FaceBook is preparing an advertising model where advertisers can target users based on demographics and interests harvested from their profiles.  This raises a lot of ethical questions, the biggest of which is how private user data is protected and handled by FaceBook, and by extension their advertisers.

What people don't realize, I think, is that there really is guideline for who owns their data.  It's a fuzzy line that starts with servers and database licenses and ends with the "right to privacy".  The more time goes on, and data mining becomes more sophisticated, companies and governments will become more and more interested in the personal data that people put out on the Internet (EVEN if that data is not supposed to be public).  It provides a window into the mass public's mind that's never been available before--it makes polling and market analysis superfluous.  There's nothing stopping companies like Google and Facebook from using, mining, and analyzing private user data except for the threat of the act being made public, which would cause (some) people to stop using them.

This is just one more reason why the data needs to be pushed out to the edges of the network, to the people who actually create and own it.  That is, it needs to be pushed back to the humans.

Mark Cuban recently wrote a post floating the idea that the Internet is dead and boring.  (He definitely get's an A+ in the provacative title department for that one...)  The gist of the post seems to be that the Internet is no longer producing exciting innovation and explosive disruption.  I generally like what Mark has to say, he's just technical enough to get a handle on what's going on without getting bogged down in technical minutae.  Although when he tries to predict when the next wave of innovation will arrive, I think he's slightly off the mark:

"The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today."

Mark is looking at this from the perspective of a content provider--he wants to be able to deliver more and better Dallas Mavericks content to sports fans.  This requires bigger pipes--making the network fatter and more robust.  Which is a perfectly valid way of innovating and evolving the Internet.  But I don't think the list of possible ways to innovate stops there.  I would add to the list of ways to explosively change the Internet:

• Making the pipes fatter (Mark's idea)
• Extending the network to new places (the Internet does not yet extend to humans, although it will)
• Adding layers of functionality that become part of the plumbing

Mark also hints towards the last method there, which is to add another layer of utility to the Internet "platform".  But he does it by way of saying that the last wave of innovative applications (primarily social networks) happened because the Internet has stopped changing, thus providing a stable platform on which to build new applications.  This is true, and I would agree that finally stabilizing around a core set of dynamic HTML (as it was called in the olden days) has given rise to the new wave of Web 2.0 applications.  But that does NOT mean that platform innovation has to stop there.

When I look into the future, I do see more bandwidth running to the house, enabling richer media applications and more entertainment variety.  It's inevitable, there's just too much value in delivering high definition media for it not to happen.  However, I also see an Internet that doesn't stop at the Web site, an Internet that extends out to the individual humans using the Internet, making them active participants in the network.  I can see much more utility resulting from this change than the added bandwidth, which I see as adding more entertainment value.  Coupled with a layer of more standardized functionality, it'll extend to the average person a rich Internet which can do many of the things that only technically-advanced enterprises and their closed networks can do right now.  Think Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes on a global scale, open, on the Internet... should be pretty cool.

The Federal Reserve is one of those things that I grew up hearing about every once in a while on the noon business hour on the local news station here in Chicago, and I knew they had something to do with interest rates, but beyond that it never really crossed my mind.  I think they talked about it for about 10 minutes in college economics 101, but otherwise we mostly talked about supply and demand, trade, monopolies, etc.  I just kind of assumed it was part of the government and never really bothered to look into what it was actually about.

Well, on my honeymoon in Tahiti, I realized that everything was REALLY expensive for Americans, but not so expensive for everyone else.  The dollar had lost a lot of value since I'd gone to Europe a few years ago.  And then I started hearing Ron Paul talking about the abolishing the Federal Reserve.  So I did a little homework.  It was enlightening.

Chris Pirillo recently wrote a post "Is It Time to Abolish the Federal Reserve?", where he cites some interesting quotes from financial experts regarding the trouble that the Federal Reserve is causing around the world.  If you've never looked into the Federal Reserve on your own, you had better sit down Dorothy, because Kansas is about to go bye-bye.  This is quite a rabbit hole:

• It is NOT part of the United States government.  It is a privately owned group of 12 banks.  The truth is that The President (you would think that this would be done by Congress, but that's another topic) is allowed to appoint members of the Federal Reserve Board, who issue guidelines about how things should be run.  But it is not part of the government, it is a privately owned corporation.
• Nobody knows who owns it.  Yeah, the kicker to the last part is that we don't get to see who owns it, although I could venture a couple of guesses.  Because it is a private corporation, not a public corporation, it doesn't have to abide by SEC rules and therefore does not have to disclose ownership.
• It is constantly stealing your money.  Every time the Fed injects money into the economy, by buying bad mortgages, making account "adjustments" at member banks, or buying T-bills, the money in your bank account loses a little value.  It's called Inflation, and it only benefits a few select people.  The law of diminishing returns says that the farther away you are from the source of new money, the less value you get from it.  The Fed and its member banks derive a LOT of value from new money, because it originates with them, but its value diminishes with each successive transaction the money is involved in.  By the time it trickles down to you and I, we end up losing value.  And make no mistake, it can just create new money *poof*:  "The Federal Reserve can also create book-keeping credits in the reserve accounts of its member banks"
• It was created under cloak and dagger.  Literally.  It's such a normal part of life now that you may not realize it, but the way the Fed was founded, the promises that were made, and the deception involved would make a great spy movie:
  

  "I was as secretive, indeed I was as furtive as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would have been wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress…I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System"

  Frank Vanderlip - President, National City Bank of New York

  Read about the early history of the Federal Reserve for more fascinating details.
• It caused the Great Depression.  Shortly after the system was put in place, the Fed reacted to a liquidity crisis by contracting the money supply.  Bad move.  As a result we got the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the big bad government we know and love today.
• It is illegal according to the Constitution.  Article 1, Section 8 states that "Congress shall have the power to create money and regulate the value thereof".  Congress no longer has anything to do with the process.

They don't teach you this stuff in school (our great educational system in action).  But this is not fringe conspiracy stuff, this is well-documented fact, just look it up on Wikipedia.  Better block out a couple hours if you do though, because you'll quickly learn that there's a lot you don't know.

Frankly I don't know how we would get rid of this thing without killing our economy temporarily.  I think we'd have to move to a new currency backed by gold, like the dollar was until Nixon took us off the gold standard in the 70's.  I'm hoping someone more educated than myself has a more elegant solution to this problem.

Finally, a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

"If the American people ever allowed the banks to control the issuance of their currency, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied."

Wise man.

"What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

Rudy Giuliani - March 20, 1994

This is one of the scariest things I have ever read.  Also, if you plan to vote for Giuliani could you please leave a comment?  I have never personally met a supporter although he leads in the polls.

As I was going through my instant messenger archives this morning looking for a fax number, I realized that what I wanted more than anything else in the world at that particular moment was a Gmail-style searchable archive of my instant messenger conversations.  A full-text indexed search on the client would be a step in the right direction, but not as useful to me as an archive online like Gmail offers.  I realized that what I really wanted is an instant messaging client that uploads my conversations to a central server for indexing and searching from a Web interface.  Preferably, where I could search email and instant messages all in once place.  After all, a message is a message, an instant message is nothing more than a short email with less overhead.

But that got me thinking about privacy concerns and hosted data.  I realized that I use Google mail services exclusively, and they have quite a bit of  my personal data.  Although I don't think Google would give up the data without a court order (I hope!), it still makes me slightly uneasy that one entity has that much of my personal information.  This probably wouldn't even have bothered me five years ago (and would probably be a very nice feature for corporations to assist with regulatory compliance), but with the boundaries of legal privacy continually eroding lately I am starting to believe that there will eventually be no privacy except for that which you yourself physically and/or legally own, exclusively.  This "war on tearism" and those darn "tearists" may be killing a lot of progress in the cross-fire here.

The more I think about it, this is really one more HUGE reason for an eventual shift to personal servers, if they're not made illegal first (that was sarcasm, with a hint of nervousness there...).  If I legally own the computer or hard drive or database on which my personal data is stored, and particularly if I'm able to control the encryption of that data, I would feel much better about the safety and privacy of my data.

Well this is interesting.  Rumors of a Google phone have been swirling for months, and I just spotted an article stating that it may be based on the OpenMoko mobile Linux platform.  If you haven't seen the OpenMoko phones yet you owe it to yourself to check them out, they're very slick and the hardware is astoundingly similar to the iPhone (touch screen, audio, Bluetooth), and even does a few tricks the iPhone doesn't (GPS, MicroSD card).  Rumors state that Google will develop their own hardware, but it makes more sense to me for Google to just snatch up OpenMoko and use their hardware as it's already being developed and tested.

OpenMoko is apparently doing pretty well.  In fact I wasn't even able to get my hands on one, apparently because they're all sold out:

OpenMoko, the first Open Source cell phone, has sold out the entire planned production run for the device's developer preview after unexpected demand.

Open phones are definitely a concept worth keeping an eye on.  If they catch on, and it certainly appears that they will (open source has a tendency to do that), it could be reminiscent of the Linux vs. Windows war waging right now.  A polished, proprietary system with a huge company behind it competing with a cheaper a open system with a ton of developers behind it.  Google throwing its considerable weight behind the OpenMoko platform would certainly lend some credibility to the concept and raise its visibility quite a bit.

If Apple is smart they'll open up their iPhone platform to third party developers before this really gets a head of steam behind it.  Otherwise iPhone owners are going to get a nasty surprise when they see a cheaper gadget doing tricks their iPhone never dreamed of, at half the cost.

By the way, one of the reasons I'm most interested in open mobile phone platforms like this is that I think there's going to be a big shift in the way people think about their phones in the next couple of years.  By opening up the platform like OpenMoko allows, phones are able to become a general purpose extension of people's online identity and become a seamless part of the online experience.  Proprietary phones won't allow this because the maker of the phone and the platform don't want to allow people to go outside their end-to-end solution (see the way Verizon cripples their Bluetooth to force their customers to download ringtones and pictures for a fee, for example).  Once that hurdle is overcome we're going to see a wave of innovation that uses mobile phones as part of a personal identity platform which will come with many new very cool solutions and applications which just aren't possible under today's closed systems.