Technology

FIIIINALLY! Google released a Chrome beta for Android! GODDDDD. What took them so long? All the Ice Cream Sandwich users have been waiting, like, FOREVER!

Finally, Tweetbot for iPad came out. I’ve only been asking them for, like, EIGHT MONTHS! Jeez.

Apple fiiiinally released iTunes Match after a whole month, and it didn’t even work right!

Listen to how this sounds. How do we, the tech bloggers, get away with headlines like this? Where do users get off complaining impatiently about updates to a service that costs them $2.99? Or a free service? Let’s have a reality check. Remember how awesome technology is?

This is an appeal to all of us, myself wholeheartedly included, to start appreciating how amazingly fast the world is changing and stop complaining about having to wait a week or two for the next incremental update of the future to arrive.

Let’s Walk From San Francisco to Los Angeles

Sometimes, it takes longer to build amazing software than developers planned back at the beginning, when they were all psyched to get started. A great Quora thread about this popped up last week: Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

Michael Wolfe’s answer lays it out. Developing software is like planning a hiking trip down the coastline. When you’re zoomed out, looking at the big map, the line is pretty straight. But as you actually start walking, you realize that the line on the big map glosses over the details.

The actual coastline twists and turns. There are cliffs and boulders and sand. “Angry sea lions!” It’s not as simple as walking a straight line for the distance calculated by Google Maps. It might take 10 times longer to go one mile today than it did to go five miles yesterday.

So that’s the part of the problem we can’t control. Software projects take longer than expected. But the customers – and the bloggers – have to do more than just cut the devs some slack.

An App Costs 1 Cup of Coffee

We have to appreciate a few things. First of all, if you can afford a computer, if you can afford a monthly Internet bill, you can afford an app that costs $3. Let’s assume we’re talking about Apple stuff here. If you paid $3, the developer made $2.10 (and Apple took 90¢).

Just think about how many times a developer has to make $2.10 in order to make a living. That is your personal share of the app you bought. If it takes the developer a month longer than you wanted for a big update full of new features, just keep that in mind before you go ranting off to the Internet and leaving ★☆☆☆☆ reviews.

If the app is free, you should be saying “thank you.”

Time & Perspective

The other part of this problem is our perspective on time. This is the one that affects the bloggers. We have our noses in this stuff every day, so the cycle of software releases tends to feel longer than it really is. But it affects lay users as well. We’ve gotten so used to things changing online all the time that we’ve started to think one month is a long time for a technological innovation.

That’s craziness. It used to take a month to send a message to someone. Let’s dial back the whininess and appreciate the amazing speed and plummeting costs of technological change. You can write your best-selling novel on an app that costs as much as a beer. I’m reminding all of us, especially myself, to try to stop saying “finally” and start saying “thank you.”

Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Discuss

Facebook has announced what will likely be the tech industry’s biggest Initial Public Offering of stock ever. What do practitioners of feminism, a philosophy centered in the experiences of women, have to say about the political economy of the world’s biggest social technology? They’ve raised a number of interesting questions so far.

It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook’s stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions about the company’s unusually exclusive all-male Board of Directors and about mega-powerful COO Sheryl Sandberg’s public calls for women to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

The seven-member Board of Directors is made up entirely of men, something Bloomberg points out is true of only 11% of the Fortune 500 overall. Angie Chang, Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Women 2.0, an online community dedicated to women founding companies, writes:

The all-male board of Facebook makes you wonder why a company serving a user base of at least 50% half women has no female representation on the board. We told ourselves that women board directors can build value and bring win-win strategies to the table – let’s #changetheratio here.

Bloomberg’s Carol Hymowitz contrasts the all male membership of the board with Facebook’s avowed social mission to empower the world and to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s powerful advocacy for women.

Facebook typically declines to comment on issues like this. It’s typical of Silicon Valley’s libertarian-leaning culture to believe that the best way to overcome injustices connected to gender, race, class and sexual orientation, are to ignore the existence of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. That approach may leave unresolved long-standing institutional, economic and cultural factors that stand in the way of equal opportunity and which cannot be overcome by society as a whole through the self interest and sheer force of will of people on the margins of power.

Sheryl Sandberg is the second most visible person at Facebook and will likely become a billionaire in the IPO. She’s often said to be a prominent advocate of women in the workplace.

Doug Barry points out on Jezebel, though, that Sandberg’s position is a very particular one: that women are fundamentally responsible for their own career development in corporate America and need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Sandberg is well known for her 2010 TED talk Why we have too few women leaders, which has been viewed more than 1 million times.

Sandberg’s message is directed at the elite crowd gathered at TED and adresses women who are not gaining top power positions in the organizations they work at. She offers three primary pieces of advice. “One, sit at the table,” by which she means give yourself the credit you deserve and aim high. “Two, make your partner a real partner,” or make sure that heterosexual married couples contain parents with equal earning power and responsibility and that men are encouraged to take responsibility around the house. “And three, don’t leave before you leave,” in other words keep seizing new opportunities despite the possibility you might take time off to have a child.

Those are relatively conservative political admonitions that speak primarily to the problems experienced by the women in society who are already closest to power.

Barry writes on Jezebel:

Not only is Sandberg exceptionally smart, but, after graduating from Harvard Business School, she landed a job at the World Bank as the chief of staff first for Larry H. Summers then the Treasury Secretary. A job at Google followed before she joined Facebook in 2008, an opportunity that Sandberg was prescient enough to take full advantage of. If success really is preparation meeting opportunity, Sandberg was more than prepared for her chance at professional success, but some women believe that when she insists on aiming high, she’s discounting the fact that her meteoric rise owes itself, at least in part, to some very favorable circumstances (including the fact that her husband, Daniel Goldberg, is a successful entrepreneur in his own right and the couple doesn’t have to worry about finding child care for their two sons).

Barry quotes Sylvia Ann Hewett, president of the Center for Talent Innovation and director for the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University:

I’m a huge fan of her accomplishments and think she’s a huge role model in some ways, but I think she’s overly critical of women because she’s almost implying that they don’t have the juice, the chutzpah, to go for it…I think she’s had a golden path herself, and perhaps does not more readily understand that the real struggles are not having children or ambition. Women are, in fact, fierce in their ambition, but they find that they’re actually derailed by other things, like they don’t have a sponsor in their life that helps them go for it.

That paragraph had a soft ending; there are far more unpleasant ways that many women are derailed than by a lack of a sponsor at work.

Courteney Martin, on one of the web’s most respected feminist blogs, Feministing, says that while Sandberg’s message to individual women is valuable, it is just one story.

In essence, her message is tantamount to The American Dream for the 21st century woman: the problem is not sexism or racism or classism, the problem is not pathetic work-family policy at the federal level, the problem is not collective. The problem is you. In the Gospel of Sandberg, individual women must find partners who will share the load and negotiate fiercely, overcome their own guilt about not being able to be fully present parents, and “lean in” to their careers despite the lack of structural or systemic supports that might make that feel even slightly safe or rewarding.

Reading this profile of Sandberg, I was reminded of Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s, incredible TED Talk, in which she talks about “the danger of the single story.” She explains, “The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

I actually think that Sandberg is smart and has great intentions with her message that women need to dig deep and stick to their own dreams. I agree with her in many ways… This is part of the story. But it’s not the whole story.

The rest of the story is better told by women who didn’t grow up with lots of familial and social support, women who didn’t go to Harvard, women who weren’t mentored by Larry Summers, women with different definitions of success and leadership.

To look at the bright side, perhaps Facebook’s social technology will itself help other women tell their stories and hear the stories of women other than the most privileged elite.

The world’s largest communication network between people is taking a big financial step, it’s infamously opportunistic with changing ideas of privacy and it’s lead by an all-male board and a woman whose perspective on gender is likely applauded by conservatives around the world. That all seems important to discuss.

There’s been a flurry of good news in the last few days for opponents of the SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy legislation worming its way through the U.S. Congress. The White House has come out opposing key flaws in the legislation, so both versions are effectively stuck for now. Not taking any chances, some of the world’s biggest websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, are going dark on Wednesday, January 18 to protest the ill-conceived anti-piracy legislation.

On American Censorship Day in November, Tumblr censored its users’ dashboards. Now other Web behemoths will follow suit, taking their sites offline entirely. For other sites interested in joining the protest, there are technical considerations affecting search engine placement that webmasters should consider. Google’s Pierre Far has shared some important tips.

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Far’s recommendations apply for any intentional, temporary downtime, whether for protest or maintenance. The essential step is to use a 503 HTTP status code, which indicates “service unavailable,” for all participating URLs.

That tells Google that the temporary conditions of the pages are not their “real” content, so the search engine won’t index them. That will also prevent duplicate content issues, even if the same message – whether it’s a word of protest or a message about maintenance – is displayed on all pages.

“Googlebot’s crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers,” Far says. This is normal, but he says the rate will recover soon for a temporary blackout. For webmasters only blacking out a portion of their sites, Far says they should not change the status code or explicitly disallow crawling in the robots.txt file, which gives Googlebot site-specific instructions. Webmaster Tools will report errors, but this is normal.

Far’s bottom-line advice is, “Keep it simple and don’t change too many things.” You can read his full instructions over on Google+.

Dan Rowinski takes a look at how Lanyrd has created a great mobile web app using HTML5. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it’s difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

How Lanyrd Uses HTML5 for a Great Mobile Web App

Lanyrd’s new mobile web app, released today, is a great example of how the HTML5 spec can be innovated upon. Taking advantage of offline caching, if the phone and browser support it, the app allows for a mobile conference experience that isn’t at the whim of the very fallible Wi-Fi offerings at so many events. Dan says that there is great potential for an app like this, especially in regards to how they might package the app.

“It can offer this functionality to conferences as a backbone service and help organizers put together dynamic cross-platform apps with offline caching. Or it could lend its mobile Web app to conferences as a partner app. This is not just cool technology being put to use. With a little creativity, Lanyrd could build a business model around its HTML5 offering.”

More Must Read Stories:

[Infographic] The Rise and Fall of Megaupload

We’re not even two weeks into the aftermath of the Megaupload shutdown, but the saga seems to unfold with a new angle or detail everyday. From Kim Dotcom’s colorful personal life to questions about the fate of non-infringing data uploaded by former Megaupload users, this story is far from over. (more)

How to Take Better Food Porn Photos

Admit it. You’re an amateur food porn photographer. But don’t worry, you’re certainly not alone.

Last week, my esteemed Internet ReadWriteWeb-y colleagues Jon Mitchell and Curt Hopkins cooked up this insanely hilarious story about the grossness of amateur food porn. Amazingly, every single photograph in his story was shot by an amateur. And every single time, the food looked totally disgusting. (more)

How Pinterest Uses Your Content Without Violating Copyright Laws

Pinterest, the increasingly popular pinboarding social network, is able to present a visually arresting interface in large part by using copyrighted images pinned by users.

“It’s a huge concern for creative bloggers,” said Amy Anderson, who blogs on the arts and crafts site Crafter Minds. “I don’t think Pinterest does anything to help protect copyright besides removing content when people ask.” (more)

Not So Fast: Teens Aren’t Fleeing Facebook For Twitter

Contrary to an Associated Press report implying otherwise, teens are not shutting down their Facebook accounts in favor of Twitter.

Emil Protalinski has a much more thorough analysis of what is happening, which includes the Pew Research report AP used, as well as a July 2011 Pew report that focused solely on teens and social media use. His conclusion? Teens are definitely using Twitter more, but they are not giving up their Facebook accounts to do so. (more)

Startup’s Petition Raises $3M in 24 Hours if Senate Passes Crowdfunding Act

“We can gamble in Vegas. We can donate on Kiva or Kickstarter. But it’s illegal to purchase $100 of stock in a job-creating business? That makes no sense.”

That is the tagline to a new project called WeFunder from three TechStars Boston alumni who are trying to garner support for the “Democratizing Access to Capital Act” (S.1791) that would allow entrepreneurs to crowdfund startups. (more)

“Anonymous” Fights the Drug Cartels and the Movie Moguls: Reaction

It’s being called the “Mexican SOPA,” especially by press sources wanting to place highly with Google News. Last week, Mexican Senator Federico Döring announced an anti-piracy bill, which that country’s justice ministry describes as establishing a notification service for suspected content pirates, one which would enable the authorities to obtain those suspects’ identities. (more)

The Other 99% of Entrepreneurs

In my recent piece Reengineering Capitalism I highlighted a phenomenon that the global entrepreneurship ecosystem is paying very little attention to: Over 99% of entrepreneurs who seek funding get rejected. Yet, the entire world is focused on the 1% that is “fundable.”

The media, when pitched a startup story, is interested in who funded the venture. They seldom ask how much revenue the company has or if it is profitable. (more)

Surprise, Surprise: Amazon Doesn’t Say How Many Kindle Fires It Sold

Amazon is notorious for sharing very little information about how its products and business units perform. Its new Kindle Fire tablet is no different.

Amazon just reported its fourth quarter financial results, and, shocking no one, it doesn’t disclose how many Kindle Fire tablets it sold. Or even how many total Kindles it sold. (more)

Blogger.com’s New Takedown Policy Thwarts Censorship

Google’s Blogger has found a way to handle local government takedown requests similar to the way Twitter now does. It will now start redirecting readers to country-specific top-level domains (TLD) instead of the usual blogspot.com domain. It does so based on the location of the user’s IP address, just as many other Google services do. This gives Google the “flexibility” to comply with removal requests according to local laws. (more)

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Earlier this week I listed 5 signs of a great user experience in a tech product. One sign is that it changes you. I referred to revolutionary products like the iPhone and Twitter, that modified our online behaviors or habits. This trend is becoming more noticeable with the so called Internet of Things, where everyday objects are connected to the Internet. If a device or object has traditionally been a static thing, then it’s guaranteed to morph into something different once it becomes interactive.

Over the coming decade, we’re going to see a lot of new Internet-connected household devices that will literally change the way you live. A great example is a new device from a very well-funded startup called Nest Labs. At the end of 2011, the company released a Web-enabled thermostat called the Nest. Yes, a thermostat. It was designed by the man who invented the iPod for Apple, Tony Fadell.

The Nest thermostat is a round, shiny, stainless steel-encased object that is attached to a wall in your home. It features a scroll-wheel navigation, inspired by the original iPod. There is a digital screen in the middle, which changes color according to the temperature (orange for heat and blue for cool). You can have more than one Nest in your home and they’ll act as a network.

The idea behind Nest was directly inspired by the revolution in smartphones, which transformed the mobile phone into a full-fledged mobile computer. Nest labs co-founder Matt Rogers explained in a blog post how he and Fadell aim to do the same for the thermostat:

“The gap between the consumer experience in mobile products and the ones in our homes is enormous. I’ve been a programmer my entire life and could not program a thermostat for the life of me. I looked at it and thought, this beige plastic box cannot be the best our generation can come up with. Surely, there must be a better way.”

So other than the elegant design of Nest (another of the 5 signs of a great user experience), what makes the product different from the traditional thermostat? The main difference is that Nest is powered by 6 sensors and proprietary algorithms, which enables it to “learn” your living habits and adjust the temperature automatically throughout the day and night. The company claims that Nest will have created a personalized temperature schedule for you after just one week of use. Nest has WiFi, which enables it to monitor weather patterns. You can also control it via an iPhone app or on the Web.

Nest is a lot more expensive than the traditional thermostat you’d buy from your local hardware store. It costs $249, plus an installation fee of $119 if you want to get it professionally installed (which All Things D’s Katherine Boehret learned is a good move). The idea is that Nest will save you money on your energy bills. Note that Nest is currently sold out, but you can add your name to an email list to be notified of availability.

The thermostat is the first home device out of Nest Labs, but it intends to expand to other devices. In a CES video interview with Techcrunch, Nest Labs co-founder Matt Rogers noted that “there are lot of things in the home that have not been changed in 20-30 years.” The smoke alarm is one example of a device ripe for Internet connection, given that it operates via sensors.

It remains to be seen whether Nest can capture a large chunk of the thermostat market, especially given its high price relative to traditional thermostats. But there’s no doubt that this is where household devices like the thermostat are heading.

Using data and the Web to learn your living patterns and change your life for the better. Get used to that, because it’s what the next generation of home appliances will do.

Photo credit: Seth Frankel, via Nest.com

There are plenty of impressive stats in Apple’s December quarter earnings report, such as 37 million iPhones shipped, $46 billion of overall sales, and $13 billion of profit.

But Apple’s most impressive stat continues to be its growth rate: Apple is not only huge, but it is growing at a rate far greater than its peers. And, even more incredible, its growth rate is accelerating.

As a company gets bigger, or as a market matures, its growth rate typically falls. It’s only natural: The numbers get bigger, so the percentage of change eventually shrinks. But for Apple, during the Christmas quarter — its busiest time of the year — that hasn’t happened yet.

Specifically, last quarter, Apple’s overall sales totaled $46.3 billion, an increase of 73% over the previous December quarter. That’s an acceleration over Apple’s growth rate from the December 2010 quarter, when it posted 71% growth. And that was better than the year before, when it grew 32%. That, too, was faster than the year before, when Apple posted a 6% growth rate in the bowels of the recession. So for the third year in a row, Apple has accelerated its Christmas quarter sales growth.

Why is this so impressive? Because maintaining your growth rate when you’re Apple’s size — never mind increasing it — takes a lot of work!

This past Christmas, Apple needed to add an extra $20 billion in new sales to grow by 73%. The year before, it “only” needed to generate an additional $11 billion in new business to grow by 71%. It’s pretty astounding, especially considering that Apple’s product lineup didn’t even change that much last year.

The reason it happened, of course, was the iPhone 4S “perfect storm.” Not only was it a new iPhone, but it launched during what is already Apple’s busiest time of the year, the holiday quarter. And it expanded Apple’s footprint to new carriers, such as Sprint. Add pent-up demand to the mix, and Apple was easily able to shatter its iPhone sales record. Then consider that the iPhone is Apple’s biggest business by revenue and profits, and the big numbers fall into place.

Can it happen again? It’s only going to get harder. To match this year’s growth — 73% — Apple’s December 2012 quarter would have to beat $80 billion in sales. That’s a lot of iPhones. The way the smartphone market is growing, and the way the iPad looks like it’s going to do, anything’s possible. But it’s not going to be easy.

More charts: Apple’s Monster Quarter In Charts

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

Where were you on the Internet in 2010? What about in 2011? The folks over at Royal Pingdom have compiled a nice set of data for the Internet, by the Internet. That is, an entire list of data about email, websites, web servers, domain names by their .dot web addresses, Internet users by country, types of social media, web browser usage, mobile users, videos and images. We decided to take a look at the data points that tell us the most about the read/write web: websites and domain names, Facebook, Twitter and Internet users by continent. More importantly, we’ll look at how the Internet of 2011 compares to the Internet of 2010.

Facebook & Twitter: 2010 vs. 2011

Facebook: By the end of 2010, there were 600 million people total on Facebook, and 250 million were new users. Seventy percent of Facebook’s user base was located outside the United States. Users installed 20 million Facebook apps each day. Fast-forward one year later: 800+ million users on Facebook, including 200 million new users. By October 2011, Facebook was as big as the Internet of 2004. In 2011, Facebook mobile hit smartphones and Androids everywhere. Three-hundred fifty million Facebook users logged on from their mobile phones. They also shared 30 billion pieces of content (links, notes, photos) on Facebook every month. By the end of 2012, we’re likely to see an additional category: Facebook users who log on from their tablets, especially the iPad.

Twitter Loves @ladygaga: By the end of 2010, Twitter counted 25 billion sent tweets, 100 million new accounts and 175 million total users. Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) was Twitter’s most followed user, with a whopping 7.7 million followers. By the end of 2011, that number had more than doubled to 18.1 million followers – @ladygaga is still the world’s most followed Twitter user. Twitter grew to 225 million accounts, but only 100 million of those were active.

Tumblr and WordPress blogs grew fast in 2011. As of September 2011, Tumblr received 8X more pageviews than WordPress. By the end of the year, Tumblr blogs numbered 39 million and WordPress blogs hit 70 million.

Where Are The Internet Users? Asia

In 2010, Asia outnumbered all other continents with 42% of Internet users; in 2011, Asia made up 44% of the Internet’s population. European Internet users declined from 24.2% in 2010 to 23% by the end of 2011. North America saw a slight drop off, too, from 13.5% to 13%. Africa grew from only 5.6% of the Internet population to 6%. Latin America/Caribbean, Middle East and Oceania/Australia stayed about the same from 2010-2011.

Websites & Domain Names in 2010 vs. 2011

As of December 2010, the Internet held 255 million websites. That number more than doubled by the end of December 2011 to 555 million. Of domain name types, .COM grew the most from 88.8 million at the end of 2010 to 95.5 million by the end of 2011. The .NET domain names only grew by 0.6 million, whereas .ORG added 1.3 million domain names. The year 2011 also brought along 7.6 million .info domain names and 2.1 million .biz domains.

What will the Internet of 2012 look like? Post your predictions in the comments.