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; more […]
As promised, here’s some of what we learned about the app approval process from Google and Apple’s letters to the FCC. There’s nothing ground-shaking, but a few details of interest to smartphone obsessives. Apple: Apple says a staff member tests every submission for technical issues like bugs and unauthorized protocols. More holistically, they look for […]
If this story is true, I think it’s a real misjudgment on Apple’s part. Floatopian, a Virginia and Palo Alto-based developer, created an app called iSinglePayer designed to advocate for single-payer healthcare in the US. Per Floatopian’s open letter, the free app contained charts and information about health care reform; it could also calculate the […]
CIO.com offers a fascinating article on the Facebook economy and how much app use has plummeted since a Facebook user interface redesign de-emphasized outside apps. I’d noticed that, too, and wondered what Facebook was thinking in stripping the site down so much (or Twitterizing itself, depending on how you look at it). The article does […]
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 […]
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. The […]
Prof. Zittrain has spent this week writing about the dangers of moving computing into the cloud. Another aspect of the same story is the danger of keeping computing on endpoints — PCs, smartphones — if those endpoints become tethered instead of generative. This story illustrates the potential problems. Etisalat, a telecom provider that serves much […]
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer Fascinating: Steven Peterson, a web developer in San Francisco, put together a handy iPhone app called Routesy that gives schedules and arrival times for Muni, the city’s public transit system. The underlying data is collected by a company called NextBus, which puts trackers on the various vehicles. Generativity at its best—the government […]