Fear and Evolution

So the web has grown so social, that if you give me the name of any person who is only somewhat active on the web, I can find information about them and kind of make a picture in my mind about one facet of their personality/life. Of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, and the latest Google Profile, a person can be found on at least one. This brings an interesting question, are we kind of exposing too much information about ourselves on the web?

Today I asked a technical question on aardvark, and got replies from 6 people across the US in 10 mins. Aardvark includes one's partial name in the replies, but since the names were so uncommon, I was still able to find them all on facebook/linkedin (and came to know that all of them were computer science enthusiasts/professionals/researchers).

Of course, for all good purposes, this sounds exciting. You are connecting with like minded people. The whole setting is ensuing true "knowledge sharing" . But how about the cons? What does it mean for anyone to go on the web and find things about me? Honestly, for some reasons, this sounds jittery as well, and hopefully none of us takes any burns to find out the reasons. Unless you choose to stay off of it (this young generation!).

We are going to experience a whole new web - which would be the result of a big bang of the current one - Google, Twitter, Facebook and proponents of other web structures (semantic web et al) each envisioning their own slice. I am curious which of these will have most life after the bang. Would all the parts of this new galaxy form separate functional networks, each for a different purpose? I am not sure.

But, I am eager.

Apple Day

So the morning today brought two interesting news. My MBP reported it was ready to install Safari 4 (though it asked for a restart, I don't know why Apple is suffering from Microsoftobia in this regard). Installed, restarted and it was worth it! I was happy last week for trying out the Google Chrome 'Danger' build, which more or less was working OK, but Safari turned out to be a jump-jack for me.

In the mobile wars, Palm came out with their Pre a couple days ago, claiming a "would be" success with some of their trademark features. Wasn't very exciting for some reason. iPhone 3Gs got announced today (or yesterday?), and my eyes read every word of a usually spammy email from Apple announcing new products. This device has a video recorder (finally), with a 3 MP auto focus camera. Well, ok, its all a matter of being late in time for Apple it seems. Compass, Voice Control are other new features, the email says. Its kind of funny that compass, a simple app built on top of the accelerometer (I dont think GPS is required) and voice control that the first Nokia phones with those monochromatic displays had 10 years ago are being termed as features in 2009.

Apple will sell planes full of this device, no doubt. Agreeably, their design is pretty slick and usability stupid-simple. But in terms of features, I am still not convinced they've done the best job. Its not that I want a particular feature on their device, but I would expect Apple to show me what else I can do with a handheld device.