applications are useful, which hasn’t been my experience with FB’s.
The head of each organization’s focus, and the resulting culture, also seem relevant. Did Apple’s Steve Jobs want many developers to write applications for the iPhone, in specific ways, while Mark Zuckerberg seems not to care too much about people writing applications for FB?
September 30th, 2009 at 6:07 am (#)
one funny thing is that when apple first launched the iphone, there was no app store, there was no official way to run third party code on the phone, and apple wanted instead that one made special iphone pages.
what i think is the issue is the ease of finding, not the level of data access.
the iphone web pages never really took of, but i suspect that was more because it was hard to tell if a page had a iphone version, unless it automatically redirected you there. In contrast, the app store is right there. It’s like apple was running a big bookmark recommendation service.
also, what are most of the apps ones you remove the games and the joke apps (farts, beer and similar)? They are mostly glossy front ends to online services.
i suspect facebook was hoping the apps would bring it ad attention, but it did not, but at the same time the worst they can do is kill the app system fully, so they push it aside while trying to hook into the twitter craze.
but that will not work either, as facebook is all about old class mates, friends and whatsnot, twitter on the other hand can be as informative or as anonymous as you want it to be, so there is no chance we will see some person doing facebook updates from the middle of some riots (at least if there is a bit of brain left in the body, we see criminals checking facebook from places they break into), while twitter is the perfect way…