iOS 5.1 release date brings Facebook integration, Apple-Zuck detente

by Bill Palmer

When iOS 5.1 reaches its release date early this year, it may mark the end of one of the odder cold wars in the current consumer technology landscape. Apple and Facebook have never been flat out rivals, and don’t generally compete in their various markets. But while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs were known to be communicative, the two companies have been less than cooperative when it comes to areas like Apple’s ill fated Ping social network foray. Lack of Facebook integration was one of the (many) reasons why Ping went south early on and never recovered. Apple has since responded by building Twitter integration into every facet of iOS 5, but has largely sidestepped Facebook integration and left users to simply rely on the Facebook app itself. Now sources from ZDNET to CNET are pointing to an impending Apple-Facebook team up with the release of the iOS 5.1 update, which could bring Facebook integration on iPhones and iPads on par with that of Twitter…

Such integration would allow users to post content such as mobile photos directly to their Facebook page from within Apple’s built in camera app, for instance. That same functionality has been in place for Twitter since iOS 5.0 was released last fall alongside the launch of the iPhone 4S. It’s worth pointing out that iOS 5.1 is still in developer beta and is currently on its third prerelease iteration, which means that several more beta versions could come before its release date – meaning that plenty of changes could still be in store for 5.1 between now and the time end-users get their hands on it. Apple may also release an IOS 5.0.2 bug fix update in the interim, although no announcements have been made along those lines.

Facebook video chat trips up veteran users, Twitter lists are liferaft

by Bill Palmer

One of the odd things about having been on today’s popular social networks since the early days is that while those networks have significantly changed over the years, I’ve been reluctant to change the way I use them. Twitter since late 2006, Facebook since early 2007. In social media years, I’m older than Moses. It doesn’t mean I know anything more about how to use either network. It just means that I’ve seen more. I still want to use those networks like I used to back in the day. And at this point that may be a handicap.

Case in point: I still approve every Facebook friend request I receive, so long as the account appears to be a legitimate, real person. That habit started back in the day because when I first joined the network, it had just gone public and very few fellow non-college adults were on there. In other words, I’d take whatever “friends” were seeking me out, within reason, in the name of populating my Facebook page. Gradually, over the years, my (actual) friends, family, and colleagues have shown up and my 1700 Facebook “friends” are a mix of people I know and people I have yet to get to know. And that’s always worked. Except now, with the launch of facebook.com live chat, at least once a week someone “friends” me and, upon approving the request, they immediately want to live-chat with me. Placed on the spot, I have no way of knowing who they really are (Beatweek reader or random spammer, for instance) and so I nearly always ignore chat requests when they come from someone I don’t know. Even though I may have just approved them as a “friend,” that doesn’t mean I want to be their buddy – especially in my line of work when those trying to “sell me” on something will use any means they can come across; there’s nothing worse than being sucked into a sales pitch you didn’t know was a sales pitch. It’s left me in a position where I’m no longer inclined to approve Facebook friend requests without finding out specifically who the person is first. Maybe I should have started doing it that way a long time ago, but I’d been too busy trying to use the 2011 evolution of Facebook as if it were still 2007. The same thing has come up and bitten me on Twitter as well…

Actually, Twitter served up a liferaft for old timers like me. Back in the day, you followed back everyone who followed you. If it turned out their tweets weren’t to your liking, you’d quietly unfollow them later. But in those days the total numbers were manageable (Robert Scoble was considered king of Twitter because he alone had five thousand followers). These days the sheer number of people who end up following a frequently-tweeting account like mine is such that I finally had to turn off email notifications regarding new followers; they were in the hundreds per day. So now, not only am I not following back new people, I’m not even aware of who my new followers are unless I hear from them in a “reply” message. That’s fine, except I’m left with a back-catalog of fifteen thousand people or so whom I’ve “followed back” over the years out of habit (or during one misguided stretch, automation). Some of these people are pure spammers. Some of them tweet things I’m fundamentally opposed to reading about. And yet there they are, leaving me with a Twitter timeline which is literally unmanageable. Thankfully, Twitter’s “lists” feature bailed me out in that I now only pay attention to certain lists of various sizes. I make no apologies for that, either. Only so much time in the day. But the group of people I’m “following” on Twitter has no correlation to who I’m actually paying attention to. In fact I’m fairly certain there are people on the private lists I check with regularity that I’m not “following” publicly. And I wouldn’t be in this non-correlating mess if not for the fact that I jumped on board with Twitter so early that it was a different network and the unwritten rules read differently…

None of this is a complaint, nor an attempt at nostalgia. Both networks are infinitely more useful to me now that they’re well populated by the mainstream. After all, I choose my social networks by who all is there. In contrast, while the new Google+ has some technical promise, it’s of no value to me at present because of who all isn’t there. The old saying is that the pioneers get the arrows while the settlers who come later get the land. I have no regrets about having been an early adopter of Facebook and Twitter, even though the usage habits I picked up back in those early days have left me with baggage I now need to clean up. I’m just not as inclined to get involved with yet another social network, one where the arrows are still flying and there’s no meaningful land to be had – particularly now that the two reigning social networks include just about everyone I actually want to converse with (along with, clearly, even more people on top of that). Even if it does mean that I’m an old graybeard on those networks who’s still trying to adjust to what they’ve evolved into as opposed to what they once were.

Facebook Timeline: a look inside the beta app and how to enable it now

Facebook recently announced some new and exciting changes to their social network. First, they rolled out a new newsfeed and ticker sidebar that got a lot of members in an uproar. And the newest change that’s about to come is the Timeline.

Timeline is a new way to view all of your Facebook activities on just one page. It will be replacing your current profile page and allow you to add a little personality while you’re at it. On the top, you’ll be able to add a cover photo to feature. And to the left will be a small photo — your profile picture. On the top right is a list of years you can click on, starting from the present time to the day you were born. Click on it and that will jump to that point in your timeline.

And if you ever thought that any posts or update you made were lost after a day or two, think again. Facebook has all of this content, and display it in a nice timeline for you to see. This could be a good or a bad thing, depending on what kind of data you post. Of course, you can go through and edit/remove unwanted data.

Developers have already started tinkering with the new profile pages and most welcome the new change. Others fear the new profile pages are too “Myspace-y.” But since the cover photo can be easily changed to be a photo from your album, we probably will not see too many glitter image and animated gifs all over the social network. A public rollout of Timeline will be happening soon, so hang in there! Pro tip: want to enable Timeline before it’s ready? Here are the instructions.

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Facebook iPad app set for October Apple event after developer quits

by Bill Palmer

Facebook’s lead iPad app developer has either successfully fallen on his sword in order to embarrass the company into finally releasing the oft-delayed app, or he’s fallen victim to the worst case of bad timing in recent memory. Jeff Verkoeyen announced today that he’s quit Facebook in order to go work for Google instead, citing reasons “related to the fact that since January of this year I was the lead engineer on Facebook’s iPad app.” Complaining that the app has been “feature-complete” since May and that Facebook has been repeatedly delaying it for no good reason, he decided to walk, although he did subsequently clarify that “working at Facebook was an incredible experience for me.” In any case he may be shocked to learn that according to Mashable, Facebook is set to debut the iPad app in question at next week’s Apple event. How these two pieces of information fit together, assuming the latter report is accurate, is a mystery. But it sounds like iPad users, who’ve inexplicably been without a dedicated Facebook app for a year and a half (even though the Facebook iPhone app can run on an iPad in half-screen mode), are set to finally get their due. Not that Verkoeyen will be around to see the launch…

The longtime lack of an iPad app is merely one prong of Facebook’s seeming anti-app stance. There’s no desktop Facebook app for Mac or PC, despite the fact that Apple and Microsoft have launched Mac and Windows app stores and made clear that they believe dedicated apps are the future. While there have been Facebook apps for mobile platforms like iPhone and Android for some time, those apps have been considered limited in scope and something which would only be used when not at home or when ones computer is otherwise not handy. Even Facebook’s recent initiatives such as group chat and Skype video chat have been launched on facebook.com and are accessed via standard web browser, pointing to the notion that Facebook simply doesn’t want its site accessed via apps when it can be accessed through the official website instead. That’s led some to suggest that Facebook doesn’t want to move to an app format for strategic reasons…

There’s the one theory that says Facebook hasn’t figured out how to properly monetize the app experience, and loses potential revenue when a user interacts with the site via an app instead of visiting facebook.com where ads are typically displayed along the right hand side of the page. Another darker theory points to Facebook placing so much emphasis on collecting a user’s data while they use the internet that it wants to make sure most Facebook usage is done through a web browser so all that usage and can be tracked; if Facebook is limited to a standalone app, it won’t have access to the rest of the user’s browser activities. Supporting this theory is the recent revelation that Facebook now tracks a user’s web surfing habits even when they’re logged out of facebook.com.

But regardless of the reason for Facebook’s continued delays of its iPad app, it appears it’ll finally surface in October at the big Apple event also expected to be the launching pad for the new iPhone(s). Whether Verkoeyen managed to successfully embarrass Facebook into finally releasing the app by resigning and then calling them out on it publicly, or whether he’s merely the victim of really bad timing, is a question we may never see fully answered.

Updated 8:25pm PST with additional remarks made by Jeff Verkoeyen

iPhone 5 to Google+ to iPad to QR, five signs geek influence is waning

by Bill Palmer

The iPhone 5 is a lock for the most popular product launch in consumer technology history, even as geeks beg the mainstream to use Android instead. Facebook is as popular as ever, even after the geeks all left in favor of Google+. The iPad is more popular than every other tablet put together, despite so many public geek meltdowns declaring it the worst product ever brought to market that you’d think a new wing need to be built on the local insane asylum. And even as geeks spend their days hunting for QR codes in public, most people merely muse at the pretty-looking square that’s part of the decor. Welcome to an era in which geek influence is at its lowest point since the consumer technology era began, and yet many geeks are under the impression that their waning influence is instead at an all time high. Part delusion, part honest misinterpretation, here’s a look at five ways in which the mainstream continues to separate itself from geek influence and why the geeks can’t see it for what it is…

The geeks really thought their influence was returning to form when Android came along. The iPhone had been the first smartphone popular with consumers (BlackBerry before it had largely been a business-assigned product), but then along came a collection of unrelated hardware devices which all ran the Android operating system, a mobile variant of Linux, which geeks have long worshipped. What really happened was that Apple tied the iPhone to one carrier per nation for its first several years, and the non-iPhone carriers all rallied around Android based phones because they need something to fight back with. If it hadn’t been Android, it would have been a Windows Phone, or the Palm Pre, or whatever else the non-iPhone carriers could grab onto. But the geeks misinterpreted this as the mainstream forsaking the iPhone in favor of the geek-blessed Android. In reality, the mainstream’s attachment to Android runs only as deep as the fact that their preferred carrier happened to offer it and didn’t offer the iPhone. Now that Apple has gotten wise and is expanding the iPhone 5 to Verizon and unofficially Sprint (T-Mobile will follow once that merger mess is resolved), suddenly the shift is on. One study shows that a third or more of the general public plans to buy the iPhone 5. Another study shows that nearly half of current Android users plan to move to the iPhone 5. Geeks have fought back against these studies by proclaiming that “no one I know uses an iPhone anymore!” without stopping to consider that they’ve intentionally surrounded themselves by nothing but fellow geeks. iPhone and Android are far from the only instance in which geek influence isn’t what most geeks think it is, and in other areas, the evidence is more glaring…

It was never clear why the geeks hated Facebook, until Google launched its own competing Google+ social network. It was invite-only, and only the geeks were initially invited. Those geeks turned around and invited more geeks, creating an insulated geek paradise. The most frequent reason cited by geeks for favoring Google+ was along the lines of “the mainstream isn’t here and we get it all to themselves.” That in hindsight explained why the geeks were never comfortable with Facebook: from their family to their old high school classmates, they were forced to interact with non-geeks on a regular basis. But while the geeks hid out in Google+ and stated their fear for how it would be “ruined” once the mainstream showed up, that never happened. The few non-geeks who got invited into Google+ found nothing of interest and left. This week Google opened the doors so everyone can sign up without an invite. Geek headline writers proclaimed that Google+ “set traffic records” when all it did was eclipse its own previous traffic levels (some record, eh?). In reality, here’s what actually happened: the mainstream is sticking with Facebook because the mainstream is on Facebook. The mainstream chooses its social networks based on who all is there. Geeks choose theirs by who isn’t there. That makes Google+ the first anti-social network. Not only did the mainstream not follow the geeks over to Google+ as the geeks were expecting, the mainstream didn’t even notice the geeks had disappeared from Facebook.

The iPhone 5 isn’t the only Apple product which the geeks would seemingly give their lives to keep you from buying. When the iPad was unveiled a year and a half ago, prominent geeks across the internet staged public meltdowns, declaring it the worst thing to ever happen to consumer technology. This wasn’t merely an Android/Linux gambit either, as Android tablets didn’t exist at the time. Most geeks were so convinced that the iPad and its “closed” nature would spell doom for the future of humanity that they told the mainstream they were better off not owning a tablet at all. The mainstream took that advice, inverted it, and bought the iPad in such large numbers that the consumer tablet market was born overnight. The iPad still owns that market in 2011, even amid a slew of middlingly popular Android tablets. The geeks can’t figure out why Android tablets aren’t as popular as Android phones, but of course that’s because they failed to understand that the popularity of Android phones was based primarily on carrier availability (and the iPhone’s lack thereof) and nothing to do with the virtues of Android.

And then there’s the QR code craze that’s sweeping the nation… except it isn’t. Those black and white squares with smaller black and white squares inside of them that look like something out of The Matrix? Scan those with a QR app on your phone, and you’ll learn secret details about the place you’re standing in, or receive special deals from the business who posted it. Except outside of the geeks, no one knows what these things are. They’re so subtle that most among the mainstream mistake them for being part of the ambience. Businesses are displaying these because their pet geek told them they should. But in most cases that pet geek is under the delusion that “everyone” knows what QR codes are, when in reality, it’s more like “every geek” knows what they are. Part of why they haven’t caught on is that geeks are so self-assured in assuming everyone knows what they are, no explanation is even offered. The other part is that unlike geeks, who want to “play” their entire day like a puzzle or video game, the mainstream doesn’t place much value on having to scan a square on a signpost into their phone just to receive bits of information which could just as easily have been displayed on the sign instead of the square.

Finally, the fifth and defining sign that geeks are losing their influence is the fact that most of them think their influence is at an all time high. They mistake mainstream Android sales (nearly all of which have been to customers whose carrier didn’t even offer the iPhone at the time) as a sign that the public suddenly wants Linux on their phone. They conflate “every geek I know” has moved to Google+ with “everyone who matters” having done so, despite Google+ already being a mainstream flop by any measurable standard. They conclude that the iPad is only popular because of the mainstream are “iSheep” or “Apple fanboys” or “fashionistas” or ” brand name slaves” or whichever propaganda term comes in most handy this week, as the concept of “ease of use” simply doesn’t exist in their world despite being the primary driver of iPad sales. But that’s okay, because they’re getting that ten percent discount from the QR code at the local chicken shack while the rest of us are paying full price.

Facebook Timeline excites, overall redesign disappoints, Google+ flops

by Bill Palmer

On the day Google+ was opened to the public, most of said public was too busy using Facebook to complain about the Facebook redesign to even notice. And while that places Google in the unenviable position trying to figure out what went wrong with the launch, Facebook is in the familiar position of facing widespread backlash from its users amid an interface revamp which has been less than embraced. However, Facebook has another trick up its sleeve which thus far has received rave reviews from the relative handful of users who’ve been allowed access to it. The new feature called Timeline allows users to interact with their entire Facebook history as if it were an interactive scrapbook. The feature is still in the developer testing phase, but it can be enabled through a trivial change in user settings. The “new Facebook” interface can also be disabled by changing the user’s settings to another language and back, a popular trick as most users have quickly soured on the hectic new page design. That’s a minor problem, however, compared to the one faced by Google+…

Earlier this year, Google+ was launched in an invite-only capacity which ten million and then twenty million users ushered past the red carpet as the early-invite geeks hurried to bring their friends along for the ride. But while those geeks gave Google Plus high marks, the most common response from the mainstream was “no one I know is here” followed by a quick return to Facebook. In turn, the geeks’ most commonly stated response for why they liked Google+ was that no one from the outside world was allowed in. Perhaps it was inevitable that once Google finally dumped the invite system this week and threw the front door open, the response was tepid: the geeks in Google+ don’t want the mainstream there, and therefore aren’t going to to tell their mainstream counterparts to join them. Most among the mainstream long ago stopped caring what a “Google+ invite” might be, and the few among the mainstream who did venture inward have reported back with less than glowing reviews. That leaves Google with a “for the geeks, by the geeks” social network, almost an anti-social network, and now the company will need to come up with an alternate strategy if it plans to use Google+ to truly rival Facebook and Twitter. Not that Facebook isn’t trying its hardest to drive away the eleventy billion users it currently has…

What’s remarkable is the sheer number of times in which Facebook has revamped its user interface to widespread user resentment without losing a meaningful fraction of its users in the process. Any redesign of any popular site is going to find its critics within the existing user base who simply don’t like change, but Facebook’s new hyperactive timeline appears to be the most unpopular interface change the site has seen to date. Yet users seem far more content to use Facebook to complain to Facebook about Facebook, rather than move to a different social network. After all, people largely choose their networks based on who they know there. With most of the mainstream on Facebook, that’s where the mainstream is inclined to stay. Just as with most of the geekiest one percent of the population having moved to Google+, that’s where the geeks are going remain. Now it’s up to Facebook to either fine-tune the new interface to make it less hated, or to roll out Timeline in a hurry so as to distract users from their current level of venom. Just as it’s up to Google to figure out how to lure the mainstream into its current geeks-only network, if indeed that is its goal.

Facebook shuts off email notifications, puts its own future in danger

by Bill Palmer

Facebook announces it’s shutting off email notifications by default for all users, in one of the more bizarre moves in social media history. Is this how the company plans to strike back against upstarts like Google+? Most users’ initial reaction will be “Thank God, less email.” But the long term ramifications are dire. Until now, when a Facebook user is sent a message from another user, or another user writes on the user’s wall, an email is sent, informing the user that the action has taken place; otherwise, the user would have no way of knowing that anything had transpired until the next time they happened to visit Facebook.com on their computer or launch their Facebook app on their mobile device. But now these notifications have been shut off, leaving users in the dark as to when and how other users of the social network are attempting to interact with them. Instead, a single email will be sent at the end of the day.

The result: an instant decrease in the frequency and number of interactions among Facebook users. Rather than real-time or nearly synchronous communication among users, Facebook “conversations” will now be dragged out across days instead of minutes or hours. Users will only be immediately aware that another user is attempting to interact with them if they happen to have their web browser at the front of their computer’s screen and happen to have Facebook.com at the front of their web browser, or if they happen to have their Facebook mobile app at the front of their mobile device’s screen. Less-frequent interaction among users means fewer page views, which in turn will lead to less interest among users along with less revenue for the company. So why make such a bizarre move?

Facebook appears to have entered the “We’ve run out of good ideas so let’s start going with bad ones” stage of its evolution. After Google Plus launched earlier this year amid a modicum of excitement over the invite-only beta, Facebook responded with a Don Quixote-like attempt at integrating video conferencing into overmatched web browsers. The response from users: laughter. Now the company has made an even more bizarre move. Rather than merely pointing out to users that they can turn off email notifications (which has always been the case), Facebook has turned off all notifications for all users. Perhaps the theory is that by not allowing its users to know when another Facebook user is trying to interact with them, they’ll instead visit Facebook.com every few minutes throughout the day, thereby racking up more page views. But putting users through such trials will grow frustrating quickly, and for most users will instead result in waning interest in Facebook in general…

The scary part for Facebook is that once it realizes page views have taken a nosedive as a result of this move, it’ll be difficult to go back and turn them back on unilaterally without catching flack. Chalk it up to another bizarre page in the recent history of the social network, which remains the most popular social network despite seemingly not having had a good idea since it launched the wall. But then again, Facebook is competing against Twitter which has been sputtering for years with no direction, and Google+ which is still too busy pandering to hardcore geeks to even so much as allow the mainstream to sign up.

2% solution: Google+ invites quickly grab 1/37th of Facebook presence

Google says its new Google+ social network has worked its invite system to bring twenty million people on board, a number as impressive for its rapidity as it is meaningless in the face of the fact that it gives Google+ merely about 2.5% as many users as Facebook has, or about 1/37th of the pie. While most geek headline writers (who not coincidentally are early Google+ champions) have framed this as a sign that Google Plus is set to take down Facebook, the latter and its 750 million users probably have something different to say about the matter, at least for now. It’s not immediately clear whether the twenty million number measures active Google+ users who’ve actually made a post or taken an action within the network, or merely those who have registered, or even those who’ve been invited (the latter would fully invalidate the statistic, as invites can be sent out at will without the recipient even wanting it, let alone being expected to put it to use). But assuming the statistic is based on the number of people who’ve registered, it means Google+ is growing fast so far and is clearly outpacing Google’s previous failed social network attempts like Wave and Buzz. Of course it begs the issue of what’s next, and that is almost invariably the point at which Google drops the velvet rope and allows the public to sign up for Google+ without having to have been invited in by an existing user. And that’s the point at which Google+ user growth will either skyrocket or go off a cliff.

On the one hand, there are those who still want to get invited to Google+ and haven’t yet found their way in. We know this because Beatweek readers keep asking us to issue them invitations (actually, our readers have been doing a fascinatingly consistent job of inviting each other). So once the doors are flung open to the public, those unlucky folks who want in but weren’t connected enough to score an invite will flow in of their own accord.

However, the invite system itself appears to be at least partially, or even perhaps primarily, driving Google+ growth thus far. People want what they can’t have, and they want it before others have it. It’s why they line up hours before Apple puts the new iPad on sale, even though they could simply come by the next day and pick one up without lines. Similarly, the “you can’t see what’s going on inside Google+ unless someone in there pulls you inside” rope line approach has ignited curiosity as to just what the Facebook-like social network is offering users which Facebook itself isn’t already offering.

Responses on that front have swung both ways. Even handed observers have pointed to features like Circles as being a potentially better way to organize ones social “friends” than Twitter’s current lists or Facebook’s current random crapshoot of a timeline. Geek cheerleaders have proclaimed how much they love the fact that Google+ is theirs and that the mainstream isn’t allowed in, going so far as to post badges and cartoons in their timelines about how superior they feel for having been invited in early. Other folks, including some Beatweek readers whom we’ve shepherded in to Google+, have remarked that there’s “nothing happening there” and that it’s a “big letdown” because “everyone I know is on Facebook.” These criticisms could fade if the entire Facebook user base, or a massive chunk of it, were to pick up and move to Google Plus. But aside from the twenty million who came in through the invite-only door, the prospects of a truly significant chunk of Facebook’s current base moving over seems unlikely unless it happens all at once so they can all immediately find each other on the other side. And that only seems likely if Facebook finds a way to blow it so badly on privacy, reliability, or MySpace-like decay such that its user base begins bailing in rapid fashion. As it stands, the current twenty million users are enough to keep the geeks and insiders pleased with the idea of Google+ being a growing community, even as those among the mainstream who’ve tried it have derided it as little more than a geeks-only hangout where the geeks go to feel superior from the people who used to beat them up in high school. Still, twenty million users in under a month is nothing to sneeze at. Then again, taking 2.5% of the user base away from an entrenched market leader sounds more like niche-work thus far than a “success” for multi billion dollar company like Google. But that’ll resolve itself one way or the other once the barn doors are thrown open and the stampede arrives – or doesn’t. In any case, here’s how to get your Google+ invite from us.

Entrenched: Google+ has no mainstream chance unless Facebook blows it

Now that Google has successfully pandered to the geekiest one percent of the population in the name of getting its new Google+ social network going, that early “success” may be about to translate to a mainstream flop. Unlike other markets in which Google has found success by showing up with a competent-ish product to go up against entrenched leaders who were either weak (Yahoo era search, Hotmail era webmail) or unavailable to the majority of the population (Android while the iPhone was limited to AT&T), a social network is not an arena in which one user can be picked off at a time. For existing mainstream Facebook users, it’s not about “Which social network is best” but instead it’s all about “Where are the people I know.” And once Google throws open the Google Plus doors the mainstream, those who give the other side a try won’t have much good news to report back to their friends on Facebook.

The most common complaint on the part of mainstream Facebook users who try Google+ will simply be “But I don’t know anyone on here!” And that’s before the secondary complaint kicks in along the lines of “All these strangers on Google+ talk about is tech and hacking and how they’re about to get a Google+ tattoo and how wonderful it is that the mainstream hasn’t ruined it yet.” Once that message gets back to Facebook users at large, and stands in stark contrast to current geek claims of Google+ being the greatest thing to ever happen to the internet, the gig may be up before it’s barely underway.

So what can Google do to avoid such a fate? Well, little of its own accord. It can try to buy Facebook, but that seems unlikely at present. Beyond that, all it can do is wait and hope Facebook screws up so royally, either by allowing its infrastructure to go to pot like MySpace did, or by committing such an unforgivable privacy atrocity that hysteria motivates the mainstream to all move to Google+ on the same day. Short of that, there’s not much more in Google’s hands. While the geeks seem to enjoy having multiple social network arenas simultaneously, the mainstream has no interest in duplicating its efforts across two similar social networks when everyone they know is on one and no one they know is on the other. No one among the mainstream wants to be the first to make the move, and so a mass migration seems impossible. Contrast that with other markets Google has concurred in the past, where moving to Gmail didn’t inhibit ones ability to continue communicating with those who were still using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, nor did it force them to suddenly begin looking for new friends among the existing Gmail userbase.

One strategy Google could employ if it gets desperate would be to try to leverage its existing success in other markets to try to force those users onto Google+. It’s a dangerous strategy for two reasons. One is that the Department of Justice tends to frown on such behavior, and Google is already being scrutinized by the DOJ as we speak. The other is that by building a mainstream reputation as the consummate Brand B, the company which delivers an “OK” product to fill the gaps when the existing products are subpar (Yahoo, BlackBerry, etc) or aren’t available on their preferred carrier (iPhone), Google has little loyalty among the mainstream. Again, this stands in direct contrast with the geekdom’s views on Google, where the company has been crowned the digital savior. But if Google tried to tie its users in other markets into Google+ by, say, refusing to release a Google+ mobile app for anything but Android, or by banning facebook.com links within emails sent in Gmail, the resulting backlash would be so large among the mainstream that it likely wouldn’t be worth the tradeoff.

This all leaves Google in the unenviable position of having arrived one generation too late in the social network wars. It could have easily killed off MySpace if it had launched Google+ five years ago, and could have conceivably become the leader that Facebook is today. But as it stands, because mainstream social networks are judged far more by who you know there more so than how marginally better it works, Google may have to settle for a Google+ network populated primarily by geeks until and unless Facebook finds a way to royally blow it with the mainstream.

Netflix down one day after AOL Mail down. Is the internet broken?

The Netflix website has gone down today during daylight hours, one day after AOL’s email website went down. While AOL is considered a past-tense joke by most these days, Netflix is an immensely popular movie rental service whose outage was felt far and wide. The question is this: are the two outages coincidental, or is this further evidence that the current broadband internet backbone is in trouble? With cable and DSL speeds being increasingly capped over the past couple of years in the name of keeping the grids intact even as internet bandwidth continues to soar, major website outages appear to be increasingly more common. While Twitter users have by now come to consider downtime a regular part of using the service, Facebook had a daytime outage recently, which came as something of a shock. While major sites do sometimes go offline intentionally in the wee hours for planned maintenance or upgrades, it’s somewhat startling to see more frequent daytime outages from major sites whose reliability hadn’t previously been in doubt.

The Social Network is a great movie, every minute of which I disliked

I’m perhaps the last Facebook user to see the movie The Social Network, which is odd because I’ve been using Facebook since before most of you had even heard of it. I’ll sum up The Social Network thusly: it’s a well written, well cast, well acted, well scored, well directed, well edited, well produced movie whose subject matter I could care less about. As anyone who’s seen the movie by now can attest, it’s not about Facebook. It’s about the inevitable child-like wanking which occurred amongst the geeks who were trying to get such a service off the ground in the first place. And I’ve already seen enough of that behavior for one lifetime.

The Social Network was actually quite smart in that rather than attempting to paint the company’s definitive history, it instead frames the story almost entirely in long-form flashbacks which tell pieces of the story from the standpoint of various characters who are testifying while suing each other. But it’s no courtroom drama. In fact the external frame of the story only exists to compensate for the fact that, thanks to Facebook’s various co-founders and wannabe co-founders having sued each other and ultimately signed nondisclosure agreements as part of settlements, no one is quite sure what was going on back then. Not only do we not know the truth, we don’t even fully know each party’s claims as to the truth.

Some have complained that even within that framework, the characters are at best caricatures of their real life counterparts, and at worst fictionalized mischaracterizations. That much is certainly true to some extent. But my issue with the characters in The Social Network is no matter how near or far they are from the real life individuals of the same names, those characters do very much exist, and in large quantities, across the geekosphere. I know, because I’ve dealt with every one of them.

There’s the obsessed geek entrepreneur who isn’t evil by nature but who is so obsessed with doing right by his project that he’ll throw anyone and anything under a bus in the name of getting it off the ground. There’s the privileged geek who’s been on such a lucky winning streak his whole life that he’s come to believe he’s entitled to that good luck and starts threatening to ruin the life of anyone who happens to outdo him by working harder or being smarter. There’s the has-been geek who hasn’t contributed anything in so long that he’s been reduced to nothing but a recognizable name and only continues to float along by leveraging the naivete of newcomers. And there’s even the overly principled geek who does nothing wrong yet still gets in the way of progress because he’s incapable of understanding that he just doesn’t get it.

Working as a technology journalist, I’ve dealt with them all over the years. In fact I’ve dealt with real life geeks whose behavior is consistently far more over the top than anything you’ll see portrayed in that movie. I’m not saying that all or even most geeks are of such a cartoonish nature, rather just enough of them to consistently leave a bad taste in my mouth. And you wonder why I spend the majority of my time these days covering music rather than technology. Sure, there are plenty in the entertainment industry who are every bit as cartoonish as the characters in The Social Network. But because those folks have actual social skills, they usually know when to rein it in.

I once described Facebook as the largest corporation ever to be run entirely by children. Naturally, some mistakenly thought I was referring to the ages of the company’s co-founders. Rather, I was pointing out that the geeks who launched it had been so deeply entrenched in their own self-imposed geek bubbles for so long that much like children, they were incapable of even understanding normal adult societal behavior, let alone participating in it. The Social Network takes much the same tack, right from the opening scene in which a college-age Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed as so incapable of having a normal conversation with the girl he’s dating that, for all his lack of understanding of the human race, he might as well have just arrived here from an alien planet. It’s not that he’s lacking confidence or unsure of himself. Quite the opposite, in fact: he’s so sure of himself that he nearly automatically dismisses those around him in a cool, almost android-like fashion. Zuckerberg’s often-awkward real life appearances suggest that such a characterization might not be that far off from the truth.

It’s perhaps appropriate, then, that these are the people who, with their total lack of ability and/or interest when it comes to normal social interaction, are the ones who have invented social interaction of an entirely new type. Who better than those who never could get anything out of a normal face-to-face or phone conversation to invent a new kind of interaction which made more sense to them? The astonishing part is that these geeks, with no grasp of how normal people have interacted with each other up to this point in human history, have managed to come up with new methods of interaction that normal people have been willing to adopt in such large measures.

Upon reflection, what stands out the most about The Social Network is just how little of a role Facebook – the actual social network, not the company which operates it – plays within the movie. Sure, there are a few concocted scenes in which the characters are actually using Facebook, including one at the end which will either feel poignant or darkly comical depending on how you’ve come to judge Zuckerberg’s character by the end of the movie. But by and large, in the movie treatment at least, the geeks involved with the launch of Facebook couldn’t be any more removed from understanding how or even why normal people have chosen to use Facebook. And if that’s also true of their real life counterparts, it might go a long way toward explaining why those geeks continue to be caught off guard by their own users’ overwhelmingly negative reactions to the changes they’ve been making to the product over the past couple of years since it went mainstream.

So why did I go to see The Social Network at all? For one thing, I’ll watch just about anything written by Aaron Sorkin. After all, despite my disdain for real life politicians in general, I thoroughly enjoyed what Sorkin did with The West Wing. But while I only have to deal with politicians every few years when I hold my nose and vote for the least offensive of the bunch, I have to deal with the odiousness of the geekdom on a far too frequent basis to get any real enjoyment out of sitting in a theater for a few hours and watching fictionalized – yet very realistic – geek characters spend seemingly more time sniping at each other than creating anything positive. Come to think of it, the geeks in the movie were acting very much like politicians throughout. Fortunately for me, I don’t work in politics. But watching geeks acting like dirty politicians just to advance their geek agendas? That’s just too much like real life, and for me at least, hits too close to home.

Would I recommend the movie to others? As I quipped on Twitter after watching it, The Social Network was okay. But if I had wanted to spend a few hours watching geeks be assholes to each other, I could have just gone on the internet. Consider it a success for the makers of the movie that I stayed to the end. Every time the nature of the product had me considering walking out and finding something else to do with my time, the quality of the product kept me in my seat.

Linkin Park interview: inside their blueprint-burning new album

The biggest band of the past decade has blown up its blueprint. Again. Something in the DNA of the six-piece outfit known as Linkin Park seemingly compels them to burn their own sound to the ground and start from scratch with each new album, a pattern which has never been quite so evident as with new release A Thousand Suns, which represents uncharted sonic and conceptual territory even for them. “There might be a misconception that this album is a commentary on what we think of our past albums,” says bassist Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell. “It’s not that.”

Still, the album sees the band tinkering with its patented formula of combining rock, rap and other styles of music in the kind of way that no one else had previously thought to. So, then, what drives Linkin Park to keep gambling with its own success? “That aspect is what makes being in a band fun for me, and when you’re in the studio, my head is not usually trying to wrap itself around ‘Will people like this?’”

As a measure of how untraditional A Thousand Suns is, while nine of the fifteen tracks have a standard length ranging from three to five minutes each, five other tracks are less than two minutes long. But rather than being an attempt at shaking things up, it’s more a representation of how the material naturally developed. “A song like Blackout, even from its earliest incarnation, always was in three movements and it was just a process of trying to figure out how to make those individual movements best fit that whole song. And the end of it, it turns into a four minute or six minute song,” says Phoenix.

“And then at the same time there’s always these little things that we’re doing where it’s more of a fragment or more of an idea, and maybe that turns into a shorter, thirty or forty second thing that is working to keep the album moving from front to end.”

In other words, the eighteen ethereal seconds of track four interlude Empty Spaces is how you get from the peppy potential single Burning In The Skies to the gritty When They Come For Me without losing flow. It’s all about creating and experience where in “if you get a chance, you can sit down with it and listen to it from front to back, kind of get a really well rounded three dimensional experience with it in the same way that it used to be back in the seventies, sixties.”

The emphasis on making a fluid yet varied album put the band, which still has to operate within the boundaries of the music business to some extent, in a quandary. “One of the biggest pressures or tensions on this record was trying to figure out what we were gonna do as far as the first single,” says Phoenix. “Chester and I were even joking, obviously it was never anything more than a joke, but we were joking about like, what if we just released this record as one giant MP3?”

As it turned out, it was the next to last (and longest) track on the album, The Catalyst, which was ultimately sent to radio, as it was “a great indication to our fans that it was gonna be a different type of record.“

The fact that the lead single just happened to fit best in the fourteenth slot on the album, rather than being positioned closer to the front of it, is yet one more unconventional fact of life for A Thousand Suns: “At the end of that process, we didn’t want to necessarily mess with the track order.”

As further evidence of the chances that the band has taken with the record, the rollicking five-plus minutes that make up The Catalyst flow directly into an acoustic ballad called The Messenger to close things out.

If history is any indication, the risks taken in the name of moving forward will pay off for Linkin Park with their new release, just as they always have. But even Linkin Park’s overwhelming popularity over the past decade doesn’t in itself entirely explain why the band has found a level of popularity within social media which has otherwise been reserved strictly for individuals, not bands.

The handful of entities to have crossed the ten million fan mark on Facebook can be counted on ones fingers, and thus far include the likes of Lady GaGa, Barack Obama, Eminem, Michael Jackson – we’ve come to learn that something in human nature compels users to be far more likely to click the “like” button for an individual than for a group. And yet Linkin Park finds itself comfortably in that tiny club with twelve million fans in its own right, more than doubling that of any other contemporary band, and even comfortably outpacing The Beatles.

So, aside from being wildly popular as a band to begin with, just what is Linkin Park doing right within social media?

“The short answer is I don’t really know,“ Phoenix admits, “but I can make hopefully some educated guesses. I think a big part of it is our fanbase is pretty awesome, and the community aspect of Linkin Park fans kind of lends itself really well to the internet. They have this interconnectivity and this web that works out perfectly with the internet.”

But there’s more to it than that. The band members, who are of an age where they didn’t get their first real taste of the internet’s potential until they were finishing high school, were nonetheless able to pinpoint the internet early on as being a way of connecting with potential fans. “When we were first starting out, we were finding people online that were interested in our music and talking to them. This was way before Hybrid Theory came out, way before anything, and we were just kind of finding people all over the U.S. through the internet who had some sort of interest either in our music or in other bands that were doing different things. After we found them we’d ask them if they wanted to try and help us get the word out or whatever, all of this being done online.”

He’s talking about way early on. “At the end of that process, we would send them a cassette. So it was this total fluxpoint of using all this technology, but it was still at that stage where it wasn’t really ready to send MP3′s or do anything else online. We were still actually sending out these demo cassette tapes.”

And it’s not just about Facebook in particular, as Apple set its sights on the band when the company decided to recently launch its own “Ping” social network within iTunes. “We got a chance to meet with them early on, before they went with it, just to be able to potentially be included in that,” says Phoenix of the fact that Linkin Park was one of the handful of artists to be featured in Ping at the moment of launch. “I know that they’re planning on continuing to grow that, and I think it could be really cool. I think it could be just a further way for us to be able to stay in contact directly with our fans.” Not surprisingly, the band has already racked up more than a quarter million followers in the network’s first two weeks of existence.

One of Ping’s early features gives fans the option to announce to their friends that they’ll be attending a band’s concert, which leads back to the question of just what Linkin Park’s shows are going to look like as they gear up to tour in support of the unconventional A Thousand Suns. The band’s live performance of The Catalyst this past Sunday night at Griffith Park Observatory as part of the MTV VMA awards offered an early hint, but Phoenix says there’s plenty more where that came from.

“This tour for us, it’s the first time we’ve really had a good chunk of time on the front end to really be able to transition what we wanted to do with the album itself,” he says. “Not only on the musical aspect of what we’re gonna be doing, but we’re lucky enough that for the last maybe eighteen months we had an artist team, basically, creating visual content for the album packaging, everything, the merch, all the way down to the video content that you’ll see at the live show. The goal of creating this is everything you see will kind of play off of one another and help round out that immersive world that the album is intended to be.”

“I think the live show is gonna be great for fans to be able to see that bridge from the old music to the newer music, and at the same time to kind of have your experience with the record rounded out even more with the visuals that will come with it.”

And as if to emphasize that the new direction of the new material isn’t meant to step on the toes of Linkin Park’s previous work, “it’s also fun to go back and find new ways to reinterpret the older stuff, and really work it all together.”

interview by Bill Palmer

LinkinPark.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

Ping, new Apple social network in iTunes 10: it’s not Facebook or Twitter

Apple has introduced its own social network named Ping. (No, not Bing). The network is built into the new iTunes 10 software, which is aimed at encouraging socialization of music and content. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made it clear that Ping is neither Twitter nor Facebook, however his demonstration of a Lady GaGa-themed page shows that Ping does integrate Twitter. Jobs referred to Ping as being for “social music discovery” – with the ability to follow artists and friends. “You can get as private or as public as you want,” Jobs says of building your own Ping social network. Jobs is also apparently a fan of Paramore.

A half-dressed Lady GaGa appeared via pre-recorded video from the studio to talk about Ping.

Jobs also announced that iTunes digital music sales will surpass total sales of CDs in the United States in 2011.

Rihanna is on Twitter for real: “no more corny label tweets”

Rihanna’s presence in social media is nothing short of massive, with nearly eight million Facebook fans and more than a million Twitter followers. But the singer hasn’t really been on Twitter – until now. Earlier today, Rihanna used her Twitter account, which had until now essentially been just a series of promotional posts, to announce that’s she “finally took over my Twitter page” and that we can expect, in her words, “no more corny label tweets.” Her announcement tweet was promptly retweeted by, at last count, more than four hundred followers, with her name currently being mentioned on Twitter more than once per second. The singer is enjoying chart success with her new collaboration “Love The Way You Lie” with Eminem.

Brutal but true tech headlines: Facebook, Kinect, Droid X, Bumpers, more

- After recent lawsuits, no one is sure who really owns Facebook at this point. As opposed to MySpace, which no wants to admit owning.

- If the Facebook ownership lawsuits do turn out to be valid, then we all learned how to spell “Zuckerberg” for nothing

- Don’t worry, no one at Verizon knows what the “X” stands for in “Droid X” either.

- Microsoft Kinect to sell for $149. Even less, if you’re willing to take a free Kin with it.

- Amazon Kindle sales up in spite of iPad popularity, proving that 30% price cuts never hurt.

- Speaking of the Kindle, it’s surprising that Amazon hasn’t yet gotten around to suing Microsoft for using names like “Kinect” and “Kin” – though in the latter case it may simply be out of pity.

- Next time you manage to get a flashlight app approved with a hidden tethering feature built in, keep it to yourself.

- Why yes, “Bumpers” is in fact the dumbest name for a case ever.

- Question of the day: will BP change its name back to “Amoco” before AT&T changes its name back to Cingular?

Lady GaGa is the most popular person alive (according to Facebook)

Lady GaGa has become the first living person to reach ten million fans on Facebook, or to use the service’s new 2010 technology, “ten million people like this.” On reaching the landmark, GaGa tweeted “Thank u so much little monsters for following me on Facebook! 10 million friends of mine who are now connected to each other” and she also posted a brief video on her Facebook page thanking fans. The late Michael Jackson has more than fourteen million Facebook fans, but GaGa is the first person to reach the mark while still alive, narrowly outpacing President Barack Obama, who at this moment only has about 9.5 million Facebook fans.

Interestingly, Lady GaGa is merely the third-most popular Twitter user, with Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher both having more than five million followers and GaGa having a mere 4.7 million, although the growth rate of each of their follower counts suggests that GaGa could surpass them both on Twitter before 2010 is over.

It’s a far cry from a mere year and a half ago, when we put Lady GaGa on the cover of Beatweek Magazine (yes, we were the first) and many of you said “Who’s that?” In any case, you can read our original cover story interview with Lady GaGa right here.

With kidnapping recovery, Facebook finally gets a positive headline

A mother in California has used Facebook to successfully locate her kidnapped children in what has produced the first positive headline for the recently beleaguered social network in some time. According to various reports, the mother managed to track down the children using Facebook, which while certainly not an advertised feature of the site, may serve to remind the public of the various positive aspects of social networking, even amidst the sudden and seemingly media-fueled public obsession with Facebook privacy, an issue that the company itself has largely failed to address. If only for one day, the Facebook-related headlines now read “Mother uses Facebook to locate kidnapped children” instead of “Users protest Facebook over privacy.”

“I quit Facebook today and all I got was this lousy MySpace!”

Quit Facebook Day, a campaign so misguided that it scheduled its event on a national holiday during which mainstream Facebook users are most likely to be nowhere near their computers anyway, has predictably flopped – if my loss of a whopping zero out of my current seventeen hundred-plus Facebook friends is any indication. While we’ll never know whether the creators of the “day” were truly attempting to effect positive change or were merely using the recent anti-Facebook PR in an attempt to carry out a geek agenda against service, the public backing of Quit Facebook Day by certain anarchist geeks whose reasons for leaving Facebook had more to do with their own distaste for the non-geekiness of Facebook and its userbase here in 2010 than any motives relating to actual privacy concerns. But in any case, the fact that the campaign received so much national attention yet resulted in a mere 26,000 signups tells us what we already knew before the clock struck midnight: quitting Facebook is no way to fix Facebook.

For social network early adopters, the lesson was learned years ago: Twitter was the only service of its specific type that had any traction, and yet it had terrible problems with uptime which more than once prompted an attempted mass exodus to competing sites like Jaiku and others you’ve never heard of unless you were a part of the mix back then. The reason why such attempted mass migrations never worked was that no one on those services like Jaiku; the few who switched over found themselves to talking to a handful of strangers or no one at all, gave up, and came back. Similarly, the 2010 campaign to try to get users to abandon Facebook has failed because nowhere on the QuitFacebookDay.com site is there a suggestion of what viable alternative the quitters are supposed to then turn to. Sure, we’ve seen some spam here about this or that tiny open source social network which is supposedly going to be the “next Facebook” if it can just get over the hump of only having three current users, but when it comes down to it there’s nowhere to go but Facebook (MySpace is a past-tense wasteland and Twitter is simply too different of a service to be a Facebook replacement), asking mainstream Facebook users to give up social networking entirely is just not the answer.

So what is the solution when it comes to getting Facebook to see it users’ way when it comes to privacy and respect? I’ve said it before: I don’t have that answer, at least not in any specific terms, and not yet. But I do know that winning the philosophical debate with Facebook’s founders (which is what this is, as there’s no actual privacy risk to participating in Facebook, despite what paranoid geek anarchists claim) is a fight which won’t be won by taking our ball and going back to the twentieth century. While some next generation service may indeed eventually replace Facebook just as Facebook replaced MySpace and what all came before, we’re not anywhere near that happening right now. So even as today’s small handful of Facebook quitters now move on to some tiny open source social network for a few days before quietly sneaking back onto Facebook out of frustration by the end of the week (or retreat back to the odorously rotting MySpace for a bit before getting tired of holding their noses and returning), the rest of us will stick with Facebook and try to find a solution to the problem together. I’m open to ideas; you should be too.

99.994% of Facebook users not quitting on “Quit Facebook Day”

“Quit Facebook Day” has turned out to be all hype, as the number of people who’ve signed the petition stating that they intend to quit the social network over privacy issues represents less then one percent of all Facebook users – way less than one percent, in fact, as according to some quick math by PC World, a mere 0.006 percent of Facebook’s userbase has stated its intention to quit the site next week, despite the high profile media attention that the QuitFacebookDay.com site has received. The news strongly suggests that while Facebook does have legitimate privacy issues that will have to be addressed either internally by the service itself or externally by its users, the idea of quitting the service entirely as a way to “fix” things hasn’t taken off, for reasons that were obvious all along. Quitting ones job doesn’t result in better pay from that job; quitting Facebook doesn’t make for a better Facebook experience.

While it’s possible that some Facebook users may ultimately quit on “Quit Facebook Day” despite not having signed up to do so, it’s probably just as likely that a good portion of those who signed up for the list did so merely out of protest and never had any intention of quitting. As a result, by the time Quit Facebook Day is over, the site could still have even more than the 99.994% of its current users that the math suggests. This disproves Beatweek’s own earlier estimate; we had predicted that Facebook would retain a mere 99.99% percent of its users.

Those who want to force Facebook into taking user privacy seriously will apparently have to find a smarter solution than merely proposing that users all take their ball and go home; as the campaign has turned out to be a non-starter.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg still doesn’t understand privacy, nor do users

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that he understands the issue of privacy about as well as some of his site’s users when he backed down from his previously stubborn stance on the matter and agreed to allow Facebook users to turn off the company’s ability to spread their data around the internet like a gossip rag if those users don’t want it to happen. The good news is that Zuckerberg turns out to be less of an iconoclast than some had feared, and is willing to give in when his users demand it. The bad news is that he doesn’t seem to understand why his users have any fear about using his service in the first place – which puts him in good company with Facebook’s users, many of whom have concerns about privacy without having any idea what is they’re concerned about.

Even the kind of Facebook users who have no hesitation about giving their credit card to a waiter who can then disappear into the back room with it for ten minutes, still tend to fear everything about entering even the most basic of data into Facebook. Part of it no doubt that they’ve been told to fear it, but there’s also likely the lingering fact that most non-geek users never really trusted the internet to begin with. Much of that hesitation comes from the fear that their data will be made available to the world, when that “data” consists of little more than their name and favorite flavor of ice cream. Facebook has no user data when it comes to social security numbers, drivers licenses, credit card numbers, or any of the kind of data that can actually be used for crimes; anyone who’s worried about identity theft based on the handful of harmless data they’ve posted to Facebook is severely misguided in their fears.

And yet there’s Facebook itself, who once decided to strike a deal with vendors such that if you happened to, for instance, book a flight through Travelocity while logged into Facebook in the background, Facebook would announce to all your Facebook friends that you had just booked that flight. And while that may have been harmless in terms of results (except for perhaps ruining a few surprise homecomings), it doesn’t take any real explanation to understand why the move was a major privacy violation and just plain wrong. And yet Facebook didn’t understand that until users harshly explained it to them.

So here we have Facebook users who are paranoid because, well, it’s the internet by golly, and that’s reason enough to be scared without having any idea why you’re scared. And then we have Facebook itself, who continues to think that it can get away with literally anything and is shocked whenever users balk as its latest crazy idea. It’s not the best of combinations when the people in charge don’t seem to have any understanding of what morals are, and most of the users of the services don’t have any idea what it is they’re fighting for.

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