It was a simpler time on the internet in 2010, but early battles for corporate control were well underway. Net neutrality battles between ISPs and consumers/tech companies were raging, as were the anti-circumvention copyfights. But beyond those narrow battles, there was a broader war. Jonathon Zittrain warned of The Future […]
17 posts
This post is part of a series in which I am detailing my move away from centralized, proprietary network services. Previous posts in this series: email, feed reader, search. Finding a replacement for Google Calendar has been one of the most difficult steps so far in my degooglification process, but […]
This post is part of a series in which I am detailing my move away from centralized, proprietary network services. Previous posts in this series: email, feed reader. Of all Google services, you’d think the hardest to replace would be search. Yet, although search is critical for navigating the web, […]
This post is part of a series in which I am detailing my move away from centralized, proprietary network services. Previous posts in this series: email. Next to email, replacing Google Reader as my feed reader was relatively easy, though I’ve chosen to use the move as an opportunity to […]
I’ve begun to write about free (libre) network services, and the hazards of being a tenant on the web instead of a property owner. I began slowly moving away from Google in 2009, but I’ve accelerated that process since the launch of Google+. I thought I’d begin to share my […]
When the “Like” button was first introduced on Facebook, it was a useful alternative to leaving a comment, another way to show you were paying attention, but it crept from posts to comments and pages, and it now permeates every aspect of the Facebook experience and defines the entire ethos […]
There are many things I like about Google+, but, beyond being yet another proprietary social networking service, something just doesn’t sit well with me about Google’s primary purpose. Comments by Brad Horowitz that Google+ will be connected to everything Google are a good example of what concerns me: Google+ is […]
I’m increasingly critical of network services — software that you use on someone else’s server to do your own computing. We rely on computers more and more for our work, social lives, civic engagement, health, education and leisure, and more and more that means relying on networking services rather than […]
[This post originally appeared on Techdirt.] Seth Godin thinks Firefox is missing the point by launching new features in response to Google Chrome. He says the problem now is that “when your friends switch to Firefox, your life doesn’t get better.” Firefox needs to provide people with an incentive to […]