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The beauty of the innovation that flows from the open web is that no one has to ask for permission, get a credential, or win a Disrupt or Launch award to go prove their idea is worthy. They just... put up a page on the web, iterate, iterate, iterate... and eventually, a Facebook emerges.
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Way back in 2008, when the iPhone was new and Instagram was a gleam in Kevin Systrom's eye, I was involved in creating a service called CrowdFire. It was a way for fans at a festival (the first was Outside Lands) to share photos, tweets, and texts in a location and event specific way.
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I have done a pretty good job of partitioning my life digitally, posting utterances and stories that I'm happy to share with anyone on Twitter, leaving a few sparse comments and 'Likes' on Facebook (I'm not a huge user of the service, I'll be honest), and sending any number of photos to thousands of 'followers' on Instagram and Tumblr.
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Building out a professional profile on LinkedIn certainly makes sense, and bolstering that CV with intelligent pieces of writing is also a great idea. But if you're going to take the time to create content, you should also take the time to create a home for that content that is yours and yours alone.
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Ideally, content should be shared, mixed, mashed, and reposted - it wants to flow through the Internet like water. This was the point of RSS, after all - a technology that has actually been declared dead more often than the lowly display banner.
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You happily give Facebook terabytes of structured data about yourself, content with the implicit tradeoff that Facebook is going to give you a social service that makes your life better.
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An elaborate system of etiquette and social standards flowered around the home phone: how long a child might be allowed to stay on the phone, how late one could call without being impolite, and of course, the dread implications of a late night call which violated that norm.
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I think Facebook is an extraordinarily important part of the Internet ecosystem, and having a robust presence there is a critical part of any brand (or company's) strategy.
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Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.
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Consumers online expect dialogue, so pairing your brand with relevant and passion-driven topics is one of the best ways to ensure that you are engaged with key audiences.
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It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.
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There's a reason publishers don't build on top of social platforms: publishers are an independent lot, and they naturally understand the value of owning your own domain. Publishers don't want to be beholden to the shifting sands of inscrutable platform policies.
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I found the iPad to be too large and heavy to use comfortably in casual situations (like reading in bed, for example), and too limited to use as a replacement for my laptop. By comparison, the Nexus 7 is just the right size for use anywhere - it's very similar in size to my daughter's Kindle Fire, but lighter.
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The smart phone isn't a perfect device, as we all know. It forces the world into a tiny screen. It runs out of battery, bandwidth, and power. It distracts us from the world around us.
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Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote 'The Search,' that hero was Google - the book wasn't about Google alone, but Google's narrative worked to drive the entire story.
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Just like the VCR opened the film and TV industries to unimaginable new revenue streams, search, RSS and the Internet will do the same for marketers and media companies.
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There will soon be streams of data coming from all manner of products - appliances, clothing, sporting goods, you name it. Wouldn't you rather live in a world where you can export the data from your son's football helmet to a new app that monitors force and impact against a cohort of high school players around the country?
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I've always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That's how Facebook started, after all.
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Founded by an ex-Apple employee, Nest devices do for thermostats and smoke alarms what the Mac did for PCs - Google Buys Nest made them relevant and far more valuable.
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As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you've allotted for vacation.
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Google Now supplants the need to open an app by surfacing cards - cards that magically turn into just the information you need, when you need it - without having to go to an app to get it.
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Where one industry stumbles, another rises up.
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As our society tips toward one based on data, our collective decisions around how that data can be used will determine what kind of a culture we live in.
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Facebook's data trove is enviable, and its moves into nearly every aspect of our lives - from payment to media, will create even more of it. The company also has created a huge base of developers for its platform, but the ecosystem is incomplete compared to vertically integrated OSes like iOS, Mac or Windows.