were we ever free of walled gardens?
Reading through the documents released by the U.S. Judiciary Committee, I’m struck by how early we lost the war on walled gardens. I take a deeper dive and see where it all went wrong
AOL
The Ugly Backside of Online Backup
I was just showing off my new Gmail/Remember the Milk marriage, which is truly a cool tool and worth checking out, to my slightly less new wife. Her response was: but it’s online. How can I use it if I’m offline? I slapped her about verbally, of course, because you can’t be doing with that … Read more
Xdrive’s New Clothes
AOL is unveiling a new media sharing and storage service, BlueString, which gets a positive write-up from Rafe Needleman at Webware. I remain more skeptical (I give it a ten minut.es write-up here.) Rafe is reliable on this kind of thing, so I take his word for it, but I’m nervous about AOL after a … Read more
How To Blow It From “From”
I’m amazed by how many times this happens, and it always seems to be PR folk in the technology industry who are the culprits: An email where the sender, say Geoff Blah, hasn’t filled in the ‘From’ field in his email program or service so it appears in my inbox as from ‘gblah@aol.com’ or, sometimes, just … Read more
Phone as Beacon
The idea that your cellphone may become a beacon of your availability took one small step closer yesterday, although you’d be forgiven for not noticing amid all the post-turkey bloat. The theory is this. Cellphones have gotten smarter, but they still miss one vital ingredient that computer users have had for years: presence. Anyone using … Read more