It begins with a little unimportant event. I was at Washington Ronald Reagan airport, having a Delta flight to Boston.

Being a Air France platinium, I used to have access to the lounge in the US, Delta being a member of sky team. I therefore thought that I could step in, even with my french card.

The lady at the entrance swipes my card, and the computer refuses the access. The reason being that I must be either on an international flight, or on a domestic flight connecting the same day to an international flight. Rules have changed since last time I flew on a US domestic flight, at that time they would let me in the lounge.

As I did not know, I started being angry, telling them that the rules are in contradiction with the french web site, eventually asking to see the manager. An old lady arrives.

The lady swipes the card, looks at the computer, and says “sorry sir, you cannot access”. Nothing new.

Then happens a series of “funny” exchanges.

“Your computer is in contradiction with Airfrance” say I

“I do not care” says the lady, “I follow what my computer says”

“If you follow the computer, what is your added value” I ask

“Sir, I must follow the computer”

“If you say this, it means that you have no intelligence, no sensitivity. You just repeat what the computer says, you then are a machine”

“Sir, I am not a machine”

“Then let me in”

“No Sir”

“So, you prefer to follow the machine rather than making a customer happy ?”

“I want to make all my customer happy”

“So let me in”

“No Sir, I am sorry”

“You are not sorry, you just pretend; your words sound fake”

“Sir I am sorry”

Etc… I was suddendly even not sure she was the manager, she may have been a comedian just hired to manage situation with angry french customer !

Of course, this poor lady was a machine. But it was not her fault, I can even imagine she was not happy to react the way she had to. I realized she had a hierarchy above her who priviledge the rules rather than customer satisfaction, and that she had to strictly obey the rules. Even worst, she could have been trapped by her manager into a double bind : “make your customer happy, but follow the rules”. But I was also thinking how employees at Apple store have much more liberty to manage customer relationship.

The industrial world has rationalized the production, by creating assembly lines, where everyone had to follow the process, and follow the rules, period.

Then came the age of knowledge workers. But the traditional managment applied the same method, whether you are a knowledge worker or not. And it leads to such situations. Everybody who needs to talk with with the hotline of telecommunication operator, an airline, a bank, knows it : customer service is just awfull, inhuman, based on process, machine. This is not normal at the age of the Internet

What should Delta, or any big corporate do ? Undo strict complicated rules. Keep simple ones : “everybody who has a gold or platinium may enter the lounge”. Period. And give the local knowledge worker the ability and the tools to manage any situation. Give them freedom to think, and act. Treat them as human, not as machines.

What sort of tools do those knowledge worker need ? Any information sharing tool, all the one that Internet provides. By doing so, local worker have the capacity to regulate the flux of people in the lounge. How ? Simple. Everyone in a lounge is waiting for an airplane, and Delta know this very accurately. So let the workers, and also the customers, have the information about the estimated amount of people in the lounge every 15 minutes, for the next three hours. Let the customer even regulate themself, in peer to peer mode.

By imposing its employees to just follow the rules, Delta is staying in an old type economy, the one of the XIXth century world. Consequence is that they make their employees unhappy, and therefore their customer who face them unhappy as well.

By changing its internal governance, by allowing them to take more local decision, based on accurate information managment tools, Delta would then really be in the 2.0 world.

Corporate companies need a huge amount of energy to do this. But they must.

By the way, I humbly suggest Delta to think about this :

The mathematicien in me, who never really slept, says that 2011 is a prime number.

This will be a prime year.

What to wish, then ?

• To the enterprises, to switch to collaborative mode, for Internet is not an issue, but the solution to create more value
• To the world of politic, to increase the necessary speed and momentum to reach Government 2.0.
• To everyone, to trust in the future, as there is no innovation without risk, and there is no risk without trust

Let us not forget thet the future is not in the stars, but in the head of those who build it.

I wish everybody to introduce joy and beauty in our common constructions !

time past, and time future,
what might have been, and what has been
point to one end, which is always present
…

Only through time time is conquered.

Facebook is, apparently, a social network. Let us point out that a social network is not a directory of persons, but a directory of links. The underlying principle is the Six Degrees Of Separation theory, which says that between any two people on earth, there are no more than five intermediaries. Take a bushman, for example:  you know someone who knows someone who, etc. who knows the bushman. All online social network are the same, in that they are not that much interested in people, but rather in relations. The proof is simple: if someone quits Facebook definitively (which is not that easy), what disappears is more than one entry in the directory, it is all links and all interactions with one’s 130 friends (the average number in mid 2010).

We shall not dwell on the amazing Facebook statistics; 500 million members, whose half connect every day, thus contradicting a sentence I hear quite often: “I am fed up with Facebook, and I quit” (sentence putting Facebook equal to the television). Actually, the celebrity on Facebook who lasted the shortest time was a charming English Lady, Ivy Bean, who joined Facebook in 2008 at the age of 102, and died in July 2010 with 5,000 friends, and also 56,000 followers on twitter.

Facebook is fundamentally different from other social networks, by at least one aspect: its open APIs. Most social networks, including professional ones, have very poor semantics in respect to the links. Linkedin, for example, allows two main definitions for the link : “we know each other“, with a few parameters (we are colleagues/one is the boss of the other/we have contracted work between one another , etc.), and “we are part of a same group“.

In Facebook, the semantic of the link is open through a set of programming interfaces, thus enriching the relation between two or more persons. Users can then calibrate their interaction, for instance they may poke each other, send flowers, play together, invite one another to an aperitif, or even share a kitty to buy a common gift. This opening of the APIs is what attracts brands, with the hope to make low cost viral marketing.

Facebook was, from the outset, designed to be an applications platform, something much more sophisticated than a simple social network. And so, little by little, Facebook overflowed out of it’s platform, and, as a cuckoo, positioned itself on sites beyond its own, each time bringing with it, a very interesting function, albeit a little intrusive.

The first one was Facebook Connect . The principle here, is quite straight forward: when someone develops a web site which requires authentication, why bother developing this feature, when Facebook offers it for free, and at low integration cost. The interesting side effect is that the end user is no longer obliged to enter one more time their own identification. It is a real win-win-win deal : the user avoids burden, the web site owner avoids development, and Facebook gains not only more users, but also more knowledge about usage. One should remark that, on Facebook, one has usually a single identity, which is contrary to the basic usage of the Internet: why should one be the same in a professional bulletin board, a forum of enthusiasts, on dating site, or as an avatar in Second Life? Facebook is always chasing for people taking another identity than his own; Facebook is anything but anonymous.

Then came the like button, which was also free to put on any other web site. If someone browses a site, and likes it, they can very easily share it, by making a single click and have it then appear on their Facebook wall. It is the same win-win logic, the web site developer sees his own viral promotion done for free. The same logic applies for other plugins : recommendations, videos, and so on. They are all offered by Facebook, under the obvious term “Social Plugin“, with the intention to be the viral marketing enablers; not only on Facebook site, but on any other site. This is a big shift from other social networks, and is in the same spirit as the Amazon set of widgets which were invented 5 years ago.

The very last one, still under test, is the button subscribe to, which allows users to follow someone else’s messages; a service directly competing with Twitter.

Facebook is forging its expansion in creative ways. In what is perhaps the strongest signal yet, it made a significant shift in its relationship to virtual goods. Those little virtual objects, which are to be found on social platforms, and hugely in 3D immersive platforms, represented, only in the US, a 3 billion US dollars market in 2009. Facebook started selling them in 2008, but the revenue was low, a few ten million dollars, almost nothing. Facebook therefore decided, earlier this year, to totally change its strategy, stop selling virtual goods, offering instead, a virtual currency, Facebook Credits, which allows 3^rd party virtual goods to be brought and sold inside the platform. If the same logic applies, this virtual money could, one day, be used on other platforms. Will Facebook become the apps store of virtual goods? Will Facebook also be interested in the market of real goods, trying to do better than Google Checkout, an attempt to be a front-end, unique payment system, which never really took off?

Then, very recently, came Facebook Places…

The market of local information is the biggest battlefield of the Internet nowadays. Being straightforward: I can quite easily, owing to twitter or blogs, know what happens in the street of Tehran. But it is 5 to 8pm on Sunday in Paris, there are three boulangeries which close at 8, I have not enough time to visit all of them, and I don’t know which one has remaining bread…

Many actors are in this market of local information. Google with Google maps, Yellow Pages, Craig’s list, Tripadvisor, Aroundme, and the last one, Foursquare. Facebook is now clearly entering this arena, and wishes to position itself on geo-localized data . Mobile Facebook apps already offer this function, albeit in the US only, at the time of this writing.

The difference between Facebook and Google is striking. We must not forget that the power of the Web is in peer to peer relations. Google, counter-intuitively perhaps, has never been 2.0. Google groups, is a revamping of the Usenet hierarchy, through the acquisition of dejanews. It is the only Google service where users are interconnected. On the other hand, Facebook Places, like Foursquare or Aroundme, allows users to exchange information on a wall. Google Maps does not.

If Google is still heavily controlling search, and advertisements on the Internet, Facebook is positioning itself more and more in crucial places: authentication, virtual goods and why not one day real goods payment, exchange of information, local information; and all this not only on its own platform, but everywhere, through its plugins. For Google, the search engine is free, and makes its income by leveraging other products, such as AdSense or AdWords. Facebook is now doing what Google has done so well, giving away its core service, to allow side businesses to come in. The difference is that it is doing it where Google is not that present: peer to peer.

Facebook is clearly taking control of some crucial applicative layers of the internet, specially the viral ones, with a probable desire to be, one day, the operating system of the Internet.

I have had a very interesting discussion with Trevor Barr, professor at Swinburne University of Technology. Trevor in an expert in Telecommunication, and is often consulted by the Australian Government, with a recent focus on the National Broadband Network (NBN) initiative.

Trevor is developing an idea which I find very interesting, and innovative. He says the Internet should be divided in three types of services : the basic Internet services, the managed services, and the publicly supported (government) services.

The basic Internet services simply entails IP packet being delivered to the users, who then manage the range of services as they wish. They may use Skype, email, iTunes, youtube, or any web site or portal that they wish to subscribe, needing only the internet connection, if possible at a monthly flat rate for an unlimited amount of data, as it is the case in some countries like France.

The managed services are in addition to the pure Internet, and are provided by the Internet service provider (ISP). At the beginning of the public Internet, ISPs tried to set-up walled garden, with a full range of owned services, thus threatening to reduce the basic Internet layer to almost nothing. This did not work, and consequently the ISPs had to reduce their managed services to a few ones. Today, there are principally two :

• telephony, which is done using voice over IP, thus totally escaping the traditional commuted network (the famous POT; Plain Old Telephony);
• television, using IPTV specific protocols.

There have been attempts to deliver more specific services, like ftp, hosting, file sharing, but none of them are on the scale of that which will be the next huge service in this category : “mobile phone”. Using Femtocell, an ISP can put a 3G antenna on the home gateway, like the bewan one. This allows its community of users to call or surf, using a mobile phone, anywhere there is an available connection, offered by a customer from the same provider; which is very easy in dense areas. Some ISPs are already providing this feature with WiFi, it would be easy to switch to 3G. This is probably what the French ISP Free will do, now that they have the license to use 3G wavelengths. In this respect, the managed services part will convey the three services which, with the pure Internet, forms the quadruple play.

On top of this, Trevor says the Government should use part of the bandwidth for its own services, the publicly supported services. This includes e-health, e-education, e-government, or any other type of services which are provided by an administration. This is a brilliant idea. As Trevor says, how come the government creates a network without taking part of it for its own services? However, this scenario implies a very important second question: what would be the impact on the network architecture? Or, to put it in another ways: does the introduction of a Government set of services compromise the principle of a neutral network?

The design of the Internet was meant to put no intelligence in the network, and to distribute it to the extremities. Therefore, the Internet network processes any IP packet in a purely equal manner. So far, the focus on bandwidth is on the last mile, because of the slowness of ADSL, and its asymmetry. Its backbones, owing to the Internet bubble investments, and the availability of Content Delivery Network (CDN), are not saturated.

Then, came the debate about network neutrality. The telecommunication providers, who were looking for ways to increase their revenues without impacting on end user bills, thought about introducing classes of services in their routers, thereby asking content or service providers to pay for privileged services. As Tim Wu explained it, amongst all impacts, it could lead to stop the innovation that created the Internet. All pure Internet players complained, and, so far, the debate is still open.

Now, Governments start embracing a very innovative approach to the Internet, such as Opendata, Government 2.0, Government as a platform. Therefore, one can imagine in the near future that they will develop a whole range of truly useful services. Will such Governments accept the “best effort” traditional philosophy of the Internet, or will they require some sort of reserved bandwidth inside the network?

Let us make two scenarios.

• The first one is tele-medicine. A very important remotely performed clinical operation requires specific high broadband end-to-end communication. If the network is congested, because, as an example, people are downloading movies, leading to a failure in the remote operation, how would the public react to this ?
• The second one is an emergency situation, say earthquake, bushfire, flood, etc. In two major crises, namely 9/11, and the Haiti earthquake, the Internet proved its resistance to stress, by being the only alive communication network. So, it may well happen that, in case of a crisis, emergency services require that the network is devoted entirely to its management, and I don’t see any counter reason to do so.

In both cases, it would imply introducing classes of services in the network. And, if this is done, I can hardly imagine the telecommunication operators not using those classes of services in other, more commercial, contexts.

How to solve the issue while keeping the Internet neutral? I see three solutions. The first one is to say that Government creates a specific network for its own services. This would be highly costly, and totally counrary to the mutualisation principle of the Internet, which led to low price adsl access, and the whole Internet economy. The second one would be to insure a high availability network whatever the situation, something that would lead to an under used network in normal time. This is the case as of now, but what happens to the backbones when fibre-to-the-home is, at last, available everywhere? CDN is not a solution, as it is of no use for a synchronous peer to peer communication. The third one would be to rely upon civic behaviour; not an easy solution…

I sometimes wonder if keeping the network always neutral is feasible, or if it is utopia. Now that the Internet is an essential service widely used, shall we be able to continue the spirit of its inventors, something like “a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site”.

How have I done this ?

FIrst of all, I found a very reasonably priced site for downloading scores : pianopublicdomain.

Then, owing to dropbox, I have put those files on the cloud.

I finlly used goodreader to uplod files from dropbox onto the iPad.

Overall, let us not forget the splendid half grand pleyel from 1898, number 118020…

Facebook is amongst the weirdest social site in the whole world wide web.

Facebook is not as crazy as datemypet, which pretends to be a social network for animals, not as specialised as sermo, a social network of doctors, not as business as Mechanical turk, a platform to put together small knowledge workers, not as idealistic as kiva, a marketplace to invest against poverty, not as old-simple-and-basic as craigslist, the most efficient local ad platform, not as nice as Habbo hotel, the biggest virtual world so far, (over 150 Million teenagers, probably more than Facebook within the 10-15 years old), not as focused as myfootballclub, a social network aimed at buying football clubs, not as professional as Innocentive, a platform to improve innovation for corporates, etc…

So Facebook is not all of that. Facebook is just Facebook. What is weird about Facebook is that it is complex to use (funny to realize how complicated its interface is…); its privacy is a nightmare, as says this excellent article from the NYT, with a funny proof here; Facebook even contains its own rebellion, which seems to be a long tradition (yes, 2006…); it generates desire to quit (on the 31st of may…); has huge bugs; and seems to be in a rather negative phase those days, according to top google search : “how to delete my facebook account”.

And, as of may 2010, facebook has 400 million users; the third largest country in the world, with a huge velocity of 25 million new users per month end of 2009. In October 2009, hosting Facebook was performed using 30.000 servers.

So, why is there such a hate / love story ?

Facebook is a social network. Many people think a social network as a directory of people. It is not; it is a directory of links. What is most important is not who is someone, but whom is he connected to. When I quit Facebook (I did it four times), it is not my single entry which disappears, it is also all the links I had with my friends, and all the dynamic of what happened between my friends and I (well, it almost disappear). A social network is based on the six degrees of separation theory, which says that two random people on earth can be connected only with 5 intermediate people on the chain. A social network is about connection, while the Internet at first was putting the intelligence at the end of the connection. With this respect, Facebook is not in the pure Internet philosophy. Napster is.

On most social network the focus is on the link, but the semantic on the link is very limited. In Linkedin, as an example, the number of parameters on the link for the introduction is 6 (colleague, classmate, done business together, friend, other, and unknown person…). Then, people can share sub-groups. But there are no other semantic on the link.

The path chosen by Facebook was totally different: Facebook creates the network, and by opening its API, allows anyone to virtually plug any semantic on the links. We can share a same brand, a common taste, poke each other, send virtual gifts, etc… The idea in itself is brilliant, and led to 550.000 active applications.

Now, on the downsize: first, privacy. It is not that much about my information privacy, but my interaction privacy. Whenever someone interacts on my wall, it is never clear who as seen what happened to me. A friend of mine may post a porn video on my wall, it is OK as long as only my friend and I know about it. But who else has seen this, I don’t know. In some languages, plural starts at three. Old Greek, or modern Arabic, have a singular, a dual, and a plural. This is a very clever approach of life : plural starts only when a third party witnesses the interaction between two others. By being unclear on this, Facebook can make many people nervous. A totally open society, where everybody sees and knows 100% about everybody, is inhuman.

Second, identity in context. One of the beauty of the Internet is that it allows people to have multiple identities. Why would someone be the same on a forum devoted to digital photo, on a forum about Italian operas, on a professional forum, on linkedin, on match.com, in Second Life, etc… Even though the person is the same, the context is not. On Facebook, a person is one, single, and not divisible. But on Facebook, the context can be pretty much various, because of the API opening. This lead to a contradiction. As an example, one of the biggest issues is to decide if parents and children should be friends of Facebook. In real life, interacting with your children is a done within a very strong, specific, and focussed context. Finding this context openly interleaved with other contexts can make many people nervous. Moreover, Facebook connect is propagating this constraint outside of the platform. The “Like” button, which is part of their social media plugins, and now social graph, is their most recent attempt to be “the web”

So why are people using Facebook ? The biggest population is 18-24 years old, and the biggest rate of change is in the senior population (cf. slide 8 of o’Reilly radar slideshare). Facebook is not for teen agers. When asking people about why they use Facebook, the most common answer is “retrieving old friends”.

So the conclusion is very simple from my point of view: Facebook could be used to propagate information, to retrieve old friend, but no more. Don’t use Facebook for application, rather use Facebook to propagate the information about application. Don’t use Facebook Connect, use OpenId (by the way, Facebook is a sponsoring member of OpenId).

Brands should pay more attention to discussion forums, places where the quantity of important information, which are not always exploited, is much bigger than anywhere else. Much bigger than in Facebook.

I have quitted Facebook.

Having heard Jean-Michel Billaut‘s conference yesterday on skype, I was interested by his thought about the four coming convergent ruptures : nanotechnology, synthetic biology, humanoid robots, and Green techs.

I can understand about the first three, but I was more thinking about the fourth one. The question I had in mind was : can we have the same processing power, with less power. It appears now that the limitation to Moore’s law is heat. The consequence of this is that a server in a server farms requires around 300 Watts to work.

This goes back also to the relationship between thermal entropy, and information entropy, and a little paradox: Maxwell’s demon. The paradox is simple : a little demon opens or closes a door between two gas containers. If the molecule comes from the right, he opens the door. If it comes from the left, he closes the door. The energy balance is equilibrated, but at the end there is more gas in a bottle than another one. Let me remind that the paradox was solved by one of the most famous French scientist, Brillouin, who showed that, in order to check if an atom comes from left or right, he needs energy to acquire the information. This is the most simple, and brilliant demonstration of the equivalence between both entropies.

Back to processor’s temperature : there are some research about decreasing this, one field of research being by electron spin carrying 0 and 1 rather than a voltage. This technology leads directly to quantum computing.

Quantum computing may be the next big rupture., an idea which seems to become more and more close to reality. The leading company, D-Wave, is building a Quantum processor. The current state of art is a processor at 10 Quantum bits, (Qubits), and they plan to go to 128. The technology is promising enough to have Google working on the topic, using a D-Wave computer.

Can we imagine a worlds with quantum computers, who are able to solve non polynomial problems in a polynomial time, with little energy ? Well, then, human being low processing capacity is totally out of the scope. The only remaining capacity would perhaps be: can we make a computer laugh !!!

Google is quitting China, whether we like it or not. It was probably not an easy decision to take. In Burma, it is almost illegal to access the net. In North Korea, only lucky few can access. Some countries are filtering Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, or simple blogs. Reporters Without Borders keeps a list of “Internet enemies”. On the contrary, Government 2.0 is taking up. What is happening between Internet and politicians ?

The strength of Internet is « peer to peer »

Looking at the history is important to understand the debates. The Internet must not be understood as a causal process; there never has been an “Internet project”. Internet construction, as well as its governance, is based upon horizontal relationships in peer to peer mode between people exchanging in a perfect symmetrical and reciprocal manner. The very first services of the Internet, in the 70’s, were email and discussion forums, 20 years ahead of the Web.

Since its inception, Internet governance has been based on rough consensus between groups of people, who networked themselves in a non-hierarchical mode. IETF, the organization which defines the technological norms, describes itself as “a loosely self-organized group of people who contribute to the engineering and evolution of Internet technologies”.

This horizontal mode is the power of the Internet today: forums, social networks, blogs, Wikipedia, Youtube, Twitter, are places where people exchange in peer to peer mode. Enterprises are starting to understand the power of the customers talking to each other, and are more and more into viral marketing. Above all, Internet is a community media. But are the politician understanding this ?

Internet governance, and Network neutrality

On-going debate is strong, between the original governance based upon a network of independent organizations, and willingness to centralize governance under United Nations.

Internet governance addresses, amongst all, a very sensitive topic : the DNS, which is the directory allowing people to access a web site. Would the DNS be split in parts, connection to a site would become dependent upon the location of the user, and would lead to a collection of sub-networkst. Globalization would be finished. Since 2006, China already started its own DNS, Russia is threatening to do so, pretext being each time the capacity to write URL in each country character’s set.

Then, a second debate appeared: network neutrality. It started in 2006, when the US telecommunication operators, who understood that they could not increase their access rates, turned towards service providers, and threatened them to introduce class of services, and to ask them premium fees to have priority on their networks. All big players in the Internet field opposed to this, argued that this business model would kill any new comer, and would stop any innovation.

This debate became political, after more and more countries started organizing network filtering. In China, many sites are forbidden, such as facebook, or typepad; skype can be accessed only through a specific Chinese software. Australia started envisaging huge content filtering, but stepped back recently. In France, LOPPSI2 law just passed, whose official goal is to censor pedo-pornographic content, but allows the police to install software on any citize’sn computer and watch his Internet activity.

Another war is starting between traditional media or enterprises, and Internet companies. In Italy, it is now necessary to have a state license to post a video on a web site, the goal being to protect traditional Television companies from Youtube. In France, Hadopi law reinforces traditional traditional copyright laws by cutting the Internet access to people who illegally download music. European Commission plans to force any commerce web site to have a physical shop, the background being a fight between pure players such as ebay or amazon and luxury brands in respect to counterfeiting.

Filtering initiatives such as these are constantly criticized for their inefficiency: routing around them is easy for real criminals, false positive will be numerous. The network, whether it is human or technological, shows a great resistance to stress, thus making any filtering approach costly for a poor result. Moderation is quite efficient in a network, at least as efficient as hierarchical one, but at a lower cost, control structures being lighter. Education remains, in fine, the most efficient way to fight against any criminal activity.

Governement 2.0

A positive trend is emerging quite recently : national, or local government, are setting up initiatives with the objective to improve relations between administration and citizens, based on the web 2.0 model.

This process is built on three pillars : administration opens its data; then improves its dialogue with citizens who become proactive by using all modern Internet tools; culture and governance of administration shifts towards a cooperative mode.

Australia is the most advance country on this subject. A report has been issued in december 2009, proposition such an action plan. US, Canada, England, are following the same path. The Obama Administration has opened a space where citizens can exchange on the topic of network neutrality. More and more cities are opening their data within the framework of open311 initiative.

Internet as vector of progress

Each politician should understand the fundamental importance of digital society. In order to manage increasing complexity, we must position ourselves in cooperative mode, and the Internet is the main tool to achieve this.

But how can we know if citizens really wish such a model ? The answer is in Internet. As an example, in France, 87.000 teacher of primary school have opened their own forum, and have exchanged 4.4 million messages, helping them to improve their practice. In some enterprises, employees are using social networks to work in a more efficient way.

This is quite encouraging. Would our politicians promote such Government 2.0, and build society around digital age, debates would become more productive, cooperation would take the lead above silos, and citizens would find new enthousiasm for voting.

The Internet favours networked intelligence, and makes the citizens more responsible. The role of a modern state is to create value by improving relations between stakeholders. The observation of fast growing Internet usages show us that citizens are much more ready to this model  than that the traditional media will acknowledge.

There have been many comments about the iPad. Many of them, coming form the geekosphere, are rather negative ones, or if positive, with funny excuses, such as comparing the iPad with Chumby. The main drawbacks, listening to many people, are that it is nothing but a too big iPhone; that there is no VGA or equivalent output, which therefore makes it impossible to display slides; that the absence of keyboard, which makes it impossible to use to write text in a situation of mobility, etc.

Yes, it is true, iPad is not a phone, is not a notebook, is not a computer, etc… As a travelling person, I understand iPad is probably not for me, because I want a computer with a big screen, weights nothing, has a big keyboard, broadband access wherever I am and, of course, fits into my pocket.

Because I love contradiction. At the beginning of my carrier, I was a cartographer. I was surprised to see customers who would come, ask for a map of all southern America, and were surprised not to see the little Inca trail they planned to use to walk to Machu Picchu. Yes, mister customer, you can’t have a single map which is both 25.000 and 5.000.000 scale.

Well, you could not, until comes Google Earth. Because Google Earth allows multiple scale, and perfectly answers the question. Drawback is that google earth needs a physical support.

Like many things in life, any travel starts with a dream. Looking at the map is the begining of this dream, then reading books, etc. Where do we dream ? At home, on the couch while drinking a good glass of wine. In our kitchen in the morning while eating our breakfast. In our bed, before falling asleep. Standing up, a good book on a lectern. In our dining room, sharing some interesting content with friends, family, etc. Everything we already do, either with a good book, or with a laptop. But a laptop folded in two parts, always lacking power, too heavy, not easy to both hold and type… Because it is not the computer which comes to ues, it is always us who go to the computer.

Books, books, books. Where do we have books in our home ? Everywhere. Gaorges Perec, in his famous book “penser classer”, show that there are books everywhere in a home, including the toilets. The only place with few books is the kitchen, where interestingly only kitchen books are found.

So the equation becomes clerearer : I want a dream machine which combines the world opening provided by the Internet, the multimedia richness, the hyperlink facility, but with the easiness of manipulation of a book. I dare to say that the iPad perfectly fits to these requierements. We shall all have an iPad at home, at least one and maybe many. It will lay on the couch, sits on the kitchen table, spend the night by our bed. We shall use it to dream about our next holydays, share web sites with our family, read content to our friends, and, I bet, we shall even take it to the toilets. Whoever has seen a friend getting out of the toilets after many minutes, with a book in his hand, may understand this.

The iPad is not a mobility instrument (so why buy the 3G version ?). It is a superb window opened to the world; an unlimited content that will become our home compagnion, our dream support, allowing us to read, surf, share, talk, and many other things, and be part of the house.

I bet it will be a huge success.

Facebook is a fascinating and intriguing phenomenon. Hate and love. On one side, a planetary phenomenon, with splendid growth; and on the other a lot of concern about privacy, and other related questions. If one had to understand the scope of facebook, a look at its wikipedia entry, or, more precisely, at the left colum : how many different wikipedia, in the sense different languages, have an entry about facebook, is impressive : 59 different languages…

There are too many studies about facebook, it is not the point here to recall them. This post started from a very specific remark, coming from a 19 years old person : “one of my professor asked me to be a friend on facebook. I did not feel comfortable, so I declined“.

Very interesting remark, from many perspective. First of all, there are people who can resist the pressure, and those people are 19 years old. Second remark, yes, facebook is about communities. But what is a community ? “I can laugh about any topics, but I cannot laugh with everybody“. When asking why he declined, this person confessed that : “I do not want my professor to see my friends in bathing suits“. There is no problem with being in bathing suit, except one : who is looking at me. It is all about context.

So, what does it mean to be part of a community ? Let me recall about a person who is almost forbidden, Wilfred Thesiger. Interestingly, its french entry on wikipedia is more complete than it english entry. Probably because he was very critic about British Petroleum’s impact on one of his love, the  Rub’Al Khali, the main desert of Saudi Arabia. He was a multi cultural person, born in Addis Abbeba from a father who was the British ambassador, graduated from Oxford, and decided to share simple life with Arabian tribes. He spent four years in the Rub’ al Khali with the nomads. He wrote a superb book out of this experience : Arabian Sands.

In his third crossing of the desert, he had a very interesting conversation with the nomads. Suddenly, one of them asked him, in a very provokative way :”Why do you not convert to Islam?“. Wilfred Thesiger had a superb answer, a single sentence from Quran : “Let God protect me from the Devil“. Superb with two respects: firstly, he told them “I share with you, I have the same life as you, but do not forget that I am different from you”, thus confirming his identity. Secondly, on the syntactic level, by using a sentence from the Quran, he spoke their language. The answer from the nomadic was beautiful : they laughed. It is all about “yes, I am part of a community, but I keep my identity, my personal willing; and therfore, I choose what I do share, and what I do not”. Exactly what this 19 years old person did, by not answering the request to be friend with the professor.

Facebook is a very innovative service, far in advance from many other social networks. But the main issue is the relationship between usage, and technology. This story about confusion in relationships in Facebook is not isolated; many people have experienced it. What we may learn is that it is much more dificult to master facebook than any other social network. Facebook is a very long term tool; a concept not very compatible with the usual short term investment views of United States. This means a very passionate debate to come, a debate about the importance of ethic versus moral.