Was reading this piece on TechCrunch about location services at SXSW:

At first, I was using all of the services I had on my phone to check-in when I arrived at a place in Austin. This included: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast, and (at certain places) Foodspotting. Even with great AT&T service, this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time.

This was at every venue we stopped at. The situation simply wasn’t tenable.

Indeed. And there are even more location based startups coming.....

I love that all these startups are emerging around location right now (at least a dozen more have emailed me just since I’ve been back from SXSW). But I’m starting to worry that this is going to turn into a repeat of the social wars, where we all have 15 different profiles we constantly have to update across a range of networks.

The outcome of the social wars are well known - concentration into just a few players. This will happen with location based services as well.

In fact I don't know why any startup after the 4th or so in a space bothers, the chance of success is miniscule and the chance of funding is minimal. Better by far to be contrarian and do something that the maddening crowd is not.

There was a piece on Daring Fireball about the increasing rivalry between Google and Apple - commenting on an earlier NYT article he notes:

That last bit, regarding a general belief that Apple is gearing up for war against Google, echoes what I’ve heard lately from several sources who work at Apple. I know that conflict between companies — particularly big companies, and even more particularly big interesting companies like Apple and Google — tends to get played up in the press, often to the point of sensationalism, because conflict is interesting. But I’ve got the growing sense that there’s nothing sensational about it. I think Steve Jobs genuinely sees Google as threatening Apple’s core business. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s right (although the more I consider it, the more I think he is). Jobs believes it, and so Apple is going to war.

Hence the patent suit against HTC. That’s all about Google — about creating a situation where Android is no longer a free operating system for handset makers in the U.S., because the cost of using it is an expensive legal defense against Apple.

The article is called "Hope You Enjoy the Smell of Napalm in the Morning", and I thought it may be worth extending the military analogies.

At the same time as this, we have been following the rattling of virtual sabres as Google, via its proxy YouTube, squares off to Viacom in the hot/cold war between Olde Media and New. And then there is Buzz, aimed as other Social media players, there is Chrome and Google Docs aimed at Microsoft, there is a scrap brewing on data storage, handling and privacy with the European Union. Then there is the spat with China, the increasingly messy campaign against the Book Publishing industry, the start of a scrap with the ISP industry.

And all this against a backdrop of continuing skirmishes with Yahoo in the traditional battlegrounds of Search.

So what can Hitler teach Google? Quite simple - that it is possible to take on too enemies at once, over-reach oneself and the resulting implosion is not pretty. A quick recap:

(i) Germany is far better prepared for the "New Ways" of fighting than its opponents, and builds more modern equipment, infrastructure, methodologies etc. In Googleterms, they came into the New Media game later than many of their major opponents and are arguably one of the best equipped and smartest (in hired IQ terms) than any company before.

(ii) Initially, Germany took on fairly weak opposition that was on its borders - in fact the first forays were more "power diplomacy" into Austria and Czechoslovakia than actual warfare - these Anschlussii were almost "acquisitions" in International Relations speak. In Googleterms this is the purchase of various assets that help bolster the search advertising business at the expense of competitors. Major players like Yahoo (cf France, England) cede assets to it because they don't see Google as a particular threat in their space

(iii) Germany's first major military escapade is to agree to partition nearby territory between itself and other great powers, and the invasion as such (Poland) is relatively bloodless, In Google terms this is the ripping into the early search advertising market, partitioning it with the major players of the time (Yahoo, Microsoft)

(iv) Germany then invades the low countries and France in a rapid campaign, deploying its new weaponry and approach (Blitzkrieg) and rapidly outmanouvering the major opponents. It takes one major opponent (France) out the war and inflicts major reverses on another (Great Britain). In Googleterms this is the taking on of Yahoo, the ceding of the rich Alsace Lorraine area has its parallels with Google helping itself to Overture (a Yahoo company)'s, technology. Microsoft's MSN is a small part of this fight and is outmanouvred.

At this point it all looks very sustainable - Germany with its conquests has the economic resources to fight Great Britain and her empire to a standstill, and the access to the French resources gives it a major advantage - over time it will be the major power, all it has to do is exert continuous pressure over time and it will achive European hegemony. But it is still worried, as it knows that over the horizon is a great fight that will eventually emerge, with Soviet Russia. This is winnable, but there is a risk with letting the Soviets re-arm, It is very tempting to attack them now, while they are weak (Stalin having shot many of his senior officers), comparatively ill equipped (their military technology is one generation earlier).

Translating this into Googleterms, this is the fight vs Microsoft - steady pressure will give Google hegemony in its area. They are economically comparable. Over the horizon is the Olde Media empire, who are still woefully disorganised and poorly equipped. All the visionaries within it have been fired or sidelined after dotcom One, and their assets are all of that era. Attacking them now is very tempting.

But the hubris and arrogance of all the easy wins pushes Hitler to greater and bigger dreams, and he starts to make strategic mistakes:

(v) The last thing Hitler should have gone for at this point is a diversion, but he does - he fights the Battle of Britain and loses, and props up Italy as it's African empire collapses to the British Empire's counterattacks. Propping up Italy is a major diversion of Germany's energy, and it finds itself having to fight all sorts of small actions against a major power.

In Googleterms, this is the opening up of the Google Docs front against Microsoft. The Googlepanzers start to park on the Microsoft Empire's lawns, but this is home turf and much more comfortable ground for Microsoft. This is a high cost fight.

(vi) The decision is taken to fight the Old Empire is taken, and Russia is invaded - it is a huge play, a massive invasion, and initially things go well as the opposition is scattered, dispersed, poorly prepared - but the sheer size of the enemy terrain starts to tell on their resources. Winter, an enemy that starts to learn how to fight better, and their embrace of equal technology is a massive drain on German resources.

In Googleterms this is the acquisition of YouTube - a massive play into the heart of the video Old Media. Initially it sweeps all before it, but they start to get better and better at countering Google, and their resources to fight with are immense.

These were the 2 major strategic mistakes Germany made, and were in themselves enough to doom it's expansion plans - there is no ways it has the resources to fight against Great Britain and Soviet Russia at the same time. But this is still a Good Old European War, and the likely outcome - arguably - can still be penning Germany back into its own historic boundaries and re-establishing the status quo until the next time. Europe has been doing this for 400 years, after all. This is not the time to get the USA to fight you too......

So, here we have Google fighting the TV/Movie industry and ViacomGrad is looming, the Microsoft fight is see-sawing back and forth, but at El AlaBing, Microsoft lands the first tanks on Google's turf. Google does not have the resources to take on Microsoft and the whole Entertainment industry, but it could still negotiate a reasonable settlement by ceding the more controversial terrain back to the major opponent industries, and coming to terms with them.

So why, at this point, do you want to then also go to war against huge powers from far way - the whole Apple spat, pushing Android panzers into the Mobile/Telecoms/ISP industry, trying to outfight the Social Media industry with Buzz-bombs and taking on the European Union over data privacy?. This is overexpansion of resources at a level that even Hitler would probably have admired.

From 1943 to 1945, an alliance of powers that were only the most uneasy of allies first got even and then surpassed German technology and methods, but their sheer economic size made eventual victory certain even if they only had "good enough" stuff, as this war was one of attrition which Germany could not win.

From 2010 to 2013, its is predictable therefore that this ring of opponents facing Google (see picture above) will be able to equal and then surpass them - and the threat that Google has posed will drive all of them to want a fairly terminal solution. Besides, the wealth that is up for grabs within the Googlereich is too, too tempting to be passed over.

Here endeth the (future) history lesson.....

Update - bit of backchannel conversation and a few additional thoughts around "So what should Google Do"?. Clearly they have been putting a lot of ooomph behind a wide range of strategic options, and at some point you have to cull. My thoughts would be:

Firstly, get out of unnecessary conflicts and try not to fight on more than one major front at a time .

(i) Make peace with the EU, they have history on their side - and recapture a bit of te "don't be evil" dust as well

(ii) Does Google really want to be an ISP and a Telco? It is not their game, they are downstream players.

Secondly, try and create alliances where they cannot win:

(i) Social Media - is this really Google's bailiwick? They have been cr*p at nearly everything they have done in this space. Better to make alliances than enemies out of the existing players

(ii) WebTV - the TV Freeconomics play is over, the regulatory pendulum is swinging against rampant piracy globally, and YouTube is a major drain on resources. Make your peace and make alliances. They overpaid by a stupid amount, but its a sunk cost - make sure it doesn't sink the rest of the opportunities.

Thirdly, decide where your One Front will be

(i) Is it really SaaS for Microsoft Office? Is that the highest value they can obtain for their effort? If so, prepare for a major scrap, Microsoft will go for their weak spots, and has the resources to do so.

(ii) Is Planet Mobile where they are headed? If so, they need some allies - like Russia, this is too big to take on, on their own, They are competing with their own supply chain, have no distribution, and no after sale customer care capability. Do Google really want to fight Apple, Nokia, all the Mobile telcos?

I don't have Google's internal economics so its hard to know the ROI of these various areas, but I suspect none are profitable right now. The question is which will return the greatest return and cost least to fund in the next 3-5 years

*Keith McMahon has pointed out that Google now taking on Apple is akin to Germany deciding to declare war on Japan.

I've been following the "YouTube Roolz" blogfest with extreme boredom, its clearly pre-emptive posturing before the Viacom court case - but this response shot from Viacom piqued my curiosity as its sets out the Viacom position:

YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube’s founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement. By their own admission, the site contained “truckloads” of infringing content and founder Steve Chen explained that YouTube needed to “steal” videos because those videos make “our traffic soar.”

Google bought YouTube because it was a haven of infringement. Google knew that YouTube’s popularity depended on infringing materials with several senior Google executives warning that YouTube was a “rogue enabler of content theft.” Instead of complying with the law, Google willfully and knowingly chose to continue YouTube’s illegal practices.

Google and YouTube had the technology to stop infringement at any time but deliberately chose not to use it. They would only offer to protect Viacom’s content if Viacom agreed to license those works, effectively holding copyright protection as ransom for a license.

The law is clear that Google and YouTube are liable for their infringement. The Supreme Court unanimously held in Grokster that a service that intends infringement is liable for that infringement. No case has ever suggested that the DMCA immunizes rampant intentional infringement of the sort Google and YouTube have engaged in.

These facts are undisputed. The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case.

Its interesting because it is in essence implying that even adopting the piracy business model is a de Jure illegal act. It has a huge impact - if you go back to our work on the evolution of the Web TV world, you will see that we assume that the very turbulent "Pirate World" holds sway in the next few years, and quite a few of the winners longer term are effectively the corporates bankrolling these Pirates (what we call Privateer Plays as a more accurate term here than Pirates). Google and YouTube being the prime example.

This is significant - when we build scenarios we add in "milestones" or "signposts" you have to watch for, and one of them that signals a shift back to The Olde Worlde media is important.

This is such. One of the conditions in our "Pirate World" and "New Model Media" scenarios was that the regulatory regimes did not shift to the side of existing rightsholders (when we did the work in 2008 the regulatory regime was fairly hands off, but its behaviour globally has been by and large increasingly "for" the rights of the rightsholder since then as country after country has become unwilling to lose the revenues from these large industries).

Thus, a 2 year refresh of our work would be to increase the probability of Olde Media doing better, and if Viacom wins this - with significant enough damages - it may put the kibosh on Privateer plays completely.

Arrr, so the winds be a-shiftin, Jim Lad. That'll send a shiver down the corporate timbers at Social Media Central.....but the pure Pirates, it seems, will be forever with us.

No sooner do Toyota have an unexplained bug in their cars acceleration, than we get this classic from Wired:

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”

This illustrates another of the downsides of simple mass interconnectness without robust security and risk mitigation systems (a similar example is computer trading systems that go into a downward sell spiral).

I recall reading a Sci Fi story many years ago (70's) about a "wired" world in which a country guy with an old petrol engined, non computerised car drives into town and is nearly killed by enraged townies who se him as eco-unfriendly, but then something goes wrong with The Grid in a levee flood and all their electric cars stop with them stuck inside, and they get drowned.

The dream is to hook up all cars so they can speed seamlessly along and optimise traffic flows. The reality, unless systems are very secure and resilient, will be massive pile ups and carnage.

It does seem like online privacy is starting to hit the big time. We got it wrong, thinking that 2009 would be the year it really hit home, but we were a year early. But now everyone is trying to get More Private Then Thou - see Google Chrome's attempts:

Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company's increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.

But Google (and Facebook) are probably past the point of believability....PC World:

Several major U.S. Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, need to "step up" and better protect consumer privacy or face tougher penalties from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, a commissioner said Wednesday.

And then there is this.....Twitter in its new "don't be evil" mode is getting the Security bug:

On Tuesday, Twitter added computer security veteran Bob Lord to the company's expanding employee roster as the manager of network and infrastructure security, bringing with him 20 years of experience focused on electronic security systems at large companies, most recently including Red Hat, AOL and Netscape. Highlights in Lord's background include his building security and encryption features into the Netscape browser, iPlanet servers (an alliance with Sun and Netscape) and the AOL Communicator product, which also included Mail, Address Book, Instant Messenger and Calendar. Since leaving AOL, Bob has worked with a team of cryptography experts to add security features to many projects including FireFox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Red Hat Linux.

Problem is, its hitting the mainstream - what we were writing 2 years ago is now hitting mainstream media - New York Times:

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

Probably not.

Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

They go on to note:

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.

The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix’s anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.

By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.

That prediction from connected data is an effect we've also noted.

And so the dance begins, as the companies whose business models rely on massive privacy violation (see above companies...) try and keep one step ahead in the dance of the seven veils that keeps the publoc from sussing them out. But it takes two to tango, and the user is getting a lot of notification about what is going on now from both the mainstream media and from New Media researchers such as dana boyd as well.

So, whose cards will be marked this year?

Agence France Presse:

SAN FRANCISCO — A study released on Wednesday indicated that the market for mobile device software programs should rocket to 17.5 billion dollars (US) within three years.

Downloads of mobile applications to handsets will leap from slightly more than seven billion in 2009 to nearly 50 billion in 2012, according to the independent study commissioned by GetJar, the world's second largest app store.

"It is easy to see how mobile apps will eclipse the traditional desktop Internet," GetJar chief executive Ilja Laurs told AFP.

"It makes perfect sense that mobile devices will kill the desktop."

Ah, another piece of cautiously optimistic research work from Planet Mobile

For the record, a rule of thumb we have found to be pretty reliable over 10 years of watching the mobile industry is to halve the prediction and double the time it takes. $25bn by 2014? I could live with that......

Network World reporting on news from Gartner:

Sixty percent of virtual servers are less secure than the physical servers they replace, the analyst firm Gartner said in new research Monday.

This state of affairs will remain true until 2012, but security should improve substantially after that point, Gartner said.

Gartner predicted that by 2015, only 30% of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical machines they replaced.

The basis of the issue is the new layer of virtualizing middleware that is emerging to help such virtual systems operate easily. These are new pieces of software, largely untested, and 40% are developed by people who know not a lot about high end system security.

There are 5 other main risks identified (see the press release here)

- A Compromise of the Virtualization Layer Could Result in the Compromise of All Hosted Workloads

- The Lack of Visibility and Controls on Internal Virtual Networks Created for VM-to-VM

- Workloads of Different Trust Levels Are Consolidated Onto a Single Physical Server Without Sufficient Separation

- Adequate Controls on Administrative Access to the Hypervisor/VMM Layer and to Administrative Tools Are Lacking

- There Is a Potential Loss of Separation of Duties for Network and Security Controls

Quite why its going to get amazingly better in 5 years is not made clear in the press release, I would have thought there is at least 5 years of FUD and Greed in there. The report is sitting behind a $95 paywall - so here's a free opinion:

There will be a load of cowboys entering the game in the next 3 years, by 2015 there will have been some major security f*ckups, and by 2015 many customers will have been spooked - and the big players who do this stuff in their sleep (they are called Telcos and Web 1.0 Hosters) will enter the game and just integrate it all as part of their infrastructure.

It is clearly becoming traditional at SXSW to have an Interview Keynote that everyone loves to hate, a process that is affectionately known as Lacyration. This year's tag team were Havas's Umair Haque and Twitter's Ev Williams. Just see here and here for the articles - but read the comments for a more balanced view than just the Twitter faithful.

But of course, this one was all predictable, as the chart above shows. Today's competition is to "spot the middle ground". Answers on a postcard.....

Update - Umair Haque's comments over here talks about a bigger picture than you can get in 140 characters.

I'm beginning to like dana boyd No, seriously, I first came across her stuff a few years ago and found it a bit too "Social media right on" - Teen Brave New World laced liberally with Kool Aid - the sort of academic stuff Posy Simmonds would send up most wittily. But I think moving to Microsoft has been the making of her as she has started to embrace the real world outside academia and the Teen. In other words, I find myself agreeing with her more and more

SXSW this year (to me) has seen the scary trend of a vicious competition between various privacy-busting location based services for (ahem) Buzz. Thus this piece from SXSW by dana on Privacy is rather good - here are some highlights:

DEAR ERIC SCHMIDT, PRIVACY IS NOT DEAD. KTXBY.

No matter how many times a privileged straight white male technology executive pronounces the death of privacy, Privacy Is Not Dead. People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline. But what privacy means may not be what you think.

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It's about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.

To get at the challenges around privacy, let's consider a recent privacy FAIL: Google Buzz. What the outrage around Google Buzz showed us is that people care deeply about privacy and control. Don't get me wrong - plenty of people will use the service and it will be extremely popular, but this doesn't mean Google didn’t screw up. They’re taking a hit in terms of trust, because not everyone benefited from what they did.

Hear hear. And then there is this:

THE BINARIES OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

It's easy to think that "public" and "private" are binaries. We certainly build a lot of technology with this assumption. At best, we break out of this with access-control lists where we list specific people who some piece of content should be available to. And at best, we expand our notion of "private" to include everything that is not "public." But this binary logic isn't good enough for understanding what people mean when they talk about privacy. What people experience when they talk about privacy is more complicated than what can be instantiated in a byte.

To get at this, let's talk about how people experience public and private in unmediated situations. Because it's not so binary there either.

First, think about a conversation that you may have with a close friend. You may think about that conversation as private, but there is nothing stopping your friend from telling someone else what was said, except for your trust in your friend. You actually learned to trust your friend, presumably through experience.

Learning who to trust is actually quite hard. Anyone who has middle school-aged kids knows that there's inevitably a point in time when someone says something that they shouldn't have and tears are shed. It's hard to learn to really know for sure that someone will keep their word. But we don't choose not to tell people things simply because they could spill the beans. We do our best to assess the situation and act accordingly.

Quite - we have been saying for 5 years that the trust seeking systems in Real Life are far more nuanced than a few puffs of whuffie, and that online systems are still very risky as they are so crude in ability to divine intentions - especially given the economic motives of some of the major players. She sums up with:

CHANGING THE RULES

Let's think of this in terms of a second privacy FAIL: Facebook's changes in December. For those who missed it, Facebook asked users to reconsider their privacy settings. The first instantiation of the process asked users to consider various types of content and choose whether to make that content available to "Everyone" or to keep their old settings. The default new choice was "Everyone." Many users encountered this pop-up when they logged in and just clicked on through because they wanted to get to Facebook itself. In doing so, these users changed all of their settings to public, many without realizing it. When challenged by the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook proudly announced that 35% of users had altered their privacy settings when they had encountered this popup. They were proud of this because, as research has shown, very few people actually change the defaults. But this means that 65% of users changed their settings to public.

If one believes that no one cares about privacy, one might think that Facebook users consciously made their content public. But I've spent a lot of time browsing Facebook's "Everybody" feed since the privacy setting debacle in December and I don't think a lot of what I'm seeing is meant to be public. [Picture of some "public" status updates on Facebook.] So I started asking non-techy users about their privacy settings on Facebook. I ask them what they think their settings are and then ask them to look at their settings with me. I have yet to find someone whose belief matched up with their reality. That is not good news. Facebook built its name and reputation on being a closed network that enabled privacy in new ways, something that its users deeply value and STILL believe is the case. Are there Facebook users who want their content to be publicly accessible? Of course. But 65% of all Facebook users? No way.

And she concludes with Five key issues:

PRIVACY DISCONNECTS

When thinking about privacy in a digital context, there are five main things you need to know.

First, you must differentiate between PII and PEI. If you've spent any time thinking about privacy, you've probably heard of PII - "Personally Identifiable Information." All too often, we assume that when people make PII available publicly that they don't care about privacy. While some folks are deeply concerned about PII, PII isn't the whole privacy story. What many people are concerned about is PEI - "Personally Embarrassing Information." This is what they're brokering, battling over, and trying to make sense of.

Second, we're seeing an inversion of defaults when it comes to what's public and what's private. Historically, a conversation that you might have in the hallway is private by default, public through effort. It's private because no one bothers to share what's being said. The conversation may be made public if something worth spreading is said. Even though the conversation took place in a public setting, the conversation is private by default, public through effort.

Third, people regularly calculate both what they have to lose and what they have to gain when entering public situations. Having control over a situation is extremely important, but it must be weighed against the opportunities that one might have to gain a friend or have a new experience by being public. The equations people use differ depending on where they are at in their life. Most generalizably, youth focus on all that they have to gain when entering into public spaces while adults are thinking about all that they have to lose. Part of the challenge in this is figuring out where someone's at and what their expectations are.

Fourth concept. Keep in mind that people don’t always make material publicly accessible because they want the world to see it. Consider this quote from 17-year-old Bly Lauritano-Warner:

"My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being "public" when she defends herself. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can communicate with my friends. Not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my life."

Finally, I want to come back to what I keep raising briefly but not properly addressing. Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized. Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy.

All very good stuff and I urge you to tread the whole original. But I want to leave you with an observation of my own, which is that the people who are heading the companies espousing Public Living the most, are also ensuring their own privacy the most - to the extent that I think we are seeing the emergence of "Privacy Feudalism" - there is a risk that in the future only the rich/powerful will have privacy, life will be lived in a public bubble except for those who can live behind the gated online communities.