The iPhone 3G has officially been released into the wild, and it's time for the most avid Apple fan here at S)T to pick apart what makes it so darned interesting and why it makes people wait in line for hours just to get one (guilty as charged).

Last year's iPhone hype was all about the hardware. The iPhone combined everything great about the iPod with a quality mobile phone complete with the best touchscreen the world has ever known.

This time around, hardware is less important (though the 3G and GPS have raised the bar). A lot of the hype is focused on software, namely the App Store, a new service that makes it simple for iPhone owners to find software that takes advantage of the hi-speed Internet access of 3G and the location-based information from the GPS. For example, Loopt has an application that combines online social networking with GPS info, so it's easier to find where one's friends are hanging out or where the cool events are happening.

With the launch of the App Store, Apple has taken a very difficult process--finding quality software for mobile phones--and made it much simpler. The App Store has already sold $55,000 worth of software within its first day.

The App Store's success seems to be driven by the innovative software developers who are contributing to the project. Apple recognized they needed to make it possible for developers to create their own applications for the iPhone, and instead of leaving that innovation to hackers, they've managed to create a successful platform that will likely continue to fuel consumer interest in mobile Internet services and, even more importantly, the mobile phone as a computing platform.

Apple has really hit another home run by giving up control over iPhone software development. And I, as a new iPhone owner, am quite thankful.

Image: velorowdy (Flickr.com)

I'm a sucker for Top 10 lists, so that's probably why these thoughts from Internet Evolution on how Web 2.0 sites are changing society caught my eye. Paragraph-long descriptions of all ten are available here.

1) New Buying Habits
iTunes is to eBay as Ellen is to Maury Povich.

2) Poor Man's TiVo
Forget to set the DVR? Click on YouTube, the world’s largest, virtual broadcast network, for American Idol caterwauling or Jon Stewart’s latest.

3) Infinitives We've Come to Love

To Skype, to RSS, to podcast, to blog, to Flickr, to GPS...

4) The E-Generation Gap
You “talk” to your teenager on each other's MySpace pages. “Private data” is only what you show 800 “friends.”

5) Attack Mode
We don’t just get spammed anymore – say hello to pharming, phishing, and vishing (voice-over-IP phishing).

6) Suddenly, Those Spring Break 2003 Photos Aren’t So Fun
Employers and recruiters use Google and popular social networking site searches as part of due diligence on prospective employees.

7) OMG!
Emoticons and IM shorthand have entered the popular vernacular, even popping up in high school English compositions.

8) Thingamajigs, Doohickeys on the Way
Wikis, widgets, applets, mashups, and dashboards have transformed desktops and GUIs.

9) That Huge $ucking $ound
Venture capital has flooded the market, fueling both clever and dubious entrepreneurs on a level not seen since the first Internet bubble of 2000. Now if some .com could somehow reverse oil’s big run-up…

10) Who Am I Today?
Create an avatar to get a Second Life. Use anonymity to flame opponents or razz friends. Online identities are a lot more fluid than they are in the real world.

Image: Social Technologies

Friendships centered around e-mail were the focus of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on May 13 by reporter Tim Barker.

Entitled, "Internet enables faceless friendships," the article describes two women who met online and talk daily via e-mail -- but have never actually met in person. He quotes one of the women as saying: "In some ways, [our friendship] is probably deeper because of the anonymity."

But not everyone has a great experience socializing virtually, warns Barker, who interviewed Social Technologies' Simeon Spearman about the security risks associated with online-only friendships.

Generally speaking, those cyber friends should be treated with more skepticism than the ones you meet in the real world, said Simeon Spearman, an analyst for Social Technologies, a futurist research and consulting firm based in Washington. If you do find someone you hit it off with, it never hurts to invest a little effort into confirming your new friend's honesty. "Get them to talk to you on the phone or in video chat," Spearman said. "I wouldn't recommend hiring a private investigator or anything like that."

Read the entire article.

Image: by Chaparral Kendra (Flickr)

Color me old--though I get made fun of here at Social Technologies because I’m the youngest employee--but I was shocked to see this recent Pew Internet and American Life survey that shows Internet-speak is creeping into teens’ school assignments.

The survey revealed that in school assignments:

• 64% of teens have used “informal” chat-style writing
• 50% of teens don’t use proper capitalization and punctuation
• 38% use common Internet-speak abbreviations such as “LOL” and “OMG”
• 25% have used emoticons--yes, emoticons, those annoying symbols to denote mood :(
  

What?! In school assignments? These statistics do seem ridiculous. But, assuming they’re relatively accurate, imagine what the future of writing, grammar, and communication will be. What scares me is that the majority of my generation seem to find it acceptable to write "formally" in this manner. Will correct spelling and grammar vanish, replaced by LOLCat speak?

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"Multitasking has long been a badge of honor for the digitally well-armed," writes Gloria Goodale in a recent Christian Science Monitor article, "Mastering the high-tech tools that help us."

She goes on to suggest that there is a price to pay for spreading oneself too thin, and asked Social Technologies futurist Simeon Spearman to offer his thoughts on the topic.

Both computers and humans really only process one thing at a time, Spearman said. The machines do this so quickly, in parallel process, that they appear to be multitasking. But they are able to process far more information than humans -- and are more capable with each jump in computer speed.

When you see the demands we put on computers these days and how much they can process, you begin to understand just how much we're being hit by all the time.

Read the entire article.

Image: Michael Verdi (flickr)

Iran’s online world is more vibrant than you might expect. While Reporters Without Borders ranked Iran’s press as the fourth least-free in the world, its blogosphere is full of lively conversation and rife with political dissent, as revealed in a new Berkman Center for Internet and Society (full disclosure: my former employer before I came to Social Technologies)  report on the state of the Internet, the blogosphere, and its affect on democracy in conservative, religious Iran.

 The report found that:

• Iran's blogosphere is male-dominated and incredibly diverse in content, and often features heated discussions about politics, religion, and pop culture.
• While the Iranian government vigorously censors the Internet and has arrested bloggers for expressing dissenting opinions, the report found a significantly smaller percentage of blogs being blocked than they expected: only about 15% of what the report deemed “reformist” (anti-government) blogs were blocked.
• Women are a significant minority in the Iranian blogosphere, except in poetry-themed blogs. (Poetry is a very popular form of expression for Iranians.)
• Even with the threat of arrest, Iranian bloggers don't write anonymously nearly as much as expected: for instance, the majority of "reformist" bloggers wrote under their own name, while the majority of "conservative" bloggers wrote anonymously.
• Young Iranian bloggers tend to be conservative and religious, while older bloggers tend to be reformist and secular.

What has emerged is a portrayal of an engaged, lively online community in Iran, a country where freedom of expression isn’t exactly valued. It's fascinating to see how a somewhat open Internet can change the way the citizens of an authoritarian regime are able to express themselves. It is also clear that while the Iranian government has attempted to block the most contentious blogs online, it lacks the resources to get all of them. And while it might be overly optimistic, the fact that this kind of honest and open dialogue can exist (with limits, of course) gives many the hope that the Internet can foster change in Iran, beyond just expression of personal opinions.

Image: Sander (Flickr)

SILICON VALLEY -- Arriving in the heart of Silicon Valley to deliver a presentation that says infotech’s most dynamic years are behind it is a little daunting.

The drive from San Francisco Airport to NASA’s Ames Research Center – site of this year’s CONTACT 2008 Conference – takes you straight down Highway 101, where some icons of the computer and Internet world are still scattered among the BMW and Lexus dealerships, strip malls, and industrial parks lining the freeway.

Gone, however, are the gung ho days of the past, when even the cab drivers had an Internet concept they were ready to pitch at the slightest sign of interest. A dozen years ago, the very air seemed to be charged with excitement over how the world was being changed by what was happening here. Five years ago, in the wake of the dot-com crash, there seemed to be a lingering hope that the glory days would return.

Not any more…at least not among those I spoke with.

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 "Facebook's new privacy controls will add an extra incentive for the many users who are now using ... LinkedIn for business contacts, Facebook for friends and school contacts, MySpace for everything else, to invest most of their time in one social networking site where they can fine-tune who sees what information," Social Technologies' analyst Kyle Spector said in an E-Commerce Times/ TechNewsWorld article by Erika Morphy on March 19.

If marketed correctly, he added, these controls could become a competitive advantage for Facebook.

"This move could certainly force other social networks to follow suit and make it potentially difficult for niche networks to compete with Facebook," he said.

Read the entire article.

At our November Futures Consortium meeting on discontinuities, Barry Lynn, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, spoke about the dangers to the world economy posed by today's globalized, single source, just-in-time manufacturing system. Lynn stated in his presentation that “because globalization is so bound up, catastrophe is inevitable … a globalized system with no redundancies is at greater risk to be unsettled by negative discontinuities.”

A perfect example of this phenomenon came this week. Because of a March 3rd fire at the second-largest laptop battery manufacturer in South Korea, HP and Dell are reporting shortages of replacement batteries, and prices for existing batteries are starting to climb. Asustek, Taiwan’s second-largest computer maker, said the shortage would likely affect 40% of its orders in the second quarter of the year. The Korean battery factory won’t be back online for another 2-3 months.

A global battery constraint will not cripple the computer industry, but it serves as a reminder of how our entangled, globalized economy is vulnerable to random events—discontinuities—and how important it is, as Lynn stated, to build resiliency and redundancy into our economic system.

Link via Engadget.

The final day of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference included two presentations that really stood out to me.

Joel Selanikio discussed the potential for Africa to be a major source of mobile phone software innovation, in sectors ranging from health to financial services. He argued that many of these innovations could make their way back to the United States and other developed countries: because mobile banking initiatives are a low priority in the US, but are a necessity in Africa, these systems can be beta tested and refined in African markets before becoming major product offerings in World 1.

Though interesting, his talk focused too much on applications that could "reverse leapfrog" back into World 1. Instead, I would have liked him to explore the implications of Africa's developing a core competency in software development aimed at bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers worldwide. African programmers could profit greatly by developing products for Worlds 2 and 3 instead of focusing on retrofitting these solutions for PC-dominated World 1 nations.

W. James Au, author of the blog "New World Notes," gave a presentation entitled "Why Won't Second Life Just Go Away Already? Understanding Web 2.0's Most Misunderstood Phenomenon." He reviewed Second Life's growth amidst its on-again/off-again relationship with the media, which tends to oscillate between finding the virtual world exciting and declaring it useless. My favorite takeaway from the session was Au's assertion that Second Life's steep learning curve for users is actually a boon, in that it guarantees a high level of user knowledge and sophistication.

Image: We Make Money Not Art (Flickr)

Wednesday's sessions at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference were just as exciting as Tuesday's. The sessions today focused more on technology in emerging markets, digital rights, and biology. The day began again with a cool game from Megaphone and then continued in an excellent series of sessions:

•  Quinn Norton channeled Walt Whitman to explore the implications of "body hacking" in a talk entitled "I Sing the Body Electric." She discussed topics ranging from recreational use of the drug Provigil to the cultural impact and history of the world's most popular smart drug: caffeine. Norton also critiqued the ethical issues surrounding steroids in the context of Tommy John surgery.
• In the afternoon, a group called Regional provided photos and examples of how digital technologies are producing change (and also being used to restrict freedoms) in Cuba. They painted a remarkable picture of how World 1 typically takes its version of the Internet for granted by showing the restrictive, "intranet" nature of Cuban cyberculture. The New York Times is running an article covering many of the same subjects discussed in Regional's session on Wednesday, for those wanting more information.
• Larry Lessig gave the evening keynote on Wednesday night. Lessig is a lawyer who was instrumental in the creation of the Creative Commons license and is now shifting his focus away from copyright to reform in the American political arena through his Change Congress project. He discussed the impact that technologists can have on effecting social change in the political landscape on many fronts, which could pave the way for a confrontation that some at the conference called "the [Silicon] Valley vs. the Beltway." It will be interesting to track whether his call to arms creates more political accountability technologies like the Sunlight Foundation, Maplight.org, and OpenCongress.
  

There were several other interesting talks on Wednesday:

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I'm in San Diego this week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I'll be providing daily updates for ChangeWaves covering the various sessions I'm attending. Here's a recap of some of the stand out sessions and ideas from today:

• Megaphone, a startup specializing in interactive digital signage, started off the morning with an interactive game that people played while waiting for the first series of talks to begin. About 20 people called in to a phone number, then moved a character around on the interactive sign using the 2, 4, 6, and 8 buttons as up, down, left and right arrows. Players could then shoot other players by pressing 5 while moving in the direction of their opponent.
• Saul Griffith was the first presenter of the morning, and his talk was entitled "Energy Literacy." He covered the statistical background of climate change and explored various steps governments and individuals need to take to address the issue. He offered a meticulous analysis of his personal energy consumption relative to global energy consumption through the lens of the "best case scenario" presented by the IPCC and Stern reports.
• Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design gave an intriguing presentation on data visualization as a medium. He showed various data visualization projects like the Oakland Crimespotting maps and MySociety travel time maps. Rodenbeck focused on showing how we can use data visualization to interact with information--in ways previously too difficult for widespread adoption--for both analysis and entertainment.

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One of the hazards of being a futurist is being peppered regularly with the “flying car” question. Variations on this question are “where’s my ray gun?” and “when are we going to have Star Trek-style matter transporters?”

The simple answer is “when someone invents it,” but of course the answer is more complicated than that. There are thousands of things that need to happen before the toys of the future become the tools of today. Undoubtedly, the most important is vision -- the set of ideas that will guide the development of a new technology.

Recently, as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on design entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind," the concept team at Nokia submitted their vision for how mobile communications, computing, and advances in nanotechnology would merge to create the infotech device of the future, which they dubbed "Morph." The wizards of Espoo, Finland have imagined an elegant and creative device that explores the intersection of form and function and how both of these requirements play on each other. It can be stretched, collapsed or reformed to whatever shape is needed, is self-cleaning, and runs on solar energy. Sound cool? It is. If you have five minutes, you can see a video of the Morph in action here.

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Why are young girls leading their male counterparts in online content creation? 

Although there are more women than men enrolled in universities across the country, computing remains a largely male-dominated field as evidenced by the low numbers of women in graduate engineering, math, and science fields.  That helps to explain the fact that only 27% of computer and mathematical jobs are held by women (pdf). Then-Harvard president Larry Summers remarked on this in a not-so-PC manner, which ultimately forced him to resign.

So it's interesting to see this article in the NYTimes about girl bloggers outnumbering boys. Girls aren't supposed to be interested in computers, right? Wrong. Not only are there more teenage girls than boys blogging (perhaps that advantage in writing coming out), but girls are also building and working on their own web pages. Still, of the students taking the AP computer science test in 2006, only 15% were girls, which seems to say girls are more interested in expressing themselves than learning C++.

What does this mean for the future? Will we see men continue to create new programs while women master them to create most online content? Or will this newfound interest in online activity prompt more girls to choose careers in more technical fields so they can generate their own platforms for interaction?

Image: crimfants (Flickr)

There I was driving through the Atlanta suburbs on February 10 when I started seeing teenagers with handmade signs and masks. In a few seconds I came over a hill and saw around 75 people with signs and face masks standing across the street from a line of police in riot gear outside of the local Church of Scientology. Later, I discovered that I had found the local version of a worldwide anti-Scientology protest held that day, organized by a group simply calling themselves "Anonymous."

Anonymous is a group of Internet users from across the globe who are organizing a series of protests against Scientology using basic Web technologies. What began as a simple series of hacks against Scientology's websites has turned into an international movement occurring in both cyberspace and in the real world. The amazing part of this story is how easily the group has managed to organize worldwide protests without a central leader or group telling everyone what to do.

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