Saturday, December 31, 2016

How To Fix Twitter..Free Speech Can Be Very Costly

  Take away anonymity and bullies lose their courage.




Blogger got it right. Facebook got it right, Twitter never did and still doesn't.

Blogs let owners decide whether comments would be posted.

Facebook gives users the ability to opt-in the people they want to comment/share info with. There is some control, some permission.

Twitter gives anyone the ability to deliver "drive by" trolling. There is no control and no consequences for doing so. Their new troll controls don't go far enough to prevent this.


There's a reason Twitter is toast and isn't even worth $10,  who wants to promote hate?

Twitter could be a very valuable platform, but right now it just enables incestuous hate without repercussions. Twitter gives anonymous people, cowards, a microphone to spew their hate.

How do you fix Twitter?

For starters..make people pay for it. Either per post or per hashtag, or just to have an account. Create different levels for different functions. this would go a long way to deterring this. 

Second, force users to publicly attach another form of ID to their Twitter account. Take away the anonymity. The payment method would do this as well.

Finally, some creative law firm should start soliciting troll targets. Go after these cretins with the threat of legal action. Getting threatened with legal action has a great way of deterring bad behavior.

If Twitter won't reveal the user, then go after Twitter for enabling the behavior.

Maybe it's time to set some kind of legal precedent for this online behavior.

Why Apple Is Overvalued And Destined For Hard Times




Yes, we love Apple and their products...but they are still thinking "local" and it is going to cost them dearly.

From the ability to carry around all of our music IN the iPod to the neat way of running applications ON our phone, Apple has clearly nailed this strategy...

However, this is their downfall.

Content and computing are shifting from being ON the device to IN the cloud and when your business depends on selling high end consumer devices, that is going to be a very big problem going forward.

Adding a camera was a pretty big step for the mobile phone. Then the creation of the app store and all of the wonderful things you could now do with a phone, was a boom for many people/industries.

Where are we going?

It is called cloud computing because the computing is done on the cloud, not the device. The applications and content will be accessed and run in the cloud and not on the device.

So when you're selling a phone for $800, when YOUR COST is $200, but the true cost of just the hardware is $25, that's a very problem for your business.

Apple, and others, should look very closely at Google and their Chromebook to see where the future is headed. The number one selling laptop isn't a laptop at all, it's simply a connection to the cloud.

Indeed Microsoft sees the future and thinks it can give the Chromebook a run for its money with the recently announced partnership with Qualcomm

The next "must have" mobile phone will be a "cloud phone", or something very similar to Chromebook capability in a mobile phone size. A simple device, costing under $100 that just accesses the cloud for your content and applications. You drop it or it gets stolen, no big deal. The battery life will be days now that unnecessary applications dont need to be running constantly. The bandwidth used will shrink (telecoms will love).

I can have access to IBM's Watson and high powered graphics, there is NO point in keeping the computing on the device any more.

The days of different app stores will be a thing of the past and Apple's iTunes gold mine will end fast. Why do I need to download the Facebook app from several stores for different devices? App stores are just glorified browsers and who pays for those?

In 2007 I discussed how Apple could introduce an iTunes browser and become an ecommerce powerhouse, Amazon beat them to it.

In 2010, I stated how Apple could turn their iTunes into the "killer platform" and be a cloud pioneer, but they sacrificed future for device revenue.

The shift from websites to apps that run websites fragmented many industries..that all changes. One app that runs on all devices. Period.

Kodak didn't see the shift from analog to digital. Apple isn't seeing the shift from local to the cloud.