Random thoughts

* Look, “can tell time” was not part of the job description when I applied for it. At least I’m going to my review meeting 2 hours early instead of posting for the interview 45 minutes late…

* It’s odd – I didn’t go through Arlington at all on this trip. That makes it a full three years since last I saw that part of the old country other than on Google Earth. I remember the last day, turning in the key in July 2004 and then walking back to where I was parked – it was like all the years rolled back at once and I was standing in 1997 seeing the apartments for the first time.

* There are so many things that are so many years ago now. California is six years this July. Next January, I’m ten years together with my girlfriend-turned-wife. This summer is my twentieth high school reunion. I don’t know why all of this amazes me so much. I probably said this already elsewhere, but 1997 is the midway point; on one side is everything from junior high to leaving grad school and on the other side is everything SINCE grad school. It doesn’t feel like a quarter-century since I was an impressionable young seventh-grader, consumed with comic books and RPGs and vaguely aware of things with two X chromosomes. There’s a big post about the non-linearity of time in there somewhere.

* Speaking of Google, above, DoubleTwist (an open-source iTunes workalike to let you use your music library with other phones) now has an interface to the Android Marketplace. It even has a web version – which means that for the first time, you can practically explore the world of Android apps without an Android device. And based on this, I was able to look and see that there are Android versions of probably 90% of my commonly used iPhone apps – there’s not a Twitter client as polished as Tweetie 2, I don’t think there’s a Tumblr app let alone one as good as the iPhone version, and I’d have to learn to live with the Texts From Last Night website – but almost everything else is there. Facebook, Foursquare, Amazon, DirecTV, MLB At Bat, Absolute Radio, Paypal, Open Table, Urbanspoon, the FCC broadband checker, WordPress, IMDB, Evernote, Midomi Soundhound – all official versions. There are also workalikes for things like Wikipedia readers, wi-fi scanners, movie ticketers, Caltrain and VTA schedulers, RSS readers, even a sleep cycle alarm clock and a lightsaber. The practical upshot is this: there is very little to keep me from replicating the functional equivalent of my iPhone environment on a Nexus One or similar Android device, especially if it includes a mechanism for direct download and playback of podcasts.

* The catch is, though, almost every single one of those apps I mentioned (except for Soundhound, the alarm clock and the lightsaber) is something that under normal circumstances can be used through a web browser, plain and simple. So why all the apps? Convenience? An attempt to refine the interface for a mobile device? (Probably.) And yet as I look through the apps, I notice a lot of apps for multiple services. Foursquare, Gowalla and Whrrl…Yelp, Urbanspoon, Opentable, Geodelic and AroundMe…and obviously Facebook and Twitter. And that’s where the thought clicked:

WE ARE BACK TO 1992. Instead of being segregated into AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, GEnie, and the like – not to mention a crap-ton of BBS outlets – we now have to have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, etc etc. These are not open systems, and are not generally fungible (except insomuch as Facebook has connectivity to them through RSS or whatever). Basically, we’ve come full circle and in the case of Facebook and Twitter are back to having a single entity providing us with a closed communication service. Or put it another way: if your email provider goes down, the rest of the world carries on using email. If Twitter goes down, that pretty much does for everybody. If Facebook goes down – well, not nice to think about, especially since the privacy model changes repeatedly and occasionally they publish everyone’s email without thinking about it. Social networking has created a situation where we are back to largely non-interoperable services and dependence on single providers, only this time there’s even more potential for mischief. Especially in light of the explosive growth of Foursquare and its competitors, who have somehow managed to wheedle us into reporting the details of our life in a manner that I can only assume they will attempt to monetize eventually…

* Actually, that’s the uneasy-making part. Social networking compels us to disclose all manner of things, because we’re only telling our friends. Well, that’s what we’re meant to think. But anything we tell our friends, we’re also telling Facebook, or Twitter, or Foursquare, or Google, and at some point the VCs and angel investors will demand some sort of return on their capital – at which point these entities will find it necessary to use your personal information to make money. Yes, I do continue to use these things – but when I only have maybe half a dozen friends on Foursquare, Buzz, Whrrl, and Gowalla combined, what’s the ratio of communicating with friends vs. preparing a detailed demographic survey to be sold for big bucks in a couple of years?

The problem with these services is that they promote lock-in. Everyone’s on Facebook, because everybody is on Facebook. It’s Metcalfe’s Law run riot – as long as these systems are closed, there can be only one – the more there are, the less likely you are to use them all. Friendster begat MySpace begat Facebook, with each one being effectively killed by its successor – because who wants to update three different social network sites? If there were some sort of interoperability system for social networking, you’d at least have the security that comes with distribution – imagine if email were simply one great big bulletin board with a few rudimentary privacy filters. As it is, I’m getting more and more uneasy every time I check in.

* I may or may not be using a company iPad this time next week. Hmmmmm…