I just tried the new Wired Internet Celebrity Meter (with low expectations):

So it turns out I’m a 28 (Julia Allison has a score of 1187, Kevin Rose gets 5865 and I can only assume Robert Scoble would be somewhere in the stratosphere). No big surprise there then. It only takes account of your MySpace and Twitter accounts and one personal website, so it’s a bit limited (not that I’d do much better if it did Facebook instead of MySpace, although I do at least have a working account there).

This sort of thing is always good fun, though - good especially for keeping you suitably humble about your own importance in the world…

I just re-read this recent post from the Google Public Policy Blog, and I still think it’s a lot of pie-in-the-sky nonsense. It really feels as though whoever wrote it either doesn’t know enough about the subject or has dumbed it down for readers to the extent that it makes no sense. Although the example cited is apparently real, the model described is far more complicated than it at first seems, and the chances of it being implemented on any large scale are virtually zero.

When I first saw the headline, “What if you could own your broadband connection?” I assumed that it was going to be about Google’s plans for wireless services - a little late perhaps given that they failed to secure any licences in the 700MHz auction, but it would have been interesting as an academic exercise. But no, it turns out they’re talking about fiber connections:

It may sound strange, and it’s certainly not what we’re used to. Today we have a “carrier-centered” model; phone and cable companies spend billions to build, operate, and own the “last-mile” connection — the copper, cable, or fiber wires that come into your house. Individual consumers then pay for particular services, like phone service or Internet access.

In turn, we tend to think about broadband deployment in carrier-centric ways. If we want to see super-fast fiber connections rolled out to consumers, the main question appears to be whether carriers have appropriate incentives to invest.

But there’s no law of nature that says this is the only possible model. Many businesses, governments, universities, and other entities already own their own fiber connections, rather than leasing access to lines. It may also be possible to find ways for consumers to purchase their own last-mile strands of fiber.

Here, as anywhere, there would be certain advantages that come with ownership over renting. No one necessarily needs to own skis or a car, but many of us do. If you owned your own fiber, you’d be able to connect it to a service provider of your own choosing. Over time, you might save money, and it could make your house more valuable to have a fiber “tail.”

I think the examples used are disingenuous - fiber cables owned by businesses or universities are often for private networks, whereas the whole point of a broadband connection is connecting to the public Internet. Even where Internet access is “owned” by someone other than the carrier, that makes no sense until you put equipment at both ends which allows the cable to be more than just a piece of hardware. And you need a carrier willing to both connect to the business end and to provide you with the appropriate equipment at your end to make that cable work. And of course, the cable itself just connects you to the carrier, which still connects you to the Internet, so they still own the vital connection even if you own the piece of string between your place and theirs. You therefore have no more real ownership over the key piece of the puzzle than you do today.

Then there are all the technical issues involved with maintaining and fixing such a cable. Even if you can get a service provider to hook you up to the Internet, you still own the last mile, and would be responsible for fixing it if something went wrong. Your service goes out - how do you figure out where it’s broken? If it’s someone digging up the road, how do they know who to notify before they do so? And how do you exercise any authority over them to get them to fix it quickly? What if something else goes wrong? Who’s going to fix it for you? Certainly not the local service provider you’ve deliberately bypassed…

I could go on and on - only three commenters have bothered so far on the post itself, so it seems most people haven’t taken it too seriously. But this feels like another one of those occasions on which someone has over-simplified a complex situation in a way that says, “now why in the world do we do this the way we do? Look how easy it would be to do it differently - and better! More freedom! More control for customers!” and so on. It’s also a favorite tool of politicians selling quick fixes to intractable problems usually caused by other politicians…

Ironically, I think there’s a lot more potential for the kind of model the Google blogger is talking about in the wireless sphere. There, no cables are necessary so ownership is a non-issue. It really is about simply having the right hardware at your end and a provider willing to hook you up at the other. With multiple wireless providers being able to serve the same area without digging up the streets there’s potential for real competition with none of the hassles associated with a wired local access network. You’re still going to need a service provider to hook you up unless you’re willing to become an Internet node in your own right. But there is at least the potential for greater competition and more choices for consumers.

Google, of course, merely participated in the 700MHz to try to force the existing carriers to create this kind of model, backing out of the bidding themselves when they thought they’d achieved their aims (possibly erroneously). Perhaps if they’d stayed in they’d have been able to make this kind of model a reality.

Mashable has a piece on FriendFeed and whether it’s destined to remain a niche service. The main reason for believing that it will be seems to be the poor interface design, but there appear to be others too.

But I tend to think that the key point here is that FriendFeed needs to remain something of a niche service in order to continue to function as it does today. As of right now most items on FriendFeed generate a manageable number of comments, and even mere mortals like me are able to contribute comments. We can engage in discussions with the illuminati of the blogosphere such as Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and so on and as such FriendFeed feels to me like the freshest and most accessible place on the web at the moment.

If it were to attract significantly more users I think the intimacy of the current FriendFeed would start to fade and that would be a great shame. I’m aware that sounds snobbish but it also gels nicely with another recent post - this one a guest post on LouisGray.com - about the accessibility of big hitters in the blogosphere.

Some have suggested that recent changes to Facebook create a FriendFeed like experience there. But the biggest difference is the closed user group that will participate in discussions on Facebook (defined by “friend” connections, ironically, whereas on FriendFeed no-one has to explicitly accept me as a friend in order for me to engage in a discussion with them.

In fact I think it’s probably almost inevitable that FriendFeed loses its niche status, or at least that it becomes used for other things than the friendly discussions I currently enjoy so much there, with its current function being demoted to a secondary role and a group of desperate hangers-on clinging to the old model.

PS wrote most of this on the iPhone app while waiting for a doctor’s appointment - worked pretty well but highlighted the significant limitation relating to the lack of a copy and paste function on the iPhone - hence, no hyperlinks unless you finish the project up on the computer or have a really good memory (and html skills)…

So I just posted from the iPhone app and although I now have a shiny new post on the site it’s clear that the app is a little glitchy (see screenshot). For some reason the app first posted an item with little title and text tags before posting my real post. In addition it seems the app doesn’t handle ampersands (&) very well. We’ll see if it does better when publishing…

(now posting from the keyboard - much easier)

It seems the ampersand didn’t cause a problem after all - just shows up funny in the categories list and in the “write” mode in the application. But the screenshot worked fine - not many options for how you incorporate an image like that - how you want text aligned, whether you want it linked to a larger version etc - but it’s probably best to keep things simple in a mobile app.

And no mystery tag post this time around, which means it was a one-off - I’ll have to test it on my other blogs to see if it happens every time you first use the app on a blog or if there was just an error somewhere this time around. At any rate, another useful application from the App Store - and best of all this one’s free, as many of the best ones are…

For info, this was the mystery post that showed up (which I’ve deleted to avoid clutter and confusion) - also viewable in its original format in the screenshot above:

!$title$!

July 22nd, 2008

!$text$!

Update: glad to see I wasn’t the only one with this problem: the venerable TechCrunch, no less:

Link apparently since removed, at least from the TechCrunch homepage.

Hurrah! WordPress finally released their iPhone app today, which was heavily trailed by WP. This is a test post that I’m writing using the app. Thank goodness for the auto correct feature on the iPhone which is preventing this from being an utterly tedious experience. I can’t imagine writing a long post on here but it will be great for the occasional short post on the run. Here goes!

So, I stood in line with about 100 other people outside my local AT&T store just under a week ago, in order to be one of the first to get my hands on the 3G iPhone. It was hot, and we were lined up down the side of the building in which the AT&T store is housed, which had a bright white wall, nicely reflecting all that heat back onto the waiting hordes, causing a nice sunburn and considerable discomfort. But, in the end, I got one, and almost the model I wanted - they ran out of black 16GB models just before I got inside, so I got a white one instead.

So was it all worth it? Well, as one man standing behind me in the line (possibly a Rabbi - in the center of the picture below) said:

You have to do something insane once in your life!

And that was more or less my opinion too - I don’t often stand in line for these things, but once in a while you want to be part of something like this. I sat out the first round - no 3G, stuck on a Verizon contract, don’t buy version 1 of anything and so on - but wasn’t going to do the same this time around.

I love the device. It’s a fantastic experience, and certainly the most fun I’ve ever had with a new phone. To date, I’ve downloaded and installed 23 applications, requiring four home screens altogether on the device (I have a separate one for web clips). I did have activation problems on the first day, along with everyone else, although they were relatively minor and solved by the evening.

I’ve read a lot of articles denigrating the iPhone in pretty strong terms over the past few days - two examples. The thing that strikes me about these articles is that they seem to assume that the iPhone is taking over the world. The Lifehacker article is titled, “Why You’re Better Off Avoiding the iPhone” and the other suggested the iPhone is going to kill the Internet.

Let’s tone that done a bit, shall we? For starters, Apple sold a total of 1 million phones in the first weekend and has since been largely sold out. Compare that with Nokia, which sells more devices than that every single day of the year, and you are quickly reminded that Apple does not dominate the mobile device market (or even the smartphone segment). Secondly, no-one is being forced to buy an iPhone - you have a choice about buying it as you do with every other device out there - and as a consumer you will weigh the pros and cons as you would with every other device. If you don’t like the relatively “closed” ecosystem and approach to applications, you don’t have to buy the phone. But, if you want the design, interface, web browsing, ease of use and so on and think the closed application environment is a small price to pay, then you’ll want to buy it anyway.

The most alarmist and hostile stuff I’ve read comes from the Free Software Foundation, which seems to have a definition of “free” which is much narrower than most people’s would be. But again, it seems to somehow assume that Apple has some kind of monopoly and that everyone is somehow tied into the Apple model whether they want to be or not. The Apple DRM approach in particular has come in for a lot of criticism, which is funny since it’s done at the behest of the record companies rather than any particular agenda Apple has. In order to secure for itself a strong position in online music sales, it acceded to the requests of the record companies to provide adequate copyright protection for their music. As the record companies have become more enlightened in their approach, Apple has begun releasing music in non-protected formats. But again, you have a choice - Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster and plenty of others offer alternative models for purchasing digital music online, and files bought from all those companies will play on iPods and iPhones.

Overall, I think Apple is adding a lot more to the mobile industry than it is taking away, and on a personal level I love the device and especially the ease of use of the device itself and the process of adding applications and media to it. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea - the FSF recommends the Free Runner, which strikes me as being an utterly uninspired (and uninspiring) device. But whatever floats your boat - and that’s the real point here: you have a choice. Stop moaning about the way Apple does things, and find a company that does things the way you like, and buy their stuff instead.