peaceoption.org

There are still some applications I use regularly that don’t have a Web equivalent: Outlook, the TopStyle HTML editor, and the Corel Paint Shop Pro imaging program, among a handful of others. The one thing all three of these programs have in common is that they were selected for me–by my boss.

(The company I worked for prior to my current employer used Lotus Notes, which is probably the only e-mail program in the world more proprietary than Outlook. Organizations must get some huge benefit from using these closed e-mail systems, because they sure make life difficult for users.)

I didn’t get far with my Linux experiment, but I’m not giving up on my dream of a simpler PC. I’m ready for the true network computer. Unfortunately, Web apps aren’t quite ready for me. More specifically, they’re not ready for my boss, though they appear to be getting closer every day.

Last year, I decided to give Linux a try. Everything was going well, until I started working for a company that uses Microsoft Outlook for e-mail. There’s simply no straightforward, reliable way to run Outlook on Linux. I tried Outlook Web Access, but the service strips code from HTML attachments, among other limitations.

Personally, I’m ready to go the Web-app-and-Netbook route. And as soon as I can say adios to the monster applications my work seems to require, I’ll give the always-online life a try. Wish me luck convincing my employer to join me.

Adoption of Web-based versions of PC applications has been slowed by the services’ limited features and performance compared to that of their desktop counterparts. Also, a dropped Internet link leaves you out in the cold.

Security of Web-based apps comes up short
Of course, from an IT perspective, the most serious shortcoming of Web-based applications is their perceived lack of security. In particular, Google doesn’t let you encrypt the data you store on the company’s servers. Zoho’s FAQ page states that the company will soon add a data-encryption option. Still, storing the organization’s data on somebody else’s servers can give system administrators nightmares.

Today, online services such as Zoho provide much of the functionality of various desktop apps, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Zoho also includes an offline component that lets you continue to work without a Web connection. Likewise, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Picasa, Wordpress, and more recently Gmail use Google Gears to allow offline access to your data in those services.

Do you really need all those programs on your hard drive?
It’s downright wasteful to have huge software applications collecting dust on PC hard drives. Take a look at the programs with shortcuts on your Start menu. I bet you haven’t opened half of them more than a handful of times in the last year, and a bunch you probably have used but once or not at all.

But which company, Martha? Which company?

“I’m not knocking Facebook. We use both Facebook and Twitter [at MSO]. They’re very different tools, and I personally don’t use Facebook. I prefer Twitter as a means of mass communication–it’s the Wal-Mart of the Internet.”

Her words, however, seem to have pained the Facebook fraternity.

The Wal-Mart of the Internet? Is that similar to “the Pulse of the Planet,” which is, according to hacked internal documents, one of the possible aims of the Twitter brand?

The other dippy stuff? Perhaps she means the throwing of sausages at each other or whatever it is Facebook people love to do. Or perhaps what irks her is people posting hundreds of pictures of their friend’s wedding in Tennessee. The one where the catering was terrible.

The Daily Beast quoted Facebook’s communications director, Brandee Barker as hoping that the culinary queen “finds more ways to use Facebook.”
Suddenly, the Beast’s Lloyd Grove had a second phone conversation with Stewart, in which she said:

After Bill Gates recently admitted that he had given up on Facebook because he couldn’t work out which of his friend requests came from friends and which from very sad people, another of the world’s great famous people has declared her Facebook unfriendliness.

“I just love it (Twitter) so much more than Facebook,” she told the Daily Beast.

Stewart claims she gets more bang per tweet. But why knock Facebook? It’s so homely, so friendly and so very inclusive of every possible political and social view, even frightfully repulsive ones.

She told the Beast: “They’re all going to be owned by the same company eventually.”

It seems Facebook's recipe is far too complex.

The stars are dancing away from Facebook. And it’s a quickstep.

(Credit: CC Art Comments/Flickr)

Stewart explained quite fully: “First of all, you don’t have to spend any time on it, and, second of all, you reach a lot more people. And I don’t have to ‘befriend’ and do all that other dippy stuff that they do on Facebook.”

While Stewart’s Twitter page is a sight to behold, I am extremely concerned that she may have happened upon some very inside information when she commented on the future of Facebook and Twitter.

Yes, Martha Stewart, perhaps one of the most iconic cooks, has decided that she is firmly in the Twitter camp and that Facebook just has to face her rejection.

The Defcon 17 press badge hides some nifty features.

(Credit:
Eddie Mize)

“It didn’t place, but it was neat,” Grand said. “They tested it on me (with only about five questions)…and it seemed to work. It was convincing.”

“Each year we push the limits of printed circuit board design techniques and try to show off devices and technologies attendees might not have seen before,” Joe “Kingpin” Grand, who has designed the Defcon badges for the past four years, said in an interview on Tuesday. “We are doing things on circuit boards now that clearly have never been done before.”

Photos: Defcon badge inspires hacks

Instead, they end up as collector’s items. Bidding on eBay for a Defcon 17 badge from last weekend had reached $81 on Tuesday with three days to go, while a 2007 badge was at $33.99.

The first place winner of the Defcon badge hacking contest went to Zoz Brooks, who has a Ph.D in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and was one of Grand’s co-stars on the Discovery Channel TV series “Prototype This.”

The second place winner of the Defcon badge hacking contest went to a group that created what they called a “Sound-Fearing Blimp.” They wrote custom software for the badges and hung three of them to the bottom of a toy blimp. Each badge measured the sound level coming from its microphone and set the speed of its individual drive motor accordingly, steering the blimp away from areas with greater noise levels. The badges were connected together to communicate between themselves.

For the second part of his project, Brooks modified a badge from last year’s Defcon to create a device that can help someone escape detection by infrared motion detection sensors that are temperature sensitive. He added a temperature sensor to the badge that indicates when the room is warm enough for someone to start moving so as not to trigger the motion sensor. A motor on the badge controls two foot-shaped pieces of plastic so that they move at the pace needed to evade detection–two inches per second, giving an indication of how slow someone’s feet need to move.

There are seven different types of badge for the different participants: Human, Press, Speaker, Vendor, Contests, Goon (security) and Uber, which is a highly coveted badge that winners of certain contests receive, giving them lifetime access to Defcon. Each type of badge has its own shape. Like a puzzle, they form an image when assembled all together.

Third place went to “Solder Guy,” who added a speaker and keypad and turned the badge into a multi-function dialer that in the vein of classic phone phreaking could be used for making free long distance calls as a blue box. “He didn’t demonstrate that part because technically it would be illegal,” Grand said.

Joe "Kingpin" Grand, the designer of the Defcon badges, wearing one of the highly coveted Uber badges that winners of certain contests are awarded that grants life-time access to Defcon. The art on the badge is by Eddie Mize.

While this year’s badge was designed as a sound-activated LED gadget, last year’s badge functioned as a TVBGone, able to remotely turn TVs off, as well as a file sharing device. They had an SD memory card so that badge holders could transmit files and receive them from other badges over infrared. In 2007, the LEDs scrolled a programmable message on the badge.

The badge also has a battery-saving feature and goes to sleep if the environment is quiet, waking occasionally to listen for sound before hibernating some more if it remains still.

Soldering wires to pins and pads

This year’s badge was the most sophisticated yet. It doesn’t just have a circuit board on it; it is the circuit board. It runs on a 3-volt battery and has a built-in microphone and a multicolored LED (red, green and blue) that reacts to sound by changing color and brightness and by blinking.

The Defcon badges and badge hacking contest, both highly anticipated at the conference each summer, not only give the hackers a mental challenge to figure out what the devices are capable of doing, but they serve as tools for participants to demonstrate their talent at coming up with innovative hacks.

The badges, which were manufactured in China and held up in U.S. Customs until shortly before the show started on Friday, include a Static Serial Bootloader that allow attendees to load on their own programs and firmware. All it requires is a simple connection to a PC and a terminal program, like HyperTerminal, to upload custom code, Grand said.

Hackers can wire three of the test points to the corresponding test points on other badges enabling a multi-badge communications interface for creating a network of badges that can blink in unison. If any badges are connected, the Human badge becomes the master and controls the LED output of all of them.

The design is slick and aesthetically pleasing and the badge itself is thin, light, and not bulky. The front has multiple layers of silk screen graphics.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

With the contest, Grand and other judges, including Defcon founder Jeff Moss, are looking for the most creative, unique or mischievous badge hacks and modifications that weren’t intended.

Most badges from conferences and trade shows end up in the trash. Not so the badges from the Defcon security show, which are stylized, mysterious, and highly customized electronics equipment designed to be hacked.

One of the more unusual of the 23 contest submissions was a badge as polygraph device. It used galvanic skin response and measured the heart rate to try to determine whether an individual was answering honestly or not to questions posed.

Grand, whose Grand Idea Studio develops and licenses electronic products, chose an MC56F8006 Digital Signal Controller manufactured by Motorola spin-off Freescale for the processing. He surrounded the chip with test points that provide access to interfaces on the chip.

He designed in some hidden features, as well. For instance, if a certain frequency of high-pitched sound–a 1,000 Hertz sine wave generated from a computer or
iPhone, say– is emitted near the microphone, the badge will blink a secret in Morse code. The message is the URL for a formerly secret Web site that has additional information on the badges.

The microphone picks up noises, such as conversation and music, and the LED pulses to it. The LED will even flash “SOS” in Morse code when the sound is extremely loud for a period of time–an eardrum protection feature that would surely be useful at the Defcon parties where loud Techno music is the standard.

Brooks modified a hat into an anti-surveillance device by wiring up the brim with LEDs. When you turn on a device controlled by the badge all the lights blink at a certain frequency that generates enough optical noise to defeat facial recognition systems.

The microphone is not a recording device (as some suspected), but the badge can be modified to capture sound for playback. One hacker did just that by attaching an SD (Secure Digital) card reader to the back and modifying the code so it would store the microphone input, Grand said. That effectively turned the badge into a bug that could be used to eavesdrop on unsuspecting bystanders.

Second, SpringSource’s ubiquitous Spring Framework already threatened Red Hat’s booming JBoss business. But add VMware’s leading virtualization technology and suddenly Red Hat is under siege by a highly credible and disruptive competitor that could well outflank it.

The SpringSource + VMware vision

Johnson describes the offering:

(Credit:
SpringSource)

I’ve been writing a lot lately about SpringSource, largely because it has demonstrated a big vision (nothing less than the redefinition of the application server and an end-to-end application story), and so I wasn’t terribly surprised today to see VMware buy SpringSource for $420 million. On roughly $20 million in sales, much of that services, it’s a rich valuation, but one that is absolutely deserved given SpringSource’s potential.

Red Hat doesn’t. Red Hat is exposed by this VMware and SpringSource combination. It needs to become more aggressive.

Red Hat is, of course, taking a leadership role in virtualization and increasingly cloud computing. But it will need to quickly move beyond its dependence on its operating system business to sell a larger, strategic story or it faces the prospect of being an excellent, limited basic infrastructure vendor.

Indeed, I found out about the SpringSource acquisition back in July, apparently even before formal discussions started between the companies (due to a leaky source at VMware). SpringSource CEO Rob Bearden denied the existence of acquisition discussions between the two companies and Rod Johnson, the company’s founder and CEO, was on vacation at the time.

In fact, it’s almost certain that SpringSource sold too early, at least as measured the size of potential exits it could have had given a bit more time. Like Zimbra before it, SpringSource had unbounded potential to shake up the application server and development market.

Happy as Fenton is with the SpringSource acquisition, I wonder if he feels the same as he did about Zimbra. So much money left on the table.

Astute observers will notice that the operating system, Red Hat’s core competence, becomes increasingly less relevant in this world. Vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and others have less to fear from this threat, because they’re already building high-value solutions above the operating system.

I had hoped, however, that Red Hat would complement its JBoss business with SpringSource, but it’s not to be, and this doesn’t bode well for Red Hat, on two counts.

Here’s what it looks like:

I remember talking to Peter Fenton, partner with Benchmark Capital and an investor in both SpringSource and Zimbra. He indicated that the firm had made tremendous efforts to keep Zimbra from selling to Yahoo as it still had so much potential to build toward an even bigger valuation.

But in denying the rumors, Bearden, COO at SpringSource, suggested that given “one more year…(SpringSource) will be bigger than MySQL,” acquired by Sun for $1 billion.

I think Bearden was right. The company’s valuation has been soaring due to efficiently run operations (Bearden) and a big vision for the company’s prospects (Johnson and others). It was only a matter of time before it IPO’d or was acquired.

commentary

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a platform as a service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

First, with every acquisition of a leading open-source company by anyone other than Red Hat, Red Hat becomes more and more isolated. Other companies are integrating open source into their business strategies. Red Hat’s differentiation as “the” open source company doesn’t have much of a shelf life left.

Japanese design firm Flower Robotics has unveiled a new concept robot cell phone that moves around on two wheels and learns from user behavior.

The company, which is headed by designer and architect Tatsuya Matsui, isn’t too clear on what such advice would consist of. Presumably nuggets like, “You really shouldn’t kick me. Don’t kick me, OK?”

Flower Robotics says the device can collect data and pool it in a “Life Log.” It gathers info such as kilometers walked daily, online transactions, and e-mails sent and received. It then starts to predict user behavior and display relevant “advice and other information” on a user’s TV.

(Via Pink Tentacle)

Flower teamed up with telecom KDDI and its Iida line of products to create the device, dubbed Polaris. In the Japanese video below it looks like a cousin of the Sony Rolly MP3 player, but Polaris is more than just a pair of wheels and electronics.

Flower hopes to commercialize Polaris sometime next year, but there’s no word on a possible price.

(Credit:
Flower Robotics)

Polaris consists of a robot sphere and the phone itself. The sphere can autonomously dock with its charging unit. The phone gathers information about user behavior and sends it to the sphere, which displays the information on a TV screen. The phone can also serve as a TV remote control.

The lithium ion battery-powered sphere has infrared, image, and obstacle sensors, with a motion range of about 10 yards. At 6.6 pounds and 5 inches across, it’s designed to fit right next to a TV.

“Polaris ‘grows on you’ not only because of its physical charm but also because of the way its daily data collection causes it to develop its own personality, creating unique movements, sounds and light patterns,” the firm says.

On Tuesday, Welburn took the wraps off an entry-level Cadillac. Even designers at its GMC brand, known for its giant SUVs and trucks, have created a model of a compact, which roughly resembles a Nissan Cube.

WARREN, Mich.–For all the attention on the electric Chevy Volt, General Motors has big expectations for another key car segment: small cars.

Henderson said that GM is seeking to meet or exceed the industry benchmark on fuel efficiency not only to meet government mandates but to appeal to consumers who expect gasoline prices to continue going up.

Higher gasoline prices

During a tour of GM’s design studios on Tuesday, company executives showed the compact cars and smaller crossovers in its pipeline. Later this year, GM will release the Chevrolet Cruze, a four-door compact, and introduce a two-door compact, the Chevy Spark, in 2012.

The auto giant opened up its design studios and testing grounds to the media on Tuesday to showcase its product pipeline of 25 new models over the coming two years. Having dramatically cut costs, its turnaround now rides on its ability to sell new cars.

The Chevy Spark, one of GM's upcoming 'small and cool' cars.

“The days when we did a great Silverado (pickup truck) and did an adequate small
car–over. We can’t do that as a company,” CEO Fritz Henderson said during a press conference on Tuesday. “If we do (small cars) well, I think we’ll reopen ourselves to a market that frankly we haven’t done as well as we should.”

“The whole trend in the industry is towards smaller and fuel-efficient vehicles but the consumer still wants the amenities,” Virag said.

The smaller cars–none would qualify as a tiny, two-seater–will help the company meet fleet mileage mandates and help GM better compete on fuel efficiency, company executives and analysts said.

Meanwhile, its Buick lineup will feature a smaller crossover, a new compact sedan, and a plug-in hybrid crossover, which will all be available over the next two years.

GM has been able to get substantially better fuel efficiency on its large vehicles, too, noted Dennis Virag, the president of Automotive Consulting Group in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Chevy Equinox, for example, gets about 32 miles per gallon while most SUVs get about 20 or 22, he said.

“Cool and small is the next big thing,” said Welburn said. “Small cars have been done before but it was always like, ‘I can’t afford big so I have this.’ I believe small cars can be cool.”

“Our fundamental premise of planning for higher gas prices is the right premise,” he said.

(Credit:
General Motors)

Certainly, GM will continue to sell SUVs, trucks, and large sedans–highly profitable product categories that flourished when gasoline was cheaper than now. But GM’s designers have sharpened their focus on smaller fuel-efficient cars and crossovers, betting that rising gasoline prices are inevitable.

Corrected at 9:17 a.m. PDT:
The name of the maker of the Cube was incorrect. It is Nissan.

But GM’s vice president of global design, Ed Welburn, made clear that the goal isn’t just to turn out “econoboxes” that post good mileage ratings.

Although the Chevrolet entry-level brand will tend to have most of its compacts, even its higher-end brands–Buick, GMC, and Cadillac–will introduce or are exploring smaller models.

In Fast Flip, neither standard Web rules nor print layout concepts apply. For example, in Fast Flip, you can only scan left and right (page by page). You can’t read down the page. If you click anywhere on the page, you leave Fast Flip and go to the Web. Links don’t work. And multimedia doesn’t work on the page either. Fast Flip previews are, in fact, flat graphics files, which explains their lack of interactivity. On the mobile versions of Fast Flip, zooming in on a column is likely to leave you with text at a readable size but displayed on a column that’s too wide to read without scrolling back and forth, making the feature rather useless. Hey Google, wasn’t HTML invented for a reason?

Fast Flip is clearly an experiment, and as I said, if it gets more people to read online content, I’ll applaud it for that alone. But I’m not going to actually like it from a technical perspective, or as a user, until it gives publishers, designers, and readers more control over their content.

Fast Flip also displays Google ads alongside publisher content. I presume Google will share revenues with content providers, but this scheme does take control over advertising away from publishers.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Mind you, I’m not opposed to the creation of different ways to get people into stories. An old mantra in publishing is to provide “multiple entry points” for readers. If I get users to my pages from Fast Flip that I otherwise wouldn’t get, who am I to argue? But Web designers have spent the past 10 years building sites that work in browsers, and Fast Flip by its existence tries to tell publishers that there’s still life left in the old print-based, dead page model. I think we’ve moved beyond that.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Fast Flip is a good solution for putting a magazine or newspaper online, and it makes scanning even a more modern Web feed really fast. But it still feels forced. It’s an intermediate online format that gives you an experience that’s even more linear than a print publication, and it provides less overall context than you can get from a moderately well-design Web site.

Dozens of sites are participating in the Fast Flip experiment.

You can quickly flip forward or back through pages, or jump to a particular page by clicking on its thumbnail view.

See also: Zinio.

Google on Monday released an experimental new content browser called Fast Flip that makes it possible to see a curated set of content sites using a physical “turn the pages” metaphor. Fast Flip pages are cached by Google and load very quickly, which is cool. And if your brain is stuck in 1969 and you want to pretend that new-fangled computer in front of you is a microfilm reader, it’ll feel natural to use.

Here’s what I’d like to see instead: first, I agree with the Fast Flip designers that loading pages takes too long and that caching pages in a Web app is a good way to bring speed back to content browsing. But can we do it with real pages instead of static graphics? Second, the idea that there’s a recommended linear reading order of pages on a site is intriguing, even if the order is simply chronological. But I don’t think readers want to be locked in to that order. How about we give readers standard forward and back content navigation buttons (not browser forward and back) to take them through a site in addition to the hyperlinks they’re used to?

“To the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard,” Nack said. “We have reason to expect that all meaningful issues of running Photoshop CS3 under Snow Leopard have been resolved. However, because we have not done the level of testing that true certification demands, we need to stand by our statement that we don’t officially support CS3 on Snow Leopard.”

And another: “The lack of CS3 testing is very disturbing. It was one thing for Adobe not to release CS4 in 64 bit for the Mac. I understand that recompiling the program in a different language is a major undertaking. OK, I can wait for CS5. But now, in what can only be interpreted as an attempt to force an upgrade to a program that doesn’t even take advantage of the 64-bit programming in Snow Leopard, Adobe will not even test CS3 for Snow Leopard compatibility.”

Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack on Tuesday published Adobe’s FAQ about its Creative Suite support for Snow Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.6, that said the current CS4 version from October 2008 is the only one that’s supported. The comments quickly took on panicky and angry tones among people who thought their older CS3 version of the software wouldn’t work on the new operating system, so Nack followed up on Wednesday with a new post to clarify that CS3 would work, albeit with some caveats.

An Adobe Systems executive is trying to calm Photoshop users who were alarmed to hear an earlier but still widely used version of Photoshop isn’t supported on Snow Leopard, the new Apple operating system arriving Friday.

Wrote one commenter, “I understand that you don’t want to waste resources, but I plan on upgrading to Snow Leopard, but cannot afford a new version of CS. At this point, I will not be out growing this version for some time. PLEASE don’t leave thousands of us weekend warriors behind with version after version. True, the new tools are cool for the power users, but average folk just can’t keep up on price!!! HELP - please support CS3 for a little while longer!!!”

A. Older versions of Adobe creative software were not included in our testing efforts. While older Adobe and Macromedia applications may install and run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may therefore experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6).

“This isn’t some kind of ploy to force people to upgrade; rather, it’s a recognition that resources are not infinite, and we need to focus our efforts on current and future technology,” he said.

This is the statement in the FAQ that got people riled up:

The upgrade from to Photoshop CS4 costs about $190; various Creative Suite collections that include other Adobe software packages such as Flash Professional, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver cost more.

Q. Will older versions of Adobe creative software–such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 or Macromedia? Studio 8 Software–support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6)?

Nack denied that particular idea.

One can argue that even a lone fanboy can help a struggling company. Evangelists (as paid fanboys are called) like Guy Kawasaki at Apple and Robert Scoble at Microsoft have both helped the companies they worked for stay relevant and appear human, even when the tide seemed to be turning against them. (Kawasaki and Scoble are no longer affiliated with these companies.)

This brief rant, against my sweeping dismissal, during a podcast, of the BlackBerry as a media platform, caused me to reconsider my position on the product. The writer was wrong that I’m an elitist but dead-right that I need to consider what I say about the product more carefully.

I’m on the take. Microsoft pays my salary. I’m an Apple elitist. If you listen to the “fanboys,” as tech product boosters are often called, you’ll find that I’ve been accused, as have most tech writers, of all these things. Often in the same day. But the next day, you’ll hear that I am biased against Microsoft, or maybe that I’m just not smart enough to appreciate the
Mac.

But to say that we use and then dismiss fanboys doesn’t adequately describe our relationship with them. Individuals fanboys may be intellectually unkempt, and in hordes as annoying as a swarm of gnats, but it pays to listen to them. Fanboys are important and valuable. Here’s why:

Writers hate fanboys. We hate them because fanboys can take a reasonable argument and turn it into a screaming match. But we can love them too. There’s a validation that comes from getting the fans riled up. If they’re yelling, we must have said something worth yelling about. At least that’s what our bosses tell us when a fanboy attack lays us low.

Those who have a critique of a popular tech product, company, or industry sector are similarly likely to bring out online crowds of people who band together to defend their technology against the dangerous opinion (and possibly the hidden, nefarious agenda) of a writer who clearly doesn’t see the truth.

Fanboys can also thwart growth of their platform or product. Linux die-hards that continue to push that platform as a good product for end-user consumer desktop computers set unrealistic expectations. But even obnoxious and dismissive statements (like writing “Get a Mac!” in reply to a question or complaint about Windows) do raise awareness of the fanboy’s pet platform.

Fanboys create standards

People are joiners. They want to feel they belong. And fanboys are the clubs tech users can join. There’s a practical advantage: If you use the same products and standards as the people you respect (or fear), you can get help using it from people who know how. Fanboys can set de facto standards of use and thus reduce training costs across the board for consumers. (There is, however, often a hazing ritual. You may have to live through being a new user, or “noob,” while you get yourself up to speed.)

That still doesn’t mean that I like them.

I conclude, therefore, that fanboys are good for technology, good for business, and good for the economy overall.

Fanboys keep us honest

On the Internet, anyone can say anything about anything, for free. If a writer gets something wrong about a popular tech product, a polite e-mail from a reader may alert him or her to the error. But the real learning–the unforgettable experience that ensures that the writer will never make that mistake, or anything like it, again–comes when a particularly biting fanboy (or an army of them) slams the writer in public for the error. It’s humiliating, it’s stupid, and it’s why some writers are more careful than they would otherwise be.

Fanboys move businesses
Fan activism has a long history. It is, in a loud way, democracy in action. A fan letter-writing campaign saved “Star Trek” from being canceled after two seasons in 1968 (it was renewed for one more). In the modern era, after Apple removed the FireWire port for the 13-inch MacBooks, a fanboy yawp contributed to the reinstatement of this feature in the next revision of the product, now the MacBook Pro. Individuals may be singly annoying, but the collective voice of fans gets changes made–often quickly.

Professional writers and bloggers, as well as people who write just for the fun of it on their own blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts, often find that it’s difficult to say anything nice about a product without arousing the ire of people who think its competitor is obviously superior.

Guy Kawasaki: The original fanboy?

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Fanboys are fun (and profitable) to bait

Whenever traffic starts to lag for a blogger, he or she can just write something off-kilter about the Mac. Or Windows, Linux, the BlackBerry, the
Xbox–name your hot button. Lob a few logic bombs into a story, and watch the hits roll in. It’s not a good long-term strategy to build trust among the readers you want, but it is a quick way to make yourself feel important and turn pages in the process. Just please don’t make a habit of it.

Plus, it’s page views. The more people read and comment on our stories, the more money we make. A bad story can mean a short-term financial gain, even if it can damage a writer’s, and a whole site’s, long-term credibility.

I get slapped by fanboys myself. A recent example, from Andy Sternberg on Twitter: “@rafe may be the ultimate
iPhone elitist, if yesterday’s @buzzoutloud is any indication. [tweeted from my BlackBerry].”

On a completely different note, I recommend reading this follow-up post on branding consultant Matt Spangler’s blog about what Ashton Kutcher means for Foursquare.

Everybody panic!

But I assume Kutcher, who seems like a pretty smart guy, will be careful with who he lets onto his friends list. Now for the real question: how long before he unlocks a “Crunked” badge?

Ashton Kutcher at the Brainstorm conference earlier this year

All joking aside, the 31-year-old Kutcher has been a prominent, and admittedly important figure when it comes to bringing social-media tools into the mainstream. His race to beat CNN to 1 million Twitter followers (he won) was one of the publicity blitzes that put the name of the microblogging service on the pop-culture map. Foursquare, a tiny New York-based start-up that launched only six months ago out of the ashes of the ill-fated Dodgeball and still hasn’t wrapped up a round of venture funding (though I hear they’re working on it) could really get a boost from this–assuming their servers are ready for it.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News)

But it also raises an important security question. Unless they’re using Foursquare to broadcast their locations for promotional purposes (as some party photographers and DJs in NYC are already doing, and it’d be certainly interesting if Kutcher did something like this), celebrities using any kind of GPS-based or geolocation app could be making themselves vulnerable to varying degrees of annoyance ranging from pesky fans with cameras to full-on stalking. It could also make Foursquare an appealing target for hackers.

Seemingly unable to let any hot social media start-up escape his hunky clutches, it appears that actor and prolific Twitter oversharer Ashton Kutcher is now using where-you-at, ping-your-friends city guide app Foursquare. A tipster pointed me to a Foursquare account for user “aplusk,” the same handle that Kutcher uses on Twitter for his 3 million-plus followers.

Is it real? Well, his friends include Digg founder (and occasional bromancer) Kevin Rose, videoblogging personality Justine Ezarik, and “mrskutcher,” which is the Twitter username for his wife, actress Demi Moore. Since Foursquare requires mutual approval of friend connections, this would indicate that the likes of Rose and Moore believe the account to be legit. And since Kutcher’s Twitter account is linked to the Foursquare profile, which requires using the Twitter log-in credentials, it’s either legit or Kutcher’s Twitter account has been hacked. (And there have been no indications as to the latter.)

So why is this important? Well, it could be pretty momentous for Foursquare if Ashton Kutcher sticks around.

UPDATE (1:06 p.m. PT): Just to clarify, a few people were under the impression Kutcher had already deleted his Foursquare account. That was actually due to a broken link in this blog post; Kutcher is, for the time being, still on Foursquare. (My bad.)