Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction. No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You're allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you're never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason. But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think? Sponsor More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, "Luddite time." Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you're with rather than the people you "follow," time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don't include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that's increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, "super" phones and what ever "super duper" devices are in the pipeline. Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can't be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web - the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts - to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you're making more connections between online entities and content, but you're losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world. I'm not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial. Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you're not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you've ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren't you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so? And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble's FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn't trend on Twitter and hit Digg's front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters. Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I've spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we've all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices. I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an "overheard" on Twitter. Maybe it's a sign that I'm aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I've certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don't want every day to be like that. What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle? Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock - or of taking periodic furloughs? Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments. Discuss

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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90's he held his school's website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group. Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he's taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world. The latest chapter in the fascinating story of Chris Messina's life ends with one of the most high-profile young proponents of an Open and Distributed Web joining Google, a company that aims to organize all the information in the world and a behemoth that many free spirits online eye with ambivalence. What will the future bring for Messina and his work? A look at how he got to Google might offer some clues. It isn't all pretty, some people worry about what the move will mean for the web, but the announcement is definitely important for all of us. Sponsor Where Chris Messina Comes From Chris Messina grew up in a well-to-do suburb in New Hampshire. As a teenager he railed vocally against a middle class culture that he says he now realizes he was very much a part of. One of his biggest influences, though, was a grandmother with strong Libertarian tendencies. When Chris entered high school, the web was in its earliest days. He became the school's web master, setting up and running its first web site. A group of students at the school wanted to start a Gay/Straight Alliance support group and were facing some resistance from parents and school officials. Messina took it upon himself to post a free banner ad promoting the organization on the school's official web site. He got suspended from school and pulled the site down in protest. (Even in those early days a school librarian had backed up some of the files, so the situation ended without young Messina being paddled or tied to the rack.) After high school Chris went to college at Carnegie Mellon, where he studied Design. That Design training took him far in the tech world and will be an important part of his new job. After graduating from college, Messina went on to build an incredible resume of accomplishments recognized around the world. He designed the full-page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox. Thousands of people donated $10 each to buy that ad, heralding an Open Source, community-based challenge to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. He co-founded BarCamp , the now international network of technology and culture "unconferences" that you may have heard of and should definitely attend next time there's one in your town. He was integral in the building of the international co-working community , a network of organizations that help each other serve independent, web-based workers who seek a physical space and support infrastructure. He is a Board member of the OpenID Foundation, the organization working on standards and adoption of open, federated and portable systems of identity for use around the web. He's a leading voice in the movement to create an Activity Streams standard that will allow user activity data to be shared and understood from one website over to another. When Messina speaks about any of the above, the biggest companies on the web listen. He's widely respected, but some people say he's become an arrogant power player at the front of a small parade of outspoken self-appointed leaders. That he gets all the credit when there are other, quieter, people doing a significant portion of the work. That's one perspective, but it's not the most common one and many of the leaders of the circle Messina runs in have shipped products that power the fundamentals of the web we all use today. Now Chris Messina will be at one of the biggest and most important companies around. Today on his 29th birthday, Messina announced he was taking a job at Google, with the title Open Web Advocate. Has Chris Messina sold out? "There are many legitimate reasons to work for a larger enterprise," social web sociologist danah boyd , who recently joined Microsoft, told us in response to Chris's move. "Some are practical: health insurance, stable income, and all of the other benefits that tend to come with such a package. But some come from the same ethos that entrepreneurs have... the desire to ship a product. Where you don't have to do every inch of legwork. And where you know that your work can touch millions. There's also something to be said for being around a whole lot of really smart people." On Landing at Google Messina has worked at a wide variety of startup companies. Most recently he was at OpenID provider Vidoop, one of a number of high profile hires the company made while it was still based in Oklahoma. In September 2008, Vidoop put its 40 person crew in a crazy caravan to its new headquarters in Portland, Oregon. In May, 2009 the company imploded, closed its doors and told some of its employees it couldn't pay back wages. Messina shared his account of what happened on his blog. The next half year Messina spent doing independent consulting, including a month and a half project with Mozilla. The fruits of that labor will be released to the public soon, he told us today. In September Messina was making the rounds, talking to a variety of companies in Silicon Valley and told a friend at Google that he was considering joining a big company as his next step. His Google contact told him that the company had a strong preference for hiring engineers, rather than people with the skills that Messina has. Doug Bowman, Google's first ever staff designer had made a high-profile departure to join Twitter just a few months prior, saying that Google didn't appreciate design. Messina left feeling like that door was closed and considered launching his own startup company. Over the next few months a few other companies offered Messina positions, he said, but then his old Google contact pinged him again and asked if he was still interested in joining Google. What had changed? His contact told him that Google was placing a new emphasis on getting the social web right, in a way that is good for the web. That month Google publicly launched a campaign that had run informally inside the company for two years, called the Data Liberation Front . It works across departments to enable users to remove their data from Google services, a key part of the vision of an Open Distributed Web that Messina has been working toward. "I went in for the interview," Messina told us today, "and 2 weeks later they made me a great offer letting me do what I was already doing. Yes, the interview process was long but very efficient, and I had to complete 1 logic problem (which I almost nailed, but alas, I'm no Joe Smarr!)" Smarr is the widely respected developer that had been working on these same matters at Comcast Plaxo until announcing that he was joining Google in December. Messina told us that he's excited to learn how to organize for an Open web from inside a very large company. It's a perspective he's never had before, but one that will lend him more credibility in his efforts to move other large companies. What This Means for the Web Messina and Smarr join a growing and impressive roster of Googlers dedicated to building an Open, Distributed web. That's a vision that's the opposite of a centralization and control - the typical model of financial success for a large company. This team of people will have to battle inertia, corporate interests and the natural tendency many people say is inherent in a large organization to bring more and more of a market under its control. Google controls a growing size of our search, our advertising sales, our email, our document collaboration, our mapping, our voice communication and much more online. The company is almost sure to face anti-trust legal pressure someday soon . It's always been a part of Google's DNA to support what's good for the web at large, the more people use the web the more they'll click on AdSense. This much centralization of power is cause for concern, though. It's as if Google is set to have a battle against itself. It's staff against the nature of its economy of scale. The culture of the corporation may be more important than its size, though. David Recordon, an open web advocate that works closely with Messina and recently joined social networking giant Facebook, had this to say: "Personally, I love how Facebook's culture lets me continue working on what I'm passionate about while having a tremendous impact on both the technology industry and the world at large. I hope that as my friend, Chris is able to do the same at Google." The day to day reality of effecting change may be more complex than that, though. Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav, the best-known technologist working to develop and support open login standard OAuth , raises an important concern. "This is clearly a big win for Google," he told us. "Messina and Smarr are huge assets in the social web space." "My concern is specific to Google. With Messina, Smarr, [inventor of OpenID and more Brad] Fitzpatrick and others all working for Google, focusing on the Social Web, there is less and less incentive for Google to reach out. Google has a strong coding culture which puts running code ahead of consensus and collaboration. Now with so many bright minds in house, they are even less likely to reach out. "A week ago, you would have to get at least Google, Plaxo, and Messina (representing the independent voice) to collaborate. This week it's just Google. "While I am certain that Messina and Smarr will keep their independent voices, and am not suggesting they will 'sell out' or alter their principles, they no longer need to surface many of their ideas out to the community. They can just have an quick internal meeting and ship products." What will going to Google mean for the rebellious young man who's become such a big personality agitating for the open web outside of the biggest companies on the web? What does it mean that the biggest companies, especially Google and Facebook, keep hiring outside social web technical leaders? Time will tell, but Messina says he's been told explicitly that people for whom "it's all about them" don't do well at Google. The company must be full of formerly big personalities now working as part of a team. PubSubHubbub co-creator and now Googler Brett Slatkin once as a brash college freshman told Newsweek that "If I made a great product, and Microsoft offered me a lot of money, I would spit in their faces." (That's one of my favorite quotes.) Now Slatkin has toned it down and talks tech without the bombast. Messina says he knows it's going to be a big change and is excited to see what being part of Google is like. So the next chapter of the story of Chris Messina will be a part of the next chapter of the story of Google. Next: What could all this look like in the future? See one vision in our article Toward a Value-Added User Data Economy Discuss

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How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google

Jive Software has acquired Filtrbox , a Boulder-based startup that monitors the social Web to help clients understand and better participate in online conversations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Jive sought a social media monitoring company to bring into its Social Business Software (SBS) platform. The goal is to extend the social footprint of the Jive platform. Jive sees the market becoming far more oriented around conversations on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. These conversations affect everything from product development to sales strategies. Monitoring is critical to following and capitalizing on the conversation flow. Sponsor Jive looked at several companies in the space before deciding to approach Filtrbox. The choice came down to the Filtrbox user experience; its collaboration features; the scalable architecture and the social intelligence baked into the product. The Filtrbox architecture may be the greatest value to Jive. Filtrbox Founder Ari Newman said its architecture is a hybrid that leverages the cloud. He would not say much more about it though its business model reflects a cloud based approach. Services that leverage the cloud effectively let users scale up and down, depending on demand. Many charge on a per use basis. Newman said Filtrbox charges $10,000 per year for up to six users. Customers get unlimited use of the platform. How companies leverage the cloud will determine how they fare in the market. The ability to crunch large amounts of data is vital for understanding the real-time nature of how conversations flow. Jive seems to understand this and appears to be moving more toward a cloud-based strategy. Initially, Jive will market Filtrbox through its Jive Market Engagement solution along side Radian6. Jive and Radian6 formed a partnership back in September. Here's what Jeremiah Owyang and his colleague, R "Ray" Wang had to say about the partnership. Radian6 and Filrtrbox are essentially in the same space. it is unclear how the relationship between Jive and Radian6 will be affected by the Filtrbox purchase. Filtrbox will be fully integrated into the Jive SBS platform in the second quarter of this year. Discuss

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Jive Software Buys Filtrbox: A Purchase All About The Social Web

In the first generation of the social Web, the marketing groups and public relations teams would develop reports to provide metrics for a particular campaign. They were pretty much the sole users of "social media," technologies. That's a problem as far as WiseWindow is concerned. Social media is a poor label for describing how comments, blog posts, updates and other opinions can be leveraged to gauge views across social networks and thousands of Web sites. "Labeling of it as social media has limited its potential up to now," said Marshall Toplansky, president of WiseWindow. "That is why we are calling it mass opinion business intelligence and not social media analytics." Sponsor Now, the social Web is a real-time engine. Cloud computing is a reality and a new era is upon us that allows the enterprise to mine the vast sea of comments, reviews, updates and blog posts from millions of people. We're entering an era where the social Web will serve as the main territory for performing predictive analytics. WiseWindow is using artificial intelligence technology, web crawlers and the processing power of the cloud to get real-time results for enterprise customers. For example, this means that companies may leverage the social Web to make sales forecasts and gauge the opinions of mass society to immediately understand the current opinions about its brand or those of competitors. WiseWindow calls the product Mass Opinion Business Intelligence, describing it as a service that goes beyond keyword search and click-throughs to predict market movement. According to WiseWindow, sentiment analysis has failed as a strategic research tool. When matching words, the context is lost. People use words differently to describe their sentiments. The mass amount of data available makes the process overwhelming. Instead, the WiseWindow web crawler will search for comments and other opinions across thousands of sites that are not blocked by privacy restrictions. The artificial intelligence trains itself to look for a particular topic. It brings back all related opinions. The information is then distilled for the client or made available through a web portal where the data can be analyzed. Recently, WiseWindow worked with a client from the film industry. WiseWindow used its technology to research 400 films, generating 4.5 million comments from 70,000 sites. They distilled the data to lean what is hot and what is not. As another example, , WiseWindow did research for the film, Marley and Me , starring Jennifer Anniston and Luke Wilson. The pre-release promotions featured Luke Wilson. But the comments from the Web demonstrated that Anniston had greater appeal than Wilson. As a result, the trailers were changed to feature Anniston more than Wilson. WiseWindow was founded in 2007 by Rajiv Dulepet. He has an impressive background. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford's School of Management and Engineering, spearheading the development of presidential prediction projects for both the 2004 and 2008 elections. WiseWindow started developing its technology in 2007 and began working with clients last year. The company has four patents for its web crawling, auto-classifications of opinions, relevance recognition and in statistical language applications. Discuss

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Gauging Mass Opinion: Don't Label it Social Media

Copia , a new e-book platform, plans to take on the big players in the market by launching its own e-book store and a set of touchscreen e-readers. Copia also wants to combine numerous social networking features with its e-book platform and plans to sell its services to original equipment manufacturers (OEM). Copia's e-book store will offer over 250,000 books from over 1,500 publishers , as well as 1,400 newspapers and over 750,000 free books from Google Books. Sponsor Copia's private, limited-invitation beta will launch this month. The company plans to expand this beta in March. Copia bills itself as a hybrid solution, as the company plans to offer both consumer-facing e-book solutions as well as an open platform for OEMs. Focus on Social Networking Features On the consumer side, Copia wants to differentiate itself from its competition by giving its users a number of social networking tools. Community profiles on Copia, for example, are linked to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition, the service will offer collaboration tools that are mostly geared towards students. Users can highlight and annotate books, for example, and share these annotations with other users. Copia will also implement a rating system for book reviews. OEM's will be able to offer all of these features to their users as well. OEMs will also be able to integrate Copia's e-book store into their own devices. Copia's E-Readers: Ocean and Tidal Copia plans to offer six different e-readers with prices ranging from $199 to $299. The Tidal will offer a six-inch ePaper display and the Ocean will come in a basic six-inch version and two advanced versions with a nine-inch screens. Both of these models will come in three different variations. The most basic models will not offer any wireless connectivity besides Wi-Fi and won't offer a touchscreen. The intermediate models offer touchscreens, and the high-end versions will offer touchscreens and 3G connectivity. All models come with tilt sensors and 4GB of internal memory. These devices will go on sale on Copia's site in April. Can This Work? We still have a lot of questions about Copia. We don't know at what price the company plans to sell books and what DRM-solution Copia plans to implement. At the same time, though, the company's plan to sell both e-books and compatible e-readers looks a lot like Amazon's strategy and there can be no doubt that Amazon has been quite successful with this model. Copia, however, doesn't have any name recognition yet and the e-book market is currently dominated by big companies like Amazon, B&N and Sony. If Copia is successful in getting enough OEM partners, though, it could establish itself as another major player in the market. The company's e-reader lineup also looks like a potential winner. Discuss

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Copia Challenges Amazon, B&N and Sony: Unveils New E-Book Platform and 6 E-Readers

Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora . Built by D'Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself "A continually improving collection of questions and answers." In our very early testing it's a pleasure to use, but we're going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow. Is this the next Facebook? Probably not - but it does look pretty fabulous. The service is still in closed beta (we've been trying to get in for months) but here's some screenshots that show some key features. Sponsor Quora is a little like Aardvark , the social Q&A service founded by ex-Googlers and rumored to be in Google's acquisition sites, and it's a little like Stack Overflow , the carefully crafted Q&A site for programmers that's shot through the roof with reader interest.  It's definitely different though.   Co-founder Charlie Cheever says it's built on Tornado, the real-time infrastructure built by FriendFeed, then bought and open sourced by Facebook. That's a nice touch. Here's what we've seen so far. Click these screenshots to get a bigger view of each of them. There are more coming up. We'll do our best to offer invites tomorrow morning. Discuss

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Facebook's 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots)

FormSpring.com is a data collection and management system with a particular emphasis in online forms, registrations and surveys. And enterprise-level system, FormSpring.com might seem rather dry to anyone but an online retailer or event coordinator. FormSpring.me , on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral. It's fun, engaging, and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It's only missing one critical element. Sponsor A stable back end. But more about that in a moment. First, let me tell you what makes FormSpring.me so infinitely entertaining. First, the site is user-to-user Q&A . This is the kind of formula that has populated the Web with masses of UGC on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers . It's also the basic formula behind such highly praised startups as Aardvark , which allows users to ping one another across networks to get answers about specific topics. Q&A between end users is a growing trend on the web, without a doubt. Second, the site allows one user to anonymously ask questions of another user. Anonymity has bred some of the most interesting and varied experiments of the social web. Very often, a lack of links to users' true identities leads to bathroom-wall-of-the-Internet content such as 4chan or YouTube comments. But while anonymity breeds trollism and is actually a dying phenomenon online, having a thin veil between the asker and the answerer of a question can act as a confessional booth in a way, allowing for more frank communication or the posing of some very interesting, controversial questions that might otherwise be considered impolite or risky. Finally, one of the most enduring trends of the social web, from its inception to the present day, is our deep and insatiable love of self-reference . The provocative beginning question for the site is, "Ask me anything," which users then tweet or post to Facebook. Answering questions all about you, your preferences, your past, your thoughts, your wishes and hopes, your regrets, what you eat and where you live - nothing is more intoxicating to the average social media user. From our first LiveJournal entries to mid-2000s MySpace chain surveys to our latest tweets, we clearly love talking about ourselves. The way that FormSpring.me caters to this inherently human attribute is by giving us the impression or illusion that someone, somewhere actually cares about what we think and do enough to ask us and expect an answer. So, when you combine the power of a Q&A site with the magic of an anonymous commenting system and the addictive qualities of navel-gazing with the expectation of being noticed, you basically have on your hands the social web app of the year just waiting to happen. And if it weren't for back end - which is likely built on Ruby on Rails, according to a few sources we've consulted today - FormSpring would have not only a money-making enterprise app but also a blockbuster social app. Although the concept is fascinating, the implementation is transparently shoddy. It seems like a hastily put-together weekend project along the lines of a Startup Weekend or Rails Rumble one-off. In fact, several developers we consulted said the site bears all the marks of a Ruby on Rails product, including rampant database scalability errors . ActiveRecord is a Rails class for accessing databases, and it's been shown in past applications to be unscalable. Concurrency issues mean that a small group of geeks or judges can have a grand time with your app, but the second it catches on with the social media crowd and then - god help you - general Internet users, the app's database is unable to handle that volume of traffic over a period of seconds, and end users start seeing error messages and abandoning ship like so many faithless rats. And since FormSpring.me is in all likelihood a side project from a single staffer or a couple employees (the company blog doesn't even mention the offshoot), it might not get the executive attention for further development or resource allocation. After all, without a revenue model, why would an enterprise-focused company waste time and energy on a social application? Speculation aside, FormSpring.com support tech Ryan Dillman writes, "Eventually, we plan to rewrite the FormSpring.me code from the ground up using the same type of database as sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so that we can handle the load. In the meantime, the millions of calls to the database cause frequent issues during peak times." Many parts of Twitter are built on Scala , and Facebook's database abstraction layer was developed in-house. If that kind of userbase - millions upon millions of users accessing the site around the clock - is what FormSpring is preparing for, they're going to need a much more robust solution that's much closer to bare metal than whatever they're currently running. And we do suggest they find one. FormSpring should consider monetizing and quickly scaling such an addictive little application before someone else does it next and better. So, to take the site's "Ask me anything" query and pose it to the site's creators, do you plan to seriously devote resources to create a stunning and addictive social app, or is this experiment destined for the digital dustbin? Ask us anything - or give us your frank opinions - in the comments. Discuss

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Anonymity, Self-Reference & Q&A: Formspring.me's Winning Combination for the Social Web