Scott Rosenberg

Now, a couple of different forces are trying to push the industry away from the personal-computing model and toward a more centralized approach. While Sun peddles its latest edition of the hoary network computer or
“network appliance” concept, a bevy of Web start-up companies are promoting a
new era of “Web-based computing,” in which we’ll do all our work — scheduling, e-mail, even word processing — inside browsers and store all our data across the Web itself.

Sun’s plan, unveiled this week, centers on a new product called the Sun Ray, a stripped-down workstation consisting of not much more than a monitor and keyboard, like the old “dumb terminals” that used to plug into mainframe computers — plus a smart-card reader for authentication (think of logging in to a Sun Ray as something like using your bank’s automated teller machine). With Sun Rays spread throughout a company’s network, Sun imagines that you’ll sit down at any desk anywhere and pick up your work from the server wherever you left off — using a software package called Star Office that Sun recently acquired, and that provides tools similar to Microsoft Office.

Sun’s strategy is aimed at the corporate world, whereas the Web-based computing companies that are trying to get us to move more of our work and data into our browsers are targeting the mass market. But both fly a similar banner of economy, convenience and simplicity. And if either really takes off, then the network really will be the computer: Our desktops will lose their independence and become vassals of a central authority, either in the corporate IS department or at the main office of some media conglomerate that has wired your neighborhood.

To be sure, independence has always come at a price. As individual users we’ve all had to take on more responsibility for protecting our data, learning the intricacies of our systems and dealing with crashes than many of us would probably like. No doubt there’s some comfort to be had in handing all this responsibility back to a geek priesthood.

But before we rush to embrace the brave new world of network-centric computing, let’s think harder about what we’re giving up — and to whom.

It’s easy to see why the Sun Ray might appeal to corporate managers: They want systems that are cheaper and easier to administer. Previous “network computer” schemes — like the Oracle NC, which Larry Ellison was promoting four years ago — floundered because they didn’t save enough money: PCs kept getting cheaper, and NCs just seemed like less bang for not a whole lot less buck. This time around, if Sun can deliver on its promises and provide relief from the “Microsoft tax” — the per-seat license fees that companies typically pay for using Microsoft’s operating systems and Office applications — it stands a chance of converting lots of firms to the Sun Ray cause.

But some of the same traits that make the network-centric model so appealing to corporations raise red flags when you transfer them to home use. Corporate managers are no doubt delighted that network computers like the Sun Ray are incapable of playing popular PC games, since their employees aren’t supposed to be squandering company time on such diversions anyway. But in the home, the hardware limitations that prevent most network computers from handling complex games are likely to turn off a lot of customers, who will favor low-end PCs instead.

Of course, proponents of Web-based computing don’t care whether you’re using a Sun Ray, a $400 PC or a “screaming” Pentium III: Their idea is to completely divorce your work from your hardware. As long as your browser is connected to the Net, you’re fine, and you can access your calendar, address book, e-mail and projects.

That puts a heavy burden on the browser — and in case you hadn’t noticed, browser development, once the supersonic engine of Web change, has been largely dead in the water for a couple of years now. One reason I don’t want to move my work life onto the Web is that I don’t want to spend every minute of my computing life inside my browser: It’s not fast enough, it’s not adaptable enough, it doesn’t provide as useful a palette of editing tools as my stand-alone applications and it still crashes more often than I’d like.

The other big problem with the Web-based computing approach is a matter of trust. Do I trust the Web site offering an application like Web-based e-mail or calendaring to keep my information to itself? If the service is free, sooner or later the application provider will itch to take whatever information it has about me and earn some money with it somehow.

Even if I’m not worried about privacy, do I trust the provider not to lose or screw up the data that I depend on? Sure, few of us are very diligent about backing up our own computers — but at least when we lose data ourselves we know who to blame. When some little Web start-up loses your entire address book, good luck getting someone to complain to on the phone. The recent Hotmail fiasco — during which anyone could access anyone else’s Hotmail e-mail through a simple Web back-door — does not inspire confidence in the Web-based approach, even when it’s being delivered by a behemoth like Microsoft (which owns Hotmail).

Microsoft itself has made it clear that if users are unhappy with what they get for free on the Web, it will be happy to transform its familiar shrink-wrapped software tools into fee-driven network-based services. In other words, instead of buying Office 2000, you’d pay Microsoft a fee to deliver use of it across the Net for a certain time period. Such metering schemes delight the software sellers with visions of endless streams of subscription revenue and an end to piracy problems. But they’ll be a hard sell to consumers who still think of software as a buy-once product rather than a pay-as-you-use service.

With all of these different strategies vying for dollars and attention, you can count on one principle to govern what succeeds and what’s left in the ever-growing trash pile of technological dead ends: simplicity. Whoever devises a system that is truly easier to use can count on some kind of market.

Sun has a lot of experience creating powerful, reliable, expensive servers that require highly trained personnel to run, but it has yet to show the world that it knows how to build intuitive interfaces for the everyday user. The Web-based computing companies are only beginning to figure out how to make their services as easy to use as the stand-alone desktop applications they’re designed to replace — and those applications aren’t exactly models of simplicity to begin with.

With the right design, either of these approaches could take off and make “the network is the computer” a fact rather than an aspiration. In the end the distinction between network and computer hardly matters: All that counts is whether it’s possible to do your work quickly and reliably. But for now, I’m not giving up my personal-computer independence — not until Sun, or whoever, can prove that doing so will pay off.

Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.

So which was Facebook: a new space for authentic communication between real people — or a new arena for self-promotion?

I could probably have handled this existential dilemma. And I know it’s one that a lot of people simply don’t care about. It bugged me, but it was the other Facebook problem that made me not want to use the service at all.

Facebook flattens our social relationships into one undifferentiated blob. It’s almost impossible to organize friends into discrete groups like “family” and “work” and “school friends” and so forth. Facebook’s just not built that way. (This critique is hardly original to me. But it’s worth repeating.)

In theory Facebook advocates a strict “one person, one account” policy, because each account’s supposed to correlate to a “real” individual. But then sometimes Facebook recommends that we keep a personal profile for our private life and a “page” for our professional life. Which seems an awful lot like “one person, two accounts.”

In truth, Facebook started out with an oversimplified conception of social life, modeled on the artificial hothouse community of a college campus, and it has never succeeded in providing a usable or convenient method for dividing or organizing your life into its different contexts. This is a massive, ongoing failure. And it is precisely where Facebook’s competitors at Google have built the strength of their new service for networking and sharing, Google+.

Google+ opened a limited trial on Tuesday, and last night it hit some sort of critical mass in the land of tech-and-media early adopters. Invitations were flying, in an eerie and amusing echo of what happened in 2004, when Google opened its very first social network, Orkut, to the public, and the Silicon Valley elite flocked to it with glee.

Google+ represents Google’s fourth big bite at building a social network. Orkut never took off because Google stopped building it out; once you found your friends there was nothing to do there. Wave was a fascinating experiment in advanced technology that was incomprehensible to the average user, and Google abandoned it. Buzz was (and is) a Twitter-like effort that botched its launch by invading your Gmail in box and raiding your contact list.

So far Google+ seems to be getting things right: It’s easy to figure out, it explains itself elegantly as you delve into its features, it’s fast (for now, at least, under a trial-size population) and it’s even a bit fun.

By far the most interesting and valuable feature of Google+ is the idea of “circles” that it’s built upon. You choose friends and organize them into different “circles,” or groups, based on any criteria you like — the obvious ones being “family,” “friends,” “work” and so on.

The most important thing to know is that you use these circles to decide who you’ll share what with. So, if you don’t want your friends to be bugged by some tidbit from your workplace, you just share with your workplace circle. Google has conceived and executed this feature beautifully; it takes little time to be up and running.

The other key choice is that you see the composition of your circles but your friends don’t: It’s as if you’re organizing them on your desktop. Your contacts never see how you’re labeling them, but your labeling choices govern what they see of what you share.

I’m sure problems will surface with this model but so far it seems sound and useful, and it’s a cinch to get started with it. Of course, if you’re already living inside Facebook, Google has a tough sell to make. You’ve invested in one network, you’re connected there; why should you bother? But if, like me, you resisted Facebook, Google+ offers a useful alternative that’s worth exploring.

The ideal future of social networking is one that isn’t controlled by any single company. But social networks depend on scale, and right now it’s big companies that are providing that.

Lord knows Google’s record isn’t perfect. But in this realm I view it as the least of evils. Look at the competition: Facebook is being built by young engineers who don’t have lives, and I don’t trust it to understand the complexity of our lives. It’s also about to go public and faces enormous pressure to cash in on the vast network it’s built. Twitter is a great service for real-time public conversation but it’s no better at nuanced social interaction than Facebook. Apple is forging the One Ring to rule all media and technology, and it’s a beaut, but I’ll keep my personal relationships out of its hands as long as I can. Microsoft? Don’t even bother.

Of the technology giants, Google — despite its missteps — has the best record of helping build and expand the Web in useful ways. It’s full of brilliant engineers who have had a very hard time figuring out how to transfer their expertise from the realm of code to the world of human interaction. But it’s learning.

So I’ll embrace the open-source, distributed, nobody-owns-it social network when it arrives, as it inevitably will, whether we get it from the likes of Diaspora and Status.net or somebody else. In the meantime, Google+ is looking pretty good. (Except for that awful punctuation-mark-laden name.)

For me it was the start of a deepening engagement with and affection for the excitement, complexity and pitfalls of building software-powered websites. (Salon itself was lovingly hand-coded then and for several years after.) We got Table Talk launched, sort of, though within weeks we had to ditch the version those Cornell kids had built and start fresh. Said kids took their software and built TheGlobe.com with it, which went on to an impossibly successful IPO at the height of the dot-com bubble before a spectacular flameout.

The original idea was that every Salon article would have a link at the end to a Table Talk thread. The articles would serve, in part, as discussion-starters and then our community would kick the ideas around. It wasn’t a dumb plan — story comments are now a Web standard. But the way we built it, modeled on the experiences some of us had had as members of The WELL, Table Talk was a separate space with threaded discussions that anyone could add. The conversations weren’t tied to the stories very well, and we quickly learned that the community members — who took to the project avidly — preferred to talk about what they wanted to talk about. Salon’s editors and writers rarely hung out in TT, and it didn’t take long before the TT members developed a dysfunctional relationship with Salon’s staff — simultaneously craving our attention and resenting our presence.

So TT went its somewhat separate way from Salon-the-magazine, which soon started running a simple, hand-coded letters-to-the-editor page to highlight actual responses to our stories. Mary Elizabeth Williams, its original and longtime host, managed the discussion space with great love and devotion for years. We all learned a lot about dealing with anonymity and trolls, personal authenticity and online performance art, technical woes and social dynamics.

What we never managed to do was find a way to knit the energy and talent of Table Talk’s remarkable community with the skills and money being invested into Salon.com itself. Instead, Salon tried over and over to find different models for tying community together with journalism. In 1999 it acquired The WELL. In 2002 it launched a blog program. In 2005 it transformed Letters to the Editor into a more Web-standard comments feature. In 2008 it launched Open Salon as a modern, social blogging platform.

As a result, Table Talk became, more and more, a separate entity. When we started Salon Premium in 2001 as a paid service that let users see an ad-free site and some premium content, we rolled Table Talk into it: Its pages were readable by anyone, but you needed to pay to post. That insured its survival but also assured its marginality. Over the years Salon’s management (which I was a part of until 2007) considered, over and over, whether to shut it down. It generated large numbers of page views from a relatively small number of users, and advertisers were not excited by that. Its WebCrossing software was increasingly out of step with the direction the Web was moving in. Yet TT’s community remained close-knit and vibrant. In the wake of this week’s announcement, its members, unsurprisingly, are already trying to figure out ways to continue their conversations after the site’s announced June 10 shutdown date.

I don’t second-guess Salon’s leadership for deciding to end TT today — I might well do the same in their shoes. I do think there’s a lesson here, though, not just for Salon but for all the other enterprises out there today that dream of doing what we tried for so long to do at Salon. (Hi, Arianna; hi, Tina.)

The lesson is simple: Don’t think of “conversation” and “community” as subsidiaries to “content.” They aren’t afterthoughts, add-ons or sidebars. They are the point of the Web. Here’s how I put it in “Say Everything”:

[Interactivity] is just a clumsy word for communication. That communication — each reader’s ability to be a writer as well — was not some bell or whistle. It was the whole point of the Web, the defining trait of the new medium — like motion in movies, or sound in radio, or narrow columns of text in newspapers.

Editors and publishers keep crossing their fingers and hoping to find some new platform that reverses this principle and puts them back in the comfortable realm of piping content out to consumers. They think this stuff will finally settle down. But change keeps accelerating instead. Today we are feeding one another stories, passing links around, telling friends what we’re fascinated by or excited about or steamed over. My Flipboard is more useful and interesting to me than the front page of the New York Times (sorry, Bill Keller). The conversation isn’t an afterthought. It’s interesting in itself, and it’s how we inform one another.

So Table Talk is dead: RIP. But Table Talk is everywhere, too — on Facebook and Twitter, all over the blogosphere, and in a billion comment threads. Table talk is what we do online. It’s not what comes after a publication’s stories. It’s what comes before.

BONUS LINK: If you haven’t already, go read Paul Ford’s wonderful essay on the nature of the Web and its fundamental question — “Why wasn’t I consulted?”

NPR rejected the bogus Muslims’ bogus contribution, but Schiller’s words got him suspended yesterday. And today we learn that NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller (no relation), has resigned too.

In a saner cultural moment, a serial liar like O’Keefe would not be taken seriously by the rest of the media or by a board of directors. Here’s why (courtesy TPM):

Previous tapes by O’Keefe’s group have later turned out to be misleadingly edited, including the video that launched them to stardom featuring O’Keefe posing as a pimp in front of ACORN offices, so it’s worth taking the overall footage with a grain of salt until further details emerge. Last year, O’Keefe’s credibility took another major hit when he reportedly tried to invite a CNN reporter onto his boat to try and seduce her as a prank, an effort that was revealed when one of his own colleagues blew the whistle to the press.

But just as the White House dumped Shirley Sherrod the moment Andrew Breitbart’s doctored video of her supposedly damning admission of racism surfaced, NPR’s board chose not only not to fight but to cave in immediately to O’Keefe’s tactics. By not fighting back, NPR has invited an open season on truth, and ushered us into a new age of mistrust.

You should go listen to O’Keefe’s tapes of Ron Schiller’s statements — first, to see that much of what he said is harmless and reasonable, but more important, to ask yourself whether you have any expertise or standing to determine the recording’s authenticity. How can we possibly trust O’Keefe’s reports when the essence of his technique is deception? Who knows how this recording was edited or doctored? Does the phrase “consider the source” mean anything any more?

Sting operations conducted by law enforcement officials have a dubious record themselves, but at least they require oversight and must meet court standards of evidence. For public actors like James O’Keefe, the oversight, we assume, is performed by the media. The press prides itself for serving as truth’s first line of defense, democracy’s bullshit filter. This week it failed in a big way.

The larger problem here isn’t Viv Schiller’s ultimate fate, and it’s not even the final disposition of congressional funding for NPR — an institution I admire in many ways but which, let’s face it, we’d survive without.

The problem is we are crediting creeps and letting liars take over our public discourse.

This is hardly a partisan concern. Roughly similar tactics caused major headaches for Wisconsin’s embattled Republican governor recently, when he got taken in by a caller impersonating conservative billionaire David Koch. (This led Wisconsin’s Legislature to start talking about outlawing prank calls.) Increasingly, public deception carries little apparent cost.

If a James O’Keefe can win attention and scalps by ruses and lies, why should he stop? And does any public figure have a big enough megaphone and a strong enough spine to say to him, “Have you no decency?”

BONUS LINK: Jeff Jarvis: “The stations’ interests and NPR’s interests are no longer aligned.” 

People think of Huffington Post as the leading popular liberal-Democratic news site. Huffington is now at least suggesting that the progressive point of view isn’t a part of what she’ll be pursuing at AOL. “Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business,” says the New York Times story. Really? This strikes me as strange, disingenuous, and about as credible as Roger Ailes claiming that Fox is not a partisan-driven institution.

One possibility is, Huffington is just saying what the corporate script requires and actually the plan is to position AOL as a sort of Democratic alternative to Fox News/Drudge — which I think would be a really interesting move. I have to assume Arianna has big TV ambitions; I have yet to meet a new-media empire builder who didn’t secretly yearn to do an Ailes (or an Oprah).

The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo’s numbers weren’t looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She’ll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000: selling itself at the top of a market bubble, pocketing the profit from a sale that couldn’t be earned from customers, and leaving a bigger, older company with all the headaches.

I was one of the few outspoken skeptics of Time Warner/AOL back in 2000. This time around there are more — see Om Malik, who looks at some numbers; Dan Lyons, who’s funny; and Ken Auletta, who views the deal as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s “hail Mary pass.”

Having all this company in doubt gives me a little pause. Maybe Huffington and Armstrong will prove a great team: The queen of low-cost SEO-driven content paired with the guy who built the Google ad machine that made SEO-driven content pay. But I still think this union is unlikely to end well. AOL remains a generic blandness factory when it comes to journalism. Huffington’s brand could change that; far more likely, it will just dissolve into the corporate miasma. 

Why do I say that The Daily spurns the Web and the Net? I mean, beyond the obvious reason that there is no Web site that offers its contents in a convenient form each day. It’s not just that. The Daily also contains no links. (Some today see this as a plus; I do not.) There are no RSS feeds. No email addresses to contact the writers and editors. No email alerts or mailing list. Comments on the articles, yes, but not reachable through the Web. No, archives, back issue index, or search! (They’re on Twitter, however. They have a blog, too, and it’s not bad.)

In other words, most of the apparatus of two-way communication that every serious digital publishing venture of the past 15 years has taken as a given is missing from The Daily. They’re serious about this iPad-only thing! But they don’t seem to realize that they’re repeating the mistakes of the very recent past.

The Daily’s designers are eager to show off sparkling graphics, integrated video, and the swipe-ability that the iPad allows. Unfortunately, they are defining “interactivity” the way the lost pioneers of the 1994-era CD-ROM “multimedia revolution” defined it. They have built a gleaming but limited set of interfaces for users to interact with static, prepackaged content. The Web taught us that true interactivity was the interaction between people moderated by the network — along with the personalization you could build into the network based on those people’s behavior.

The Daily’s one concession to today’s Web is the mechanisms it provides for its readers to share individual stories via the usual routes — Facebook, Twitter, email. The recipient of your share notice receives a link to a URL that’s a Web page version of The Daily article. We don’t know how long these web addresses will be good for. But for the moment, at least, it’s pretty easy to assemble a set of links that points you to the Web-accessible versions of each article in the day’s Daily edition. That’s what Andy Baio has done.

How long will Baio’s index last? Will it still be easy to assemble after The Daily’s first-two-weeks-free period ends? Will the News Corp. folks ask him to take it down? We’ll have to wait and see.

The question is whether The Daily’s secession from the Web is a matter of convenience or ideology for its creators. Did they put their energy into spiffing things up for the iPad — the hard, fun, innovative part — figuring that they can circle back to beef up their Web offerings later? Or do they feel that it is their calling, their mission, to leave the Web behind?

My prediction: If they’re pragmatists about the Web, they’ve got a chance — they can adapt and evolve their product so it’s a little more up to date, less hermetic and more inclusive of the public that lives online today. But if they’re ideologues — if they really believe that what is essentially a magazine “pasted on a screen” is the future of journalism — then they’re in deep trouble, and The Daily will only be Murdoch’s latest and most spectacular digital money-sink.