We took a look at Russian startups, breaking them down into five categories: hotel booking, games, daily deals sites, discovery engines and social networks. Here they are, in no particular order whatsoever.

Oktogo.ru: The Russian Version of Kayak and Travelocity

ZeptoLab Is Russia's Answer To The Super Popular Game Angry Birds

BigLion Is Russia's Answer To Groupon, And A Total Rip-Off

SurfingBird Is Russia's StumbleUpon

Vkontakte.ru: The Russian Answer to Facebook

But their sweetest vengeance, the schadiest of schadenfreudes has to be the moment when it dawns on each of us that, having created a blog, Twitter feed or YouTube channel, we have to feed the damn thing with content.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

If you start taking this stuff seriously, then the voraciousness of the content beast can be all-consuming. That struck home in Larry Carlat's essay in last week's New York Times magazine, about how his Twitter addiction cost him everything.

None of his symptoms resonated until this one: "When I wasn't on Twitter, I would compose faux aphorisms that I might use later."

Gulp. Oh, god. Yeah, I've done that. Worse, I've been the jackass who stops after saying something in a conversation, and then says out loud that I should remember to tweet that.

Apparently offline conversations and relationships aren't just fodder for online content streams, just as cats and accident-prone children aren't just props for mad-viral YouTube videos. They serve other purposes as well, and as soon as I find out what those purposes are, I'll tweet them.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Burning Man participants refer to the sphere of work, chores, shopping and Web surfing - the things that occupy the other 358 days of the year - as the "default world." This is my first day back in it, having just returned from my annual rite of passage at the desert festival. As always, the planned disconnection from the Web was an immense relief. When surrounded by such works of human days and hands that deserve complete attention, framed by a vast and serene natural environment, the last thing I want is for a white number in a red box to pop into my field of vision and distract me.

Playa Technology

But the influences of high technology at Burning Man are impossible to ignore. Fast computers, original software, and touchscreen interfaces enable more interactive and engrossing works of art. They also power, in a manner of speaking, Burners' thoughts about the default world. My friends at Camp Above The Limit hosted the Saraswati Speaker Series this year, which featured founders and principals of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and science-fiction author Cory Doctorow. Their views on the future of data-driven society made for invigorating topics of conversation. Moreover, the camp's technical wizards provided Internet access on the playa, which enabled these dedicated info warriors to join us out there without having to retreat from the fight.

Other uses of Web technology enhance the Burning Man experience for all participants. A new Facebook app called Burner Map allowed Burners to input their camping locations and print out a city map prior to leaving, enabling us to find each other's camps when we arrived. I taped mine into the front cover of my notebook. Many of the Web's most popular services brought Burners together before the event, too. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram connected many of us with new friends, and the massive art projects that made the whole event possible, like the Temple of Transition and the 1MileClock, were able to use Kickstarter and other viral methods to raise the funds they needed.

Online and Over the Line

However, somewhere out in that sandy place, there's a line to be drawn, and it is occasionally crossed. Whereas Burner Map is printed before the event, an iOS app called iBurn has provided a digital playa map for two years running, creating the expectation that devices are part of the social milieu out there. Though that app is designed to work offline, there was also occasional cellphone service on the playa this year, which I only know because I saw people taking advantage of it in the most absurd settings. And at the burning of the Trojan Horse on Friday night, someone right in front of my group was holding up an iPad to take video, obstructing the view of everyone behind him with a 10-inch screen showing a washed-out perversion of what was actually happening. My friend Mischa had to step in front of him to take a picture, after which he put down his camera and continued watching with his naked eyes.

Social Expectations

The problem with the Web at Burning Man is that the social expectations are flipped. On the last morning, just after sunrise, my friend Rain Doll and I experienced a few moments of wonder as we considered what chat or IM services could do for Burning Man participants, but that wonder quickly rotted into nauseous aversion. We shivered with visions of people making that long, bottom-lit stare down their arms toward a small black device instead of staring wide-eyed all around them.

"In the default world," Rain Doll says, "the assumption is that groups of people hanging around in the park don't want to interact with you. They're already with their friends... Where are yours? At Burning Man, the assumption is that everyone around you does want to interact and is just a friend you don't yet know."

Immediate Experience

The social Web empowers us in the default world by giving us an excuse to start a conversation. It gives us hints into each other's interests and friends, and it creates the expectation that it's all right to approach strangers. Maybe we need that here amidst all our distractions. But Burning Man is enough of a common context, and it's built around the principle that it's okay to approach one another unconditionally. Could we use that principle in the default world as well? Good social Web technologies break down barriers to interactions, as well as enhance their speed, range and bandwidth, but is there a point where technological solutions can no longer solve social problems?

What are some good principles for the social Web? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Jon also writes for the official Burning Man blog. You can read his entries here.

Photos by Mischa Steiner
Lead photo by dmitrysumin

Unlike Google's last big invite-only rollout of a social initiative - Google Wave - users will not be confounded on just what the heck you are supposed to do with the service when signing up for the first time. From Friendster, Friendfeed, MySpace and Facebook, users are familiar with how a social platform is theoretically supposed to look. At its core level, Plus is not that much different. Yet, there is so much more. How do you get started with Google Plus? Let's break down the nuts and bolts.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Create Your Circles

Imagine the ability to break down Facebook into its various constituent parts and keep them separate from each other as opposed to one giant feed. That is what Google has done with Plus. There is one main stream where all your friends' updates show up, then you have the option to see updates from only certain groups like "Work," "Friends" or "Family." This is the essence of Circles.

From the initial interface, you will see four buttons - Home, Photos, Profile and Circles.

The first thing you are going to want to do is set up your circles. Click on the tab and it will bring you to a interface where all of your contacts in Gmail (not just Gmail addresses, but all of your contacts) are listed in a panel on top of the screen. Below is a panel that has your various circles. To add a contact to a circle, drag from the top of the list to the appropriate group. Contacts can be added to multiple circles.

One of the initial problems I had from the circles interface was that I added a couple of "Friends" into my "Work" circle and could not figure out how to get them out. You can do this from the user streams by hovering over the person's name and hovering over "Add to circles" and clicking the appropriate boxes. Yet, from the circles interface, that was not readily apparent. To take people out of a circle, hover above the circle, grab their icon and drag it back into the people plane.

One of the great differentiators between Twitter and Facebook is the "unbalanced" or "balanced" follow. Facebook was initially a two-way follow paradigm - I friend you, you friend me and we see each other's updates. This has been changed with the ability to "like" groups, brands and pages without them following you back. Twitter has always been a one-way follow - I follow you and you do not necessarily have to follow me back.

This line has been blurred in circles. If a person is in your contacts, they can be added to a circle and will get a notification that has happend (but not what circle they have actually been added to). There is also a "follow" circle. Just like Twitter, you can follow people and see their updates without them having to follow you back. As your circles evolve this could allow to track different interests, like Twitter lists.

The Stream and "Bumping"

Once you have set up your circles, go back to the Home screen to see the results. Below the profile picture you will see the choices of stream. You can view your entire stream at once (à la Facebook) or by particular circle.

There are two other options below your circles - Incoming and Notifications. Clicking incoming will bring you to messages that have been sent by people outside of your circles. Notifications will show you when people in your circles have commented on something you have posted, or something you have commented on.

Below the circles and notifications there is a tab dubbed "Sparks." More on that below.

One of the killer features of Gmail, or any Google product, is Chat. It has made its way into Plus and sits in the familiar left-hand, bottom-right portion of the screen that it is found in Gmail. Users with a lot of Circle and Chat contacts will like the ability to enable chat for particular groups. Want to surface friends and family but not acquaintances? Plus will let you do that.

If you are using Plus in a Chrome browser, desktop notifications do not pop up when someone sends you a message like it would in Gmail.

Posting a status update in Plus is not like sending a Tweet or updating Facebook. The core functions of an update are present - photos, links, video and location - but when you hit "share" it doesn't automatically post your message to everybody in your circles. You have the option to decide which circles your update is posted to, from individual groups to all circles, to extended circles, or just a single person.

An interesting feature in the user stream is that conversations will surface back to the top of the feed when subsequent comments are made on a thread. This, according to Google developer Jean-Baptiste Queru, is called "bumping." Google Buzz has this same capability and it was also a feature of FriendFeed.

Photos

Photos in Plus are relatively self-explanatory. Users can update photos from their computers or from their phones, see photos that people in their circles have uploaded. With the Android app, there is a way to upload any photo that you take with your phone straight to Plus, an interesting if slightly disconcerting feature.

When you add a photo, it will prompt you to create an album. Once that album is created it will ask which of your circles you would like to share it with. This is a prime differentiator from Facebook where all of your photos are visible to all of your friends by default (you can change who can view certain photos in Facebook preferences). You can also pick an individual to share photos with instead of an entire circle.

Photo uploading is easy within Plus. Just like adding a picture or an attachment to a Gmail document, you can drag-and-drop from your desktop or click the on the upload button and browse your computer for pictures.

Users can also add photos by posting them in status updates or by uploading them through the Profile tab.

Profile

If you use any Google products and have a Google account, you have a Google Profile. Profiles are unknown to most of the Internet because, until now, it was relatively useless to anyone but Google.

Your Google Profile is now the hub of you Plus experience, the backbone that everything else is built upon. There are six tabs in your profile page - posts, about, photos, videos, +1s and Buzz.

A significant change to your profile page is that there is now a location where your +1s live. Until now, when you clicked +1 on content on the Web, nothing happened. The information was sent to Google and integrated into some type of esoteric search algorithm. Users can now see what people have +1ed through their Google Profile. Unlike the Facebook share/like/recommend buttons, it does not go straight into your stream but rather to the profile page.

Sparks and Hangouts

Hangouts is a new feature rolled out with Plus. Essentially it is an area where your circles or a select group of friends can video chat all on one screen. To start a Hangout, go to the "Welcome" button in the home tab. It will prompt you to start a hangout and invite individuals or entire circles. Up to 10 people can be in a hangout at once and it will be seen in that circle or users' stream.

Sparks is the part of Plus where you can find content on the Web that you are interested in. In the "Field Trial" version of Plus, it looks like Sparks is a randomized version of content and news generated through Google News. Sparks can be a dashboard for things you are interested in on the Web. When you do a search in Sparks, it will predict what you are searching for with a drop down menu (like old Google search, not quite like Google Instant). You can pin particular topics you search for to the Sparks dashboard for quick access.

You can share articles found in Sparks with a share button on the bottom of every article that surfaces in a search. Like everything else in Plus, it can be shared with a specific person, circle, group of circles or the general public.

For more information, check the videos that Google made explaining Plus and all of its aspects -- Circles, Hangouts and Sparks.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

The study, by Dr. Sabina Datcu, a researcher at Bitdefender's Romanian research lab, put together two phony profiles of a 25-year old woman. In one profile, she was shown as an IT worker, while in the other she was specifically shown as an IT security worker. Over the course of many weeks, the phony profile gradually gained the trust of her 100 presumably real people with a series of online chats. Datcu noted what kinds of personal information her marks would disclose. It is a chilling result.

"The study revealed that no matter if working in the IT security industry or as a 'bad guy' (i.e. hacker), everyone can be vulnerable, and can disclose sensitive information to an unknown friend," she states in the paper.

For example, 81% of the IT security people gave their mother's maiden name, while 78% of the hackers divulged this information. Similar percentages show that both groups use the same password for multiple accounts. And even 7% of the hacker group provided their passwords! Almost all of the participants gave out information about their families.

"The results of this study suggest not only that people accept unknown people into their group based solely on a nice pro?le and on apparently having the same interests, but also that they are willing to reveal personal, sensitive information to such unknown people in an online conversation," she wrote in her paper.

No surprise that people develop this false sense of anonymity over social media and are willing to share too much information. But this study shows that you really do need to be careful about what you say online about yourself, and whom you befriend or at least engage in conversation.

Frictionless sharing, the act of passively notifying social media of all manner of activity, scares the hell out of me. Not just because of the obvious privacy implications. Frictionless sharing turns up the volume on useless information and simultaneously threatens user privacy and control of online identity. Not only is Facebook becoming too central to our online discourse, it's becoming too crapified to even be useful. We have a social media problem, and the time to turn back is now. And the answer isn't regulating Facebook.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Frictionless sharing is not the only problem, but it's the straw that broke the proverbial dromedary's back. Passive sharing is not a feature I hear other users clamoring for. The value of observing every action online is of little value to users, but of far too much value to Facebook and the lot.

Social Media as Game of Telephone

Social media means, more than ever, little control of your message. As an individual, you surrender control of distribution. As publisher, you surrender the notion that the receiver will have actually read the source. Too often, I've noticed that I garner far more feedback on articles via Google Plus and Facebook than on the site that hosts the articles.

This would be fine, except for one little problem – all too few of the commentators take the time to actually read the article or post in question. This becomes abundantly clear when you see howls of outrage in response to features on The Onion because the reader had no idea they were responding to a satirical article.

My friends in PR and marketing may complain that companies are losing control of their message. Some argue that it's well and fine that companies lose control of their message, because it forces engagement directly with the audience. That's true, as far as it goes, but it misses the larger point. Social media has not only wrested control of message, it's made it incredibly difficult to ensure accuracy of the message. It's one thing that organizations have less ability to spin, yet another when they're faced with a 21st century game of telephone.

When a publication gets things wrong, a correction may not receive the same level of attention as an inaccurate headline or story. But when a tweet heard round the world is wrong, making a correction is next to impossible. That's not the only problem with using a handful of social media tools as the hub of conversation and information discovery.

Expression Depends on Tools

Marshall McLuhan said "the medium is the message," and he wasn't wrong. How you say something, the medium that you choose, is often as important as what you say. And, of course, what you say is shaped by where you say it. Our dependence on social media means that we have to conform our messages to the tools, with the predictable deleterious results.

Just by broadcasting your thoughts on a social network, your message is shaped and colored by that medium. Twitter is immediate, short and ephemeral. It's sending smoke signals in the hopes they'll be received and relayed. Conversations are terse by necessity. I enjoy the challenge, sometimes, of fitting a thought into 140 characters (chalk it up to J-School damage). It's of limited value when there's more to share than fits in 140 characters, but by limiting its scope I think Twitter also limits the damage. No one expects to carry on all of their conversations on Twitter.

Privacy Roulette

The same can't be said for Facebook, which would happily engulf all of our online discourse, and then some. Facebook allows for more lengthy discourse, and the ability to "like" (but not dislike) a sender's message. Comments, however, are mandatory. It's always somewhat unclear who will receive your message, given Facebook's ever-shifting privacy policies and controls.

Call it privacy roulette. Sometimes you want your updates to be received by everyone, but Facebook opts to display them only to a sliver of your audience based on its importance algorithms. Sometimes you want to control your audience, but Facebook's privacy controls are so complex it's never quite clear who can and can't see your messages. You're not assured that someone will or won't see a message, at all.

Google Plus is more straightforward, but the oracle in Mountain View has decreed that we must all be our literal selves online and not more comfortable pseudonymous personas. Businesses, as of yet, have no presence at all except through their spokespeople. While this suggests that communications from companies will be "more personal" it also forces the identity of a company onto the individual. If Acme Corporation hopes to have a voice on Google Plus, it must do so via its employees.

Google Plus has, in my opinion, better technical tools for expression and better privacy options, with the exception of its onerous pseudonym policies (and vigorous enforcement). Google also has well-publicized tools for extracting your data, should you choose to leave Google Plus. However, this is not the same thing as being able to extract your data from, say, WordPress. You cannot simply pick up and re-host your content on a competing network. You can take your toys and go home, but you can't play with them there.

In all cases, you surrender control of your platform to the owner of the network. This is illustrated quite well by the collapse of MySpace. Bands (it always seems to be bands) that built up a following on MySpace cannot easily move that following to another social network, or to their own site. Companies that build up a loyal following on Twitter or Facebook (they're not yet welcome on Google Plus) can't move that following to a competing network.

Feeding the Beast

The problems I've mentioned so far would not be so bad if social media were avoidable. Companies and media are embracing, out of necessity, the intermediaries as a way to reach the audience we wish to connect with. As Adrian Short so rightly pointed out, avoiding social media is not an option for most individuals or companies. "We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom." The right to avoid social networks, as Short says, is the right to be ignored.

Indeed, it's a vicious cycle. If you're not on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus or whatever comes, then your chances of being "heard" are far more remote than just a few years ago. Holding out seems futile, participating makes the problem worse. Short asks how long before social networks are essential, I'd argue they already are, but only because we've collectively decided that it's OK.

You Get the Web You Deserve

Like Short, I'm not sure I have an answer except this: moderation.

We cannot depend on Facebook to be moderate in its attempts to be the center of the Web. The answer is not a kinder, gentler and less privacy abusive alternative to Facebook.

The answer is to moderate our use of and dependence on Facebook. Like moderating diet, drink, television consumption or any other pleasurable but ultimately damaging-if-done-in-excess activity it is up to individuals. If we cannot do this, the fault lies only with us.

The damage being done by excessive social media is every bit as real as the damage done by a steady diet of bacon cheeseburgers and no exercise, and just as slow to become obvious. Frictionless sharing is the cardiac event that should signal it's time to cut back on the endless diet of bacon cheeseburgers. Stop feeding the beast, and start using social media in moderation.

The thing journalists still do today is extract and present the viewpoints of people who matter more to the business they cover than the journalists themselves. Here now in living color are a handful of the most revealing, poignant, and on occasion, truthful statements made to ReadWriteWeb journalists in the year about to pass.

#10

After people finish college, they probably grow (in their professional capacity) about 10% a year - learning and earning double in 7 years. As a startup, you can't afford to do it that way. You need to invest in them and get them to grow faster. Spending time with them is key.

Auren Hoffman, CEO, Rapleaf, a personal data aggregation service, to RWW's Marshall Kirkpatrick, September 8, 2011.

#9

I see the platform business being in a once-in-a-decade transformation. That transformation is driven by the move to cloud, to build social apps, mobile apps, real-time applications. Developers are saying, "Look, the ten-year-old technologies from .NET or Java Enterprise Edition weren't really designed for this new world."

#8

We're faced with a real challenge of covering an entirely new coverage area. A lot of the tried and true methods don't work anymore. I remember being a cub reporter and going in at 5 am to write up the police blotter. There are no media rooms in what we're trying to cover. No one is faxing us things. There are so much less formal systems; everything's out there but it's an enormous mess. When someone walks down the street it doesn't leave a path of 1s and 0s but when someone walks down the street on Twitter, it does.

Nick White, CEO, The Daily Dot, to RWW's Marshall Kirkpatrick, August 23, 2011.

#7

I think one of the real challenges was not knowing what the challenges were going to be and kind of uncovering a lot of new problems here that no one has solved in the past. So, it requires a lot of new solutions that no one has never thought up. It is a lot of hard work.

Mat Marquis, principal designer, The Boston Globe, discussing the paper's "responsive redesign" project with RWW's Dan Rowinski, September 14, 2011.

#6

A lot of us are too willing to accept roles as consumers in society. I understand the economic reasons for that, but I don't think it leads to a fulfilling life or a sustainable community. The best way out of this is to deconstruct what you're consuming, or better yet to become a creator yourself. I'm trying to help people see their own creativity.

Douglas Roshkoff, author, Program or Be Programmed, to RWW's Klint Finley, May 26, 2011.

#5

There are literally 100 million people who are building software in one way, shape, or form. One of the things that we want to do, particularly in this world of connected devices and continuous services, is to say, how can we make our platforms and our tools desirable and relevant to the broader development community? At the same time... we absolutely want to keep in mind that there is a set of people who we call "the existing Microsoft developer base," and we actually want to figure out how to move them forward into this new world. When you have a .NET or a .NET code base, how do you bring that forward into the new world? Do you want to run it as a Windows Desktop application, or into the Metro world? We want to make it easy for people to bring their skill set, their expertise, and their code forward into this new world.

S. Somasegar, Senior VP, Microsoft Developer Division, to RWW's Scott M. Fulton, III, September 14, 2011.

#4

The concept of journalism is going away. It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert.

Jason Calcanis, CEO, Weblogs, Inc., to RWW Managing Editor Abraham Hyatt, June 13, 2011.

#3

It's astonishing to me that, when we see certain people with some of the quality that Steve Jobs undoubtedly had, we reject them out of hand because they stand against the tide. Their "hell-no-ness," if you will, gets on our nerves. I dare say, especially if they're women. And that's a little sexist.

Carmi Levy, contributing analyst, CTV News Channel, to RWW's Scott M. Fulton, III, November 24, 2011.

#2

BROWSER SHOULD BE WINDOW TO INTERNET. IT NOT JOB OF WINDOW TO BREAK THING YOU LOOKING AT DEPENDING ON WHAT WINDOW YOU USE.

@FAKEGRIMLOCK, GIANT ROBOT DINOSAUR MAKE COMMENT IN COMMENTS, AT JON MITCHELL, OTHER DAY IN 2011.

#1

It became too much of a tangle. At the end of the day the focus on what was important was lost, and what is important are the developers.

At one of Microsoft's sessions on HTML5 and CSS3 a few weeks ago, the lead program manager for Internet Explorer 10, John Hrvatin, was introducing Web developers to the basic concepts of layout. These were folks who held up their hands to show they've built Web sites for a decade or more. And for many of them, this was the first experience they ever had in considering the following elements: Column flow. White space. Gutter adjustment. Pagination. Visibility at a distance. Symmetry.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

The reason HTML5 (in all its many manifestations) is such a foreign object to so many companies, especially publishers, is because we have gone so long without acknowledging these basic elements of style that they have ceased to be part of our diet. Blogs, which house a majority of the Web's daily content, are the fast food of today's publishing society. They give publishers a convenient means for manufacturing roughly uniform, bite-size chunks of content in a long, single column. And in turn, they give aggregators such as Google News and now, even more prominently, Facebook an easy means for repackaging and broadcasting that content to whatever passes today for a mass audience.

The blog format relieves publishers from the tiresome duty of producing covers and front pages and things to make their content more attractive and attract readers. In some cases, it enables publishers to surrender any responsibility for making content attractive in the first place.

There is a prophetic scene in the magnificent movie "Wall-E" where, after having floated in space for centuries in a self-contained shopping mall, the remains of the human race return to Earth. There, upon realizing that food once grew on trees and that trees must be cared for, the people ponder for the first time in their lives just how the pizza and ice cream sprouted forth from these stem-like thingies.

This is what sitting in that room for the Microsoft session reminded me of. Here, Hrvatin was preaching principles I've believed my entire career: that an online publication should become functional, like software, and that software should become informative and balanced, like a magazine.

HTML5 restores to the public conscience all those prospects and possibilities we publishers lost sight of when we became bloggers:

1. Not all articles should be created equal. Blogs are conveyor belts for nuggets of text. But a major news story, a feature on how to build a private cloud in your office, an interview with a mobile app developer, and some guy ranting about the stupidity of the blog format, are different beasts with varying life spans. Longer-living articles should be allowed to live longer, rather than being dumped off the conveyor belt into the void when replacements come along. HTML5 offers the possibility of componentized, two-dimensional layout where the Table of Contents can live and breathe again.

2. Publications are packages. The great thing about the magazine was that the reader tended to consume most or all of it. Readers appreciated it as a whole. Blogs are designed to be entered through the middle, into the meat of an article, and then exited through-and-through like a bullet. Even regular readers of a blog find themselves entering and exiting, letting their aggregator of choice lead the way. By reviving an old concept of scaling components to suit flexible-sized containers, HTML5 enables tables of contents to zoom in and out of unused spaces, so that readers entering through the middle are treated to the entire package.

3. An article does not have to be an "article." In a blog, anything functional - a video, a podcast, an interactive chart - must be embedded in the text, and the frame and context for the functional element must fit within whatever the text allows. This is, and has always been, backwards. HTML5 recognizes, and to at least some extent addresses, the fact that functional elements do not belong in static containers. In other words, apps are not text. So if a publisher wants to at least try to produce a piece of useful software as a feature of its publication, it need not be concerned with the syntax of the embed tag or the requirements of the plug-in.

HTML5 offers a glimpse of the freedom to define the Web publication the way it should have been defined fifteen years ago: as a more functional descendant of the magazine and the broadcast. But it can only do so to the extent that the content management systems upon which publishers have entrusted their livelihoods embrace, incorporate and advance that vision. This is not a certainty; in fact, I fear it's not even a likelihood.

The CMS of today is a machine that produces blogs, that shapes and forms content to equal-sized nuggets dropped onto a conveyor belt, the length of which constitutes the duration of their natural lives. It's about as prepared to embrace the full prospect of HTML5 as government is prepared to embrace "change." As long as Web publishers continue to rely on today's CMS to define the nature of their content, they'll remain stuck in deep space aboard the Starship Buy 'n' Large.

Kelly's book is a must read for technologists and anybody interested in the future of the Web. In this post I'll explore a few of the main themes of the book, in particular as they relate to the evolving Web. (there won't be any spoilers, for those of you in the middle of reading it or if you haven't yet read it!) Two of the main themes are how technology will evolve and how we - humanity - can guide it and make the best use of it.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

The book literally starts from The Big Bang, proceeds through 4 billion years of our planet's evolution, and finally looks ahead to how technology will evolve.

The Technium: a Living System of Technology

Key to the book is a new term that Kelly invents: the technium. He spends about 6 pages explaining the term, but at it's most basic it means a system of technologies. It includes not only what we ordinarily think of as specific technologies (such as cars, radar, computers), but the entire system around technology - culture, art, social institutions, "the extended human" and more.

A key to grokking the technium is that it's a living system, which evolves in a similar way to humans. On page 45, Kelly explains that "the technium can really only be understood as a type of evolutionary life." He goes on to suggest that technology evolves in a mix of inevitable and chance ways, just as humans have done. His point being that we can fairly accurately predict the macro evolution of the technium (that computers will eventually acquire a level of intelligence akin to a human, for example), but not the micro details of that evolution.

We've been writing about the Internet of Things, when real world objects become connected to the Internet, for the past couple of years on ReadWriteWeb. Kelly's book reinforces what a profound change in the Web this is. As everyday objects get connected to the Internet, they almost become 'alive' to us. They might not be able to think for themselves, yet, but billions of 'things' in the world will be able to sense and compute information about the world.

Living With Technology's Increasing Power

On page 254, Kelly writes that "technologies are nearly living things." So we will need to adjust to this and figure out how best to utilize - and live with - technologies. Kelly lists five "proactions" that humanity should take to assess and engage with technologies:

1. Anticipation
2. Continual Assessment
3. Prioritization of Risks, Including Natural Ones
4. Rapid Correction of Harm
5. Not Prohibition but Redirection

At one point he compares technologies to children. As parents we aim to guide our children to reach their potential and contribute something to the world. "We can't really change the nature of our children," Kelly writes on page 257, "but we can steer them to tasks and duties that match their talents." Likewise, he suggests, we can guide and steer technology.

Was The Unibomber Right?

Kelly spends a significant part of the book exploring the moral and ethical issues around an ever more powerful technium. Is it wise for humanity to continue to let technologies evolve, until the technium is more intelligent than humanity?

A whole chapter is devoted to the theories of the infamous Unibomber, Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski wrote a manifesto about destroying modern technology before it destroys us. He killed 3 people with mail bombs, while attempting to carry out his manifesto. Kelly at first defends Kaczynski's theories, but he ends the chapter by attacking him on a moral level. Kelly writes (page 212-213):

"But despite the reality of technology's faults, the Unibomber is wrong to want to exterminate it, for many reasons, not the least of which is that the machine of civilization offers us more actual freedoms than the alternative [...] so far the gains from this ever-enlarging technium outweigh the alternative of no machine at all."

The Optimistic View of Technology

Ultimately 'What technology Wants' is an uplifting and optimistic book about the future of technology. It contrasts in many ways to another thought-provoking technology book, which I read and reviewed a year ago: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto; by Jaron Lanier. In that book, Lanier argued that technology reduces our humanity - for example by promoting the 'hive mind' over individual expression. Interestingly, Lanier is quoted on the jacket of Kelly's book. He recommends you read this book, "even though I profoundly disagree with aspects of it."

It's always beneficial to have skeptics about technology, so there's a place for Lanier's arguments. Both of Lanier's and Kelly's books are stimulating and well worth reading. However, I find myself much more swayed by Kelly's theories. Whereas Lanier dismisses the Internet as meaningless in and of itself, Kelly essentially argues that the technium (of which the Internet is a part) is a hugely important evolving system. It's as much a living system as humanity is. That, I suspect, is one of the aspects that Lanier would disagree with. But I find Kelly's theory to be compelling - and helpful as an approach to the increasing power of technology.

The book concludes that technology is ultimately good for humanity. Admittedly that was Kelly's pre-destined outcome - back in November, 2004, when he began writing the book, he blogged: "I sense that overall, technology is a good thing." However the end result of his 7 year quest, the book, compellingly makes that case. I think this line near the end of the book sums it up beautifully:

"How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing each person with chances."

(which incidentally echoes my own thoughts after I read Lanier's book: "[...] Lanier glosses over the benefits of web 2.0 - that it gives everyone who has a computer (and nowadays a smart phone) a publishing platform with which to explore their creativity and have their say.")

I gave Kelly's book 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads, because ultimately it provides useful advice on how to think about and deal with technology. Perhaps aspects of the book can be challenged on scientific or philosophical terms, as some have argued. But that seems beside the point. I think we'd all agree that technology is evolving incredibly fast. We need to try and understand the changes. We need strategies to get the best out of technology (and, by extension, ourselves). That's what Kevin Kelly wants; and in my view the book achieves it.

Photo credit: Doc Searls

While certainly not every business needs to raise venture financing, it is the path for many high-growth technology startups. Therefore, going down the fundraising path is something many technology entrepreneurs will need to do and is a critical step in the development of their business. This can be an intimidating experience so I've put together a list of five tips for raising a venture round. This is by no means an exhaustive list so I'd love to hear other suggestions from you in the comments of this post.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Tip 1: Make Sure You Are Ready to Scale

First, before you even start the process of raising a lot of money, make sure you have figured out your model and are truly ready to scale. Earlier this week on ReadWriteStart, Steve Blank used research at The Startup Genome Project and explained:

One of the biggest surprises is that success isn't about size of team or funding. It turns out Premature Scaling is the leading cause of hemorrhaging cash in a startup, and death.

If you're early in the investment process, a small angel round or partnering with an accelerator may be the best approach. In fact, research conducted by the Startup Genome Project found that the best practice in the first phase, a.ka. discovery, is to only raise between $10,000 and $50,000.

Tip 2: Have A Real Lead

Next, if you are going to raise a round, find one or two partners to do it with. As Mark Suster pointed out yesterday on his blog, he's seeing more and more cases where "entrepreneurs are working hard to make sure they have as many VC names and famous angels on their cap table for signaling value." He explains five problems with this and I couldn't agree more. Remember, once you screw up your cap table it's really hard to go back. So in your first few funding rounds, try to raise money from as few people as possible and make sure they really will help.

Tip 3: Conduct Diligence on Your Potential Investors

When you get close to finding a lead, don't be afraid to ask to speak to some CEOs who have worked with the firm. They are going to poke and prod your business to figure out if you're someone they want to work with. You should figure out the same thing. Pay special attention to investors who are willing to introduce you to CEOs of their portfolio companies that went through hard times. This is when your potential investor will really show how committed they are to the companies they invest in.

Tip 4: Really Understand Key Terms

Once you get the term sheet make sure you know how to read it. I strongly recommend reading Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson's Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. This will give you tons of information on all the terms you'll encounter when raising a venture round and how they could impact your deal. This includes things like how liquidation preferences impact future rounds and ultimate liquidity, to why VCs ask to expand an option pool before investing as part of their term sheet. Too many entrepreneurs focus exclusive on the valuation number and this book can really help you understand all the implications around the term sheet you receive.

Tip 5: Remember Time Kills Deals

Once you have a term sheet you are happy with, don't over negotiate. You have a business to run and more importantly don't forget one of the first principals of any sales process: "time kills deals". The worst thing that can happen is for you to drag your feet over some meaningless terms (which you'll understand are meaningless thanks to reading Brad and Jason's book above) and end up having your potential investor get cold feet or even have something that's outside your control change. Just get the deal done once you're happy with the material terms and have an investor you trust and want to work with.

Bonus Tip: Run a Great First Board Meeting

When the cash is in the bank, you're not done; in fact you are just starting. Once you've raise your round, you'll almost certainly end up with at least one new board member. It's really key that you run a great first board meeting at this point. If this is your first round, this may be the first formal board meeting you've had, so prepare for it and make sure you know what you want to accomplish. This will set the tone for future board meetings so make sure that board members take your meetings seriously. There are a number of great posts on this topic and I may try to summarize these in a future post, but one of my favorites for now is from Guy Kawasaki on "The Art of the Board Meeting."

As I said at the beginning of this post, this isn't an exhaustive list. I'd love suggestions in the comments below for other tips when raising a venture round.

Thanks to Mark Coggins for creative commons use of the photo.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Web 3.0: The Age of Expertise

"You have to have a deep understanding to be a blogger," Calacanis said.

Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." Blogging brought about the era of Web 2.0 where people who may not have had a voice before could publish whatever they want. The rise of kittens on the Web, for instance. Add the ability to comment on stories and then share them through social media and Web 2.0 was the Age of Interactivity.

"The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. "It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert."

Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. In that vein, he thinks that AOL local news effort Patch, which the company has poured millions of dollars into, will ultimately fail. Instead of just the news of a local McDonalds being built, people want how much that new franchise will cost, what benefit it will have for the local economy etc.

"People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. "Who gives a f***l? Nobody cares anymore."

The blog itself is not going away. People will continue to have a voice and low barrier to put that voice on the Web. Yet, that doesn't mean that anybody will be paying attention.

"People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. "But, I think that experts will inherit the space."

That is what Calacanis is starting to do with Mahalo. He considers the site to be a "video education company." He wants employees who are a "triple threat" - the ability to shoot video, edit and produce video and be the host of the video.

On Mahalo vs. Google Panda and Launch

As Experian reported in April, Mahalo's traffic has been crushed by the changes to Google's algorithm - codenamed Panda - designed to limit the affect of content farms in search results.

"Yeah, Panda has cut our traffic in half," Calacanis said. "Yet, it didn't affect our YouTube traffic at all."

Essentially, Calacanis sees the future of the Web through the lenses of experts who produce video. He does not hold out hope that he can approach Google to tweak Panda so that Mahalo does not suffer along with the rest of the so-called content farms.

Calacanis is also betting on the resurrection of the email newsletter, this time as an interactive discussion engine of experts. His newest venture is called Launch and is centered around tech news. And as he is known to do, Calacanis is predicting big things.

"Within a year, Launch will have more traffic than TechCrunch," Calalcanis said.

To celebrate the iPad's one year anniversary, I'm listing out my favorite 10 iPad apps over the past year. I've attempted to put them in some kind of order too. Some apps have had a bigger impact on the way I interact with the Web than others, notably apps that have changed my reading and media consumption habits. Read on to find out how!

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

1. Flipboard

I've raved about Flipboard many times, but it really has changed the way I consume RSS feeds. Prior to the iPad, I mostly used Google Reader on my computer (and Bloglines before that) to consume RSS. Over time though, my usage of Google Reader and RSS Readers in general had slipped. I still valued all of the feeds I'd saved in Google Reader and I often searched them to research topics. But as a daily browsing activity, Twitter and Facebook had begun to replace my time spent in Google Reader - as has been the case for many of you, I'm sure.

Flipboard changed that. Now I regularly browse my RSS feeds - and some of Twitter and Facebook - through Flipboard on my iPad. Funnily enough, Flipboard has actually increased my usage of Google Reader again. I have a number of my topical folders from Google Reader in my Flipboard. So Google Reader has in essence become my feed platform, it's just that the user interface has changed. I explored that trend as it relates to smartphone RSS Readers yesterday.

2. Kindle

Just as Flipboard changed my feed reading habits, Kindle changed my book reading. I've read a number of books in the Kindle iPad app over the past year, including novels and biographies. I still read more paper books than eBooks, but the Kindle app has been my first long-term relationship (if I may put it like that) with an eReader.

3. Zinio

A third metamorphosis in my reading habits occurred thanks largely to Zinio, the digital magazine service. I subscribe to a number of magazines in Zinio, mostly art and music related. While the reading experience is often not optimal - most of my subscriptions are simply PDF files of the magazines, so there's limited interactivity - the cost savings alone make this very worthwhile to me. Also it's handy to carry around a back catalog of magazines on my iPad.

4. Instapaper

Instapaper has been yet another driver of change in my reading habits (yes, there's a theme here!). In the 'old days' of RSS Readers, people were obsessed with their Unread count - that is, how many items in the RSS Reader were as yet unread. People would get uptight if their Unread count got too high and an urge to purge would well up. Nowadays most people don't worry themselves with the Unread count, because interesting information comes from too many different places now: Twitter, Facebook, content aggregators like Techmeme, iPhone apps, iPad apps, and so on. This is where Instapaper came into its own, because from most of those places you can click a 'Read Later' button and an item is saved to Instapaper's servers. When you have Internet connectivity, the Instapaper app downloads all of those stories so you can read them offline if need be.

Instapaper has an iPhone app too - no official Android one so far, although there are unofficial apps. However I've mostly used Instapaper on my iPad, because - you guessed it - the iPad has become the device where I now do the bulk of my reading.

5. Evernote

Finally, a non-reading app! Evernote is a note-taking app, that eventually wants to be your online brain. It's been around for much longer than the iPad, but I began to use it more when the iPad came onto the scene. I particularly like the offline feature, because it allows me to update and add to my notes when I'm out and about (I have the WiFi only version of iPad and wireless connectivity is far from a given where I live).

6. Newsy

I wrote about Newsy earlier this week, as an example of a media app that has created a new form of media delivery on the iPad. I enjoy watching a selection of 2-3 minute video news clips over my lunch, or when I need a break from my computer.

Read my interview with the founder, Jim Spencer, to discover more about this innovative news service.

7. Art Authority

I love exploring art and Art Authority is the best and most comprehensive archive of art available for the iPad. It features high quality images of art work from most of the great artists in our history.

I've spent a lot of time with my nose buried in this app.

8. Brushes

Unless you count Evernote, this is the first iPad app on my list that has more emphasis on 'write' than 'read.' That emphasizes that, for me anyway, the iPad has been mostly about consuming content. The iPad is not a great writing tool (although I have been using it more lately for things like real-time note taking from conferences). The first generation iPad didn't even have a camera, so it has always been marketed as a consumer tool more so than a creative one.

An app which does foster creativity though is Brushes, the finger painting app. In all honesty I prefer to do my amateurish painting on paper using acrylic paints, as I spend way too much time on electronic devices as it is. However Brushes is a sophisticated finger painting app and I've (ahem) dipped my finger into it from time to time.

9. YouTube

We're back to consumption now. I have to mention YouTube, as it hosts many of the videos I end up watching - whether they be presentations from tech events, videos of live music, or random videos found via Twitter or Facebook. I don't watch that much online video, but if I do there's a good chance I'll fire up YouTube on my iPad to watch it. The only issue has been that Instapaper doesn't save videos and I've yet to find a good app that does - suggestions anyone?

10. TweetDeck

Like most of you, my usage of Twitter and Facebook has increased over the past couple of years. However I don't tend to interact on either service using the iPad. There are adequate iPad apps for both, but social networking hasn't turned out to be one of my main activities on the iPad.

Friendly is a good app for Facebook and I've largely stuck to TweetDeck for Twitter. I sometimes use the official Twitter iPad app, which is slick too. Of those apps, TweetDeck is probably the one I access the most on my iPad. Although I use my Mac desktop app for TweetDeck much more, followed by the iPhone app.

Conclusion: iPad Really is About Consumption!

There you have it, my favorite 10 iPad apps since the iPad launched one year ago. I'm a little surprised at just how dominant media consumption apps have been for me; and in particular reading apps. It goes to show how much of an impact the iPad has had on my online media consumption habits.

I should add that I still do the bulk of my creation activities on the computer - mostly writing, but also curation on my personal Wordpress.com site and online social networking on various web services. However, the iPad has literally caused a paradigm shift in how I explore and consume content.

Did you get an iPad when it first launched? If so, I'd love to hear about if and how it changed your consumption patterns. Tell me your favorite iPad apps, too!

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Apple's Highly Objectionable App Store Censorship

When Jobs introduced the App Store in June 2008, porn was at the top of the not-allowed-here list of content. Some apps containing nudity snuck into the App Store, and were later pulled. Now only partial nudity seems to show up (e.g. Beautiful Boobs, Asian Boobs), especially if it only focuses on boobs.

Speaking of boobs, in June 2010 Apple once again censored "Ulysses Seen," a web comic version of the classic James Joyce novel. Apple forced the creators to remove images that contained nudity before they would approve it as an iPad app. History seems to have repeated itself here: Ulysses had been put on trial in 1933. Apple ended up changing its mind after all, so the boob-filled web comic is available for download.

A few months after the App Store opened in June 2008, a great controversy erupted over an app called Podcaster that Apple decided to reject. It would have permitted people to listen to podcasts without downloading them first to iTunes; Apple worried that the app "duplicated the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes," and thus saw it as a threat. Here is a longer list of types of apps that Apple rejected from its Mac App Store.

In September 2010, Apple's iTunes social network Ping omitted Lady Gaga's Tweets in which she protests anti-gay marriage legislation Prop8. But don't worry, Apple still released an It Gets Better video, so they must be pro-gay folks, right?

Not long after that, in October 2010, Apple was awarded a patent that could stop people from sending "objectionable" text messages. It was filed in January 2008, and approved on October 12, 2010, and would allow certain content to be filtered based on parental controls. While it might seem like Apple is trying to keep its devices safe from porn, and therefore more workplace and school-friendly, this was still one step closer toward authoritarian control over the iPhone.

Additional apps were banned from the App store: In July 2011, Apple removed the ThirdIntifada app from its store because it "glorified violence against Israel." Apple also banned the violent comic book "Murderdrome" from its App Store, based on the Apple SDK which states that "Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users." There were a few beheadings and ripped out limbs - but those aren't unusual in the world of comic books.

Here's perhaps the most telling App store ban of all: On September 13, 2011, an app called Phone Story, a game that also serves as social commentary, was banned from the Apple App Store only a few hours after its release. The answer as to why this happened was actually quite simple, and can be found in this elegantly written description of the game:

"Phone Story is a game for smartphone devices that attempts to provoke a critical reflection on its own technological platform. Under the shiny surface of our electronic gadgets, behind its polished interface, hides the product of a troubling supply chain that stretches across the globe. Phone Story represents this process with four educational games that make the player symbolically complicit in coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labor in China, e-waste in Pakistan and gadget consumerism in the West."

Oh wait, that sounds a whole lot like exactly what Apple does! Yet Apple would never come out and say that. Instead, they said that the app was banned because it "depicted violence or abuse of children," and "presented excessively objectionable or crude content." This highly questionable act raises serious concerns over the freedom of information in a democratic society, playing into Apple's "walled garden" approach to both its products, and the Web at large.

The Controversies

In 2008, the Advertising Standards Authority responded to two British TV viewers who claimed that a TV ad featuring a voiceover that said "all parts of the Internet are on the iPhone" was misleading because the iPhone didn't support Flash or Java. The ad was found to breach CAP (Broadcast) TV Advertising Standards Code rules 5.1 (Misleading advertising), 5.2.1 (Evidence) and 5.2.2 (Implications), and could not be broadcast again.

Also back in 2008, a gaping security hole in Apple's firmware posed serious problems for anyone who wanted to lock their phone. Instead of being able to lock the phone with a security code, anyone could bypass that by tapping the "Emergency Call" button and then double tapping the homepage (if it was set to the default favorites).

Apple's Inhumane Working Conditions

Apple outsources its labor to China's most horrible factories, and abuses at one in particular stand out: The Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Here, some workers as young as 12 years old were forced to work for extended periods of time to meet increased demand for iPhones and iPads from all over the world. As popularity increased for Apple devices, workers were pushed to work longer. Workers ages 18-20 were being forced to work 60-80 hours of extended overtime every month in cramped, low-quality conditions. They were being treated like the very machines they were being forced to produce.

Inhumane treatment of workers first came to light when seven workers at the Foxconn plant committed suicide in May 2010. They were working on the iPad production sector. After these suicides, workers were required to sign a statement that says they are not allowed to commit suicide.

Image via Flickr user mailox.

Will you continue to buy Apple products? Tell us why or why not in the comments below.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

I hear the three words, "He gave us..." as a jump-starter, or what Steve Wozniak would call a "bootstrap," for sentences that precede a recitation of all the technology milestones presented to the world by Steve Jobs. Right off the bat, those three words are wrong. Steve Jobs did not give us anything. To presume that he did is an insult to what the man genuinely believed, and to the ethics and goals he personally championed from the beginning of his career.

Kids in garages

Apple was an empowering company. It empowered people to build the personal computer - to build it for themselves, to make it individual and adaptable. The Apple II, I wrote in 1985, is a box of promises. What had sustained its popularity and its magnitude to that point in time was its users' belief in those promises. The fire that fueled that belief was sparked, kindled, and spread by Steve Jobs.

I blatantly leveraged his image to jump-start my career. The only way a kid as young as I was, as removed from the technology centers of the world as I was, and as flat broke as I was could ever hope to get in on the ground floor of the only revolution that America would see in the latter quarter of the 20th century, was to dress, look, and talk like one of those garage inventors. What amazed businesspeople back then - the type who would become my first clients - was that these wunderkinds, these Bill Gates and Steve Jobs-types, were so young, sure of themselves, arrogant, and could assimilate everything they touched.

Steve had a moustache, so I grew one too. I was 14, pretending to be 19. I looked like I was caught red-handed eating a Ding-Dong. But I looked enough like these smart, garage-inventor types to pull it off, wearing a tailored suit with a tweed jacket and the leather elbow patches. At the first computer conferences in the nation, I struck deals with the companies representing Apple. This was back before Apple had a national sales team big enough to cover the nation. Put me next to your computer, I bargained with them, and I'll demonstrate to people how to use it. I'll sell your Apple II, and you refer them to me as clients.

It was 1979. I lived and breathed Microsoft BASIC, and could diagram its statements and functions in every dialect, including Apple. I had developed a stump speech - what I'd say to people who looked at this thing and asked me, "What does it do?"

"Well, let me tell you, the two men who created this thing," my speech began, "are named Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak." ("Steven" was his name back then; it was "corrected" later.) "Jobs is this guy who came from Hewlett-Packard, which is the company over there in the center aisle that makes those huge pen plotters. Wozniak is this designer from Atari. You've seen that home video game called 'Video Pinball?' He designed it." That qualification impressed folks right away - a guy who could put a pinball machine on a TV.

"Anyway, they'd gone to some of these conferences a few years ago, and they'd seen the first home computers - the ugly ones in the blue boxes with the switches and wires - and they asked, 'What does it do?' And they'd get all kinds of responses, but nothing that had anything to do with what someone like you or me would want to do with it. So they built the first Apple I prototype in their garage, that's why this one is called 'Apple II.' And what they decided was this: Let's make a mass-production machine using HP standards and Atari construction. But let's make it really, really programmable. So if you try something, even off the top of your head, you might be able to find a way to make it work. Here, let me show you an example."

Then I'd do something mind-boggling for them, like write a Microsoft BASIC program right there on the command line, that calculated the distance between two points on a map. (It's the Pythagorean Theorem, and I wish I'd patented it because I'd be a rich man today.) Then I'd plot a little graph for them in their choice of 16 fabulous colors. Ten minutes later, they were plunking down twelve hundred bucks for something they weren't sure what it was, and I was handing out business cards.

A television ad produced by the store I consulted for in the late 1970s.

Containers for ideas

The things which the cable news anchors are saying Steve Jobs "gave" us (as if they were old enough to remember) are actually containers. They're beautiful containers, but they're open. They're made for us to fill them - with information, with functionality, with the pictures and songs and dreams that remind us of who we are, or believe we can be.

To my knowledge, Steve Jobs invented nothing. As I've said here before, he was a brilliant businessman who could look into your eyes (and make you look deeply into his), and sell you on an idea. That idea, from the very beginning of Apple, was this:

You can make it work. It doesn't have to be a multi-function gizmo box. You're already smart enough and capable enough to make the box do what you need it to do. The box changed shape over Apple's history - Apple IIc, Apple IIgs, Macintosh, Macintosh Plus, iMac, Power Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad - and it was certainly exciting when the box got small enough to fit into the spare-change pocket of Steve's Levis. But it was always small and big at the same time. And Steve's idea of "scale" was that making it smaller made it bigger.

Icons and ideals

Fewer Americans than ever before in this country's history are iconic symbols of something great and powerful. Folks today stare with sadness at the "HOPE" poster, and wonder what it was they had conjured in their minds that made it seem so real. Icons (not the desktop kind, but the ones that take human form) are often full of other people's hopes, but they usually don't keep there for very long.

There are many falsehoods being attributed to Steve Jobs - that he "invented the personal computer," that he "dreamed of the mouse," that he "created graphical computing," that he "made the first tablet PC," I've heard all these things just tonight. Clear away all the false attributions, erase the whiteboard of all the things "he gave us." Let there be, for one moment, just the man, devoid of the stuff. What did he do?

Well, let me tell you. For an entire generation of young Americans who had every reason to believe what they were being told by their teachers, their friends, their bosses, even their family - that their dreams and ambitions were unattainable and that we were just cogs in a great machine we could never understand - Steve Jobs was living, breathing, human proof that it was all wrong. We were all vessels for something greater, we had it within ourselves to put on a game face and stand up to everything and everyone. He was the personification of "Hell, no!"

The gauntlet

On a cheap plastic TV in the middle of an Oklahoma art studio, my friends and I watched the 1984 Super Bowl. We weren't interested in the football; I don't even remember who played. We had known in advance about that ad, because the firm I consulted for gave me a heads-up. We watched that gorgeous blonde girl (great choice there, Ridley Scott) hurl that gauntlet. But we knew it was Steve who guided it right up Big Brother's nose. We cheered louder than for any touchdown that had ever been scored. Three weeks later, I was a nationally published computing writer.

Steve Jobs did not give us anything. He challenged us, and his charisma and doggedness and determination not to let failure define him, made us respond. We know him mainly because of the things his company built, and mainly for his charismatic demos, which in the larger scheme of things is actually not all that much.

Take away those products and their demos as though they never existed, and what remains is the single best creation of his life, more valuable than anything Apple has ever produced. And right now, this moment, despite all that Apple has enabled me to do in my life, I would give it all for an eraser that could wipe out every Apple device ever made, in exchange for the one technology that matters this moment, in the here and now - or, better yet, 24 hours ago: the cure for his pancreatic cancer.

There are bigger problems to solve than can fit in an iPad. In his memory, we should revolutionize our approach to conquering death the way Steve Jobs revolutionized our approach to living life.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/12/28/redux_what_steve_meant_back_then http://readwrite.com/2011/12/28/redux_what_steve_meant_back_then 2011 Redux Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0800 Scott M. Fulton Big data and sentiment analysis can do amazing things, whether it's in the enterprise or in the quest to create compelling applications and experiences for consumers. But can technology trends such as these actually predict major real-world events?

As sci-fi as it may sound, that's exactly what researcher Kalev Leetaru was able to accomplish with a little help from SGI's Altix UV supercomputer packing 8.2 teraflops of processing power. Leetaru, a digital media analytics expert at the University of Illinois, wrote software that can scan over 100 million news articles and uses sentiment analysis, text geocoding and predictive analytics to determine when political upheaval will go from rowdy to revolutionary.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Leetaru's software was able to churn through all that data and visually demonstrate a sharp increase in negative tone preceding recent uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. It analyzed thousands of international news articles from the last 30 years pertaining to those countries and algorithmically mined for certain phrases denoting both positive and negative tones. It then geocoded the text to tie these sentiments to specific geographic locations in the world.

Well sure, you might say, wasn't it obvious that the Egyptian revolution was coming to anybody following current events? In early 2011, perhaps it was. What this software was able to pinpoint was a an increase in negative tone during the entire decade that preceded these revolutions.

Writes Peter Murray on the Singularity Hub:

Tone monitoring was performed on 52,438 articles worldwide between January 1979 and March 2011 that contained any mention of an Egyptian city. The software selected for Egyptian cities rather than the word "Egypt" to filter out articles that only casually mentioned Egypt the way a travel guide might do. Between January 1 and January 24 of 2011, global tone about Egypt dropped to an extent that had only been seen twice in the past 30 years.

This is Culturnomics at work. One of the more well-known applications of it would be the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a Google Labs project that scans 15 million digitized books to reveal the frequency of certain words and phrases over time. By applying a similar methodology to news articles, researchers can gain insight into human society on an even bigger scale and in a more real-time fashion.

"A growing body of work has shown that measuring the 'tone' of this real-time consciousness can accurately forecast many broad social behaviors, ranging from box office sales to the stock market itself," Leetaru writes in the introduction to his recent study on how the tone of news global news coverage can be used to predict events.

"Despite being hailed as a social media revolution, monitoring the tone of only mainstream media around the world would have been enough to suggest the potential for unrest in Egypt," continues Leetaru.

The academic paper, which is well worth at least a skim for those interested in this topic, goes into detail about how this method can be applied to retroactively foresee turmoil in the Middle East and the Balkans and even allegedly narrow down the location of Osama Bin Laden's hideout, at least within a range of 200 kilometers.

Of course, this is a relatively new area of study and the methodology has yet to be used to actually predict future events. Either way, there's no doubt that we stand to gain substantial new insights when the real-time, Web-based dissemination of news meets large-scale sentiment analysis.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/12/28/redux_can_the_worlds_next_political_revolution_be_predic http://readwrite.com/2011/12/28/redux_can_the_worlds_next_political_revolution_be_predic 2011 Redux Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:00:00 -0800 John Paul Titlow In the last few months, Netflix has lost 800,000 subscribers and Redbox is being accused of "pulling a Netflix" due to price increases. From the whining about Redbox and Netflix online, you'd think that the companies were demanding customers' first-born children.

The reality is that both companies have been entirely reasonable about pricing. In the face of market forces out of their control, both companies have put forward reasonable price increases. The reaction online, unfortunately, has been entirely out of proportion with the reality. People need to stop whining and do a little research before they lay all the blame on Netflix and Redbox.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year, and ahead to what next year holds, we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

In Defense of Netflix (Sort Of...)

I will grant you that Netflix totally botched its announcement about its price increases. And the Qwikster thing? That was like the New Coke of online service announcements. If you're not old enough to remember the New Coke debacle, Wikipedia can hook you up. But what it can't do is actually convey the taste of New Coke, which was horrible. It was sort of the haggis of soft drinks, but I digress...

But if you consider the cost increases that Netflix has been facing, there's really only one way its prices could go, and that's up. I actually applaud Netflix in that its reaction to being squeezed by the content providers was to raise prices rather than laying people off, which is a more typical corporate reaction. (Not that Netflix is innocent of layoffs entirely.)

Consider that when Netflix first launched its streaming service, it didn't bump the price of subscriptions. Last year, the company introduced a modest price bump of $1 a month for plans with the same number of DVDs plus streaming. That's $1 a month for a service that now accounts for 32.7% of Internet bandwidth. This tells me that Netflix users, at least some of them, are using the hell out of streaming.

Since then, Netflix has had to increase licensing payments to Starz, for CW content and others. Netflix is also producing original programming to feed the demand for content. In other words, the company's costs are going up, up and up. More money for content. More money for bandwidth. More money to create new content.

Netflix isn't doing this out of the kindness of its heart, of course. I'm not saying that its users need to be thrilled about its changes, but the numbers of users storming off in a huff and sounding off online is completely disproportionate.

The folks who are complaining about the current streaming selection with Netflix need to understand, it's not like Netflix is just opting not to carry certain movies or TV shows. In some cases, the content providers (like HBO) won't license to Netflix at any cost. Others have priced themselves out of reach.

Alternatives and Pricing

One thing that seems to be missing entirely is a sense of perspective. A single DVD plus streaming account with Netflix will set you back a whopping $15.98 a month. Renting a movie with Redbox now sets you back $1.20 a night, up from $1.00. I don't know how many movies folks rent with Redbox on average, but if you rent 10 movies a month for one night your costs have "soared" by $2.00.

To put that in perspective, movie ticket prices in St. Louis (where I live) run anywhere from $5.00 for matinée showings to around $10.00 for weekend showings of 3D flicks. You have to multiply that by the number of people going to the theater, plus snacks, plus gas to and from the theater. Think of how much movie ticket prices have risen since Netflix introduced streaming, or since Redbox's inception.

Alternately you could look at the costs of cable or satellite. I don't think it's possible to get a reasonable cable/satellite package with decent movie channels for less than $50 a month.

Why People Are Over-Reacting

It's not entirely surprising that people are over-reacting to the price increases. Prices for goods and services go up all the time, but Netflix and Redbox have a few factors working against them.

First, they're fairly new services. They established pricing in new markets, and now they're having to readjust. The increases are taken out of proportion because there's nothing to compare against. The price of milk goes up, no big deal. If you rent, you expect that your rent will go up every year or two. When gas prices went up, local businesses raised prices accordingly, and people (mostly) took it in stride. But for some reason, people seem to expect the costs for these new services to remain immutable, or (magically) go down.

Secondly, the press has made a big deal out of the increases. Especially Netflix. Because both are national services with standardized pricing, it's obvious when the pricing changes. I've noticed the same effect with the price of stamps, despite being incredibly cheap to mail letters in the United States (compared to other countries) people get all bent out of shape over a few pennies for postage. But few people pitch a hissy fit when bread goes up by a few cents.

There's also the fact that a lot of people are really concerned about money right now. If the price increases had come at a different time, a lot fewer people would have gotten upset about it. Timing is not on their side.

Finally, the customer loyalty that Netflix and Redbox have is predicated on the fact that people feel that they're getting a great deal and good service. If people were less attached to the services, they'd not be as peeved now. It's weird, but we expect to get gouged by AT&T. Netflix wants more money? It's an outrage!

Blame Where It Belongs

If you really feel injured by the Netflix and Redbox price bumps, put the blame where it belongs. In this case, it belongs firmly at the feet of the content companies (in the case of Netflix) and the banks (in the case of Redbox).

The problem is, of course, it takes a lot more effort to actually punish the content providers or banks. So people cancel their accounts and/or stop renting from Redbox. This doesn't really hurt the guilty parties in the slightest. A weakened Netflix is exactly what the content providers would love to see. If it goes under, it's business as usual. Netflix stops disrupting their business models. If not, the company is in a weakened bargaining position because in the face of lost subscribers the company can ill afford to lose any more content deals.

The fees that banks see from Redbox, individually, probably wouldn't even be a blip in the banks' profits. They're wringing more money out of all merchants, not just Redbox.

Do what you want with your money, of course. If the content selection doesn't work for you, then it doesn't work. But the virtual fist-shaking and complaints that Netflix or Redbox are "gouging" customers are way off-target. I've never used Redbox, but I wouldn't stop using the service over its first price increase in eight years.

I'm keeping my Netflix subscription as-is, though. The company has, with the exception of the Qwikster debacle, earned my business. People should stop whining and reconsider whether they're really getting the bang for their buck. What do you think?

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/12/28/redux_stop_whining_about_netflix_and_redbox_price_increa http://readwrite.com/2011/12/28/redux_stop_whining_about_netflix_and_redbox_price_increa 2011 Redux Wed, 28 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0800 Joe Brockmeier In the dead of night on Monday, November 14, Zuccotti Park in New York City was raided by police. In the preceding days, there were crackdowns at several of the major Occupy protests around the country. The effort had apparently been coordinated between cities. Monday night's actions against the original Occupy Wall Street encampment were stern, heavy enough to bring a decisive end to the protest. But the raid only served to turn up the heat in New York and around the country.

As they have since the Occupation began, people on the ground fired up their smartphones to report the events as they happened, and curators around the Web gathered and retweeted the salient messages. But early on in the raid, mainstream media outlets began reporting that the police were barring their reporters from entering the park. The NYPD even grounded a CBS News helicopter. The night had chilling implications for freedom of the press. But the news got out anyway. The raw power of citizen media - and the future of news envisioned by a site called Storify - thwarted the media blackout.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Saving The News

This is a new media age. The news of the Occupation has countless reporters, and some of the Web's best curators have taken on the task of weaving the Occupy stories together. In particular, Xeni Jardin has been a machine on Twitter, providing a one-woman breaking news channel of so many successive Occupy confrontations.

But for the Monday night raid at Zuccotti Park, and indeed for much of the Occupation, Storify has come into its own as the social news curation tool par excellence. In fact, thanks to the media blackout Monday night, some of the most important news outlets in the country would not have had a story if not for Storify.

 

Josh Harkinson, a reporter for Mother Jones, crashed the barricades and reported from the scene, becoming a source for all the curators, including his own publication:

 

Storify's New Role: The Backbone of News

 

"Most of the content comes from the people on the ground, from the 99%."

Storify is one of those companies that arrives at its point in history just in the nick of time. Its co-founders pitched the idea during the Green Revolution in Iran, one of the first popular uprisings driven by social media. "Now it's actually happening here, on the soil of America, with the Occupy movement," says co-founder Xavier Damman.

 

The world needed a shareable, embeddable way to gather the tweetstorm of breaking news and turn it into a lasting document. Storify has made that possible. After a closed beta period with professional journalists, Storify opened to the public in April.

In October, it rolled out a brand new editing interface making the tool vastly easier to use. And one week ago, just before the police raided Zuccotti Park, Storify made its move, redesigning its homepage as a destination featuring the most important stories on the social Web. Storify's vision is no less than a leveling of the media playing field. On the Storify homepage, lifelong and first-time journalists stand side by side.

"All news is social now," says Storify CEO and co-founder Burt Herman. Whoever's on the ground is the reporter, and whoever's curating on the Web is the editor. It doesn't matter who is whom. "We always talk about quoting from the original sources, from politicians, companies and everybody else, but now the journalists who are normally reporting are the sources."

From a Dorm Room to the Front Page

While career journalists were being removed from Zuccotti Park, Ben Doernberg was watching the Web from his dorm room at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Ben is a college junior, and journalism is not his major. But his Storify of the Occupy Wall Street raid reached tens of thousands of people and was embedded by the Washington Post.

"This is not actually my first Storify," he says, despite fun rumors to the contrary. "I was at Zuccotti Park about a month ago and happened to take a video that ended up getting on CNN, so this is kind of the second bizarre media day I've had in the last month."

Doernberg used Storify to track the reports of the media blackout. "I looked at Twitter around 1 o'clock, and everything was going insane," Doernberg says.

"By the time I decided to make a Storify, I had already read probably 100 tweets on this issue, so I tried to figure out what the overarching themes or the story seemed to be to me, and I went back through my memory of who tweeted what at what time." What resulted was a comprehensive document of tweets, links, photos and videos of instances of the NYPD suppressing the media presence in Zuccotti Park. The Washington Post ran it, and the post has been viewed more than 20,000 times.

The 99% Media

The founders of Storify couldn't be more delighted that students are making headlines using their platform. The day after the raid on Zuccotti Park, Storify shared two student stories from the raid on its blog. Doernberg's was one. The other was by Columbia journalism grad student XinHui Lim, whose Storify post captured the grisly details from the ground and included embedded live-streamed video. At one point in the night, that amateur video stream had 23,000 viewers.

Damman says this is the perfect demonstration of the Storify redesign. These social media documents are the real story, and the NYPD's obstruction of credentialed journalists only shows how out of touch the police are. "The police in New York don't realize that it doesn't matter to not have journalists on the scene," Damman says, "because everybody is a reporter. What happened last night shows that they don't get that."

"Most of the content comes from the people on the ground, from the 99%."

Herman agrees that Monday's events prove that the distinction between legacy media and new media is no longer important. During the raid, journalists became sources, regular people became journalists, and they traded places with each other throughout the night. It's all one medium now. "Let's not spite the Internet," Herman says. "Let's let the Internet be what it is."

The Gatekeepers

The NYPD's censorship efforts were thwarted by smartphones, Web technology and good, old-fashioned gumption. But authorities are working hard around the country to block journalists from covering the Occupation. Twenty six reporters have been arrested so far, ten of them in Zuccotti Park on Monday night.

Fortunately, those incidents are being captured on Storify, too, and the curator wants to make sure the free press is protected.

Josh Stearns, Associate Program Director at Free Press, has been storifying journalist arrests at Occupy protests since September. He's using Storify as a living page, updating each time another journalist is arrested. You can help him by sending tips and tweets to @jcstearns.

Free Press is also holding a petition for their Save The News campaign urging New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to stop attacking freedom of the press.

Watching the Story Unfold

November 15 was a big night for journalist arrests, and Stearns was watching Twitter closely. "I think of Twitter as the place where I watch the story unfold," Stearns says, "but then I often look to a place like Storify or an article or liveblog where there's somebody intentionally trying to contextualize and weave things together."

One of the things Stearns struggled with during Monday's raids was "that reports were coming in at all different times. Trying to piece together when something happened" was a challenge, since both the events and tweets about the events were displaced in time.

"Twitter's so great for seeing the story unfold, but I think there's a lot of awesome work that can be done in contextualizing it." That's where Storify comes in. "I think Storify is a very flexible tool, being able to do that kind of rapid reporting or to bear witness over time."

Media Symbiosis

Stearns was impressed with Doernberg's work Monday night and how Storify enabled it. "His Storify wouldn't have been possible without people on the ground, and people on the ground weren't able to get their story out until his Storify collected those from all over the place and broadcasted it, and that story got into the Washington Post."

Storify provides the bridge between legacy and new media in situations like this. "I think there's really nice symbiosis between the two," Stearns says. "I think that's one thing Storify has done really well, positioning itself within a new media realm but making new media approachable for traditional organizations."

The Gatekeepers Are Changing

But legacy institutions aren't weathering the transition well. The Associated Press came down hard on its staff for tweeting too eagerly about their arrests in an email that feels awfully shy about new media participation. It warns AP reporters not to get "caught in the moment."

 

"If we're having people who are non-traditional journalists doing critical reporting, and they're getting thrown in jail because they don't have the right press credentials, we need to figure that out."

And law enforcement agencies seem to have little conscience about arresting journalists, even ones who are waving press credentials at them. Doernberg's Storifycaptures two police officers replying "not tonight" and "don't care" to protestations by journalists.

 

For Stearns, the important question is why. "The question becomes, were [the police] effective only to the point because they were only paying attention to one kind of media? And what was the intention behind that?"

"Why was there the decision to have a media blackout? Why were helicopters grounded? Why were journalists kept to the edges? If we ask those 'why' questions, and it turns out there was actual intentionality behind it, then that's profoundly troubling." If the police are really concerned about any message getting out at all, Stearns worries, they will learn to adapt to new media eventually.

Adapting To The New Reality

For some law enforcement agencies, that adaptation is already underway. "We've heard about Occupy protests around the country where they do strobe lights that actually blind camera phones and other kinds of cameras. Or things like the BART stations in San Francisco shutting down the cell networks when the protests come in."

Law enforcement isn't the only force that threatens freedom of the press. The technology companies who make the devices used by citizen journalists are a bottleneck for what kinds of reporting are possible. And many of the big ones have shown a disturbing willingness to comply with authorities.

"Whether it's Amazon taking down all of WikiLeaks that was stored on their cloud servers because Senator Joe Lieberman asked them to," Stearns recounts, "or whether it's Apple and their patent for the camera [that blocks recording in designated areas], or Verizon blocking NARAL text messages, regardless of what issue it is, as the platforms change, the gatekeepers are changing."

Taking Back The Media

Stearns sees hope in the way Storify and social media platforms have broken the police barricades around the media. "The one thing I think is really encouraging is that people are actually feeling ownership of their media," Stearns says. "People feel like, 'This is my phone. I'm creating my media on this.' People want to take back the media."

This is what the Storify founders have in mind. "This is a chance to create this whole new form of news," Herman says. Storify held a gathering called Occupy The News at its San Francisco headquarters on November 7, where career journalists from a range of publications came together to discuss the possibilities of new media. You can soak in their insights - where else - on Storify.

A tumultuous time like ours is ripe for a disruption of the ways in which we capture our stories and work toward the truth. The gatekeepers are changing, but the media are changing faster. There have never been more ways to experiment with information. Thanks to platforms like smartphones, Twitter and Storify, the barriers to participation are vanishing.

You can see all Storify posts about the Occupation on the occupy topic page.

Check out our guide on How To Curate Conversations With Storify.

Sign the petition to Save The News.

Have you ever used Storify? Share your posts in the comments.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/12/27/redux_how_storifying_occupy_wall_street_saved_the_news http://readwrite.com/2011/12/27/redux_how_storifying_occupy_wall_street_saved_the_news 2011 Redux Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:12:00 -0800 Jon Mitchell Hinds Hall, Syracuse University campus, 2:48 am ET November 11 - Three in the morning is a magical time. There's a certain weightlessness about 3 am, when you're up all night working on a huge project, after midnight has hurdled you into the great unknown, when you realize you're reaching maximum altitude and every action seems effortless. Inertia seems to carry you forward, and for a few moments, it's as though your body were floating in front of you.

From the point of view of 3 am, everything seems equalized. The pressure subsides, a new rhythm enters your head, and only tomorrow exists. For the students cranking away at the MLB.com University Challenge, there's no question any more about which way to go. That decision was already made, the booster stage has already blasted off, and from here until the rest of the project, they'll be feeling more and more like passengers.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Team "Winston" is now committed to a Flash-based interactive mockup of its "game within a game." They've moved from one of the conference rooms to one of the open iLabs, where each terminal has dual monitors, the air circulates a little more, and there's the sound of other students in the hallways to keep you from feeling you're in a cavern.

Ross is driving "Winston's" vision with his trademark laser-like precision and intensity. You get the feeling that, if he were your younger brother, he'd still be badgering you like your older one.

Elsewhere in the iLabs, the "Web Gems" have hit upon an HTML5 motif. They've seen some impressive demos of layering, where separate elements can scroll at different speeds, creating a Disney-like rotoscoping effect.

Right now, they're scrolling everything they can find, and they're raiding the Web for photos. What they don't have in mind quite yet is an application for their vision, but they know they have a technology and they're storing up the energy to drive it. Which makes "Web Gems" like a great many Silicon Valley startups.

"The Walkoffs" have the most experienced talent in the game: two of them graduate students, one of them a senior majoring in aerospace engineering, one a senior majoring in architecture. And Reynaldo, the only sophomore, is the expert on the Android SDK. Chris, a library science major, is a JavaScript expert. His vision is to create a fully working mockup, not using Flash, but real events captured by the browser, processed, then rendered using jQuery.

Like a battle cry for the ages, Chris has emblazoned along the top of the whiteboard in his cramped lab room, "Flash is dead!" You can see the remnants of impromptu lectures he's been giving on JavaScript events architecture. He's teaching Deven, a computer science major but not yet the jQuery expert, how the jQuery syntax simplifies itself by chaining new methods onto the end of the results of earlier ones. The trick they're working on at the moment, apparently, is knowing the variable type of the returned value before passing it to the next method.

It's not the type of subject matter that keeps Deven's eyes from glazing over at 3:30. He's starting to switch to autopilot mode, as they engage the help of Reynaldo's Droid phone, which is hooked up via USB cable. They're trying to find which events fire at what times, so they can chain the events to one another in jQuery in the right order. This way, if they're successful, they might be the only team to show their real-world mockup not on an SDK, but with an actual, live smartphone demo.

They're not seeing the results they're looking for, and they're starting to blame the Android operating system. There's too many simultaneous versions, Chris notes, so some phones may fire events that are recognized by jQuery 1.7, and some won't. That's a problem in the end, because Chris wants believability. He doesn't want to say his team's demo can do something, if it can't work on a Droid.

"Rubin's Army" is spinning out. They've abandoned their previous ideas, and now they're scanning through the history page of the existing MLB.com in search of clues for where to go now. Their palms are telling them the only place they'd really like to go contains pillows.

"SRFA" is made up of management and entrepreneurship majors, who also happen to be dedicated console gamers. They know the Asian games market as well as, if not better than, the U.S. market. And German (pronounced "H-herr-mann," he tells me, with Ricardo Montalban's accent) has hit upon a market need he'd like to fill: There's no franchise game for smartphones in the U.S. based on Major League Baseball. Ironically, there is one in South Korea, and it's a huge hit.

From German's perspective, it's a no-brainer: Obviously the MLB franchise needs a smartphone game. So instead of writing one, think like a businessman, he proposes. Buy the two existing games that are already written and already supported. Merge the best parts of both into a single unit, and market it as "MLB: Challenge." Launch it online with a downloadable component at a low $5 price point.

It would solve the problem of having to create a mockup, German reasons, as he begins listing the reasons for doing it on the whiteboard he is now the unchallenged master of. Why mock up something that's already a huge hit? There is the problem of tying it in with the MLB.com Web site, the others point out. Don't focus on it as a problem, German posits like a marketing specialist, but recast it as a solution. MLB.com doesn't have a smartphone game. That's a market void. Here's something to fill it. Bam.

For some reason, it's hard to sit through marketing jargon when the clock on the wall says 4 am. Funny, but at 3 am, the world seemed so effortless. Now all of a sudden, "vertical" is a direction that takes many opposing angles at once. And horizontal is starting to look like the best one of all.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/12/27/redux_mlbcom_challenge_4th_inning_the_point_of_no_return http://readwrite.com/2011/12/27/redux_mlbcom_challenge_4th_inning_the_point_of_no_return 2011 Redux Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:00:00 -0800 Scott M. Fulton For all the wonders of Apple's iPad, one feature that's always been a little underwhelming is its native Web browser. Like on the iPhone, Safari for the iPad definitely gets the job done and is overall a pretty solid browser in terms of performance, but there are few features that are inexcusably absent.

Fortunately, there have been a number of third party browsers that have made their way into the App Store. Atomic Browser and Opera Mini are both very popular, streamlined browsers that support tabbed browsing. Skyfire offers rich social integration and can even play Flash videos. The newest entrant into this space is Dolphin HD, a tablet-optimized version of the popular Android browser, which just launched for iPhone a few weeks ago.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

While none of these third options universally blows Safari out of the water (for most users anyway), there are a number of things that each one does very well and that Apple would be wise to make note of.

1. The Web is Social Now. Make Sharing Easy.

By far the most shocking limitation of Safari for iPad is its lack of native social sharing options. Tapping the "share" icon next to the URL bar reveals four options: bookmark it, add it to the home screen, email a link or print it. That's right, Apple has made it easier to share Web content on paper than via Twitter or Facebook.

This may well improve with iOS 5, but for the time being the process of sharing a link on Twitter from the iPad looks something like this:

1. Double-tap the URL.
2. Tap "Select All" (or, more likely, be forced to drag the text selection tool manually).
3. Hit "Copy".
4. Minimize Safari.
5. Open Twitter or your Twitter iPad app of choice.
6. Write a clever tweet.
7. Paste the URL.
8. Shorten the URL.
9. Post the tweet.

On the desktop, sharing any page via Twitter is a much simpler process, especially with tools like the Bit.ly sidebar bookmarklet or Hootsuite's hootlet.

The Web itself is a very social place now, with sharing tools for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and all the rest woven throughout many pages, especially on content-heavy sites. But users also need simple, browser-level tools for easily sharing pages on social networks. The "social magazine" apps like Flipboard and Pulse do a wonderful job of this.

For an example of how a tablet browser can nail social features, look no further than Skyfire. The browser gives prominent placement to social sharing buttons across the bottom of the app, and even includes a universal "Like" button for Facebook. It can also send content straight to InstaPaper without the need for workarounds. Dolphin HD for iPad is another browser that makes sharing easy, although it's limited to Facebook and Twitter.

The next version of iOS is going to have deep integration with Twitter, so we can probably expect to see improvements in this area as far as Twitter is concerned. Hopefully other social networks will get baked into Safari in due time.

2. Tabbed Browsing is the Norm (To Be Fair: Coming Soon!)

Yes, we know this one is a little unfair, but we had to get it out of the way. When iOS 5 is publicly released this Fall, Safari will finally have tabbed browsing. This is something that many users have been clamoring for since the iPad first launched, and we understand why. Desktop browser have had tabs for years now.

Granted, the processing power on a tablet is not quite the same as a desktop computer, and stability is important. Those of us who keep dozens of browser tabs open all day would probably be more frustrated with a crashing browser than with its lack of tabs. But a few third party iPad browsers have successfully implemented tabbed browsing, even if their performance isn't always quite as good as Safari's. Dolphin and Terra are two of the more popular third party browsers that include tabs.

3. RSS Feeds Were Meant to Be Subscribed To

RSS may not have reached mainstream status, but lots of people use it and it's very important to how content is consumed online. Thus, you'd think that Safari for iPad would know what to do when it encounters an RSS feed on a Web page. In some cases, it does. For example, if the feed is hosted on Feedburner, that service's usual feed landing page displays and you can subscribe in your feedreader of choice. But if it's a plain RSS feed, Safari will simply display a page containing its title and recent items. Yes, you can bookmark that page and check it later and there may well be other workarounds to enable RSS subscriptions, but they are exactly that: workarounds.

Dolphin includes an "RSS Subscribe" button on any page that offers a feed. This is a feature that should be built directly into any modern Web browser, regardless of the device it's running on.

4. Take Better Advantage of Multitouch

One of the most celebrated features of iOS is its use of multitouch for user interactivity, which has been used to create some truly neat user experiences in various apps. Surprisingly, the Safari browser doesn't take as much advantage of this as it could. In addition to the pinching and zooming necessary to scale Web pages up and down, the browser could easily utilize multi-finger swipes to the left and right to advance pages, for example. Just as the browser window scrolls up and down, similar gestures could be used to navigate between pages.

Terra uses sideways swipe gestures to jump from tab to tab. Perhaps in a future version of Safari, a two-finger swipe to the left would skip to the previous page, while a three-finger swipe would jump to the next tab.

Taking things a step further is the Dolphin browser, which uses custom gestures to navigate the Web. Users can define their own gestures to call up certain bookmarked pages.

5. Better Download Management

Another feature that's standard on the desktop but hasn't quite made its way into the mobile versions of Safari is download management. The browser renders standards-compliant Web pages beautifully and even handles PDFs and certain other filetypes well. When you encounter files that don't naturally render in a Web browser, Safari gives you the option to try opening the file in another application, but there's no central repository from which to manage those downloads.

Dolphin handles this quite nicely. It keeps a "Downloads" list of every file you've downloaded from the Web and gives you the option to open in Dropbox (if you have it installed) or whatever app would be most suitable.

A Few Other Things We'd Like to See

Some other features we've seen in third party iPad browsers that we wish Safari had are fullscreen page viewing, the ability to clear data from within the browser (in Safari, you have to go to the device's settings to wipe history, cookies and cache), a "speed dial" feature similar to the one seen in Dolphin in Opera. This is just a tiled home screen that lets you jump straight to your favorite sites without having to dig through bookmarks.

Of course, a few lessons can be drawn from desktop browsers as well. The ability to install browser add-ons and plugins to extend its functionality would be a dream come true. Most modern desktop browsers support this and its a great way to customize the browsing experience. In addition to full-blown extensions, an easy way to add simple bookmarklets to the browser would help users take better advantage of the Web's capabilities when using their tablets.

See Also: ReadWriteWeb's roundup of the best third party browsers for Android.

Are there any features you'd like to see in future versions of Safari for iPad? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/12/27/redux_5_things_apple_can_learn_from_third_party_ipad_web http://readwrite.com/2011/12/27/redux_5_things_apple_can_learn_from_third_party_ipad_web 2011 Redux Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0800 John Paul Titlow Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing, using everything from basic feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then has grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to HTML5. Facebook's creed, really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once, run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.

Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Fetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got where it is now and how it will iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

What is below is a direct transcript with photos from Fetterman's f8 presentation. A few things to note:

Facebook mobile has its backbone in its mobile website. Everything that is built into the native applications actually comes from the mobile Web. Think of the way PhoneGap wraps a browser-based website and that is how Facebook approached the problem. And then some.

HTML5 is the future. The fourth page gets into how all of this history is leading Facebook to a precipice of change with HTML5 and the so-called Project Spartan.

Also note that Fetterman talks fast and occasionally swears. He is the classic Facebook engineer: kind of young, pretty brash and supremely confident. The transcript is as true to his actual words as possible.

Changing Mobile Standards Through The Past Five Years

We took an extreme HTML-based approach to this. So we will go into how we do this so you can learn how HTML5 is the way out of a lot of these problems.

Because, it wasn't really always this way for us. We have had the same mobile problems that you guys have. We are following the same mobile ecosystem that you guys are following to develop for your users.

So, we have the same problems of cross-platform development that you have and we are hoping that you can learn a little bit from us. So, we have been learning to deal with these issues with what we call "FaceWeb" and learning a new opportunity to get out of this that is emerging as we speak called HTML5.

So, in 2006, building a mobile presence meant that you had a WAP deck that was based on an HTML application with SMS and all of that. But, as you all know, mobile changed fundamentally in 2007. What happened then?

[Crowd] - The iPhone.

The iPhone! Great. What else happened in 2007, perhaps unveiling in the room that you are sitting in right now?

[Crowd] - The Platform.

Yes, the Facebook Platform API. So, what changed for us is that we had to develop a second user experience for the iPhone. A computer in your pocket that no longer sucked. So, it could have Javascript, a CSS and a really rich interaction model. In addition there was Facebook for BlackBerry, Facebook for Windows phone, for Nokia, for Samsung, for everyone now available through the Facebook API.

How about 2008? What was the big thing that happened in 2008?

[Crowd] - Ummm ... Android?

I will pretend that I heard the iPhone App Store. What most developers don't realize is that the first version of the iPhone, you could build websites but the App Store was not available to later. So, in 2008, the App Store enables us to build Facebook for iPhone. The flagship, the vanguard, the best substantiation of Facebook. Based off the API, the same way that you guys are building apps off the API now.

In 2009, what changed in 2009?

[Crowd] Ummm ... Android?

Android, yes. I will pretend that I heard Android. Android was the new player in 2009 and really started taking off. So, all of a sudden we have all of these users on all these devices using Facebook mobile in the wide rainbow of lovely different experiences across Android, iPhone, Windows, the Web. That was great from a user perspective. What sucks? The environment for my developers, essentially. You have the bad old days. You have four different platforms to build for something essentially. You want to build for all of those groups? You are going to have to build the sucker four times. Then there are all of the features - groups, deals, the new profile. All of this stuff and the matrix got really bad. So, we have to build things four times which means that the code gets slow. The code gets old. There are different versions of parity and things just don't work together which makes it extremely difficult for a fast moving company like Facebook.

Next page: Fetterman describes how Facebook reconciled M.Sites and Touch

How To Not Write The Same Functionality Four Times

So, how do we solve this problem? If we have any shot at solving this problem of building things four times ... if you want to build it once, the Web is probably your best shot. So, back in the day we said that we have two websites, right? We have touch.facebook.com and we have m.facebook.com. Different complete docket roots and who decided what is was going to be, where you are going to go based on your phone? Well, it wasn't that complicated. If you were a Webkit phone, you basically redirected towards touch, if you didn't, you got M. If you had CSS, hey, we could throw that in there, no charge, no problem. So, have had this guess and redirect sort of approach to the Web.

That doesn't really solve the problem of everyone having and optimized experience for their phone. Even things like inline images inside the screen, across CSS and versions, that is really problematic when you that those to my right are saved, those to my left are damned. That is the way it is going to work. So, if we had any chance of unifying these two groups and building something once for the mobile Web, we had to solve this problem.

So, what do we need to do? WebKit wasn't enough, we had to have a better level of granularity. What is the difference between a Javascript enabled mobile website from a non-Javascript enabled mobile website? Really, Javascript is there to enable certain types of display and certain type of interaction, primarily AJAX. But, when you think about the controller --- what is Groups? What is the news feed? What is Message? Those are kind of the same thing and they really don't have to be written twice. So back in the day you had to use inefficient solutions like NetBiscuits which were opaque. You could do some XSL post-processing but you can't post-process your way to good Javascript, it doesn't work. With Webkit you started to get poly-fills and modernizer and all this great stuff. But, you actually needed a way to write your code once.

Progressive Enhancement

Here is what we did.

The cornerstone of this is detecting what your phone is going to be able to do. Capabilities, then you can start the right experience. You guys heard of WURFL at all? Wireless Universal Resource File? This is one of the projects out there that attempts to map a user to a user-agent set of capabilities. You know, what is your screen size? What is your JS? Can it do cookies? These are all pernicious, nasty problems that need to be solved. And the use-agent, as you guys can tell, doesn't do the job. So, you need an open database for manufacturers and concerned citizens to be able to tell you what is up. We sponsored this project and this project is continuing to evolve as an open source data site.

So, once you have these capabilities you actually have to figure out what to do with these. A button on Facebook isn't just like it is HTML or this block of Javascript or something. What you want for the homepage is to have your composers render a button that does something. So, you guys say what we really want is a button. You guys figure internally what should be rendering. If it is a low-end phone maybe it is just straight up post form. It if it is a mid-range phone with CSS, maybe you could layer CSS on there. But if it is a high-end phone you really want an AJAX style experience. So, this technique was pioneered by somebody like Yahoo blueprint. So, instead of saying at the top level that this is going to be a good site and this is going to be a low-end site, each component inside that declarative markup that renders the display will decide what it is able to do. And they compose together to form the ideal experience for that phone. This technique is called progressive enhancement.

So, this actually got us to the point where we were able to write once and run anywhere across the Web. And, you know, the Web seems doable. You can do that on your desktop browsers already. Mobile is getting to the point where you actually can do this using a system like this. But, you guys are probably bored about hearing about the Web, despite the fact that an iPhone user and Android user, whoever, can go use a mobile website competently because they all have good browsers, everyone wants an iPhone feature.

So, we were able to eliminate on of our four stacks and get to the point where we had three and that is great. But, of course, everyone wants and iPhone feature. They want their stuff to look like and iPhone, to perform like an iPhone, to feel like an iPhone, all of that. So, we could write it in Objective-C, which we had to do, or we could think about this. Right, so, what about the Facebook news feed is really iPhone-y? You have the top, you have the fixed header, you have it to render directly from cache, all that great stuff. But really, if you look at the content of the publication, that looks a whole lot like a m.site news feed. There is not really that much that is different, there is nothing that special about any particular stack. So, that means that you have to write it three times to do exactly the same shit.

Crazier Than You Guys Can Imagine

So, what if we put the actual browser inside the app? That is the crazy idea. The way we did this was even crazier than you guys might imagine. So, there are a few phones, what browser is going to be able to work for all these phones? Well, three of them have pretty good WebKit implementations. So, we thought, what if we put a Webkit enabled site inside the app and just straight up make that thing work? Just, forget it, we will figure out how to make that thing work.

So, this is actually pretty crazy. This isn't just building Javascript that runs on the client and uses the back end as a data portal. We are actually straight up injecting the site inside these apps. Not quite as simple as getting a UI Web view or whatever. You have to have some interactivity between that Web view and the container but what if we could just straight up use the site? It is almost the same thing, right? So, this is what we did and it is kind of insane.

So, I want to tell you what we learned from this. Of course, unifying the site into the content containers is difficult and something that we would have to overcome but, betting on the browser is just kind of something that we do at Facebook. It is what we are good at and it is our ultimate opportunity to move fast and we are betting hard on the Web because that is what got us here (f8) today. So, we basically want to put the browser inside the Facebook for iPhone app.

Iterate Daily

So, what doe this get us? It means that you can ship daily. You do not have to wait for an app store approval, which sucks, and you don't have to wait for every user to download this version on the binary which has to be shipped over into their phone. That sucks. You can ship every day. You can break it every day, but you can ship every day.

You can ship it in easy language too. Your Web development team, you iPhone team and your Android team don't have to be separate. They are all the same people, they are all solving the same problem. And you can ship once instead of having to ship four times.

So, how does this work? Project FaceWeb is an extension of this progressive enhancement idea. So, instead of the phone saying I am rendering for a WebKit browser, we send an agent that says you are going to be rendering for a WebKit UI WebKit view inside the iPhone app. So, what you have to do is detect that, style a Web code to make that work, build a bridge between the things that you want to write to interact natively with the Objective-C, say in Javascript, then build HTML pages for Facebok in the iPhone. So, you build much smaller native goop instead of having to build over and over again.

The Answer: Wrap Facebook Mobile Inside the Native App

So, how does this technically work? Essentially the user hits the news feed icon on their iPhone. If this thing is enabled for this FaceWeb technology, it won't map to a native Web controller, it will instead map to some end point on our server that literally says serves up m.facebook.com/home.php. It can't just jam that thing in there. It can't just have the Web view. You actually have to know how it is going to be interacting with the Objective-C. So, you have to send back a JS skeleton which specifies the "platform extraction calls layer" required for that frame. Then you make another trip and load the home.php and the Javascript.

It is a bit of extra work and that does affect some things. But, what that means is that we can write a basic m.facebook.com site and use Javascript to make it work on great phones and use this abstraction layer to interpret Javascript when applicable to do native things like say open the camera for something like the iPhone application.

So, what kinds of things have to go across this bridge? Obvious things like sensors and data. If you want to get your GPS, your accelerometer or orientation lock or some of these things, some are available in HTML5 but a lot of them aren't. So, you have to be able to make some of these sensor-esque answer queries. Depending on the display and how aggressive you want to be, you have to be able to render things look like iPhone. Look like Android. And, you can't do those things just with the browser. You could in theory do this with JS but to look exactly the same you are going to have to use a native call. And additionally, there are elements to Facebook for iPhone that we don't really want to move to HTML. For instance, the camera flow. You open up the camera, you take a picture, you put it in your album or you select something from your gallery and caption it and upload it. That is a lot to do in a browser but it is easy to do in native. So, if you want to deep dive into any existing native flows, that is a bridge we are going to have to cross as well.

Sticky Points: Web v. Native Design and Design

PhoneGap has already solved this first problem actually pretty well across even more than just the iPhone. The common problems that you will run into if you do this is; one -- objection, it doesn't look native. Second one is that it is not going to feel native and third is that it isn't fast enough. Here is what we found for each of these things.

The initial mandate was, hey, you guys want to do this thing in HTML, fine, I don't want to be able to tell the difference between Objective-C rendered news feed and HTML rendered news feed. This actually didn't end up being a big problem in terms of visuals. The Web and the app actually work pretty well together. When we shipped this to users there wasn't any complaint except for one that I thought was pretty funny.

There was an iPad "app" for Facebook that was friendly for Facebook, It just simply wrapped the m.site. Some users said, hey, Facebook is copying the app that wraps its m.site as part of its Facebook for iPhone application. Which we were because we were actually just using our m.site and that was great. So, the fact that it doesn't look native, we don't actually have a big problem with that one.

Still, there are some things that you have to look out for. Position fix and overflow scroll were obviously a big problem. Android 2.1 and below, no chance. (Android) 2.2, it is starting to work and iOS 5, thank god, has promised to implement all this stuff. So, you guys are in a better position now to start down this road than you would have been 10 months ago. CSS regradients are a problem, images are a problem and [there are a couple of more gotchas].

Web v. Native Feel: Scrolling

Another problem is that it doesn't feel native and almost always this means scrolling. It doesn't really mean, hey, I want to swipe to delete. That is like, pfft, who cares? Almost always it is going to be something about interactivity and scrolling. Something that the native code does really well by using the GPU and like pipelining all that shit but it is something that it really hard to do in HTML. So, when people say that it doesn't feel native, they are going to be talking about scrolling.

Sometimes you do have implement scrolling. iScroll works pretty well, Hewitts is working on a library that is pretty good. So, you kind of have to defer to a good JS scrolling library. And, make sure you do things like resize your images because was once the responsibility of the GPU is now the responsibility of the browser. And, there are all these little things that just aren't documented, like the keyboard showing up and not closing on Android and iPhone. There are just a lot of little things that are baked into the system that are getting fixed.

The Issue Of Speed

The final one and this is the real bad one is that it just isn't fast enough. If you see a slowdown in your Facebook for iPhone application, it means that we are working through just how to make an HTML-based application work for Facebook for iPhone and it has been pretty hard.

So, tactic one is obviously pre-cache the hell out of this thing. If you render a news feed, start and going to get the content for all of those stories because when the user hits that, you want to have the content ready for them. Cache your Web views. If that doesn't work, the best thing that you can do is to just trick your users. At least have content appear to be ready. Fill out the rendered skeleton and then put in that cached content and then beneath, go get your new content. At least users will feel that there is something there because that is usually what their initial response is. A white screen is just not going to cut it.

So, gotchas in PERF means that you are going to use a lot of JS. You are no longer just loading data, you are loading pre-rendered markup, which is a lot more expensive. And things like HTTP cache and the app cache, they say they work within UI Web views but often they don't. So, you have to be really careful about promises that are made here.

Taking The Approach Everywhere

But, this worked well enough that we said we are going to put the Android app on this party train too. So, we were actually able to write something like the m.site news feed once. Any time you change a news feed story or add a news feed story or add commenting and Liking or whatever, that is going to show up on low-end m.site, high-end m.site, Facebook for iPhone and Facebook for Android the very next day, or whenever we push, which is actually pretty awesome.

So, we did do this. Now we have elements of the Facebook experience, the browser running inside everything. Especially the most volatile stuff, the stuff that relies least on a certain type of display, the stuff that is going to be evolving and changing so much, like the news feed or your profile timeline, we are doing this straight in HTML. That is where the maximum benefit is.

Next Page: How HTML5 Is Leading Facebook In A New Direction

How It Has Evolved: Heading to HTML5

So, what is the history of this? So, for iOS 3.4 and 3.5 we actually did this. Your news feed and your profile feed are actually being sourced from the m.site. So, that means if the m.site changes and adds a feature, you guys get it. If the m.site is broken, it breaks everything. There are positives and negatives there. To be launched in iOS 4.0, requests, notifications and search, this list-style content that doesn't require very specific native access, that is going to be based on FaceWeb as well. Android 1.6 and 1.7 follow the same suit. The feedback and the design have been pretty great but the bugs have been pretty crappy though. Because when you version your Javascript and things go wrong, you are tying your future to the actual Web working perfectly all the time which is something that we obviously move fast on very often.

So, the mission is to operate from one code base and adapt to all the browsers in the world. This sounds like something that Facebook would say, this is actually part of the HTML5 battle flag.

HTML5 is probably the way that we should have done it. This is the way we get to do it now because HTML5 has changed so much under our feet. The initial attempt at building a hybrid application, there were certain things in HTML5 that weren't ready yet and we said forget it, we are going to keep moving forward. The initial attempt to defer certain things to native rendering and native handling that really could be better handled by something like HTML5 and with in-browser technology - device access, good native frameworks and application and display code.

What has changed between then and now that we can take advantage of and that you guys can, who are going to be starting down this hybrid path, might be able to take advantage of in the near term?

Device Access

So, device access. Simple things like getting things that are privileged inside the device. Geo-location, network connectivity, obviously very big for caching, things like your camera and your contacts, what has changed? Well, geo-location has actually been pretty good for a while. This could certainly be HTML5 and that is what we use inside out m.facebook.com based Places and Deals stuff. Network connectivity is emerging and that is getting to the point where you can rely on newer browsers to do it via HTML5. Camera and contacts, because those are so wildly different, a lot of those things are still specified. But, if you want to look at a general list and start by asking the system for a response and getting an answer back, PhoneGap.com actually has a lot of this stuff and they have been able to this poly-fill to make a lot of this work. So, this is the easiest problem but it is the furthest along towards getting solved, especially since we have started working on this hybrid application.

History

There are certain development frameworks that are native. Being able to manage your history, it's weird. Because your history inside a native stack is very different from a browser history. Browsers are very idiosyncratic about how they handle history and it is a very different model. History management, client-side storage is obviously the big one and threading. With threading, if you guys have developed in iOS, you know there are certain things that you have to respect. That is true in Javascript as well. So, you need a good way to figure out how to get other threads to do your work and get it in a cross-platform way.

HTML5 is emerging standards to make all of this go away as well. History management, there is some good stuff in HTML5 coming. IndexDB and client-side storage is getting much better as well. Things like WebWorkers, if we did these things again, we would be able to do it in HTML5.

Can An App Be Built Now Using Only Web Technology?

Finally, I think the important thing is, could you build your app building straight up Web technologies? The actual Web technologies they are using, you are using. Scrolling, refresh, fast stuff, these are things that we had to defer to a native handler in an awkward way. But, scrolling, thank you to Apple and iOS 5 for promising that they are going to make scrolling, position fixed overflow scroll, this might be the problem of the past. Fixed position headers and good scrolling is a hallmark of what people have come to think of as a native application but it is a problem that can be solved by good JS now thanks to these new frameworks.

I think the most important takeaway is that the JS rendering engines have just gotten so much better in the past year and a half. V8 and Nitro have shown that you can build full-fledged, client-side JS applications instead of using Objective-C or Android Java and they will run and users will love them. Things like Netflix have done this very productively already.

So, the emergence and the investment of big browser manufacturers that are making really, really good JS stuff, which is finally paying off. And if you guys are just starting down this path, you will be surprised at just how much success I think that you could really have.

Move Things, Break Things, Fix Things Fast

So, we have been following what was available to us along the road for us since 2006 in Facebook mobile. If the best that we can do is XHTML, fine. If we have a really good browser that uses JS and CSS fine. If we can build and iPhone app and an Android app, that is great. But, what is changing beneath us now is actually the emergence of this HTML5 standards and browsers that implement these standards. Especially around device access and the ability to write apps entirely in Javascript. We have seen a lot of benefit to writing something in HTML. All of our developers are good at HTML. Only a few of them are really good at Objective-C and Android. We are able to make our Web developers the same as our client-side developers in some respects.

Being able to write it once today and ship it tomorrow? That is something that Facebook is really good at and that we love doing and that is at the center of being able to move fast. Move fast has an implicit third clause - move fast, break things, and fix things fast. That is very difficult to do if you have already shipped your binary to Apple or Android and they have to download another version of it.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/12/27/redux_how_facebook_mobile_was_designed_to_write_once_run http://readwrite.com/2011/12/27/redux_how_facebook_mobile_was_designed_to_write_once_run 2011 Redux Tue, 27 Dec 2011 07:00:00 -0800 Dan Rowinski