Five Network Services You Need To Use
Here are five network services that I use, consume, promote and on which I rely heavily. My affiliations with them are purely tangential (I’m on the board of the MIX, which does indirect business with kiva.org; and a friend works for Evernote) and this isn’t paid or promotional; I just felt like vamping on where [...]
Instagram Is About Context
There have been lots of bytes written about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, with the eigenvectors of sentiment pointing in roughly these directions: keep it away from Google, pick up wickedly smart engineers, build on their mobile expertise, get a rapidly growing user base at a reasonable cost per user. The real answer (in my network-centric [...]
Networking Killed Kodak
I’m watching with both sadness and bemusement (perhaps the definition of schadenfreude) as Kodak limps toward bankruptcy. The company that gave us song titles (Kodachrome), vernacular (Kodak moment), iconic Olympics television ads, and made it possible for the consumer to chronicle his or her life is now about to end its own corporate lifetime. Disclaimers: [...]
Steve Jobs and Buzz Lightyear Changed My Life
Social media is lit up tonight from the warmth of words expressing sympathy, sorrow, and condolences over the death of Steve Jobs. Everyone has their story of how Jobs changed their life – in a chance meeting in the elevator, at a conference, through his insistence on insanely great product design. Steve Jobs indeed changed [...]
Do Facebook Lists Leak Personal Information?
Since Facebook introduced Lists a few days ago, I’ve had two people comment to me about actions I’ve taken adding them to pre-defined lists — actions that should have been completely and totally private. This makes me believe that the Facebook lists feature bleeds private information or actions. Background: Facebook will pre-define lists for you [...]
Copying Pictures Off Of Your iPhone
Apple makes it very easy to put things on client devices: playlists and music to your iPod, pictures, calendars, photos and music on your iPhone, applications on just about anything other than an iPod. What’s hard is getting your own content off of those devices with cameras. All of the pictures I took on last [...]
You Can’t See Your Facebook Profile Viewers
The volume of clickjack spam on Facebook is astounding, and getting worse each day. It’s our own fault. By participating in a social network, we choose to make certain bits of our private lives much more open and available then we would in a real-world circle of friends. It’s somewhat fun to “like” the artists, [...]
Yahoo Is Still Not Delicious
Yahoo’s financial mess has led it to kill the bookmark sharing site Del.icio.us. And reactions range from “Oh noes, make it open source so the Internet can take care of it” to “It’s like burning a library”. I should say “all of the bad reactions.” Delicious is dying because it’s not generating revenue for Yahoo, [...]
Cloud Computing and P=NP
A sports betting friend once advised me to “never take the under.” It’s good, practical thinking – when you play the under (betting that fewer goals, points, or touchdowns will be scored than the Vegas line indicates) you’re betting on something not to happen. I’m a big believer in never betting against potential. Which is [...]
Why You Care if P=NP
I had started a long thought on one of the toughest open problems in computing and realized I had stepped in too many scientific puddles along the way. So here is a long thought in two parts; the first is for everyone (including non-math, non-computer science people) because I believe this is the kind of [...]