And Apple sells 99.5% of all mobile applications. Sounds like the makings of a monopoly to me. Why does everybody buy Windows? Because that’s where the apps are. They gained this monopoly through skill and the incompetence of their competitors.

Which is part of the problem. They earned their current position. We can admire that, and yet at the same time acknowledge and fight their evil.

The real story of Apple and Open Source is that Open Source is about enabling anyone to control the technology that’s available to them, whereas Apple is about turning computers into appliances–that is, closed devices intended to be used “as is” rather than programmed and customized. My first MP3 player was a Linux box; Apple turned the “music player” category into something completely different.

The reason I have a MacBook is that on the one hand, a lot of the user experience is superior to anything Windows or Linux have come up with. On the days when I don’t have time to geek out, and I just need things to work, Apple is good for that. But at the same time, I can compile unix software from source, and the modified BSD operating system is a lot friendlier to me than Windows. Apple has learned how to seduce geeks by offering the best of both worlds–commercial and Open Source–rather than a bad compromise.

Right now, I’m not as bothered by the App store restrictions as many people. I figure that when you buy an iPhone, you have two choices: you either decide to go commercial, and treat the iPhone as an appliance, or you go geek and “jailbreak” it.

But I must admit that the iPad could make things a little scarier: IF these things catch on, we could be going from a world where your phone is an appliance–which it always was–to a world where your *computer* is an appliance. I would agree that this is NOT a good thing.

However, at the moment Apple’s share of computers is still relatively small, and if anything, the iPad’s success will do the same as the iPhone’s did: just create momentum for an existing category of devices, ie. tablets and netbooks. We’ll see a lot more netbooks becoming tablets, and they’ll be much cheaper than the iPad.

So for now I’m just hoping that the fight between Adobe and Apple could benefit the consumer, as many corporate fights do.

It’s especially ironic because Apple could have killed Flash quite easily if it wanted to. Apple’s refusal to endorse Ogg Theora was the only reason that Theora did not become a mandated codec for HTML5 video.

But of course, that’s a minor evil compared to Apple’s refusal to allow third party applications on the iPad and the iPhone. The phone is the next generation of computing platform. We’re all familiar with the harm that Microsoft inflicted on the good of mankind through their monopolistic control of the microcomputer platform. Apple has proven themselves to be much more heavy-handed and greedy in their control of the smartphone platform.

Yet Apple is praised by geeks, not condemned. One knew that one was selling ones soul when one went to work for Microsoft or indirectly supporting the Microsoft platform. Supporting the Apple platform should be viewed in the same respect.

I hate Flash, perhaps much more than you do. I use Linux, so Flash regularly impacts my web experience. But in this case, the enemy or my enemy is my friend, and I hope it’s Flash that impacts Apple.

I think some stuff coming out of the blogosphere makes an impact. HuffPo for one. Although sometimes they seem sensationalized too. I guess it’s too early to tell if they find their sea legs or are swept away.

But much of the blogosphere is merely new-tech low-price vanity press. While it may be cheaper than therapy, it’s not really reporting or journalism or even particularly unbiased. Whether it can “grow up” and become a real replacement for current news outlets is unclear

But I’d say that it was your eyeballs that kept you on the radar. Since these media are paid for by advertisers, they need readers (or viewers) in order to attract enough advertising revenue.

I think that the missing link here is that this is often not enough. We can talk about users “voting with their feet” to use their influence as potential eyeballs for ads, but they have to be aware that they’re missing something in the first place. But again, I think that this is improving overall with the web because of all the independent bloggers. One of the easiest ways for bloggers to get noticed is by creating controversy or disagreeing with influential people.

Even when I used to subscribe to the print edition of Time Magazine, say, or Scientific American, I can’t imagine my $50 or so a year covered more than about 10% of their costs. But … it meant that the editors had to acknowledge two customer groups. Most reputable news outlets published a statement of editorial independence from the advertisers. Seeming violations of that independence would be cause for a letter to the editor, something that was taken seriously.

Now, with only one customer group (and it isn’t us), there’s no reason for editorial independence (and we’re seeing that there really is none for a lot of media).

Perhaps freemium is a solution. I sort of doubt it, though. It seems to work well for certain sections of coverage (the stock market, perhaps, or expensive cars, or real estate) and not others. So perhaps those areas will exert some editorial independence. If freemium income is under 1% of total income, there’s no reason for the editors to even feign independence from advertisers. And so it won’t work, at least not in the sense I want it to.

I don’t know what the solution is. I just know this isn’t working for me.

If you’re only allowed to have 150 friends within a certain category, then maybe it could make it less socially unacceptable to take a friend out of that category.

But even better than that would be to do something along the lines of what gmail and gtalk do: to identify your real friends organically, based on whether or not you actually talk *back* to them. So maybe that’s the key: to create the concentric groups of “friends” and have them automatically updated based on who you interact with the most. So people you never talk to would be in a limbo stage unless you identified them as “people I like to follow” (meaning the equivalent of subscribing to a newsfeed), and the people you interact with the most would be the only ones to show up in your feed…. UNLESS your closest friends start responding to a less-prioritized message, in which case it would get bumped up as “probably more significant.”