Google Is Forcing Social Down Your Throat
This has got to be a mistake, right? "Google Reader's team decided to show your private data to all your GMail contacts. This is now the default, no need to opt-in." I don't use GMail very much so it's not so much an issue. More...

Valve boss Gabe Newell calls Windows 8 a 'catastrophe'
BBC News, January 22, 2013
To understand why Valve would consider Windows 8 a catastrophe, it's helpful to understand that Valve has set up its own software store and service. So when you buy, say, Civilization V from them, you basically install Valve, which then downloads Civilization V from the internet and runs it on your system - and indeed, any computer you own, even your Macbook, since you are running it from the internet. More...

It was just a matter of time... Google plans to kill passwords
Katina Michael, Uberveillance, January 22, 2013
Nobody would be happier than I to see the end of passwords - as it stands right now I have more than a hundred different passwords for home, office, web and other applications (I have an algorithm I use to make sure they're all different, but can be remembered). More...

Course o’ the Week – PRDV103 Available on iTunes U
Marissa Citro, The Saylor Journals, January 22, 2013
I think maybe we need a vocabulary reboot, because it seems to me that if you are downloading something from iTunes, whatever it is, it is not a "course" (it might be a "video lecture" or some such thing). More...

Graph Search: Facebook and Microsoft team up to take on Google’s search dominance
Brian Jackson, ITBusiness.ca, January 16, 2013

facebook and Microsoft announced today a new 'graph search' service. "Graph Search will be the new empty field next to a magnifying glass icon that appears at the top of every Facebook Page you visit, eventually. The tool is in limited rollout to the market right now and only available to select US English users. More...

Paying for Proof
Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, January 9, 2013.

Facebook Charging $100 to Message Mark Zuckerberg
Chris Taylor, Mashable, January 11, 2013.

My first thought was, if Facebook can charge $100 to unconnected people to send a message to mark Zuckerberg, how much could it charge unconnected people to send a message to me? A dollar? My second thought way, why should Facebook keep all that money? And this made me contemplate a new internet economy where advertisers pay intended targets, not the communications medium. More...

Business School, Disrupted
Jerry Useem, New York Times, June 2, 2014
Good article in the New York Times on the struggles of Harvard Business School, which depends on being elite, is coping with the arrival of online learning, which depends on being egalitarian. The school's response is to create a new type of credential, the Credential of Readiness, or CORe, which students can take online. More...

Facebook Introduces ‘Hack,’ the Programming Language of the Future
Cade Metz, Wired, March 20, 2014
Interesting. I remember when Facebook was PHP (I actually saw the code once, because of a dropped format declaration). Their new programming language "lets programmers build complex websites and other software at great speed while still ensuring that their software code is precisely organized and relatively free of flaws... the new language is called Hack." It has some nice features - it's statically typed (which means you declare what all your variables are before you use them) but compiles at run-time, which means developers can immediately see the rsults of minor changes. More...