Month: April 2012

Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion

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Well, this is huge news in the tech world today. Facebook acquires the photo app Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. Here is Mark Zuckerberg with the announcement:

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

This is the pivotal reaction from Instagram’s founders:

It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.

Based on the above statements, the Instagram app should still remain the same. I hope that’s the case. Something I value deeply is ability to post items on Instagram unaffiliated to my Facebook timeline/stream. I feel the same way about discovering other photographers using the app.

World War 3.0

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Michael Joseph Gross, in Vanity Fair, writes on the inevitable war for the internet:

The War for the Internet was inevitable—a time bomb built into its creation. The war grows out of tensions that came to a head as the Internet grew to serve populations far beyond those for which it was designed. Originally built to supplement the analog interactions among American soldiers and scientists who knew one another off­-line, the Internet was established on a bedrock of trust: trust that people were who they said they were, and trust that information would be handled according to existing social and legal norms. That foundation of trust crumbled as the Internet expanded. The system is now approaching a state of crisis on four main fronts.

The first is sovereignty: by definition, a boundary-less system flouts geography and challenges the power of nation-states. The second is piracy and intellectual property: information wants to be free, as the hoary saying goes, but rights-holders want to be paid and protected. The third is privacy: online anonymity allows for creativity and political dissent, but it also gives cover to disruptive and criminal behavior—and much of what Internet users believe they do anonymously online can be tracked and tied to people’s real-world identities. The fourth is security: free access to an open Internet makes users vulnerable to various kinds of hacking, including corporate and government espionage, personal surveillance, the hijacking of Web traffic, and remote manipulation of computer-controlled military and industrial processes.

On boundaries on the internet:

Freedom in human society, by definition, includes some concept of bound­a­ries. Freedom on the Internet has, thus far, lacked any real concept of boundaries. But boundaries are being invented. It seems certain that nations, corporations, or both will create more zones on the Internet where all who enter will have to prove their real-world identities. Google and Facebook are already moving in this direction. The most heavy-handed suggestions entail a virtual passport or ID, which could include biometric data.

Some see stringent, universal, and mandatory authentication of identity as a commonsense solution to a number of the Internet’s biggest problems. If all of our alter egos were brought into line with our analog selves, wouldn’t we all behave better? Wouldn’t online criminals stop using the cloak of anonymity to steal from and spy on people? Wouldn’t people pay for the books, music, movies, and newspapers that many now take for free?

A thought provoking read.

Can Men and Women Just Be Friends?

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This was a timely piece for me, as this was on my mind over the weekend: can men and women just be friends? In an op-ed for The New York Times, William Deresiewicz writes:

There’s a history here, and it’s a surprisingly political one. Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. Men and women occupied different spheres, and women were regarded as inferior in any case. A few epistolary friendships between monastics, a few relationships in literary and court circles, but beyond that, cross-sex friendship was as unthinkable in Western society as it still is in many cultures.

From his own personal experience, the author concludes:

Consult your own experience, but as I look around, I don’t see that platonic friendships are actually rare at all or worthy of a lot of winks and nudges. Which is why you don’t much hear the term anymore. Platonic friendships now are simply friendships.

The one portion I disagree with:

Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Friendships can begin and end as easily as romantic relationships. Your thoughts?

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Related: a must-read on solitude and leadership, also by William Deresiewicz.

The Problem with Buying Sports Experiences

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Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier argue that when people are buying a sports experience, they let emotions get in the way, and end up making poor judgments. Their examples:

    • A fan goes to StubHub to buy a ticket to a big basketball game and shells out $125 for the best seat she can afford. The logic here is understandable: More money seems like it should give you a better view of the action and a better fan experience. But in practice, the worst seats in the highest-priced section are often no better, or are even worse, than the best seats in the next lower-priced section. But the seller is not going to tell you that.
    • When customers sign up for a gym, they’re typically given two options: an all-inclusive membership or pay-by-the-visit. Studies from economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier have shown that even though it would be cheaper for most customers to pay by the visit, they almost always choose the unlimited plan, losing (on average) $600 for their trouble. Gym owners do not advertise this proudly, nor do they usually encourage you to take the cheaper deal.
    • A fan scans the upcoming schedule of his local (lousy) NBA team and has to pick an upcoming game — so naturally he goes for one featuring a star team or a star player. (Our editor-in-chief has been known to do exactly that when, say, the Thunder come into town to play the Clippers.) But more often than not, an unbalanced game results, one with little drama and that sees the star play only 27 minutes, much of it at half-speed. You expect a ticket agency to point that out before you shell out hundreds of dollars? Yeah. We thought not.

When I visit a new city and if there is a sports event that I can attend, I do my best to get tickets. I am surprised the authors purely focus on the experience of the game, when it’s so much more than that. It’s the walking to/from the event, interacting with the fans, trying out the food at the ballpark. Often, these other experiences more than compensate if one observes a lackluster game.

Living Like a Billionaire For a Single Day

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Kevin Roose is a writer for the Dealbook blog at The New York Times. For his most recent story, he wanted to see what it would be like to live like a billionaire for a day…

First, you’ve got to appreciate this introduction:

As a reporter who writes about Wall Street, I spend a fair amount of time around extreme wealth. But my face is often pressed up against the gilded window. I’ve never eaten at Per Se, or gone boating on the French Riviera. I live in a pint-size Brooklyn apartment, rarely take cabs and feel like sending Time Warner to The Hague every time my cable bill arrives.

And then we get to Kevin’s reporting:

Really, I wondered, what’s so great about billionaires? What privileges and perks do a billion dollars confer? And could I tap into the psyches of the ultrawealthy by walking a mile in their Ferragamo loafers?

At 6 a.m., Mike, a chauffeur with Flyte Tyme Worldwide, picked me up at my apartment. He opened the Rolls-Royce’s doors to reveal a spotless white interior, with lamb’s wool floor mats, seatback TVs and a football field’s worth of legroom. The car, like the watch, was lent to me by the manufacturer for the day while The New York Times made payments toward the other services.

Mike took me to my first appointment, a power breakfast at the Core club in Midtown. “Core,” as the cognoscenti call it, is a members-only enclave with hefty dues — $15,000 annually, plus a $50,000 initiation fee — and a membership roll that includes brand-name financiers like Stephen A. Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group and Daniel S. Loeb of Third Point.

And the key takeaways:

One thing I’ve noticed so far is that when you’re a billionaire, you’re never alone. All day, your life is supervised by a coterie of handlers and attendants catering to your whims. In the locker room alone after my workout, I feel unsettled. Where’s my bodyguard? Where’s my chauffeur? Why is nobody offering me an amuse-bouche while I shampoo my hair?

I feel bad admitting it, but my billionaire day has been stressful. Without an assistant, just keeping up with the hundreds of moving parts — the driver, the security detail, the minute-by-minute scheduling — has been a full-time job and then some.

Writing Advice from C.S. Lewis

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In June of 1956, a young American fan named Joan Lancaster sent C.S. Lewis a letter. Lancaster received a letter back in which C.S. Lewis offered the following writing advice:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’timplement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

A lot of these tips appear in Stephen King’s On Writing. But it’s good to know when/how writing tips are recycled and offered as wisdom time and time again.

Earliest Human Use of Fire: One Million Years Ago

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An international team led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years ago at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300,000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life…

This research was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From the paper’s abstract:

Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence—in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains—that burning took place in the cave during the early Acheulean occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.

From this Boston Globe article, a note on the surprising finding:

The BU team wasn’t looking for evidence of fire. The discovery was so unexpected that Francesco Berna, a research assistant professor who led the work, found himself trying to poke holes in his provocative observation. But he ruled out that the fires could have been caused by the spontaneous combustion of bat droppings, or that the signal he was seeing was due to the age of the burned bones, by comparing them with 8-million-year-old bones.

Sounds like history books need to be rewritten…

The Global Financial Crisis in One Infinite Run-On Sentence

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This one long run-on sentence describes the global financial crisis:

In the beginning man created the housing bubble when dishonest banks loaned money to unqualified home owners whose jointly illegal activities were ignored by a sleeping financial press and an incompetent regulatory army who both failed to awaken the FBI and SEC and other financial-crime prosecutors from pursuing criminal charges including those against Wall Street bankers who knowingly sold bad assets with grossly erroneous ratings to highly leveraged investors (including themselves) who had all gorged to the hilt on the FED’s cheap money leveraging their losses and destroying their entire equity accounts which bankrupted our major financial institutions  who were saved by bailouts but not before triggering a global financial crisis during which all lenders on all continents lost all faith in each other because they all knew about their own garbage mortgage holdings bundled into black-box securities whose staggering losses panicked banks again due to the known unknown of massive pools of unregulated derivatives which pay off in the event of a financial default and whose opacity re-double-spooked investors thereby multiplying a crowded stampede into high-quality high-liquidity assets and setting the pattern thereby for what we can expect to be an endless loop of panic lasting a decade or two as terror is continually re-discovered by global markets now concentrated on European banks who made overleveraged housing investments many in housing bubbles much more crazy-Ponzi than that of America’s 120-year-power-ball bubble and further exacerbated by bankers depending upon the ultra safety of sovereign-debt requiring that old magical no-money-down equity investment for their loans to European governments of which many or all are now strangulating themselves after having accumulated 60-plus years of socialist labor laws and entitlement obligations but now those asphyxiating restrictions and promises are revealed as unworkable and un-payable when new borrowing must end and is unaffordable but still the Europeans while they are pathetic and bankrupt they have not achieved the scale of otherworldliness which is The Great & Terrible Japanese Zombie…

You can finish reading the rest of this masterpiece over here. Why is it a masterpiece? Because once you reach the end, you are requested to continue at the beginning… So it’s an infinite run-on sentence describing the financial crisis!

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(hat tip: @counterparties)

On Facebook Passwords and Employment

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There’s been a lot of talk these days about employers asking potential employees for their social media credentials. Facebook, in particular, has issued strong resistance against this trend, going so far as publicly explaining their stance in a blog post:

The most alarming of these practices is the reported incidents of employers asking prospective or actual employees to reveal their passwords.  If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password, let anyone access your account, or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your account or violate the privacy of your friends.  We have worked really hard at Facebook to give you the tools to control who sees your information. 

As a user, you shouldn’t be forced to share your private information and communications just to get a job.  And as the friend of a user, you shouldn’t have to worry that your private information or communications will be revealed to someone you don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that user is looking for a job.  That’s why we’ve made it a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to share or solicit a Facebook password.

We don’t think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their passwords because we don’t think it’s the right thing to do.  But it also may cause problems for the employers that they are not anticipating.  For example, if an employer sees on Facebook that someone is a member of a protected group (e.g. over a certain age, etc.) that employer may open themselves up to claims of discrimination if they don’t hire that person. 

Today, The House of Representatives shut down a bill that would have prevented employers from demanding your Facebook password. So, what’s the worst that could happen?

Reginald Braithwaite has a fictional post on the matter titled “I Hereby Resign”. Just imagine if this scenario played out for real (if it hasn’t already somewhere around the world):

One of the new terms is that every prospective new hire allow their manager to “shoulder surf” as they browse their Facebook or better still, to voluntarily log their manager into their Facebook account. If I recall correctly, she claims that we have the obligation to do a “background check” on prospective hires. I’m extremely vague on the correlation between faux-promiscuous sex or drinking and employee performance, but as she is a seasoned veteran, I have to trust her when she says that things like this overrule my judgment as to who is and who isn’t fit to be a programmer in our employ.

I was willing to go along with things and see how they panned out. But today something went seriously wrong. I have been interviewing senior hires for the crucial tech lead position on the Fizz Buzz team, and while several walked out in a huff when I asked them to let me look at their Facebook, one young lady smiled and said I could help myself. She logged into her Facebook as I requested, and as I followed the COO’s instructions to scan her timeline and friends list looking for evidence of moral turpitude, I became aware she was writing something on her iPad.

 “Taking notes?” I asked politely.

 “No,” she smiled, “Emailing a human rights lawyer I know.” To say that the tension in the room could be cut with a knife would be understatement of the highest order. “Oh?” I asked. I waited, and as I am an expert in out-waiting people, she eventually cracked and explained herself.

“If you are surfing my Facebook, you could reasonably be expected to discover that I am a Lesbian. Since discrimination against me on this basis is illegal in Ontario, I am just preparing myself for the possibility that you might refuse to hire me and instead hire someone who is a heterosexual but less qualified in any way. Likewise, if you do hire me, I might need to have your employment contracts disclosed to ensure you aren’t paying me less than any male and/or heterosexual colleagues with equivalent responsibilities and experience.”
I got her out of the room as quickly as possible. The next few interviews were a blur, I was shaken. And then it happened again. This time, I found myself talking to a young man fresh out of University about a development position. After allowing me to surf his Facebook, he asked me how I felt about parenting. As a parent, it was easy to say I liked the idea. Then he dropped the bombshell.
His partner was expecting, and shortly after being hired he would be taking six months of parental leave as required by Ontario law. I told him that he should not have discussed this matter with me. “Oh normally I wouldn’t, but since you’re looking through my Facebook, you know that already. Now of course, you would never refuse to hire someone because they plan to exercise their legal right to parental leave, would you?”
Worth reading in its entirety. Think your stance on this issue doesn’t matter? Think again.