Because We (the FAA) Said So...

You may have long suspected that there is no genuine technical reason that electronic devices need to be stowed during takeoff and landing on a commercial airline flight.

Most of us in fact have been aware of this for so long that the jokes about it have become as tired and shopworn as the old airline food jokes. Alec Baldwin brought the joke back for one last round with his Saturday Night Live appearance.

But the truth of the matter is much as you've suspected. Independent testing demonstrates that the actual risk of interference with aircraft systems by a Kindle or a non-transmitting handheld device is not significant.

A curious technology writer, Nick Bilton, had this to say on the matter.

“The power coming off a Kindle is completely minuscule and can’t do anything to interfere with a plane,” said Jay Gandhi, chief executive of EMT Labs, after going over the results of the test. “It’s so low that it just isn’t sending out any real interference.” 

So the most likely case seems to be that the FAA has not altered regulations it enacted many years ago when devices were different and when accurate and comprehensive test results may not have been available. 

I've always accepted that the regulation existed to force passengers to be more alert and ready to take emergency action during the most critical portions of the flight. The FAA does not support this claim and cannot explain why the rule exists.

What can you do about that?

Who is this about, anyway?

One of my most long-established pet peeves about web content, and presentation of information on the web is what I call Header Fluff.

Early browsers were often plagued with this unsightly condition. But even if browsers have grown somewhat free of this heartbreaking life challenge, content designers can still succumb to it for their individual efforts.

Here's a page we encountered recently.

The news story is in there somewhere. Even with a generous definition of other parts of this page as useful content, the total proportion of meat is around 15% here I think.

I want this publication to succeed, and I hope they wake up to the imperative that they lead with content.

Red Queen's Race Continues

It seems that the proliferation of interesting platforms designed to deliver us media forces us to stay constantly in motion to see what's next.

The old conversation about which "portal" and later which "platform" would prevail -- that conversation has evolved.

Now we are in a conversation for what will integrate and expand the social media space. We can agree that there will be more than one influential platform and our next exploration is that of how to make them work together.

Two recent rollouts speak to the emergence of new needs and requests in the marketplace for media delivery.

How to Ride Into the Sunset

...I got a note today about the waning days of Google Wave. After I'd read and considered it, I realized that what I was looking at is the Very Right Way to sunset a product or service. Once again I'm struck by how, against all odds, Google continues to behave in the marketplace the way I'd ask a corporation to act. I wrote about Google Wave earlier here, first when I was introduced to it and impressed by what might be possible, and later when the announcement came that the service would be retired.

Today I received a letter from Google that told me what to expect, and what my options might be. I was impressed with the informative nature of the communication, and an open exhibition of concern for my experience as a consumer. The truth is that I never paid Google a penny for Wave, but they relate to me as a customer. There is another corporation in this Valley to whom I have given plenty of money and I still find myself treated there as an adversary, a mark, or an annoyance whose purchase in the past holds no weight today. ("What have you bought from me lately?")

What was exceptional about this Sunset Notice is that it not only told me exactly when the shutdown date would be (60 and 180 days in advance) but it also told me where I could find open source alternatives that might serve my needs as someone who's come to appreciate what Wave can offer.

Take a look:

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

I've been involved in the emerging software game since the days when we thought spreadsheets were pretty darn spiffy, and I have to say this is not the usual approach to turning out the lights on a service.

But there's a more important thing, and I've spoken here about it before. It's the matter of how easy (or difficult) a company makes it to take your stuff and move on.

Earlier in my career, I took home a nice consulting fee to help a client retrieve its information from a Microsoft service and put it on another platform. It required the creation of some fancy scripts and a lot of hand curation to get the stuff out because no means had been devised to allow my client free access to its own data. It had been easy enough for this client to put the information into the system, but there was no means to download/retrieve the information in a fundamentally whole fashion. (Well of course! Because who at Microsoft could ever dream that you'd want to use anyone else's service?)

Today the issues are more with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and their peers.  How many of those give you a clean method for retrieving all of your data?

Certainly Google leads that pack in terms of making my data available to me in a form that I can use. To me, that's the main feature that a cloud computing company needs to offer. It's cool if you make it easy for me to get data into the system. I just insist that I have a way to retrieve it and remove it when I wish to do so.

Using the service to retrieve my data from G+ it took me about 4 minutes (including time to search for the right page, and time to expand the resulting zip file archive so I could see into it).  In contrast, the download process for Facebook was easy to initiate, but rather than deliver the goods in real-time for download, FB will be processing my request offline and send me an email when it's time to download.  Since I began it, I've had time to read a number of emails and do a little bit of other research, and still no archive... I'm sure it will be fine and that I'll find it useful.  We shall see.

In contrast even to that, Twitter posts that I've made more than 90 days in the past are not available to me from Twitter. I did have some luck with Tweetdoc, and a search for "Twitter archive download" yields some ideas although many of them are dated from between 2007 and 2009. So your mileage may vary.

I've said it before and I'll close with this observation one more time. One of the most critical factors in choosing a cloud company is their willingness to make it possible for you to get your data back.

I might have lied a little when I said that I had not paid Google. (Actually, I said that I'd never given them a penny, and that is accurate.) I am fully aware that having me put my information into their system in the first place is what Google is accepting as payment. I've certainly done that.

But I have to say that I have certainly been paid back in full with the services and benefits that the Mountain View corporation has given me. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn are all trafficking on the data I provide to them. Are they delivering equivalent value to me in the marketplace? Look for yourself and see your own answer to that question.

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And by the way, I've finished writing this article, proofread it, done more research in the meantime, and I still have not heard back from Facebook about my archive there. I'll update here if it ever comes through.

Five Social Media Tools

Choosing the most useful tools from among the wildflower garden that makes up today's suite of social media services and software is a game with a moving goal line. For one thing, the way we use social media is evolving rapidly. Another factor is that the field is so new (in terms of human history with technology) that we're scarcely certain about what we need or what we want.

These five tools are the ones that I find that I use regularly today. If we talk about this in three months, I believe that my answers will change.

Whence Our Soul

In a day of melodramatic news and oversimplified analysis of today's situation, it was delightful to discover this wickedly insightful article by Sean Gallagher about the future of Hewlett-Packard with the reins in the hand of new CEO Meg Whitman.


The major players in Silicon Valley have changed since I first arrived in 1987, but a few of the old pillar players remain and their fate impacts the jobs of many and the fortunes of the region as a whole.

Which Seat Shall I Take?

The world of social networks has exploded and although most of the talk has centered around the most prominent three or four, there are new tools being announced every day that provide or pretend to provide support for the individual or small business to be connected more powerfully to the marketplace.

Aside from the top three (I still consider LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to be the platforms with the most entrenched effective status although that's likely to change soon), there are new choices emerging that you may find interesting, and some that you may safely ignore.