


The Unbearable Lightness of Being Twitter
Don’t look now but Twitter is having a crisis, struggling to discover its identity. Welcome, Twitter, to Middle School, where you’re not the coolest kid in homeroom anymore.

A Final Twenty-four Hours of Public Comment on Net Neutrality
Your cable company, your phone company and your wireless phone company are arguing that Net Neutrality provisions would impact their investment in new broadband capacity (and investment in their companies on Wall Street, and presumably the American way of life). This argument is false on its face. More, it gets the cause and the effect reversed: it’s not service providers that create the impetus or demand for increased speed or capacity, but innovative new applications that do.

Will Your Next Wearable Come from Google, Apple, or a Middle Schooler?
In 1990 I bought a Nintendo Power Glove. I wasn’t exactly Mattel’s target demographic: I was twenty-four years old, and I didn’t have a Nintendo game system. I bought the glove for one reason alone: to hack it, hook it up to a personal computer and control the machine by gesture, alone.

A Contagion of Negativity: Why Facebook Made Us Sad
So it turns out that, yes, we are impacted emotionally by the streams of social information we consume. Happy stories make us happy. Sad stories? Spoiler alert: they make us sad. But it’s Facebook’s manipulation of our news feeds that makes us very angry, indeed.

It’s a Consumer Appliance. It’s a Digital Media Consumption Device. Oh, and it takes calls.
Jeff Bezos this week trumpeted Amazon’s Fire Phone, an all-new smartphone-cum-shopping-appliance species with a fork of Android OS at its core and cameras perched on most every available conceivable surface, most of which unblinkingly observe the user. (Selfie fans take note.)