Samsung and its rivals show off the future of TVs

Edward C. Baig
January 7, 2013
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2013/01/07/baig-samsung-ces-2013/1813595

Tech titans Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook rarely come out of hiding at the annual International CES. And after years on center stage, Microsoft has pretty much applied for the CES equivalent of the witness protection program.

So with apologies to a formidable list of consumer electronics show stalwarts that includes LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba, Samsung is arguably the biggest of the Big Cheese consumer electronics mainstays left exhibiting at these proceedings.

Above all else, CES is still about televisions. Samsung, as much as any of its rivals, serves as a proxy for where the industry hopes to take you. The path leads to Ultra High-Definition models that boast four times the pixel count of today's 1080p HDTVs. Gee, it was only a few years ago that you cozied up to the thin — and yes, affordable — HDTV that now graces your living room.

Make no mistake, Samsung's upcoming 85-inch flagship UN85S9 UHD TV takes your breath away. It's just that you may have to take out a small mortgage to own this stunning TV, not that you can even buy it yet. Samsung isn't saying what it will cost or when precisely it will go on sale, but says the model will ship this year. I should also point out that there's precious little content out there to take advantage of all those extra pixels — a familiar chicken and egg scenario that slowed the launch of early HDTVs.

The splashy cutting-edge sets are expected to fetch in the $20,000 range, says tech and media analyst Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications. Still, if UHDs go the way of HDTVs — and myriad other consumer electronics categories before them — prices might drop sooner than may now seem likely, though I wouldn't bet a lot on the prospect. (I am in Vegas, after all.)

Samsung executive Joe Stinziano calls the TV a "statement piece" -- to my mind, code-language for, "if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it". He says the pixel density of the panels in the set is very expensive to manufacture.

Fortunately, the new TV flaunts other features that will be available on less-expensive 2013 models, notably a newly designed Smart Hub interface. Through the early years of Smart TVs, the various TV makers have done a generally mediocre job when it comes to screen interfaces, perhaps one reason behind all the talk of an eventual Apple-branded television.

My initial impression of Samsung's new Smart Hub is positive, though, as always, you can't really judge these things until you use it outside the boundaries of a trade show.

Samsung's Smart Hub consists of five panels: The "On TV" panel shows the channel you're watching now in a window that's adjacent to a half-dozen smaller windows representing other shows airing at the same time. Below are thumbnails revealing shows that are coming up. The visible content is based on Samsung recommendations generated from your viewing habits.

A "Movie & TV" panel, also based on your viewing history, reveals on-demand flicks, movies available to you as a subscriber to certain services, and material you may have purchased.

Other panels cover your personal "Photos, Videos and Movies," "Apps" (where you'll find Netflix, Hulu Plus, Spotify, Pandora, etc.) and "Social" (feeds and videos from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on).

You can manipulate the Smart Hub with a new remote that has a touch panel, as well as left-right, up-down slide bar controls.

Samsung also says the voice interaction in its latest TVs — advancing the state of the art from last year — has improved to the point where the TV understands complete sentences. You'll be able to say "I want to watch CSI" and the TV will serve up all the likely matches. Or you might say, "go to South Park," or, "go to ESPN," since the TV can distinguish the name of a show from a channel.

Inside the UHD TV (and other new models) is a quad-core processor that Samsung claims is 3.6 times faster than last year's dual-core models. No you won't change the channels any faster. But you can speed up the time when you stop watching a stream from one content provider and start searching on

It's fair to say that all the consumer electronics companies with a diverse portfolio of products at this show want you to keep it in the family. So it goes with Samsung. If you have Samsung phones, tablets or home appliances, for example, you can take advantage of "AllShare" features that tie the TV to compatible devices. Via an onscreen TV app, you might be able to monitor the wash cycle of your Samsung washer-dryer or change the temperature of the air conditioner without having to pause the TV content. Samsung will let you stream from the TV to one of its mobile phones.

Moreover, Samsung will soon start selling the Smart Evolution kits it announced at last year's CES, which will enable folks to upgrade certain 2012 (but not older) models to the quadcore generation. You get the new remote control as part of the kit, and can add the latest Smart Hub interface. The kit is likely to cost between $200 and $500, Samsung says.

Not that there's anything wrong with your current HDTV, which you'll be able to safely enjoy watching for quite some time. Samsung expects it to take several years before UHDs begin to overtake today's popular HDTVs. But UHD does reveal a lot about where Samsung, and its industry counterparts who are pushing the same or similar technologies, are directing the near and longer-term future of television.

The top 10 tech 'fails' of 2012

Doug Gross
Fri December 28, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/28/tech/web/tech-fails-2012/index.html

Well, you can't win 'em all.

In 2012, we saw big tech advances. Smartphones got bigger. Tablets got smaller. Social media played a role in everything from a presidential election to disaster relief.

But with advances come clunkers.

When you're in a field that demands near-constant innovation and unprecedented levels of creativity, sometimes even the most successful players are going to shoot and miss.

So, at the risk of playing Scrooge in this season of good will, here we come to wallow in it. Because, let's face it: The Internet loves a good fail.

Behold the top 10 tech "fails" of 2012, with wishes for happier days ahead to all involved.

Apple Maps

Apple's unofficial slogan, "It Just Works," took a beating on this one.

Along with the rollout of the much anticipated iPhone 5 in September, Apple overhauled iOS, the operating system that runs the phone, its iPad and other mobile devices. A much-hyped feature of the change was Apple's first effort at its own mapping app -- after dumping rival Google's map software.

The result was so bad that a few days later Apple's CEO was essentially telling customers to use Google Maps.

Entire cities appeared in the wrong place. Landmarks such as the Washington Monument showed up submerged in bodies of water, and big chunks of the globe appeared as roadless wastelands.

"At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers," CEO Tim Cook wrote in a rare apology. "With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better."

It was a little more than a month later when Scott Forstall, vice president in charge of iOS, was ousted from the company, reportedly, in part, for not wanting to apologize for Maps.

The company has been gradually improving Maps, but as recently as this month Australian police complained that an Apple Maps glitch could endanger motorists by mislocating a city of 30,000 people in the middle of the outback.

Facebook's IPO

Everybody uses Facebook. And everybody likes to make money. So everybody's going to gobble up Facebook stock, right?

So went the conventional thinking -- at least among those of us who spend more time thinking about mobile phones than mutual funds. But on Wall Street? Not so much.

It's hard to remember a stock opening more hyped than Facebook's when it hit the market in May. The stock began the day worth about $38. Then, after what everyone predicted to be a dynamic day of trading for the social media superstar, it closed at ... well ... about $38.

It wouldn't take long for the pinstripe-suit types to decide it wasn't even worth that. Facebook's stock bottomed out in September, falling below $18. Since then, it's been steadily rebounding and currently sells for about $28.

Facebook says it has solid financial plans for the future. And the stock may well keep climbing, eventually turning a profit for folks who bought early.

But that fateful day in May will be a reminder that Wall Street and Silicon Valley don't always play well together.

Airtime

When the man who created Napster and helped launch Facebook talks, the tech industry listens.

And when Sean Parker and partner Shawn Fanning tease something new called Airtime, techies fall all over themselves to see what the next great innovation will be.

But then, at a fancy launch event featuring celebrities such as Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg, Parker announces that it's ... basically, a random Web chat tool.

Cue the collective, "Huh?"

It didn't help that, at that fancy event, Airtime crashed over and over again. Or that folks had a hard time seeing how it would be different than Chatroulette (although Parker promised more users would actually be wearing pants).

In October, Parker admitted that Airtme, launched with more than $33 million in backing, had just 10,000 active users. (That's $3,300 spent per user, if you're scoring along at home.)

"Running a startup is like eating glass," he said at the All Things D conference. "You just start to like the taste of your own blood."

Ouch.

Online coupons

"These aren't your grandma's coupons!" the digital generation so brashly declared.

With their mobile apps and irreverent style, daily-deal offerings such as Groupon and Living Social were all the rage as 2012 dawned.

Now? Um, not so much.

Groupon, perhaps the best-known player in the field, watched its value plummet 79% in 2012. Its stock value dropped about three-quarters since opening in November 2011 as high-profile investors washed their hands of it.

And this is the company Google reportedly tried to buy for $6 billion in 2010.

LivingSocial, meanwhile, announced last month it was laying off 400 people. That's after announcing months of revenue losses.

So what happened? Inbox fatigue made some users stop checking the deals. A glut of offers you don't care about (pottery classes?) can make your eyes glaze over. And some businesses quit making offers, saying they never saw the promised returns on their investment.

Nexus Q

When Google gets something right, they get it really, really right.

Redefining Web search? Yep. World's leading mobile system? Check. A car that drives itself? Vroom!

But some of the Big G's outings in the gadget world have hit with a thud. Enter ... the Nexus Q.

The size and shape of a Magic Eight Ball, the Nexus Q is (or was ... it's hard to say) a media streamer that uses Android to play audio and video. It's also made in the United States, no small thing in a world where virtually all gadgets come from China.

Unfortunately, in the grand tradition of Google Wave, nobody really knew what it was when it was released in June. Its release date was pushed back and, eventually, Google just gave everybody who pre-ordered a free one.

The Q has not officially been canned. But on Google's online store, the never-released gadget is listed as "not available at this time."

Stop Online Piracy Act

The new law was supposed to be about fighting online piracy. Who's going to be against that, right?

Answer: Pretty much the whole Internet.

Members of Congress sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and related bills to make it easier to shut down websites that illegally share music, movies and other content.

But opponents argued it went too far and could end up shutting down legitimate sites while stifling free expression in the process.

Unfortunately for backers of SOPA, Web heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia joined the fight against the bill. Sites went black on January 18 to raise awareness. Members of communities such as Reddit put intense pressure on lawmakers (including soon-to-be GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan) until they dropped their support or went on record opposing the bill.

The unprecedented backlash eventually caused supporters to shelve SOPA, and quite possibly ushered in a new age of Web activism.

'Social discovery' apps

If the first wave of social networking was about hooking up with friends, the next wave would be about meeting strangers -- or so the thinking went.

Tech-world pundits predicted a new wave of "social discovery" apps that would change the way we meet people. The basic idea was that, by using phones' GPS, users could see who else was nearby and then meet up with other users with shared friends or similar interests.

"If we get this right, I cannot think of a bigger thing to be working on right now," Paul Davison, CEO of the app Highlight, told CNN in June. "We can take billions and billions of dollars."

Significantly, he also chose not to tell a reporter how many users the app had at the time.

Banjo and Glancee were apps that did something similar. Others, such as Skout and Grindr, were even more specific -- they let you hunt down willing partners for a quick hookup.

But here's the thing -- some users, particularly women, found the apps a little creepy.

OK, so you know that somebody sitting in the same bar as you likes the Pixies, "Firefly," the fantasy stylings of George R.R. Martin and the Atlanta Braves. Are you really just going to start waving around your smartphone to get their attention?

Sure, they've got good taste. But they still might be jerks.

Color

It was supposed to be a tech-world slam-dunk. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about what some feel could become a tech "bubble."

Color, a photo-sharing mobile app, stoked excitement in the startup community that was virtually unrivaled. Before it had a single user, Color had raised $41 million from investors. So certain were its Silicon Valley creators that, reportedly, they turned down a $200 million buyout offer from Google.

With much fanfare, Color launched in March 2011. But users soon complained that the app, designed to share photos with the people around you, often didn't find anyone for them to share with. Its creators were forced to announce they were working on a major overhaul on the same day it was released.

Color tallied about 1 million users at its peak and, more recently, was reportedly down to about 100,000. Compare that to the roughly 100 million users of photo app Instagram (it had about 27 million when Facebook bought it last year), and you see the problem.

Color will be shutting down on New Year's Eve.

Zynga

It reads like an old VH1 "Behind the Music" episode.

"Zynga was riding high. Love them or hate them, its games like "Mafia Wars" and "FarmVille" were everywhere, clogging up Facebook pages and spurring millions of bored casual gamers to pay real cash for virtual cows. Then, it all came crumbling down."

OK, maybe "crumbling down" is an overstatement. But things in The 'Ville definitely didn't go Zynga's way in 2012.

In October, Zynga announced it was laying off 5% of its employees, shutting down its studio in Boston and proposing the closure of others in Japan and England.

(It would be entirely cynical to suggest Zynga hoped to bury that news by making the announcement during Apple's much-hyped iPad Mini event. So we won't suggest that here.)

Facebook, which gets a cut when people spend money on games such as "FarmVille," said that income from Zynga was down 20% over last year.

And, like unskilled mafia warriors, Zynga shot itself in the foot again in March when it bought the company that makes mobile game "Draw Something" for an eye-popping $180 million. But fascination with "Draw Something" dropped off fast. When's the last time you played?

Twitter twits

OK, so you can post something stupid anywhere. But there's something about Twitter's rapid-fire, 140-character bursts that brings out the stupid in people.

From companies embarrassing themselves to celebrities behaving badly, it's hard to name just one Twitter doofus. But here are a few nominees:

• Chris Brown, the hip-hop star, consistently used Twitter to make himself look like a foul-mouthed rage monster. Instead of thanking fans after winning a Grammy, he launched a profanity-laced bromide at his "haters." Then there were the misogynistic, scatological insults he hurled at comedian-critic Jenny Johnson before "quitting" Twitter. (He's back.)

• McDonald's thought it would get a little of that social media love it had been hearing about in January when it created the #McDstories hashtag -- asking customers to share their favorite McDonald's memories. Then it found out what happens when you give the Internet open access to your advertising effort. McDonald's yanked the campaign after just two hours and countless food-horror stories about fingernails, insects and bouts of food poisoning.

• Spike Lee was, like many Twitter users, angered by the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. Tweeting the home address of shooter George Zimmerman would have been questionable enough. But Lee mistakenly tweeted out the address of a couple who have a son by that name. They had to leave their home after being besieged by reporters and threats. Lee would later apologize and "reach an agreement" with the aggrieved family.

• Greek triple jumper Paraskevi Papachristou was on her way to the Olympics when she tried a little ill-advised Twitter humor. With so many African Olympians in London, "the West Nile mosquitoes will at least eat homemade food!" she wrote. Her tweet was quickly criticized as racially insensitive, and Greece's Olympic Committee barred her from participating in the Games.

• Oprah Winfrey had been gushing for weeks about how much she loved the new Microsoft Surface tablet, culminating in this tweet: "Gotta say love that SURFACE! Have bought 12 already for Christmas gifts." Unfortunately for her, those words were followed by ... "via Twitter for iPad."

The top 12 tech stories of 2012

Heather Kelly
Fri December 28, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/27/tech/web/top-tech-stories-2012/

Facebook struggled with its new life as a publicly traded company, and Instagram, the photo-sharing network it acquired in April, was dragged along for the ride.

There were inspiring stories, such as the Internet coming together to protest anti-piracy legislation. And there was darker news, like the Israeli military live-tweeting its strikes against Gaza.

And as always, the world's dominant and most closely watched tech company was all over the news. Apple did a little bit of everything in 2012, from hit new products (the iPad Mini) to high-profile failures (Apple Maps) to some old-fashioned courtroom drama in its patent war with Samsung.

Here are our picks for the top 12 tech stories of 2012. What did we leave out? Let us know in the comment section below.

Microsoft's big push

This was the year Microsoft took a big, bold and surprisingly fun step with a new version of Windows, an updated mobile operating system and its very own iPad rival.

The company, best known for its efficient but stodgy desktop software, needed to do something fresh to get customers' attention in 2012 and started with its flagship product. Windows 8 is a complete overhaul of the Windows operating system. Microsoft nixed the Start button and mixed a playful touchscreen interface with a more traditional desktop experience that runs on tablets, traditional computers, and hybrid machines.

The company also made a leap into the hardware market, releasing its first tablet, the Microsoft Surface, which ran a truncated version of the new Windows 8 operating system. And finally, there was Windows Phone 8, a major revamp of its smartphone operating system, which Microsoft hopes can compete with Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

It's still too soon to judge any of the new releases as successes or failures, but give Microsoft credit for taking chances.

SOPA backlash

In January, a pair of anti-piracy bills united the Internet in outrage. The proposed legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, would have restricted access to sites associated with pirated content, including the search engines and ad networks that do business with them.

The Internet cried censorship, and on January 18 some of the most popular sites blacked out their pages in protest. Reddit, Craigslist, Boing Boing, The Oatmeal, the English-language version of Wikipedia and thousands of other sites went dark. Even Google put a black censorship box over its logo. There were also petitions and organized boycotts of companies that supported the bills.

The protests worked, as both SOPA and PIPA were shelved. It was an impressive demonstration of the power of an organized Internet community.

Live-tweeting war

Violence and war have long been documented on Twitter and other social networks -- typically by journalists and by regular people on the ground (notably the Pakistani witness to the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden).

But in November, the Israeli military took this concept to a new level. During its conflict with Palestinian forces in Gaza, the Israel Defense Force tweeted updates, including the news it had "eliminated" Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari. The military arm of Hamas responded on Twitter with its own provocations.

The back-and-forth between the warring sides signaled a jarring evolution in how war is broadcast in real time.

iPhone 5 and Apple Maps stumble

Every Apple hardware release is a big news story, starting with rumors months in advance and peaking with a well-oiled Apple press event, followed by usually glowing reviews and huge sales numbers. But in 2012, Apple made a major misstep when it released the iPhone 5 and its new operating system, iOS 6.

The company dropped the Google-powered maps that had come pre-installed on every iPhone since 2007. In its place, Apple introduced its own mapping app. Apple Maps looked stunning, with 3-D graphics and neat features like Flyover and turn-by-turn directions. All it was missing was transit directions and accuracy -- the maps were riddled with mistaken locations and outdated information.

The resulting criticism inspired an apology from CEO Tim Cook and led to an executive shakeup at Apple. Customers turned to third-party map apps until Google finally released an iOS version of its popular maps in December.

Apple vs. Samsung

It was the biggest tech trial of the year. Two of the top phone and tablet manufacturers went to war when Apple accused Samsung of infringing on its iPad and iPhone patents for a variety of tablets and smartphones. The drama culminated in a federal jury trial over the summer that offered a rare peek into how notoriously secretive Apple operates.

The story became huge because of the large amount of money at stake and the implications that its verdict would have on Samsung's business and the Android platform.

The jury decided in Apple's favor, awarding the company just over $1 billion in damages. But the case is far from over. Lawyers for both sides will continue bickering over potential appeals for months and possibly years to come.

Facebook's botched IPO

It was the most anticipated IPO of the year, and one of the largest ever for a tech company. Social-media darling Facebook looked primed for a big public opening: The company was valued at $104 billion, snapped up popular photo-sharing app Instagram and was still growing.

But then an array of problems and misjudgments led to a botched IPO in May, and the company's stock plummeted. The initial offer price of $38 was too high, too many shares were issued, its opening day was marred by Nasdaq's technical glitches, and underwriter Morgan Stanley was fined for improperly influencing share sales.

The stock price dropped significantly, hitting a low of $17.55 on September 4. Facebook is still struggling to recover some of its early-2012 luster.

The Instagram boom

Instagram started out scrappy two years ago as a fun little app for sharing sepia-shaded photos with friends. But when its user base skyrocketed, Facebook bought it for $1 billion in cash and shares of Facebook stock. That amount later dropped to $735 million as the value of Facebook shares plummeted.

By September, Instagram had more than 100 million users. The app capped off its big year with a rite of passage for social networks: a bungled update to its terms of service that sparked user outrage and led to a hasty backtrack by founder Kevin Systrom.

Instagram's challenge for 2013 is to figure out how to grow its free service into a business that makes money so that Facebook can begin to get its money's worth.

Megaupload and Kim Dotcom

The Megaupload case would have been mildly interesting on its own. A popular file-sharing company and its various sites were shut down by the F.B.I for piracy. But when Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was arrested in January at his lavish New Zealand estate, he went from unknown entrepreneur to a flamboyantly rich cult hero.

Dotcom (he legally changed his last name from Schmitz in 2005) did what any self-respecting boy video-game nerd would do with millions of dollars. He bought a yacht, helicopter, luxury cars and motorcycles. He lived with his model wife in a $24 million rented mansion in New Zealand where he spent hours playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3," earning a spot as the top-ranked player in the world.

But after Dotcom was jailed and his assets were seized, he slowly emerged as a leader for Internet freedom activists who thought he was unfairly targeted. He's still fighting the charges and using his newfound fame to launch new projects. His current plans include a new file-sharing site that encrypts all its files, and a streaming music service called Megabox.

Mid-sized tablets take off

It was the rare case of Apple following a trend instead of setting it. Apple introduced its 7.9-inch iPad Mini in October to take on its new rivals in the tablet market: cheaper 7-inch devices from Google and Amazon. While the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 were only selling modestly compared to the iPad, Apple quickly recognized the growing demand for a smaller, more portable device.

The iPad Mini proved especially notable because Apple's late CEO, Steve Jobs, famously stated a 7-inch tablet would never make it in the market because it was "too big to compete with a smartphone; too small to compete with an iPad." This may have been one of those rare cases in which Jobs was wrong.

Nintendo launches Wii U

In November, Nintendo released a new version of its popular Wii game console, which while groundbreaking when launched in 2006 was badly in need of a refresh.

The Wii U's most novel feature is a touchscreen tablet controller called a GamePad, which communicates with the main console. Inside the tablet are motion control sensors, speakers, a camera, buttons and other bells and whistles -- all of which the gamer uses to interact with what's happening on the larger screen.

It's a bold move for the company and brings a new perspective to console gaming, although the Wii U has received mixed reviews so far.

Yahoo hires Marissa Mayer

Aging Internet giant Yahoo was facing slumping revenues and internal strife in July when it hired Google exec Marissa Mayer as its new chief executive. The hire made headlines for many reasons: Mayer was a bold choice that showed Yahoo was serious about shaking things up. She was also young, a Silicon Valley power player, and a woman who was expecting her first child.

There was much media hand-wringing over her pregnancy, with some pundits wondering aloud whether Mayer could juggle a newborn baby and a demanding new job. Many saw her as a role model for working mothers.

But when the news settled, the real question returned: Could Mayer save the floundering Yahoo? So far she has shaken up Yahoo's executive team, given employee morale a much-needed boost and begun to improve the company's mobile offerings, including a stunning new Flickr app.

It will take a while to properly gauge her impact, but investors seem optimistic. Yahoo's stock price has risen $4 a share since her hiring was announced.

Tech's role in the presidential election

Technology issues such as net neutrality weren't discussed much during the 2012 presidential election, but tech played a huge role in rallying supporters and getting out the vote. President Obama, arguably the most tech-savvy of U.S. presidents, went on Google Plus and Reddit to take questions from voters.

And both his campaign and that of his GOP challenger, Mitt Romney, sent social media messages almost daily in attempts to sway media reports and public opinion.

But the most impressive use of tech took place behind the scenes, where both sides used new and powerful computer databases to target voters. The Romney campaign's get-out-the-vote program, called Orca, suffered technical glitches on Election Day and was perceived to have been outflanked by Obama campaign software which compiled massive amounts of data on voters and dispatched volunteers to pinpoint locations across the country.

Why We Must Stop SOPA

End of the American Dream
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/why-we-must-stop-sopa

Right now, there are two pieces of legislation in Congress that would change the Internet forever if they are enacted. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) would give the federal government the ability to potentially shut down millions of websites. SOPA (the version being considered in the U.S. House of Representatives) is the more dangerous of the two. It would essentially be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the Internet. It would give government officials unlimited power to very rapidly shut down any website that is found to "engage in, enable or facilitate" copyright infringement. That language is very broad and very vague. Many fear that it will be used to shut down any websites that even inadvertently link to "infringing material". Can you imagine a world where there is no more Facebook, Twitter or YouTube? Sites like those would be forced to hire thousands of Internet censors to make sure that no "infringing material" is posted, and many prominent websites may simply decide that allowing users to post content is no longer profitable and is just not worth the hassle. Are you starting to get the picture? That is why we must stop SOPA. If SOPA is enacted, it could be the death of the free Internet.

But this is exactly the kind of bill that the establishment media has been waiting for. It would give them back control. SOPA is being heavily promoted by big media corporations. If they are able to shut down free speech on the Internet, then suddenly everyone would be forced to rely on them for news and entertainment once again.

That is why SOPA and PIPA must be stopped. A recent editorial in the New York Times described how these new laws would work....

The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright – a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.

Everyone would be deathly scared of allowing anything to be posted on their websites in such an environment. Free speech on the Internet would be a thing of the past.

An article on lifehacker.com explained how easy it would be to bring a claim against a website under SOPA....

If it's possible to post pirated content on the site, or information that could further online piracy, a claim can be brought against it. This can be something as minor as you posting a copyrighted image to your Facebook page, or piracy-friendly information in the comments of a post such as this one. The vague, sweeping language in this bill is what makes it so troubling.

Fortunately, some of the biggest names on the Internet are rallying to defeat SOPA. For example, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says that he believes that SOPA will actually "criminalize" links....

"By criminalizing links, what these bills do is they force you to take content off the Internet"

Another huge name, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is alarmed that SOPA would give the U.S. government the power to censor search results without even having to go through a court trial....

"Imagine my astonishment when the newest threat to free speech has come from none other but the United States. Two bills currently making their way through congress – SOPA and PIPA – give the U.S. government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial)"

In the United States, we used to believe that the government should not take our property away without a fair trial.

But now SOPA would allow the U.S. government to hit Internet websites with a "death penalty" without even having to go to court.

If SOPA becomes law, the Internet will change dramatically.

If there were no websites where people could post thoughts and ideas, what would the world look like?

Over recent months we have seen how sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook can literally change the face of the globe. The following comes from the same New York Times article referenced above....

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have played an important role in political movements from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. At present, social networking services are protected by a “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content as soon as rights-holders point it out to them. The House bill would destroy that immunity, putting the onus on YouTube to vet videos in advance or risk legal action. It would put Twitter in a similar position to that of its Chinese cousin, Weibo, which reportedly employs around 1,000 people to monitor and censor user content and keep the company in good standing with authorities.

Do we really want Chinese-style Internet censorship in America?

Thankfully, the Internet community is fighting back against SOPA really hard.

Initially, GoDaddy.com was publicly supporting SOPA, but a boycott organized on Reddit has hit them really hard. In fact, GoDaddy lost more than 70,000 domains just last week.

All of this pressure forced GoDaddy to renounce its support for SOPA. However, they are not actively opposing the bill at this point.

Congress is in recess right now, so action on SOPA and PIPA is stalled for now. But the battle is far from over.

And the stakes are incredibly high. One blogger recently put it this way....

“If either the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) & the U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) become law, political blogs such as Red Mass Group [conservative] & Blue Mass Group [liberal] will cease to exist”

Yes, the free Internet that we all love and enjoy today is under assault.

If we do not stand up now, we may lose it forever.

Every single day, control of the Internet gets tighter and tighter. For example, did you know that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now watching everything that is said on Facebook and Twitter?

The following comes from a recent Daily Mail article....

The Department of Homeland Security makes fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for 'sensitive' words - and tracking people who use them.

Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS's 'watch' list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group.

But it is one thing for them to watch the Internet.

It is another thing for them to shut down free speech on the Internet entirely.

Please do what you can to save the open and free Internet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping to organize users of the Internet to protest this draconian legislation. The following is from a statement that the EFF recently put out....

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: Under SOPA's provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the “U.S. authorized version”).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a page that makes it very easy to send a letter about SOPA to your representatives in Congress. You can find it right here.

There is also a website called "Stop American Censorship" that has even more ways to let the federal government know that you do not want SOPA to pass. You can find that site right here.

We must stop SOPA. The Internet has made it possible for average people all over the world to communicate with one another on a grand scale, and this is a direct threat to the establishment and the big media corporations that they control. They are going to try again and again to take back control over the flow of information. We must not allow them to succeed.

Please share this article with as many people as you can, and please do what you can to help defeat SOPA...

Doh! The top 10 tech 'fails' of 2011

Doug Gross, CNN Thu December 29, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/29/tech/web/2011-tech-fails/index.html
Netflix's short-lived plan to split itself into two services didn't go over so well this year. Qwikster?

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
The highs were high but the lows were lower in the tech world in 2011
U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner makes our top 10 list for using Twitter to send lewd photos
PlayStation outage, "Duke Nukem Forever" and failed tablets also made the cut
It was a rough year for RIM and its BlackBerry, with a handful of "fails"

(CNN) -- Can't win 'em all, can you?

The highs were pretty high in the tech world in 2011, as new gadgets, updates and advances delighted the masses. I mean, Facebook made a change that most people (so far) seemed to actually like. What are the odds?

But the lows were lower. For every moment of digital bliss, it seemed, there was a clunker of equal or greater magnitude.

So, who are we to not rub salt in the wounds of those who got it oh-so-wrong this year?

In fairness, some of these "Doh!" moments came from folks who had otherwise good years. And nobody, not even perennial tech darling Apple, is perfect. (One hard-working journalist even had to write this very story twice after he accidentally deleted it and was forced to start over. Sweet, sweet irony.).

Sure, tech successes are nice. But these social-media miscues, foot-in-mouth e-moves and other digital duds gave us more to talk about in 2011.

Here are our 2011 "Tech Fails of the Year." Feel free to jump in the comments and let us know what we missed.

Weiner on Twitter

In a crowded and competitive field, former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner grabs our "What Were You Thinking?" award for this one.

The congressman (we're staying away from name jokes because ... well ... too easy) was being talked up as possibly the next mayor of New York City when his Twitter account was apparently hacked by someone who sent lewd photos to some of his female followers. That's the story Weiner gave, anyway.

Except, as it turned out, that someone was him.

Many of us gave Weiner the benefit of the doubt in the scandal's opening hours. I mean, what public official would be dumb enough to get raunchy on a platform like Twitter, where anyone who wants to can follow your every tweet?

Turns out ...

He wasn't alone. Comedian Gilbert Gottfried tweeted jokes about the Japan tsunami and earthquake that killed more than 15,000 people. Actor and Twitter pioneer Ashton Kutcher posted a hasty tweet defending Penn State coach Joe Paterno -- before, he says, learning the full extent of the school's child-sex scandal. The resulting backlash even led him to quit Twitter, at least temporarily.

But for so badly misunderstanding the public nature of Twitter, for the whirlwind of lies that followed before he fessed up and resigned and ... yes ... for thinking women like it when you send them closeup pictures of your crotch on the Internet, Weiner earns this bulging "Fail."

Go Daddy's SOPA misstep

When the vast majority of the Web's most active players are against something, and when your livelihood depends on the Web's most active players, it's probably best to either go along or keep quiet about it, right?

Not so for Go Daddy, the Web registrar and hosting company known for its titillating TV ads. In December, the company made the ill-fated decision to come out in support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Google, Yahoo and Facebook are just some of the Internet heavyweights that have lined up to stop the proposed federal law, which would penalize websites that host pirated content. The bill has come under fire from Web-freedom advocates, who say it could dampen online expression.

Go Daddy, which had submitted testimony to Congress in support of the bill, issued a public statement supporting it -- even doubling down with a stronger statement when the Web backlash began.

Fast forward 24 hours and the company -- which had already earned ire in some quarters for its racy (some might say sexist) TV commercials and its founder's penchant for elephant hunting -- changed its mind amid a rash of defections.

Tens of thousands of domains, including more than 50 owned by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, were moved from Go Daddy, and that's before a Reddit-organized boycott planned for Friday. Oops.

'Duke Nukem Forever'

When video gamers wait 14 years for a follow-up to one of their favorite titles, they sort of expect it not to suck. In the minds of many, "Duke Nukem Forever" failed that important test.

First announced in 1997, "Forever" was to be a follow-up to a game that got lots of love for good-heartedly pushing the boundaries of sex, violence and naughty language in the emerging field of shooter games.

It was delayed. And delayed. And delayed. What finally emerged in June hit with a thud.

"At best, it can look a few years out of date; at worst, it is a blurry, stuttering mess," wrote CNN's Ravi Hiranand, in what actually was one of the kinder reviews of the game "Playing the game feels like being thrown back into the mid-'90s, and not in a happy, nostalgic sense."

In a post-"Grand Theft Auto" world, maybe waiting "forever" would have been a better idea after all.

The other tablets

As 2011 dawned, it appeared that Apple had created a thriving new space in personal computing with its iPad.

Beginning in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, a host of competing companies stepped forward with their rival tablets. The Motorola Xoom. BlackBerry's PlayBook. Samsung Galaxy Tab. The HP TouchPad.

One problem: Nobody bought them.

Most of the new tablets, many running Google's Android operating system, came in at roughly $500 -- about the same price as Apple's new iPad 2. And the public showed that at that price, they were happy going with the industry leader.

Some tablets got pulled. Others never made it off the production line. HP had some luck selling TouchPads -- after throwing up its hands and slashing prices to fire-sale levels.

One exception. Amazon may have cracked the code late in the year with its Kindle Fire, a smaller, simpler tablet that, at $199, is $300 cheaper than the least-expensive iPad 2.

Game off at PlayStation Network

When roughly 70 million users lose access to your gaming and entertainment network, it's a "fail."

In April, a hacker accessed account information for users of Sony's PlayStation Network, ultimately knocking the network offline in late April. It wasn't completely restored until early June and some gamers lacked access for weeks.

While getting hacked was bad, some users were even madder after Sony took a week from the time of the attack to let them know what happened.

Another, much smaller, attack happened in October. In the end, it looks like most of the network's fans stuck around -- a fact no doubt aided by multiple blockbuster game releases this year.

iPhones and bars don't mix

Seriously, Apple employees?

No ... seriously?

In 2010, the tech world was aflutter after an Apple employee, reportedly celebrating his birthday, lost a prototype of the unreleased iPhone 4 in a California beer hall.

Tech blog Gizmodo bought the phone, showcased it on their site, and touched off a firestorm that included everything from police raids to legal threats.

Well, at least we know that after all of that, it could never possibly happen again.

No ... wait. It happened again.

Tech blog CNET reported that an Appler left a prototype of the iPhone 4S in a Mexican bar and restaurant in San Francisco.

As our John Sutter wrote: "Here's a theory: Maybe there's some sort of connection between drinking and losing things?"

Netflix-Qwikster

Netflix, the Web's most popular movie-rental service, first rattled some customers by raising prices in July.

Then, in September, the company announced it was, basically, splitting itself in half. Web-streaming video would still come from Netflix. DVD-by-mail rentals would come from a separate company.

Called ... "Qwikster."

Where to start here? Customers who wanted both services complained about having to set up and maintain two different accounts on two different websites. Then there was the new name, which felt dated (Napster and Friendster, anyone?) and like it was spat out by some zany-misspelled-startup name generator.

Oh yeah ... and there was the fact that the "Qwikster" Twitter handle was already owned by a guy whose avatar was a weed-smoking Elmo muppet.

Chris Taylor, of Mashable, questioned whether Qwikster was "the worst product launch since New Coke."

It didn't even last as long as that syrupy mistake. About three weeks later, Netflix announced that Qwikster was dead.

PayPal plays Scrooge

Shutting down a fund to give presents to children in need at Christmas? Sounds like something one-percenter Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" would endorse.

But that's essentially what Web-payment titan PayPal was doing before getting popped in the nose by the Internet.

Snarky blog Regretsy, when not mocking regrettable craft projects, has long maintained various charity funds. With the holidays approaching, actress and blog runner April Winchell (who writes on the site as "Helen Killer") announced a fund drive to buy toys for 200 children submitted by community members.

It was hugely successful, meeting its fundraising goal in the first 24 hours. Then PayPal, which was processing the donations, stepped in and froze the fund because it said Winchell used a "Donate" button that's supposed to be for nonprofits only.

The Web wasn't pleased.

Winchell used her popular blog to blast PayPal in less-than-friendly terms. Twitter users and other sites amplified the outrage.

A day later, PayPal said it "recognized our error" and even offered to donate to the fund.

God bless us ... every one.

iPhone 4S battery life

OK ... this one never reached the fever pitch that the iPhone 4's antenna problems did last year.

And maybe it's a sign that, when millions of people buy your product in the first few hours it exists, there are bound to be problems.

Despite not being the mythical iPhone 5, the 4S flew out of Apple stores when it was released October 14. But within hours, users started flocking to Apple's support forum to complain their batteries were running out of juice faster than Herman Cain's presidential campaign.

Apple publicly ignored the complaints for a little over two weeks. Then the company issued a statement saying that "a small number of customers" had complained about the battery and that an update to the phone's operating system was on the way.

As with the iPhone 4 "death grip," we'll call this a modest "fail" wrapped inside an epic win. The battery gripes didn't stop Apple from selling an iLoad of the new phones.

Bad year for BlackBerry

Alas, poor BlackBerry.

Research in Motion's crack-like gadget was once synonymous with "smartphone," effectively ushering in the era of messaging, e-mail-checking and other Phone 2.0 behavior.

But, 2011 wasn't kind.

It's bad enough that the iPhone and the rise of the Androids continue to muscle BlackBerrys out of the limelight. Then the BlackBerry PlayBook, RIM's effort in the burgeoning tablet space, arrived with a thud in April.

The capper, however, was an October outage at a data center that caused users to lose messaging ability in parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America and North America. (To their credit, RIM ultimately gave away a pile of free apps to the folks affected).

The outage lasted for several days and was the final straw for some users, who abandoned ship for other phones.

Who Will Be the Next Steve Jobs?

Source: FoxNews.com
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/07/next-steve-jobs

1. Mark Pincus
Have you played Farmville? Then you already know the work of Mark Pincus, the CEO and co-founder of a San Francisco start-up called Zynga that has made a killing with Facebook apps. According to an SEC filing, about 232 million people play Zynga games routinely. This past summer, the Wall Street Journal valued the five-year-old company at a hefty $15 billion to $20 billion. Pincus is a social marketing genius with a broad smile, bright ideas and plenty of charisma.

2. Caterina Fake
Fake has a long history of innovation -- her entrepreneurial record in Silicon Valley is legendary. She helped launch the site Flickr.com in 2004, which paved the wave for other Web 2.0 services that allow user contributions, tagging (to make images easier to find) and discussion over content. (The site was sold to Yahoo! in 2005. Her latest project, called Hunch.com, goes a step further, allowing users to share their preferences and create an on-going recommendation system for books, movies, or just about anything you can find on the Web.

3. Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg has the same golden aura and visionary outlook of Jobs. The CEO and co-founder of Facebook said during a recent Facebook tech conference that his company stands at “the intersection of technology and social issues,” so he’s prone to make grand statements. His main contribution is building what's become a second Internet of sorts, a safe and mostly secure haven for storing your digital life: photos, conversations, news and more. The company is steadily closing in on 1 billion users on the network -- all of this, and the guy is only 27.

4. Jon Rubenstein
Born a year after Steve Jobs, in 1956, Jon Rubenstein worked at Apple up until 2006. According to Rob Enderle, a consumer analyst, Rubenstein was being groomed to replace Steve Jobs. He even has the same knack for creating a “reality distortion field” at product launches. Rubenstein helped create the original iPod but eventually left Apple for Palm. His efforts to create a new smartphone interface called WebOS fell flat: the company was eventually sold to HP. Still, there’s signs he will rise to prominence from within HP as a tech executive.

5. Marissa Meyer
Named one of the 50 most powerful woman by Fortune Magazine, Marissa Meyer has a bright tech future. A vice president at Google, this well-liked visionary is also the “face” of the company: She's said to have created the basic building blocks for the Google.com and Gmail interfaces. Meyer is well-spoken, chats easily with press and has a upbeat personality.

6. Dean Kamen
The inventor of the Segway, Kamen has the bright spark of the entrepreneur about him. And he's clearly got "that vision thing": When he invents something, it takes a while for people to realize how innovative it is. The Segway is still an uncommon sight on sidewalks, but lately he has worked with science foundations for kids, invented alternative engines and founded a research institute.

7. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
The co-founders of Google have a youthful exuberance about technology and a penchant for inventing products everyone uses. Even the mission statement at Google is far-reaching: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Charles King, an IT analyst at PUND-IT, says the two founders did more than just create a search engine -- they invented (or at least popularized) the idea of using the Web for data processing and storage.

8. Tony Hseih
Here’s a name you might not know, unless you've read his best-selling book about entrepreneurship, "Delivering Happiness." In the book, the founder of Zappos.com -- a shoe retailer now owned by Amazon -- makes a case for pleasing customers by making a company all about customer service. Hseih’s greatest gift is in communicating ideas, something that served Steve Jobs well throughout his career.

9. Michael Dell
A wild card pick, Michael Dell is a successful entrepreneur and visionary who started Dell in 1984. He’s older than Zuckerberg, who was born in 1984, and his contributions in tech have more to do with enterprise computing (the servers that run in a company), IT services (helping a business run efficiently) and direct marketing to consumers. His time may finally come now that HP has pulled out of the PC business.

7 Formerly Popular Sites that Are Dying

Indications are that Slashdot, Blogger, Digg and other sites are on their way out.
John Brandon, FoxNews.com
Thu Aug 25, 2011
http://news.discovery.com/tech/seven-popular-website-dying-110825.html

Today's hot new website is tomorrow's old news.

Sunny days sometimes turn dark and dismal. A shirt that looked good on the rack at Target now sits in the bargain bin at Goodwill. And, that new car with the Hemi engine and the third-row backseat? It now drives like a crusty tank.

The same is true of websites. What seemed so fresh when you first registered now seems like a ghost town. What happened? According to Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg, site visitors routinely check the door to see if anyone else is leaving for better services. Like lemmings, they can pull up stakes and leave in a heartbeat. (Facebook, are you listening?) All you can hear are the crickets.

1. Gawker.com

This popular gossip site's traffic has dropped 75 percent this year, according to Compete, and has wallowed in its own bad press over the years: cuts in freelancer budgets, a stalker map that showed the location of celebs, and several site changes. At the same time, tech sister-site Gizmodo has risen in the ranks, growing views by 10 percent this year.

2. Chatroulette.com

Sometimes, it’s hard to say whether a Web site is actually dying. Chatroulette.com is a site that lets you chat with a stranger; sometimes, the stranger is naked. Visitor counts are on the rise again, hovering around 1 million after a 25 percent drop this year, per Compete.com. The site went live in late 2009, and Wired wrote about it early last year. Andrey Ternovskiy from Russia created the site when he was 17. What has died out is the press coverage: the tech media is not touching the site anymore. Most critically: the site offers nothing extra beyond what you can do on Skype. “Chatroulette was a fad, an interesting one for a while, but was invaded by male exhibitionists, and most people aren't into that sort of voyeurism,” says Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies (http://www.ndpta.com/).

3. Digg.com

Statistics don’t lie -- they just help explain the mystery. Digg.com started out in 2004 as the brainchild of San Francisco whiz-kid Kevin Rose and allowed visitors to “digg” a link so that everyone could see what was popular. In the past year, the site has been bleeding users by the boatload. There were 8 million visitors in January; this month, there were only about 3 million, per Compete.com. That’s a 60 percent drop. Competitor Reddit, which has maintained an interest level, is not so ad-centric. But the real killer is Twitter, which has become a link aggregator and social medium. Kay agrees: many people find their Web links on Facebook these days.

4. MySpace.com

You would think MySpace would have gotten the message by now: we don’t like ugly banner ads that fill the page, and a consistent user interface is more appealing to most than one that allows crazy customizations. MySpace had 30 million visitors in July, per Compete.com, but Facebook squashed them like a bug with 150 million. The real story: MySpace had 64 million visitors in last year in July. That’s a 54 percent drop. Gartenberg says the drop is almost inexplicable: users just gave up on visiting. Kay argues that the brand was somehow tarnished and uses antiquated technology.

5. Bebo.com

Going from 2M users to just 600,000 in one year might seem like a crushing blow. But consider this: AOL bought the upstart social network in 2008 for $850 million. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, AOL sold it for just $10 million last year. So what happened? This one is a mystery. Kay says that there is no real explanation, because the site offers similar services to Facebook and even Tumblr.com.

6. Salon.com

One of the oldest and most-beloved online magazines, Salon.com has sunk like a rock lately, losing about one million regular visitors over the past year, per Compete.com, a 37 percent decline. Once again, there is no reasonable explanation for the sharp decline, but there are a few clues. The user-hemorrhaging started almost immediately last November when the main editor, Joan Walsh, took a back-seat to write a new book. Many online magazines have struggled to balance free content with paid services, and Salon tends to be a little ad heavy at times. Kay says Salon has had a hard time competing with classier mags like The New Yorker.

7. Blogger/Typepad

Blogging is dead – or at least it has shifted to another medium. Now, instead of typing several pages worth of material, most Web users just tap in a 140-character sentiment on Twitter. “Long-form” blogging is not as popular, and we all know the jokes about the blogger in his parent’s basement. Sites like Blogger.com and TypePad.com have declined considerably of late, dropping about 25 to 30 percent in user visits per Compete.com. Granted, some have discovered the streamlined blogging tool WordPress.com, which has enjoyed steady growth the past few years.

8. Slashdot.org

Sadly, one of the best tech sites on the Web has seen declining user involvement. Started as a home project focused mostly on computer tech, the site grew to almost one million users back in 2008. Quantcast.com shows a bar graph that looks like a ski slope: user counts dipped down to just over 100,000 in April, although the latest counts are in the 500,000 range.

What the Rise of Google+ Says About Facebook

Google's new social network is a hit, but its sudden popularity may have more to do with the missteps of its predecessor. Peter Pachal
August 13, 2011
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391038,00.asp

When Google debuted its social network, this time for real, this time for really real, about six weeks ago, it was big news. Once Google+ arrived, many wondered whether or not a true Facebook rival was finally here. People focused on features, apps, APIs, and Google's potential to scale to measure whether this thing would ever be a real Facebook rival, or another dud, like Google Buzz.

While all those things are all important, there's another factor at work in the rise of Google+, which, by most measures, has been incredible. And that's Facebook. More specifically, the things about Facebook that annoy and frustrate its users. When PCMag put the question to readers, "Will you ditch Facebook for Google+," a whopping 50 percent said they would. Even if most of those who answered yes don't actually end up quitting Facebook, that statistic illustrates a general frustration with the service that's probably familiar to anyone who's on it.

Facebook has been annoying its users probably since its inception. Now, every piece of software has its problems. Some users of iPhoto might be annoyed that it doesn't have built-in integration with Snapfish. Twitter users may not like that a direct message looks almost identical to an @reply (Anthony Weiner certainly doesn't). That's normal. Facebook's issues go deeper, though. Facebook's integration into our lives is so personal, so far-reaching, that when it does something users don't like, irritation can quickly become outrage.

There have been numerous cases of Facebook making some kind of of change to its features, users responding with an uproar, and then Facebook proceeds to make the change anyway. A good example is friend lists, which were recently replaced with Groups. Facebook gave its users lists, noted that (after a while) only 5 percent of users actually used them, and then took them away.

"I know that they say only 5 percent of users really cared about that feature, but they cared about that feature a lot," says Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, Facebook app developer, and an self-described unofficial Google+ statistician. "In the end, everyone had to comply and go along with all the Facebook changes, some of them pretty radical, because they had no choice."

Unitl now, of course. There have been other social networks since Facebook came on the scene, sure, but Google+ is the only one that has the features, the scale, and—possibly most important—the buzz to be a real Facebook competitor. Until now, quitting Facebook was a difficult prospect. Not necessarily physically difficult (though Facebook does bury how to leave the service on its site), but socially difficult. I personally know at least a half-dozen people who left the network at one time or another only to inevitably return. The reason? Some variation of "All my friends are on it, and I don't want to miss out."

In other words, there was really nowhere to go that offered the same experience, so they returned. But now that there's another place for people to get social online, things could be different the next time someone walks away. Google+ isn't quite the Facebook alternative Google wishes it was, however, since the new service doesn't actually have all your friends on it—yet. While the growth has been extremely rapid, it's still 25 million to Facebook's 750 million.

"Google has a big chicken and egg problem," says social media analyst Lou Kerner. "Nobody's going to use it until people are on it. But that's a problem that all social networks have. But to the degree that anyone can solve it, it's Google."

Even though Google+'s member base is a drop in Facebook's bucket, it's actually a pretty notable drop. Google was selective about whom it let into its private playground when it debuted its social network, making sure the initial users were, in a word, smart. What Kerner sees as a weakness of Google+—that it's been limited more or less to the digital "cognoscenti"—Allen sees as a strength. Google+ is already the cool new thing, and a dynamic population of first-generation users (see the slideshow above) multiplies that perception.

"The geek crowd has fallen in love with Google+," says Allen. "Those first 10 or 20 million people who first jumped into Google+, it's like the cream of the crop in technical and professional circles. I have never seen this kind of online discourse and communication."

In the end, the cool factor could be the one that ultimately matters the most. A couple of months ago, when it looked like Facebook's popularity in the U.S. was starting to wane, I entertained the theory (one of many) that Facebook's time might have come. I dismissed it right away—rightly, since user engagement on the site is still rising—but all endings have a beginning. Facebook, for all its impressive features and vast statistics, not to mention a looming IPO said to be potentially worth $100 billion, just isn't cool anymore. Even Allen says the people he talks to about Facebook say "It feels so much like MySpace."

Cool, almost by definition, isn't quantifiable. But there's virtually no question that Google+ currently has loads of it, and Facebook is running dry. Mark Zuckerberg probably isn't losing any sleep over Google+ just yet, and maybe he's shouldn't given Facebook's collosal size and influence. But he should definitely think twice before pulling the trigger on the next Facebook feature with questionable privacy implications. As soon as Google+ opens its doors fully (it's still invitation-only and limited to users 18 or older), every single Facebook user will have the chance to try something new. And they may decide they like it better.

For more from Peter, follow him on Twitter @petepachal.

Facebook's Phonebook Fiasco

Want to find the phone numbers of all your friends and some strangers, too? Just look inside your Facebook contacts page.
Dan Tynan, ITworld
Aug 11, 2011
http://www.pcworld.com/article/237940/facebooks_phonebook_fiasco.html

Who are all these people, and what are their phone numbers doing on my Facebook contacts page? That’s the question I am now asking.

I have 987 Facebook friends, some of whom I actually know. A handful of them are on my Android phone. Most, if not all, of the contacts inside my mobile phone are now listed in Facebook – as well as numbers for things like the pizza joint down the street, which doesn’t have a Facebook page.

You know how it goes on Facebook – somebody you don’t know asks to be your friend, you look over their friends list, decide they probably aren’t an axe murderer or a Tea Party member, and you say Yes, because Facebook is a fairly low risk, low maintenance connection. And if they prove to be truly annoying you can always block or defriend them later.

The vast majority of these people did not voluntarily give me their phone numbers. Some probably would if I asked, others might decline. But Facebook just gave me all their numbers – no questions asked. Apparently it’s because they elected to share their contact information with the world, so Facebook took the next step and added their info to my list.

Want to see for yourself? Launch Facebook, click Account and then Edit Friends, then select Contacts from the menu on the left. You should see a long list of profile pictures with phone numbers attached.

My Facebook phonebook: Who are all these people?

It gets weirder. There are also people whom I do not know, who are not in my Android phone’s contact list, with whom I share no connection whatsoever and have no friends in common, who are in my Facebook phone book. Now Facebook is asking if I want to friend them. I have no idea why.

And some of them are minors.

Wait, it gets weirder still. As regular readers of TY4NS may remember, I have a few Facebook alias accounts that I use for testing. None of these have their own cell phones or contact lists, so I never imported any contacts to them. Yet these accounts also display the phone numbers of everyone in their respective friends’ lists. So despite what Facebook’s contacts page says, this has nothing to do with using Facebook’s mobile app.

As Swiss developer Kurt Von Moos points out, Facebook has been syncing mobile contacts this way for some time. I’d just never clicked the contacts page before.

He writes: ... with neither your knowledge or consent, [Facebook will] import ALL the names and phone numbers FROM your phone’s address book and upload them to your Facebook Phonebook app ... on Facebook.com, thus storing your private contact numbers on Facebook‘s servers. Once your phone is synced , Facebook will attempt to match the newly uploaded phone numbers to users that have listed the same phone number on their Facebook profile, whether you are friends with them or not.

Why exactly is Facebook storing all of those numbers on its servers? That’s a good question.

The problem: Many people give everyone on Facebook access to their contact information and may not even be aware of it. Freelance coder Tom Scott has created a Web app (called “Evil”) that randomly displays phone numbers unsuspecting Facebook users have made public, along with their profile picture. He blocks out the last three digits of each one, but they are visible on Facebook itself.

My advice: Stop sharing your phone number on Facebook. You can go to Facebook’s Remove Imported Contacts Page to delete the numbers of your friends (though when I tried to do that with one of my dummy accounts, it didn’t do a damned thing). You can go into your Account/Privacy settings, click Customize settings, and change access to your Contact Information so only select people can see your number. Or you can just delete your digits from Facebook and be done with it.

Would you just hand your phone number to a random stranger in a bar or on the street? Probably not. So why are you doing that on Facebook?

TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan’s Facebook phone number is literally a Facebook phone number; don’t dial it unless you enjoy getting an earful of fax noise.

Facebook: We’re Not Giving Out Your Number

Sarah Kessler
8-11-11
http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/facebook-phone-numbers

Facebook has publicly responded to rumors that it is harvesting numbers from mobile phones and then making them public.

The source of the rumors is a misinterpretation of a feature called “Contacts.” When you download Facebook’s mobile app, this feature syncs your phone’s address book with your profile. From then on you can access all of the numbers in your phone from your Facebook profile.

What has made some users uneasy is this: Contacts uses your mobile phone contacts to match your friends’ Facebook profiles with their numbers. If a friend hasn’t included her number on her Facebook profile, it looks as though Facebook has just given you her number when in reality it came from your own phone.

The feature also uses the numbers in your phone’s contact list to search for potential friends on Facebook. If it finds somebody who has posted a number on Facebook that matches one in your phone book, it will suggest that you add them as a friend.

To see the feature in action on your own profile, go to the Accounts tab at the upper right-hand corner, select “edit friends,” and then choose “contacts” from the menu on the left.

A viral Facebook post warned users that Facebook also posts the numbers it finds on your phone to other users’ Contacts tabs. This is not the case, the company said in a post on its wall late Wednesday.

“Our Contacts list, formerly called Phonebook, has existed for a long time,” the statement says. “The phone numbers listed there were either added by your friends themselves and made visible to you, or you have previously synced your phone contacts with Facebook. Just like on your phone, only you can see these numbers.”

While Facebook says it is not sharing phone numbers collected from mobile phones, its ability to populate them in this way is still disturbing to some users, who left a total of about 9,000 comments on the message.

“You should have to opt INTO this feature, rather than have it happen automatically and have to uninstall it,” wrote user Heather Hollowell.

Facebook: Korporate Phone Hackers

If you need another reason to hate FB, here's a little note from Konformist Korrespondent AF on their latest (and probably greatest) outrage, which amounts to a criminal invasion of privacy (of both users and their friends who may want to keep their phone numbers private):
THIS IS NOT COOL!!!

ALL THE PHONE NUMBERS IN YOUR PHONE are now on Facebook. No joke - go to the top right of the screen, click on Account, then click on Edit Friends, go left on the screen and click on Contacts. All phone numbers from your phone (FB friends or not) are published. Please repost this on your Status, so your friends can remove their numbers and thus prevent abuse if they do not want them published.

Richard Metzger: How I became an accidental spokesperson for gay rights

Richard Metzger: How I, a married, middle-aged man, became an accidental spokesperson for gay rights overnight
Xeni Jardin
Tuesday, Apr 19, 2011
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/04/19/richard-metzger-how.html

Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds (you may know him as founder of Disinformation, or as a BB guestblogger, or as the counterculture "Charlie Rose"), writes in with the odd story of a Facebook photo ban, and the media misinfo frenzy that followed.
Since just last Friday, the above photo, a publicity still from the popular BBC soap opera "EastEnders" has become the emblem of an utterly unnecessary Facebook scandal. One that's already gone international and one that I, personally, I am tangentially involved in. I say unnecessary because it never should have happened in the first place, but let me state this at the beginning of this for those of you--you know who you are-- who'll just read the first two paragraphs before zipping off to write something snarky in the comments: I do not personally believe that the Facebook corporation is in any way homophobic. Not even in the slightest. Okay?

Now that I've got that out of the way, here is what happened and why some people might think that they are:

On Friday afternoon, one of my fellow bloggers at Dangerous Minds, Niall O'Conghaile did a quickie cut-n-paste blog post about a "kiss-in" protest scheduled for that night in London at a pub where two young men had been asked to leave earlier in the week because they were kissing. You can read Niall's post here. He decided to use the above photo because he felt that it was inoffensive (Some outlets have reported that this photo came from the London "kiss-in" page on Facebook, but this is not true, it was Niall's choice and he found it on Google Images).

I posted this to my own Facebook wall as a matter of course. I put up all of the Dangerous Minds content on my wall. Sometime mid-day is when this would have gone up.

I didn't really pay that much attention to the matter, but before we went to sleep that night, my wife Tara McGinley, who also blogs at Dangerous Minds, mentioned that this heavy metal kinda guy "Jerry" had written a bunch of childish and homophobic things about this picture on my Facebook wall, saying that he found it "disgusting." Predictably, a bunch of people jumped all over him and right around 10:30pm Tara noticed that "Jerry" had deleted all of his comments and vamoosed.

The next morning I woke up around 6am to find a note from Facebook waiting for me with the ominous subject "Facebook Warning" informing me that I had posted "abusive material" which they had removed. Here's what it said:

"Hello: Content that you shared on Facebook has been removed because it violated Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Shares that contain nudity, or any kind of graphic or sexually suggestive content, are not permitted on Facebook.

This message serves as a warning. Additional violations may result in the termination of your account. Please read the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities carefully and refrain from posting abusive material in the future. Thanks in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

--The Facebook Team"

I assumed that the item in question was a post that had legitimately risqué footage of 1960s strippers in an embedded video and shrugged it off. I didn't even look. When my wife Tara woke up, I told her about the Facebook warning and she also assumed that it came as a result of the stripper footage.

Five minutes later she came into my office and said "You won't believe this. The thing Facebook cited you over? It was the thing about the kiss-in at the London pub that Niall posted."

Here is what I wrote back to Facebook:

Hello,

Can you please tell me exactly what this objectionable post was? My FB profile is an extension of the Dangerous Minds.net blog which gets around 200,000 daily readers and over 5 million a month. We post tons of content there, so it would be helpful to find out what this material was.

Does this mean that you got a specific complaint?


The more I thought about it, the more this minor act of censorship bothered me. It seemed so small-minded.

I wondered why Facebook would remove this rather innocuous photo and I was also pissed off that this "Jerry" fellow, this supposed "friend" of mine (someone I've never met of course) should be able to get something taken down from my wall simply because he's a whiner. I mean... look at that picture. They are both fully-clothed. It's a still from a popular prime-time (or "pre-watershed" as they say in the UK) BBC TV show, not a porn film! Why should this ridiculous homophobe heavy metal guy get to call the tune?

The stupidity of this situation really bugged me, so I sat down and wrote up a quick blog post because I was in such a snit about it. When I was adding HTML links I realized that the link in Niall O'Conghaile's original post to the Facebook page organizing the London pub "kiss-in" was now gone. I worked this in also, but only in the sense of asking IF there was a connection (I now know there wasn't, but I'll get to that part later). I put up the post, titled "Hey Facebook: What's SO wrong about a pic of two men kissing?" and went about my day.

Within a matter of minutes, that blog post was getting hundreds upon hundreds of shares. And then thousands and then tens of thousands. There are currently, as I type this, over 75,000 shares and over 1100 tweets. In just two days, considerably more than a million people have read that post. Without trying to, I wrote a blog post that was heard round the world. Had I known so many people would be reading it, I'd have spent more time polishing my prose.

The post I wrote is still being read by many hundreds more people every hour who come to the (I think false) conclusion that Facebook is a homophobic, evil company. As I stated at the beginning of this, I don't believe that is true. My beef with them was about "Jerry" as I think I make clear in my post, but other people, and I can't say I blame them, are jumping to different conclusions.

What pissed me off is that they let a knucklehead like my "friend" get away with this and allowed a dummy--the turd in the punchbowl-- to get the better of my nearly 5000 other "friends" who were laying into his dumbass with knives drawn! The group/tribe there wished to oust "Jerry" and his lowbrow homophobia from their midst. Why did Facebook side with him and not the vast majority of my "friends"? It was obvious that he was the irritant to the group at large, not the photograph! Him!

According to Facebook's FAQ on matters like this, EVERY claim of "abusive" posts is investigated by an actual live human being. If we take them at their word, it wasn't automatically deleted.

My assumption is that "Jerry" complained and that perhaps a conservative or religious person working for Facebook --maybe it was an outsourced worker in another country, I can't say--got that case number, looked at it for a split second, vaguely (or wholeheartedly, who can say?) agreed with "Jerry" (or it was just "easier" to "agree" with him as a matter of corporate policy) dinged it and moved on. I doubt that there was very, very little thought given to the matter. "Delete" and move on to the next item of "abusive material" on the list.

THAT'S ALL I THINK HAPPENED.

There is little else to report. How people reacted to it is in evidence all over Facebook now with thousands of people changing their photo to one of a same sex smooch. There are protests planned all over the world now. It has a life of its own now, but one that resulted from a mistake, ultimately.

The real problem here is certainly not that Facebook is a homophobic company. It's that their terrible corporate policy on censorship needs to stop siding with the idiots, the complainers and the least-enlightened and evolved amongst us as a matter of business expediency! That ill-advised policy can cause huge --and otherwise avoidable-- international public relations problems for them. Why just give that power to dummies and homophobes to use like a caveman club on the rest of us? It makes no rational sense (certainly not from a legal standpoint) and is anything BUT expedient when you consider the damage to their brand which can occur in a situation, ahem, exactly like this one.

They're a young company, but this is something that they've GOT to get right. If Facebook adopted new guidelines that would put the "burden of proof," so to speak, on the complaining party, this would have an undeniably positive effect on society at large because of the supremely high leverage point an entity like Facebook holds in cultures all over the world.

On Monday morning, I was contacted by a woman working with a foundation in New York that aims to accelerate full equality and acceptance for lesbian, gay, bi and trans people, about advising them on an advertising campaign hitting Facebook hard over this policy. This seems like an especially good idea to me. If Facebook can be persuaded to modify their censorship criteria, and PREVENT the stupids, the jerks, the blue-noses and the idiots from always having the advantage, the LGBT community will have won a very important battle FOR free speech and AGAINST hate speech and bullying.

It's a win-win situation all the way around for everyone except for the assholes. What do you say, Facebook?

[When I get a reply from Facebook, with an explanation which they owe not just to me, but everyone using their contraption I'll update this post. I still haven't gotten one. They know how to reach me, obviously.]

Addendum: I also wanted to mention that it turns out that the Facebook event for the "kiss-in" was not, in fact, blocked by Facebook, as I questioned on Saturday morning in my original post. The page was made private by the creator of the event itself, Paul Shetler, due to the"abusive material" that he was having to deal with himself left by homophobes and Internet trolls. Come Saturday morning it was a dead link. Paul Shetler wrote this in the comments of the post at Dangerous Minds to clear the matter up:

Paul Shetler says: Hey I just saw this. Before it goes too far, I just want people to know that FB have NOT removed the kiss-in event page; it's still there, but _I made the event private after the event_ was over and only visible to those who had been invited as there were starting to be trolls posting abusive nonsense on it.

Other people, seem to be confused about what exactly was taken down from my Facebook page, it was a link to the Dangerous Minds post that Niall wrote, not, as some seem to think, the link Paul refers to above.

Once more with feeling: They were two separate things, my speculation did not really assume they were conjoined matters, but I think I did confuse some readers. I noticed both things at the same time. My speculation in the first post was pretty clearly just that, speculation.

I'm not walking back what I wrote Saturday morning, I'm just reporting what subsequently came to light with Paul's note. Niall tried to clear up some of the confusion that we could see was happing in the comment with this follow-up post. It's worth mentioning that aside from this ZDnet article, almost everything I've been reading about this on Perez Hilton, The Advocate's blog and elsewhere, outlets both pro and con, even when they are trying to be supportive, are often really factually incorrect, or simply inept in their reporting, sometimes to a idiotic degree. It's been very odd to see all of this transpire. I've been accused of all kinds of nefarious things.

What still remains to be seen is why Facebook removed the original Dangerous Minds post from my personal profile with the warning that I had posted "abusive" material. Still waiting on that.

Culture, Sex, Technology • Tags: BBC, Facebook, Gay, Homosexual, LGBT, Social Media

Wikileaks for Nobel Peace Prize

In your face, Facebook! Wikileaks has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Bono will be pissed if he gets passed up again...

FT names Steve Jobs as Person of the Year

http://www.techtree.com/India/News/FT_names_Steve_Jobs_as_Person_of_the_Year/551-113917-547.html
FT names Steve Jobs as Person of the Year
Samir Makwana, Dec 24, 2010
Noted for coming up with three revolutionary products

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been titled as Person of the Year by Financial Times. Widely know has the visionary for Apple products who has taken some crucial decision to roll out one of the best products of this decade in mobile and computing segment. Be it iPhone or thin MacBook Air, Jobs was the one to uncover it publicly. Side-lining the modern age nerd Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, few decades back Steve Jobs played a formative role in popularizing the personal computer and made Apple's public offering at the young age of 25.

TIME did make into news and faced some heat after naming Facebook's young CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the Person of the Year. Three years ago, Apple's iPhone changed the way we interact with the phone and then followed the iPod touch that has still left many portable media player way behind in the competition. Earlier this year we saw the 9.7-inch screen bearing iPad tablet that continued to be the top searched term, heavily admired, and secretly desired product of this year. Steve Jobs has been credited for continuously tapping the demand for right gadgets at the right time and perfected to suit average user's requirements.

Yes, Jobs has been heavily criticized for limiting the features in the Apple products and taking decision on behalf of millions. Apple products love them, hate them or try to resist them. You can't ignore them. That's what Steve Jobs has created and bred in the technology domain.

Recently US President Barack Obama cited Steve Jobs as an example for a person who Americans should "expect to be rich" as an incentive for others.

Microsoft is a dying consumer brand

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/27/technology/microsoft_pdc
Microsoft is a dying consumer brand
Steve Ballmer, and the company he leads, are struggling with "the vision thing."
David Goldman, staff writer
October 27, 2010

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past.

Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind in Web browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.

Outgoing Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie called out Microsoft's lost ground in a blog post over the weekend.

"Our early and clear vision notwithstanding, [competitors'] execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless fusion of hardware & software & services, and in social networking & myriad new forms of internet-centric social interaction," he said.

It's not like Microsoft didn't foresee the changes ahead. With a staff of almost 90,000, the company has many of the tech world's smartest minds on its payroll, and has incubated projects in a wide range of fields that later took off. Experiments like Courier (tablets), HailStorm/Passport (digital identity), and Windows Media Center (content in the cloud) show the company was ahead of the game in many areas -- but then it either failed to bring those products to market, or didn't execute.

"In this age, the race really is to the swift. You cannot afford to be an hour late or a dollar short," says Laura DiDio, principal analyst at ITIC. "Now the biggest question is: Can they make it in the 21st century and compete with Google and Apple?"

Some influential analysts think not. Several have downgraded Microsoft's (MSFT, Fortune 500) stock in recent weeks, as PC sales continue to slow and Microsoft struggles with its tablet strategy. The company's stock is down more than 17% this year.

What's wrong with Microsoft

A rundown of Microsoft's major consumer projects finds trouble in almost all of them.

Internet Explorer's popularity has been waning for years, and one recent study showed that for the first time in more than a decade, more people are using alternative browsers. The browser is becoming the single most critical piece of software on a device -- potentially eclipsing the operating system -- but all of the major innovations of the past few years, like tabbed browsing and add-on extensions, came from outside Microsoft.

Windows Phone 7 has promise, but Microsoft dug itself an enormous hole with the subpar Windows Mobile platform. With its market share currently sitting below 5%, developers are taking a "wait and see" approach.

Microsoft's media platform Zune was dead on arrival.

Bing is growing, but substantially all of that growth has come at the expense of its business partner, Yahoo -- not its archrival Google.

Microsoft's attempts to build a social network through Windows Live have failed to gain traction. It has no real answer to Facebook.

Six months after Apple's release of the iPad, Microsoft still has virtually no presence in the tablet market. And its strategy for taking on Apple -- Windows 7 on a tablet, rather than a tablet-specific operating system -- is leaving potential partners cold. Lenovo's technology director recently told PC Mag that his company won't be building around the platform: "The challenge with Windows 7 is that it's based on the same paradigm as 1985 -- it's really an interface that's optimized for a mouse and keyboard."

With Xbox, Microsoft succeeded at innovating: It created a competitive video game brand for hardcore gamers. But even Xbox was outdueled by Nintendo with the Wii, which outsold Xbox by appealing to casual gamers.

Then there's the epicenter of the Microsoft universe: Windows. Microsoft likes to point out that its operating system is its biggest consumer brand and Windows 7 has been selling rapidly. Its new version has sold 240 million licenses in a year, making it the fastest-selling OS in Microsoft's history.

But Windows' momentum isn't from consumers. In fact, consumers are a worry for the Windows division, because they have dramatically slowed their purchases of PCs in recent months.

Rather, the fast sales are coming from businesses, which significantly delayed their purchases of new Windows licenses because Windows Vista was bug-ridden mess. Then the recession hit. A years-overdue corporate PC refresh cycle is now happening all at once.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's executive suite is in turmoil. CFO Chris Liddel, entertainment unit head Robbie Bach, device design leader J Allard and business division chief Stephen Elop have left within the past year. Ray Ozzie joined the exit parade last week.

Consumers matter

Microsoft has a lot of questions to answer, and it will have an opportunity to do so at its Professional Developers Conference in Seattle, which kicks off Thursday.

But PDC, which used to be one of Microsoft's most important and widely attended conferences, is going to be relatively small this year, with only a few thousand people making the trip, analysts say. PDC's hottest news this year is about cloud computing -- vital to enterprises, but not exactly sexy stuff.

So is this Microsoft's Waterloo? Will it become the next IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) -- crucially important to businesses but an afterthought for consumers?

"Microsoft is at a transition point, and there is a risk of that happening," says Al Hilwa, analyst at IDC. "But Microsoft cares much more about consumers than IBM ever did. It's in its DNA, and it understands that it is necessary to stay relevant. I don't see Microsoft ever abandoning consumers."

As Apple has proven, success in consumer products can fuel explosive growth. Apple surpassed Microsoft's market value earlier this year, and is on pace to eclipse the company in sales for 2010.

And if Microsoft cedes consumer ground, it risks its enterprise stronghold. Businesses are becoming more willing to allow employees to use their personal devices for work purposes, and a growing number of those gizmos are Macs, iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones.

So it's up to Microsoft to turn that around by being a leader, rather than a follower, in the consumer market.

Windows Phone 7 is a good start. Internet Explorer 9 has some exciting new features that other browsers lack. And Xbox's controllerless Kinect -- the first of its kind -- is coming this holiday season.

Microsoft just has to hope it's not too late.