According to Nicholas Keung, "All immigrants face mandatory language test", The Star, 7/20/2010:

Born and raised in New York, Dodi Robbins graduated from Harvard University and has been practising law for 13 years.

Her first language is English. Yet like all other skilled immigrants applying to settle in Canada, the American corporate lawyer must now take a language test to prove her English is good enough to settle here.

I was outraged, insulted and floored, said Robbins, who obtained her law degree at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York. A mother of two, she has been working in Toronto on a work permit for four years as compliance and regulations counsel for an international financial services company.

I almost fell off the chair. I've been practising law here for years and I have to prove my proficiency in English?

Last month Ottawa made its language proficiency test mandatory for all skilled immigrant applicants, including native English and French speakers. The so-called ministerial instructions stipulate officials are not to process applications without language test results, starting June 26.

There seems to be some substantive controversy over the way the policy was introduced:

Critics say the government is now trying to use the ministerial instructions to circumvent public scrutiny and consultation, ramming through changes without parliamentary oversight.

But Ms. Robbins' case seems to be an odd one to lead with. It's legitimate for her to be annoyed at having to spend a half a day and $285 taking the IELTS. But the article describes her as sweating the outcome:

Robbins says she is juggling her full-time job and two kids to prepare for the IELTS test in August.

Does a native speaker with a college education really need to "prepare for the IELTS test"? If so, it must not be a very well-designed instrument.

I recognize that "language exams" can be (and sometimes are) designed to test something other than language proficiency. When I was a graduate student, we needed to demonstrate proficiency in two languages other than English. In principle, all that was required was the ability to translate a linguistics article, with access to a dictionary. Having achieved roughly that level of competence in German, I planned to take the German exam. Then one of my fellow grad students, a native speaker of German who had an undergraduate degree from a well-regarded institution in Austria, told me that she had failed that exam.

Apparently the gentleman who administered the German exam had a chip on his shoulder about all the grad students who didn't take the courses his department offered. In any event, he apparently set my friend to translate a particularly fiendish passage from von Humboldt, which she found so impenetrable that she occasionally got confused about who did what to whom. Or perhaps she suffered the fate that Mark Twain described in The Awful German Language:

You observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.

Anyhow, I abruptly changed course and arranged to take my German exam in Latin.

And then there's the traditional Japanese method of determining English proficiency, which apparently is a version of the cloze test that in effect requires students to commit large numbers of classic works to memory.

But I find it hard to believe that the IELTS is designed in such a way that a highly educated native speaker really needs to study for it. Can someone who's taken it recently comment?

If I understand the situation correctly, this is roughly the Canadian equivalent of a U.S. H-1B visa, for which a language proficiency exam is not required, rather than the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Naturalization process, which does have a language proficiency requirement, though a rather minimal one:

During your interview, a USCIS officer will test your ability to read, write, and speak English and your knowledge of civics. You must read one sentence out of three sentences correctly in English, and you must write one sentence out of three sentences correctly in English. Your ability to speak English is determined during your interview on your naturalization application. Finally, you must answer 6 out of 10 civics questions correctly to achieve a passing score.

[Update other stories suggest that Ms. Robbins has had a Canadian work permit for several years, and is now applying for citizenship. But it seems that what she is actually doing is applying for status as a "permanent resident" like having "green card" in the U.S. which may or may not be a step on the way to naturalization. It's not clear to me yet whether similar language tests are required in order to get a work permit.]

[Update #2 Apparently there is no "passing grade" on the test. According to this page,

You must provide proof of language proficiency by taking a language test from an agency designated by CIC. With your test results, you will be able to see exactly how many points you will receive for the language selection factor.

The "points" are part of the system described here:

Also, this is part of the application for admission as a "permanent resident" under the "skilled workers and professionals category", which is not the same as applying for citizenship, but is a bigger deal than getting a limited-term work permit.]

In reading about the lives of history's great men, one thing I've noticed is that many of them had a place they could go to be alone with their thoughts. Some of these men had a study where they would retreat to think, read, and write. Others had a garage or workshop where they would tinker and experiment. But what all these rooms had in common was their sheer manliness. They were man spaces, places a man could call his own.

Below we give you a look inside the man rooms of 14 famous men from history. Within these rooms they formulated ideas that would change the world, wrote books that remain classics, and revitalized the dynamic manliness that drove their success. While we all can't have a Carnegie-esque study, perhaps you'll find inspiration from these manly spaces to spruce up your own room or simply the push to find a place where you can get away from it all and in tune with your manliness.

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Studio

The room where Papa wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and Death in the Afternoon. Ernest Hemingway lived in this house in Key West, Florida for more than 10 years. Needing a place where he could drink a glass of scotch, smoke a cigar, and write about men being men, Hemingway turned the old carriage house on the property into his personal writing studio. The main features in the room are the Cuban cigar-maker's chair and his Royal typewriter. Throughout the room, Hemingway placed mementos he collected from his manly adventures in Africa and Cuba.

Theodore Roosevelt's Trophy Room

After Theodore Roosevelt's Dakota cattle business failed, he came back East to New York and built a home in Oyster Bay, NY. He called his estate Sagamore Hill, and he lived there until he died (with a stint in the White House, of course). It was where Roosevelt would go to relax, romp in the woods, and revitalize his man spirit. The crowning manly jewel of the house was TR's trophy room where he kept his collection of wild game he had hunted in Africa and throughout the American West. The room has a high ceiling and is filled with rich, dark Philippine camagon woodwork. A perfect place for the manliest president to read a book about adventure in the grasslands or to entertain guests and dignitaries.

Frederick Douglass' Office

Frederick Douglass was a true self-made man. He escaped from slavery and through hard work and self-education, became a writer, publisher, speaker and fierce abolitionist. With the money he made from writing and speaking, Douglass bought a 14 bedroom house in Washington, D.C. that he called Cedar Hill. His office was lined with over 1,000 books on a wide variety of subjects, and his walls were adorned with portraits of people he admired like Susan B. Anthony and Wendell Phillips. Douglas would spend up to five hours a day reading and writing in his manly study. At his sturdy wooden desk he penned many of his inspiring speeches and his famous autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Thomas Jefferson's Study

The author of the Declaration of Independence also was a master architect. Jefferson designed the home that crowned his beautiful Monticello estate. Jefferson's man space was his study where he'd read about, write about, and ponder liberty and other profound principles in solitude. The busts of great men served as muses for Jefferson. One of the unique aspects of Jefferson's man space is how it's connected to his bedroom. He placed his bed in an alcove in the wall between his study and room. That way Jefferson could roll right out of bed and start working or if he needed to take a power nap after hours of manly meditation and study, he could lie down for a respite.

Mark Twain's Writing Hut

Mark Twain would often summer with his sister who lived in Elmira, New York. Needing a place where he could get some work done, Twain built himself a writing hut on his sister's property. Free from distractions and inspired by the setting, Twain could write in peace and quiet. In this sanctuary of manliness, Twain wrote some of his most widely read and manly works: Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I love how Twain described his man space in an 1874 letter to William Dean Howells:

It is the loveliest study you ever sawoctagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious windowperched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my headimagine the luxury of it.

Henry David Thoreau's Cabin

Tired of the distractions of modern living, Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to live a deliberate and simple life. He borrowed some land near a pond called Walden from friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and built himself a simple 10x5 shack. The inside was furnished with a bed, a table, a desk, and three chairs. That's it. Total cost to build his man shack? $28.12. It was in this small hut in the woods that Thoreau would get the inspiration he needed to write his most famous work of Transcendental Philosophy, Walden, Or Life in the Woods. Thoreau's rustic man-hut has inspired men for generations to tear out into the woods, build a shack with their own bare man hands, and start sucking the marrow out of life.

Thomas Edison's Library

Many people argue that Thomas Edison's greatest contribution to science and technology was his Invention Factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. This series of brick buildings was the first industrial research and development laboratory and is the model for today's corporate and government R&D labs. Nestled in the complex was Edison's personal library. The focal point of the room is the roll top desk that Edison likely used to design cool stuff like the phonograph or Kinetoscope. Edison knew how to hustle and would often work for 24 hours (or more!) straight. He'd take catnaps in a cot that he set up in his library to recharge himself for more work.

John Muir's Study

When John Muir wasn't wandering through Yosemite and pondering the awe-inspiring power of nature, he lived with his wife in a 14-room mansion in Martinez, California that had been built in 1883 by his father-in-law. The Muirs occupied that home from 1890 until John's death in 1914. This was the most fruitful time of Muir's career, and much of his productivity took place within the walls of his study, which he called his scribble den. Seated at his simple wooden desk, Muir laid much of the foundation for the modern conservation movement, penning hundreds of passionate magazine and newspaper articles and writing books on the importance of preserving nature, mulling over how to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed, pushing for the creation of National Parks and a Park Service, and taking care of work for his job as the first president of the Sierra Club.

Winston Churchill's Art Studio

In addition to being a first-class statesman, Winston Churchill was a talented artist as well. The man loved to paint. He loved it so much that he built himself an art studio in his estate's garden. When he felt the Black Dog of depression tailing him, he would retreat to his studio and keep the darkness away by putting brush to canvas.

Mark Twain's Billiards Room

Mark Twain is so manly that two of his man rooms made the list. This billiards room took up the entire top floor of his three-story Hartford, CT house where he lived from 1871-1891. The room was off limits to Twain's wife and kids and reserved for Twain and his male guests to shoot pool, smoke cigars, and imbibe spirits. Twain also used the room as a man retreat, a place to write and hide from the domestic chaos on the other floors of the house. Twain explained the reason this special man space was needed in his home:

There ought to be a room in this house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like thatUnder certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

The Wright Brothers' Bicycle Shop

The garage or workshop is a favorite place for men to retreat to, drink a beer, and tinker on their car. The Wright brothers spent hours together in their bike shop fixing bikes and creating the first successful flying machine. Their shop actually changed locations several times, but what stayed the same was the industrial utility of the room and the solitude it offered them to ponder how to get man into the air.

Charles Darwin's Study

Located in rural Kent, England, Charles Darwin's Down House is where the famous scientist lived and worked for over 40 years. Inside the home, Darwin had a private study where he would write in solitude. Darwin was a morning person and felt he did his best work between the hours of 8 AM and 9:30 AM. It was in this room that Darwin wrote his landmark work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin lined his shelves not only with books but also with animal specimens he found while taking walks in the afternoons. I'm totally digging that spiral cane and bowler hat placed on the chair in the first picture.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Drafting Studio

Frank Lloyd Wright lived at his Oak Park, IL residence from 1889 until 1909. During these first two decades of his career, Wright developed his architectural practice and style, brainstorming ideas and drafting plans within the handsome home studio he designed himself. Under the octagonal hanging lights, Wright and his associates developed the Prairie style of architecture and designed 125 structures. The magnificent studio is certainly a worthy workplace for such a revered architect; a fellow architect said it offered inspiration everywhere.

Andrew Carnegie's Study

Steele magnate Andrew Carnegie used some of his vast millions to build a 64-room mansion located on 5th Ave near Central Park in New York City. Among its 64 rooms were Carnegie's private library and study where he would spend his mornings either alone or with his personal secretary. He used his library to receive applicants seeking a piece of his philanthropic treasure chest and his study to determine which ones would get funds. The rooms were decked out in typical Gilded Age furnishings- dark hand-carved wood, plush furniture, and decorative ceilings. Along the walls of both rooms were stenciled Carnegie's favorite inspirational sayings like The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. It's pretty amazing what sort of man room you can build when you're the richest guy in the world.

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Larry Rohter, reporting for the NYT on Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography:

Whether anguishing over American military interventions abroad or delivering jabs at Wall Street tycoons, this Twain is strikingly contemporary. Though the autobiography also contains its share of homespun tales, some of its observations about American life are so acerbic at one point Twain refers to American soldiers as uniformed assassins that his heirs and editors, as well as the writer himself, feared they would damage his reputation if not withheld.

From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out, Twain instructed them in 1906. There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.

Full text of Mark Twain's "Concerning the 'Interview.'"

"Concerning the 'Interview.'"

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone's idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn't have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn't. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear--a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think--for you don't think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going around in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb way that you hadn't done it, though really you don't know which it is you wish you hadn't done, and moreover you don't care: that is not the point; you simply wish you hadn't done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance and hasn't anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.

Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time, at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him trying to trick you into saying humorous things. And in truth that is what he is always trying to do. He shows it so plainly, works for it so openly and shamelessly, that his very first effort closes up that reservoir, and his next one caulks it tight. I do not suppose that a really humorous thing was ever said to an interviewer since the invention of his uncanny trade. Yet he must have something "characteristic;" so he invents the humorisms himself, and interlards them when he writes up his interview. They are always extravagant, often too wordy, and generally framed in "dialect"--a non-existent and impossible dialect at that. This treatment has destroyed many a humorist. But that is no merit in the interviewer, because he didn't intend to do it.

There are plenty of reasons why the Interview is a mistake. One is, that the interviewer never seems to reflect that the wise thing to do, after he has turned on this and that and the other tap, by a multitude of questions, till he has found one that flows freely and with interest, would be to confine himself to that one, and make the best of it, and throw away the emptyings he had secured before. He doesn't think of that. He is sure to shut off that stream with a question about some other matter; and straightway his one poor little chance of getting something worth the trouble of carrying home is gone, and gone for good. It would have been better to stick to the thing his man was interested in talking about, but you would never be able to make him understand that. He doesn't know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling out slag, he can't tell dirt from ducats; it's all one to him, he puts in everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and wasn't worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so does the cyclone.

Now his interruptions, his fashion of diverting you from topic to topic, have in a certain way a very serious effect: they leave you but partly uttered on each topic. Generally, you have got out just enough of your statement to damage you; you never get to the place where you meant to explain and justify your position.

Mark Twain / Online NewsHour:
Exclusive: Newly Published Mark Twain Essay, Concerning the Interview' Thanks to the Mark Twain Foundation and its trustees, the PBS NewsHour brings you for the first known time in print an essay by the American literary giant on a topic dear to our hearts the journalistic interview.

Yesterday we discussed the trick to growing a Facebook fan base to place the like button everywhere, get folks to like everything, as treat your fan base like an email list. Now that you have the initial set of fans, here's where the fun begins.

Facebook has 3 types of connection targeting: users who are fans, users who aren't fans, and friends of fans. It's this last option that is amazing so awesome that I'm afraid public mention of it may cause Facebook to remove it. And that's why we keep testing, plus don't reveal all our tips, but I digress.

Let's consider a poker site the National League of Poker. When we target only fans of the page, Facebook gives us an audience of 2,060 people:

The actual fan count is 2,894, but that's because Facebook's estimate are delayed and we're automatically filtering by US 18+. By using the first connection targeting option, we can continue to nurture those folks who have become fans. As a marketer, you know that you want to say something different to folks who already know you versus those who don't, right? So why is it that Facebook advertisers treat everyone the same? When you use the first connection option, you're trying to move people from the interest stage to either desire or action. You should not be trying to generate awareness with these folks who are already fans. Note that how our messaging is quite different than Learn how to play poker!

If you already are a fan of the page, the like button won't show up, by the way. It will just say You like this ad/page and if you have other friends who like it, they'll show up, too. Sometimes the unlike button shows- not sure what governs when it shows. There are so few advertisers that are sending traffic to Facebook pages and also using connection targeting that it's hard to tell.

Finally, this is what you've been waiting for. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. So the 2,060 fans allow us to reach 304,800 people.

This particular example works out to 148 friends per fan. The larger the base, the smaller the number of friends per user. It's partly that your initial users are more likely to be early adopters and have more fans in general. But it's also that the more fans you have, the greater the chance of overlap between them, such that the unduplicated audience decreases. When you have over 500,000 fans, then your factor of reach vs fans may be only low double digits. While decreased reach may appear bad, this is actually VERY good, since it means that each time you show the ad, it's showing MULTIPLE people below providing endorsements. Awesomeness on Facebook = maximizing PEER PRESSURE!

Consider an ad for a pizza restaurant that says they have the best pizza in town. Yawn. That's what 99% of advertising is about in fact, pretty much all advertising outside of Facebook is like this we just tune it out. Now imagine the same ad, but below it, your friend says they like it. Might you trust the claim a bit more perhaps even be more likely to drop in and order pizza the next time you drive by the place?

How do you think this may affect the CTR as well as the conversion rates?

What if we could say this to 304,800 people showing each of them an ad that had their particular friend's endorsement below it?

What if you got clever with your ad copy to make outrageous claims?

By the way, these are fake examples you'll have to see what you can get by Facebook's ad review team. The winning psychology: if you're doing retargeting (remarketing) on Google, then you can use similar ads in your direct fan and friends of fans (FOF) targeting. For example, if someone has abandoned their shopping cart, you can say Hey, why didn't you buy? Here's 10% off now to make it worth your while! And you can put a retargeting pixel on your Facebook page, but that's something to discuss in a post by itself.

Now consider the reach you have when you multiply your fan base by 150 and hit each of those folks with ads that have endorsements attached. The Las Vegas metro has 606,460 people on Facebook.

UNLV has 14,151 fans of our page of their 3 Las Vegas stadiums. We can cover over 50% of Las Vegas Facebook users with an endorsed ad. Consider if you're a dentist in a suburb of 100,000 people. You need only a fan base of 500 people to effectively dominate your town with endorsed (FOF) ads to have more than 50% coverage of a geo-graphic area.

Now before you go crazy with FOF targeting, consider when it works and when it doesn't:

• B2B: Nearly a complete FAIL. Why? When you do FOF targeting for an electronics manufacturer targeting design engineers, you end up targeting that design engineer's family and friends who are decidedly NOT interested in the latest data sheets on your 16 bit transformer assemblies. For B2B, use workplace and interest targeting to hit their place of employment and title.
• Consumer products and entertainment: ABSOLUTELY! Targeting the friends of of your fans is highly likely to result in something interesting to them. Ask yourself what percentage of a user's fans will be interested in their endorsement of a new movie, their favorite brand of soap, or whatever.
• Local: This is the goldmine of Facebook ads. People's Facebook friends tend to be people they see and interact with in real-life. There is a high likelihood that you can leverage that fan's recommendation broadly across their friend base. You can make it even better by adding a geographic and age filter, so you're not showing ads to old college alumni or children, depending on what your business does. BlitzLocal has asserted that Facebook is the sleeping giant of local, because of the wealth of trusted information available and effectiveness of targeting. We don't believe this will replace Google, but rather, augment it.

By the way, users who are being hit with this targeting aren't aware that the advertiser is doing so unless you are as blatant as the example I've provided. The ad itself doesn't show what targeting criteria was used to match them to the ad. Note to Facebook: this would be a cool feature and it would assuage many of the privacy concerns, where users are afraid that anything they have on their profile or interactions on Facebook is fair game for ad targeting.

There is a third targeting option, which is to exclude folks who are fans. Negation targeting matters only when your fan base is large enough that you risk showing awareness ads to folks who are fans.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

Few people realize that Facebook plays at all points in the conversion funnel they simplistically believe that Facebook is just display advertising with social elements, and that Google is for conversion. It's true that Google is primarily demand harvesting and that Facebook is more towards demand generation.

(image courtesy of Facebook)

More accurately, because you can target whether people are totally new to you, are connected to someone who does know you, or knows you that lets you separate out your messaging and conversion paths. Most marketers are familiar with the AIDA funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). And you can see how clearly Facebook's ad system allows you to hit people at each of these points.

Advertisers inherently understand that word of mouth has been the most powerful marketing vehicle previously unmeasurable. These ad options on Facebook, which we've only superficially covered here, allow not only for the measurement of word of mouth, but the aggressive amplification of it. Social media is inherently about leveraging trust to promote your business.

Was it Mark Twain who said something like The key to success is to be genuine. Fake that and you have it made! Seriously, when you have a solid brand, you get an amazing boost from advertising on Facebook the investment you've made in your brand means that users are already aware of who you are, are more likely to like your page, and are more willing to endorse you whether they know it or not.

In our next article, we'll discuss the next phase of your Facebook campaigns how to manage your pages effectively such that you build upon the principles we've discussed so far. What if your company has multiple brands and multiple products in multiple countries. Do you create one page for each combination of country, product, artist, and language? Maybe have one page per country and then separate tabs for each product, so local fans can interact? Or maybe one page per product with tabs by country? The answer is none of the above and we'll explain why.

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a firm specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. Mr. Yu has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues. He is an internationally sought after speaker and author on all things Facebook. BlitzLocal serves both national brands and local service businesses.

As Mark Twain was fond of saying, there are three kinds of mistruths: lies, damned lies, and statistics. We are working with the third element today. In a recent report from RescueTime, the company raised issue with the supposed dominance of Microsoft Office and other Redmond products over Google's comparable offerings.

The company made two major claims: that Google Docs (et al, the full suite) is actually much more popular than Microsoft Office among current computer users, and that Gmail is dominating Outlook. Before you sputter and dribble tea on your keyboard, they are basing this claim on acutual data. The company does this: RescueTime provides a time management tool to allow individuals and businesses to track their time and attention to see where their days go. That sounds reasonable, let's look at their data that they have aggregated from their myriad users.

Wow, you might think, not only is Gmail taking over the world's communication online, but Office is on its way out. A small party for Google's coup in both email and the traditionally offline productivity application sphere is in order!

But wait just a second, Gmail reaches nearly 55% of all computer users? That sounds high. After all, Comscore told us that late last year Gmail was the third most popular online email application. Odd, but perhaps that data is just old? The Office data smells bad as well, though. According to Wakoopa, Word has nearly twice the users that Google Docs does. Oh dear.

It seems odd that Gmail and Google Docs are overrepresented in the above data. What is going on? The answer is simple, and not malicious. People have to opt in to RescueTime and install their tracking application to send in data. Now just who is going to do that? The most web savvy. And what applications do the most web savvy people use? Cloud based applications.

That in a nutshell is why the above data is not a lie, or a damn lie, but is just statistics. In this case the data has been pulled in from a pool of self selecting heavy technology users. The average person has no idea what Google Docs is, so to contemplate an 80% market penetration is lunacy. However, among the RescueTime users, I am surprised it is not higher.

Don't sell that MSFT stock just yet it seems, at least according to the above graphs. Microsoft might be struggling to build a great browser tool for document creation and the like, but that hardly means that they have died.

Original title and link for this post: Is Google Spanking Microsoft In The Productivity And Email Wars?

Shared by phillip
Great book.

Lest Darkness Fall is an alternate history science fiction novel written in 1939 by author L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published as a short story in Unknown #10, December 1939. It was published as a complete novel by Henry Holt and Company in 1941 and reprinted by both Galaxy Publishing and Prime Press in 1949.

The book is often considered one of the best examples of the alternative history genre; it is certainly one of the most influential. Alternative history author Harry Turtledove has said it sparked his interest in the genre as well as his desire to study Byzantine history.^[1]

[edit] 1 Plot summary

Lest Darkness Fall is written along lines similar to those of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. American archaeologist Martin Padway is visiting the Pantheon in Rome in 1938. A thunderstorm arrives, lightning cracks, and he finds himself transported to 6th century Rome (AD 535).

The period Padway arrives in is a rather obscure one: Italy was ruled by the Ostrogoths, who had recently overthrown the Western Roman Empire, but were (in de Camp's opinion anyway) ruling relatively benevolently, e.g. allowing freedom of religion. In real history, shortly after this the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire temporarily expanded westwards, and overthrew the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Vandals in north Africa, but they never consolidated their rule over Italy, and it collapsed into various small states with further invasions by the Lombards.

Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc., 1949

Padway begins his adventures confused, wondering if he is dreaming or delusional. Quickly he accepts his fate and sets out to survive. At first Padway hits upon the idea of making a copper still and selling brandy for a living. He convinces a banker, Thomasus the Syrian, to lend him money to start his endeavor.

Padway moves on to develop a printing press, issue newspapers, and build a sketchy semaphore telegraph system. His efforts to produce a mechanical clock, gunpowder, and a cannon are failures. Despite his technological and academic bent he becomes more involved in the politics of the state, as Italy is invaded by the Imperials and also threatened from the south and east.

Padway rescues the recently deposed Thiudahad and becomes his quaestor. He uses the king's support to gather forces to defeat the Imperial general Belisarius and then, deceiving the Dalmatian army, re-enthrones the largely senile Thiudahad and imprisons King Wittigis as a hostage. In 537, when Wittigis is killed and Thiudahad reduced to madness, Padway has a proteg of his married to Mathaswentha and then created king of the Ostrogoths. He also tricks Justinian I into releasing Belisarius from his oath of allegiance and quickly enlists the military genius to command an army against the Franks.

The landing of an Imperial army at Vibo and a rebellion led by the son of Thiudahad threaten the Ostrogothic kingdom and the Ostrogoth army is destroyed at Crathis Valley. Padway assembles a new force, distributes an "emancipation proclamation" to the Italian serfs, and recalls Belisarius. The armies clash near Calatia and then Benevento. Despite the lethal indiscipline of his Gothic forces, some simple tactical tricks and the nick-of-time arrival of Belisarius secure Padway's victory.

At the end of the novel Padway has stabilised the Italo-Gothic kingdom, introduced a constitution, arranged the end of serfdom, liberated the Burgunds, is having boats built for an Atlantic expedition (Padway wants tobacco) and he has entered negotiations with the Visigothic kingdom in the Iberian peninsula.

Europe will not experience the Dark Ages due to Padway's actions; darkness will not fall.

Recently in the news, a (not yet published?) study by Lauren Emberson and MIchael Goldstein, on why "halfalogues" are so annoying. Thus "Eavesdropping a waste of energy", ABC Science:

Ever wonder why overhearing a phone conversation is so annoying? American researchers think they have found the answer.

Whether it is the office, on a train or in a car, only hearing half of a conversation drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking, according to scientists at Cornell University.

"We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation, or 'halfalogue', than when listening to a dialogue," says Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study that will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Since halfalogues really are more distracting and you can't tune them out, this could explain why people are irritated," she says.

Or in the LA Times:

Researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests to gauge people's reactions when exposed to four background noise settings: silence, a monologue, a conversation between two people and half a conversation (called a halfalogue). The study participants were seated at computers and asked to perform various cognitive tests while exposed to one of the three sounds or silence.

The study showed that hearing the halfalogue was the only background noise that distracted the study participants and lowered their scores on the cognitive tests. For some reason, our brains are unable to tune out half a conversation. Researchers believe this is because we can't predict the speech pattern of a halfalogue the way we can with a monologue or two-way conversation making it harder to ignore. []

"We believe this finding helps reveal how we understand language in conversation," the lead author of the study, Lauren Emberson, said in a news release. "We actively predict what the person is going to say next and this reduces the difficulty of language comprehension."

But regular LL readers read it here first:

"Mind-reading fatigue", 11/23/2003
"Mind-reading experiments at the University of York", 4/13/2004

And regular readers of Mark Twain have suspected it since 1880, four years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone:

"That queerest of all the queer things in the world", 3/25/2004

Seriously, this sounds like an excellent study, though it would be nice if they made it available for readers before pitching it to the media.

The Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium
Through the Lens of Time: Perspectives on Medicine and Health Care
May 19 20, 2010

Events on Wednesday, May 19, 2010

2 4 p.m. Visit the Ars Medica Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's new Perelman Building (across from the Museum's main building, corner of Pennsylvania and Fairmount Avenues); Hosted by Peter Barberie, PhD, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs

6:30 8:30 p.m. What Mark Twain Might Tell Us (And Ask Us) If He Could Join Us Tonight, K. Patrick Ober, MD, Professor of Internal Medicine and Associate Dean for Education, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC; author of Mark Twain and Medicine: Any Mummery Will Cure.

At the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 19 South Twenty-Second Street (between Chestnut and Market Streets).

Wine-and-cheese reception to follow. This program is open to the public.


Events on Thursday, May 20, 2010

At The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 19 South Twenty-Second Street

8 a.m. Breakfast Mitchell Hall

8:30 a.m. Welcome
Rhonda L. Soricelli, MD Chair, Program Committee
Paul C. Brucker, MD President, College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Mary Ellen Glasgow, PhD, RN Associate Dean, Drexel University College of Nursing & Health Professions

8:459:45 a.m. Opening Session Mitchell Hall
The Medical/Healthcare Humanities: Where We Are; Where We've Been; Where We're Going
Moderator: David H. Flood, PhD

• Humanism Versus Humanities in Medicine: An Historical Perspective, Jack Coulehan, MD, MPH
• Medical Humanism/Professionalism Teaching in a Community Hospital Since WWII, Victor Bressler, MD
• Disability, Medicine, and Representation: Integrating Disability Studies into Medical, Education and Practice, Rebecca Garden, PhD
• American Missionary Health Care Projects in the late Ottoman Empire: Civilization, Hygiene, and Salvation, Sylvia nder, PhD
  

9:4510:15 a.m. Discussion: Flood, Coulehan, Bressler, Garden and nder

10:15 10:30 a.m. Morning break Mitchell Hall

10:30 11:30 a.m. Concurrent sessions

1. Cholera and Its Representations Mitchell Hall
Moderator: Steven J. Peitzman, MD

• Cholera, Commerce, and Contagion: Rediscovering Dr. Beck's Report, Ashleigh R.Tuite, MHSc(c) and David N. Fisman, MD
• The Epidemic Behind the Veil: Cholera in Fiction, Film and History, Agnes A. Cardoni, PhD; Molly Bridger; Angel Fuller; and Casey Kelly
  

2. Impact of Illness and Disabilty Gross Library
Moderator: Jennifer Patterson, DO(c)

• Home Sweet Home: The Impact of Poliomyelitis on the American Family, Richard J. Altenbaugh, PhD
• Casualties of the Spirit: The Transatlantic Origins of Post Traumatic Neuroses, Susan Epting, PhD(c)
• Turning a Blind Eye to the Rehabilitation Act: Meaningful Access and the Dollar Bill, Kenji Saito, MD/JD 2010(c)

3. The Medical Environment Koop Room
Moderator: Todd Vladyka, DO

• The Anemic Narrative: Will the electronic health record reduce the patient narrative to a footnote?, Valerie Satkoske, MSW, PhD
• Gender Roles and the Changing Face of Medicine, Nina Singh, MD and Gabrielle Jones, PhD
• The Changing Public Image of the American Catholic Hospital, 1925 Present, Barbra Mann Wall, PhD

11:45 a.m. Concurrent sessions

12:45 p.m.

4. Exploring the Text Koop Room
Moderator: Jack Truten, PhD

• Was Sherlock Holmes a Quack? Or, Why Arthur Conan Doyle's Medical Stories Matter, Sylvia A. Pamboukian, PhD
• Reaching Back Through Time: Constructing Genealogies of the Not-Neurotypical in Illness, Narratives, Elizabeth A. Dolan, PhD
• Pathographies: Teaching Illness, Creating Theory, Karol Weaver, PhD and
• A Recovery Narrative, Jenny Traig's Devils in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood, Sara Kern

5. Alternative Dimensions in Health Care Gross Library
Moderator: Steven Rosenzweig, MD

• Cacao: From Ethnobotany to Translational Medicine, William J. Hurst, PhD
• Just Language: The Key to Bridging the Gap Between Physicians and Patients, Kathryn M. Ross, MBE, DMH(c)
• Historical Perspectives on Compensation in Human Subjects Research, Ilene Albala, JD/MBE(c)

6. On Stage and Screen Mitchell Hall
Moderator: Joe Vander Veer, Jr., MD

• Dramatizing the Local History of Medicine: An Early 21st Century Perspective on the Yellow Fever Epidemic of the Late 19th Century, Robert J. Bonk, PhD
• Television's Images of Health Practitioners and/or Health Care Institutions Through the Ages, Rosemary Mazanet, MD, PhD and Joseph Turow, PhD

12:45 1:45 p.m. Lunch with Performance Mitchell Hall
My doc's better than your doc: Medical advertising's rinse and spin and the lost voice of Arthur Godfrey, Richard Donze, DO, MPH

2:00 - 3:00 p.m. Concurrent sessions

7. Narratives of Illness, Aging and Grief Koop Room
Moderator: Kimberly Myers, PhD

• Listening to the Stories of Patients, David Biro, MD, PhD
• MY FATHER'S HEART: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease, Steve McKee
• Imagining Death: Contemporary Grief Narratives, Kate Dean-Haidet, RN, MSN, MA, PhD(c)

8. The Art of Anatomy and Other Collections Mitchell Hall
Moderator: Jan Goplerud, MD

• Joseph Maclise and the Anatomical Arts Tradition, Rebecca E. May, PhD
• The Exquisite Cadaver and the Evolution of the Anatomic Theater, Sherrilyn M. Sethi, MMH(c), DMH(c)
• Constituting the Syphilitic Collector, Elizabeth Lee, PhD

3:15 4:15 p.m. Closing Panel Mitchell Hall
Moderator: Rhonda L. Soricelli, MD
The Virtual and the Real: Medical History at the 21st Century Mutter Museum, Robert Hicks, PhD; Anna Dhody, MA and Karie Youngdahl, BA

4:20 5:00 p.m. Wrap-up; future plans for consortium

Program Committee: Andrew Berns, PhD(c), David H. Flood, PhD, Jan Goplerud, MD, Steven J. Peitzman, MD, Rhonda L. Soricelli, MD (Chair), Joseph Vander Veer, Jr., MD and Todd Vladyka, DO.

This meeting is made possible through the generous support of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia's Francis C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine and Sections on Medicine and the Arts and Medical History and Drexel University's College of Nursing & Health Professions and College of Medicine with additional support from the Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Solicitor General Elena Kagan would be the first person in 38 years to join the Supreme Court without first serving as a judge. She's had a year as perhaps the next best thing.

As the Obama administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, Kagan has argued six cases before the people who will become her colleagues if she wins Senate confirmation.

In nominating Kagan to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, President Barack Obama has chosen a brilliant legal scholar with liberal views and conservative friends. Kagan, 50, already has won Senate confirmation once, after Obama nominated her to be solicitor general, the administration's top Supreme Court lawyer.

Kagan's reputation for bringing together liberals and conservatives on Harvard's notoriously fractious law school faculty appears to hold the key to her rapid rise.

As dean of the Harvard Law School, Kagan's hiring of young conservative scholars "sent a strong signal to conservative alumni that, despite her own party affiliation, she was committed to intellectual diversity and meritocracy at the law school," said Harvard alumnus and former Bush administration lawyer Brad Berenson.

Laurence Tribe, the noted liberal law professor at Harvard who now is a Justice Department official, called the school "an almost ungovernable place." Tribe is on leave from the law school.

"In the 40 years I've been on the law faculty, it has never been as effective and enthusiastic a place as it is now," Tribe said last year in assessing Kagan's time as dean. "That's a result of her insights and political savvy."

When Kagan took over as the first female law dean at Harvard, she called the challenge exciting and scary "but scary in the way that all exciting things are scary." And she pledged to draw on the political and people skills she had developed while serving in government.

Her belief in the power of government was there early on.

The quotation she selected to run with her photo in the Hunter College high school yearbook in 1977 was from former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

It read: "Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of arts,"

Kagan also showed a lighter side by selecting a quotation from Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn:" "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

Kagan is now the first woman to serve as solicitor general, and she would be only the fourth woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

She was a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall toward the end of his time on the court, and spent the bulk of her career in academia and as a lawyer and domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House.

She would be the youngest justice 40 years younger than Stevens and five years behind Chief Justice John Roberts.

Kagan would be the fifth solicitor general to move to the high court, but her ascent from one job to the other would be the fastest, outstripping even her barrier-shattering onetime boss, Marshall.

President Bill Clinton nominated her to the federal appeals court in Washington in 1999, but the Republican-controlled Senate never acted on the nomination.

Liberal interest groups were not thrilled when Kagan publicly supported a couple of President George W. Bush's appeals court nominees, but criticism of Kagan from the left could be blunted in part because Obama could have additional high court vacancies to fill.

Social conservatives, on the other hand, already have sought to paint her as "disturbingly out of the mainstream" on some issues, including her opposition to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gay soldiers.

Kagan argued strenuously against the policy, calling it "just flat out wrong."

She was among law school deans who filed a brief in a Supreme Court case over a federal law that withholds government money from colleges that ban the military from recruiting on campus because of objections to the Pentagon's policy on gays. The Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously.

Last year, the Senate confirmed Kagan by a vote of 61-31, with only 7 Republicans supporting her. The relatively large number of votes against her cheered some conservative activists, although the margin suggested Kagan would again prevail in a confirmation vote for the Supreme Court.

One academic paper she wrote in the 1990s could be used against her in the confirmation process. Kagan lamented the lack of "seriousness and substance" in confirmation hearings for Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce," she wrote in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1995.

Asked about this by senators when her nomination as solicitor general was pending, Kagan replied that she is "less convinced than I was in 1995 that substantive discussions of legal issues and views, in the context of nomination hearings, provide the great public benefits I suggested."

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Shared by louisgray
Wow - this is thorough.

This post is Part Two of my State of the Internet Operating System. If you haven't read Part One, you should do so before reading this piece.

As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system, an operating system that manages access by devices such as personal computers, phones, and other personal electronics to cloud subsystems ranging from computation, storage, and communications to location, identity, social graph, search, and payment. The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards.

There are many competing contenders to the Internet Operating System throne. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and VMware all have credible platforms with strong developer ecosystems. Then there is a collection of players with strong point solutions but no complete operating system offering. Let's take them in alphabetical order.

Amazon

A number of competitors, including Rackspace, Terremark, Joyent, GoGrid, and AppNexus are going head to head with Amazon in providing cloud infrastructure services. Many analysts are simply handicapping these providers and comparing them to offerings from Microsoft and Google. But to compare only cloud infrastructure providers is to miss the point. It's a bit like leaving out Microsoft while comparing IBM, Compaq, and Dell when handicapping the PC operating system wars. Hardware was no longer king; the competition had moved up the stack.

The key subsystems of the Internet Operating System are not storage and computation. Those are merely table stakes to get into the game. What will distinguish players are data subsystems.

Data is hard to acquire and expensive to maintain. Delivering it algorithmically at the speeds applications required for reasonable real-time performance is the province of very few companies.

In this regard, Amazon has three major subsystems that give it an edge: its access to media (notably books, music, and video); its massive database of user contributed reviews, ratings, and purchase data, and its One-Click database of hundreds of millions of payment accounts. As yet, only one of these, payment, has been turned into a web service, Amazon Flexible Payment Service.

Despite having an early lead in internet payment, Amazon reserved its use for too long for competitive advantage for its own e-commerce site, and didn't deploy it as an internet-wide service usable by developers until recently. And even then, Amazon lacks significant payment presence on mobile devices. Amazon has its own Kindle device for ebook sales, and its iPhone and Android apps for e-commerce, but powerful as these apps may be for driving sales to Amazon, they give the company no leverage in supporting third party developers. If anything, they will hinder the development of a mobile e-commerce ecosystem based on Amazon because Amazon is the largest competitor for many potential e-commerce developers.

Amazon's use of its media database as a back-end for its own proprietary e-reader device, the Kindle, highlights one of the fronts in what I've elsewhere called the War for the Web, namely the use of a dedicated front-end device giving preferential access to a player's back-end services. Apple and Google are in a much stronger position in this regard, with general-purpose smartphones as the device front-ends for their platforms. But Amazon has moved quickly to deploy its Kindle software on iPhone and Android; their compelling library of content may make the use of a proprietary device less important.

Two other Amazon service worthy of note are the Mechanical Turk service and the Fulfillment Web Service.

The Mechanical Turk service allows developers to farm out simple tasks to human participants. This turns out to be a remarkably powerful capability, with applications as divergent as data cleansing, metadata management, and even crowdsourcing disaster relief. There are many tasks that computers can't do alone, but that humans can help with. I've often made the case that all Web 2.0 applications are in fact systems for harnessing the collective intelligence of human users. But most of these applications do it in a single field of endeavor; Mechanical Turk is the leading general-purpose platform for putting people to work on small tasks that are easy for humans but hard for computers to do on their own.

Amazon's Fulfillment Web Service is another sleeper, whose full significance hasn't yet been realized. I foresee a future in which phone-based e-commerce makes the leap from virtual to physical goods. Right now, there's a huge business in selling songs, applications, ebooks, movies, and games on phones. There's an even bigger explosion coming in buying physical goods on the phone. And Amazon is the only platform player who actually can offer programmatically-driven fulfillment services. This is hugely important.

Amazon's weaknesses: Search (they have search capabilities with A9 and Alexa, but don't have a business model to support or extend those capabilities to developers at a cost (free) that is going to be required); advertising; location services; speech recognition; social graph. They have a very strong hand, very deep in some areas, but almost completely lacking in others.

Amazon also is weaker financially than its big three competitors: Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Jeff Bezos argues that this is actually a strength. He has noted more than once that Amazon's core business is retail, a notably low margin business. Cloud computing is a better business for Amazon than the school of hard knocks where it's learned to make a profit. "Commodity businesses don't scare us," he says. "We're experts at them. We've never had 35 or 40 percent margins like most tech companies."

This idea, of course, applies only to the commodity layers of cloud computing. And that's one more reminder that the outsized profits actually reside in the data subsystems where lock-in is achievable.

Apple

Apple's strongest Internet OS subsystems are media (the iTunes store), application hosting (the App Store), and payment. Apple has over a hundred million people who are used to buying content with one click. They've given Apple their payment credentials, and use them to buy a wide variety of digital goods: first music, then applications, including games, then books.

What's next? As physical goods e-commerce takes off on the phone, I expect Apple to try to insert itself into the great money river flowing through its platform. Apple takes a 30% cut from application sales. While this percentage is too high for physical goods, it's not hard to imagine Apple interposing itself as the payment processor for applications ranging from ebay to Chipotle, taking a little bit of a much larger revenue stream.

Apple's weaknesses are legion. They have no cloud computation platform, they are latecomers to location and advertising, with interesting acquisitions but no clear strategy and nothing like a critical mass of data. (They do, however, have piles of cash, and strategic acquisitions could quickly change those dynamics.) They have great social graph assets in the form of user address books, email stores, and instant messaging friend networks, but they show little sign of understanding how to turn those assets into next generation applications or services. But most strikingly, they don't really seem to understand some key aspects of the game that is afoot.

If they did, MobileMe would be free to every user, not a $99 add-on. Web 2.0 companies know that systems that get better the more people use them are the key to marketplace dominance in the network era. The social graph is one such system, for which Facebook is currently the market leader. Companies that want to dominate the Internet Operating System either need to make a deal with Facebook to integrate their platforms, or have a compelling strategy for building out their own social graph assets. Unless Apple is planning a deal with Facebook, their current MobileMe strategy seems only to indicate that they don't understand the stakes.

Apple's other weaknesses might well be addressed by an alliance with Microsoft, which has strengths everywhere that Apple is weak. Given Apple's feud with Google, this is an increasingly likely scenario. In fact, you can imagine a 3-way alliance between Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft that would make for a very powerful platform. That being said, alliances are relatively weak at coordinated execution, so this opportunity may be stronger in theory than it turns out in fact.

But all of these weaknesses may be outweighed by the amazing job that Apple has done in creating a new computing paradigm to rival the web itself. As Jim Stogdill wrote in a recent post, the iPad isn't a computer, it's a distribution channel:

One interesting twist is how the iPad combines network effects and constrained distribution. The bright shiny object design of the iPad leads to network effects at the app store which in turn drives more consumers back to the device itself. Then to the degree that those two forces hold consumers in thrall of the device, Apple can use the device as the point of sale for content worth more than the device itself. The leverage is linked - the first leads to market presence, and then the market presence makes for stronger monetization opportunities in the device-hosted channel.

The other interesting thing is that so many of those "apps" are really just web pages without a URL. Or books packaged as an app. In short, this is content that is abandoning the web to become a monetizable app.

History is never completely new and we've seen things like this happen before. Prior to the 1980's essentially all television was broadcast in the clear. An unconstrained distribution channel like broadcast TV could only be monetized through ad sales, but along came cable with its point-to-point wave guides and surprised consumers were suddenly faced with paying for access.

There are those who point to the lessons of VHS vs Betamax and the commodity PC vs Apple, and see Android as an inevitable winner. However, as Mark Sigal points out in Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows:

It is a truism that in platform plays he who wins the hearts and minds of developers, wins the war. In the PC era, Apple forgot this, bungling badly by launching and abandoning technology initiatives, co-opting and competing with their developers and routinely missed promised milestones. By contrast, Microsoft provided clear delineation points for developers, integrated core technologies across all products, and made sure developer tools readily supported these core initiatives. No less, Microsoft excelled at ensuring that the ecosystem made money.

Lesson learned, Apple is moving on to the 4.0 stage of its mobile platform, has consistently hit promised milestones, has done yeomen's work on evangelizing key technologies within the platform (and third-party developer creations - "There's an app for that"), and developed multiple ways for developers to monetize their products. No less, they have offered 100 percent distribution to 85 million iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, and one-click monetization via same. Nested in every one of these devices is a giant vending machine that is bottomless and never closes. By contrast, Google has taught consumers to expect free, the Android Market is hobbled by poor discovery and clunky, inconsistent monetization workflows. Most damning, despite touted high-volume third-party applications, there are (seemingly) no breakout third-party developer successes, despite Android being around two-thirds as long as the iPhone platform.

Nonetheless, even if Apple has the dominant mobile platform, they won't have the full recipe for the operating system of the future. A network connection has two ends, and until Apple can offer a complete suite of cloud data services, they can't deliver the kind of lock-in that Microsoft enjoyed in the PC era. This is actually a good thing, and a harbinger of the best outcome for the Internet OS, namely that no one controls enough of it, everyone has to compromise, and interoperability (the internet as "network of networks") continues to play its generative role.

Facebook

Facebook is more than a website. For many people, it is a replacement for the web, the entire platform, the world in which they receive news, communicate with friends, play games, store and share photographs and videos, and use any one of hundreds of thousands of applications. The Facebook Application ecosystem exceeds even the Apple App Store in the number of applications (500,000 to Apple's 187,000); third party developers like Zynga are amassing fortunes using entirely new social selling dynamics.

Facebook Connect is well on its way to becoming the universal single-signon for the web - one of the first Internet Operating System subsystems (after Google Maps) to get wide adoption across a range of websites not belonging to the platform provider. Even more importantly, Facebook Connect allows you to Facebook-enable mobile apps. Clearly, Facebook understands what it means to be a platform provider.

Their latest announcements, of Facebook's Graph API and Social Plugins, are taking Facebook beyond its original "walled garden" approach, instead turning Facebook into a social utility for the entire web (including mobile devices.)

Facebook is testing a payment platform, but perhaps more interestingly, they appear to be partnering with Paypal to increase their capabilities in this area. They are getting better at monetization via advertising, but they haven't yet found the golden path for social advertising that Google found for search.

Facebook's weaknesses: Location, control over mobile devices, general purpose computing and storage platforms. But these are weaknesses only in the context of the desire to have a vertically-integrated platform from a single vendor. It may instead be that the lack of these capabilities is Facebook's greatest strength, as it will force them into a strategy of horizontal integration.

Google

"For the the first time your applications can take advantage of the same scalable technologies that Google applications are built on, things like BigTable and GFS. Automatic scaling is built in with App Engine, all you have to do is write your application code and we'll do the rest. No matter how many users you have or how much data your application stores, App Engine can scale to meet your needs."

But to focus too much on AppEngine is to miss the point. If all the Internet Operating System does is provide storage and computation, then Amazon, Microsoft, and VMware are all contenders - and Amazon has the lead.

Remember, though, that in the future, the subsystems that applications depend on to differentiate themselves will largely be data subsystems. And data at scale is Google's sweet spot.

Consider a few of the following applications, and ask yourself how many companies could put together all the data and computation assets to deliver on the following promises:

• Provide free turn-by-turn directions on the phone, with destinations set by natural language search rather than by address, with optional speech recognition to set the destination or to search along the route for items of interest, with real-time traffic information used to calculate your arrival time, and actual Streetview images of turns as well as of your final destination. (The ability to deliver these services directly is a critical advantage. Anyone who has to license one or more of the components from another company has a much harder time giving the service away for free.)

• Point your cell phone camera at many common objects - a book cover, a wine label, a work of art in a museum, a famous building or other landmark, a company logo, a business card, a bar code, and even, in an unreleased version, a human face - and return information about that object (Google Goggles). (Amazon's e-commerce app for the iPhone and Android does show off some similar capabilities. Bar-code scanning and image recognition allow you to see something in the real world, quickly find it at Amazon, and either order it, or simply remember it on your Amazon wishlist. But the range of objects recognized is less complete, and the use case is Amazon e-commerce, versus Google's more general platform.)

• Automatically dial all of your phone numbers until you answer one of them, and if you aren't found, automatically transcribe (even badly) the message that was left for you.

• Translate your speech or document (even badly) into any one of fifty languages.

And that's leaving out Google's stronghold in search and advertising, its dominance via YouTube of internet video, its cloud office suite, its strong email offering, the fact that Google Maps is becoming the lingua franca of mapping across the web, and more. With Android, Google also has the front-end component of the full mobile-to-cloud stack, with an industry adoption strategy (open hardware from multiple manufacturers) that has worked before, for both the VCR and the personal computer. They have a robust application ecosystem, both for the phone and for the enterprise. A week after its launch, the Google Application Marketplace had nearly 1500 apps, a faster uptake than even the iPhone. Today, there are over 50,000 Android Apps. (But as Marc Sigal notes in the analysis linked earlier, Apple has demonstrated much more consistent monetization for developers. According to O'Reilly Research, 24% of iPhone apps are free apps, while 59% of Android apps are free.)

That being said, Google does have a payment platform. While Google Checkout was an also-ran in the web payment wars, it has renewed significance and opportunity in the mobile era, as every Android Market customer is, by default, now a Google Checkout customer. In this one story you see how having all of the elements together makes each of them stronger than they would be alone. If you have an Android phone, Google Checkout is suddenly the default payment option. It doesn't have to be the best. It's the incumbent.

Google's weaknesses: they are the one to beat, the new Microsoft that everyone is afraid of. In addition, they lack Apple's sure touch on user experience; even the slickest Android phone lags Apple's fit and finish. They also have yet to come up with a convincing social media subsystem, although they are clearly focused on this opportunity. Their strongest assets are not actually overtly social systems like Google Wave or Google Buzz, but the phone itself, and its connection to the Gmail-based cloud address book.

I continue to believe that the tools we actually use to communicate with each other - our phones, our email, our instant messaging, and our shared documents - are the most powerful measures of our real social network. The company that first cracks the code of reflecting that social network throughout its applications, and giving the user the power to harness that network, will ultimately win. Google has many of the data assets necessary to develop those next-generation applications, but they haven't yet found the way to put them together.

Microsoft

That being said, Microsoft's biggest asset right now might just be that they aren't Google, making them the favored white knight of everyone from Apple to Facebook. With rumors flying that Apple is in talks with Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on iPhone, you can see the shape of a possible future in which an alliance between Apple and Microsoft acts as a counter to Google's outsized ambitions. Add in a partnership with Facebook, in which Microsoft is an investor, and you have a powerful combination.

Microsoft's biggest weaknesses (apart from the fact that the original Windows Mobile platform was a failure, and they are now facing a restart) are the "strategy tax" of continuing to support Windows and Microsoft Office, the very same problem that kept Microsoft from seizing the internet opportunity in the late 1990s.

Another point of distinction between Microsoft and Google is Microsoft's "software plus services" vision - namely the idea that rich, device-specific client apps will be the front end to web services, versus Google's web-only vision. Microsoft argues that, faced with the success of native apps on smartphones, even Google is embracing a software-plus-services approach. However, the rich clients that are driving the equation are not PC-based; they are native smartphone apps. And barring a successful restart of Microsoft's phone strategy, Google has the advantage there.

This isn't to say that Microsoft won't continue to be a phenomenally successful company - just as IBM managed to do despite the death of its mainframe monopoly - but the cutting edge of the future is in data-backed mobile services, where they are playing serious catch up.

Microsoft's greatest opportunity, paradoxically, is to embrace open data services in the same way that IBM embraced Open Source Software, to integrate their offerings with those from Facebook, Nuance, Paypal, and other best of breed data services. The question is whether that's in their DNA or their business model. My bet is that it's Facebook that emerges as the integration point for selected Microsoft services (location and search in particular) rather than the other way around.

Nokia

PayPal

And payment is hard. Knowing how much credit to extend is one of the problems that is best left to people with algorithmic expertise and massive amounts of data.

Apple and Google have their own built-in payment solutions (as does Microsoft for some of their platforms, such as Xbox), but what about everyone else? Visa and MasterCard remain sleeping giants; mobile phone carriers too have payment capabilities, but their business culture and systems make it difficult for them to deploy them for cutting edge applications. PayPal is web-native; making the transition to mobile has got to be their highest priority. Startups like Square (and others yet to be announced) are also taking aim at this area. Expect innovation. Expect competition. Expect acquisitions.

Salesforce

Twitter

VMware

But is that enough?

But anyone who knows Paul Maritz knows that this is a man who understands the dynamics of internet data. While at PiCorp, the startup he founded after leaving Microsoft in 2000, he was focused on a vision of shared data in the cloud. "Why would you want to have your data in the cloud?" he told me in a private conversation some years ago. "For the same reason you keep your money in the bank rather than under your mattress. It becomes more valuable when it's kept with other people's data."

And as Scott Yara, founder and chairman of Greenplum, the massively multiprocessor Postgres database (disclosure: I am an advisor) pointed out to me when describing Greenplum's Chorus offering, it is not in fact Google that has the world's largest data repository. The New York Stock Exchange, T-mobile, Skype, Fox Interactive Media (MySpace), and many others, host their data in Greenplum. The sum of corporate data (sometimes referred to as "the dark web") is far greater than that in any consumer web company. Hence Chorus, Greenplum's platform to enable data sharing between its corporate customers.

Put in this light, VMware's management of private clouds may turn out to be an unexpected advantage. As companies far from the consumer web become fuller participants in the cloud data operating system, they will rely on facilities that VMware is already building: facilities that allow them to manage the boundaries between private and public data. This data and service segmentation may turn out to be one of the fundamental Internet OS capabilities.

In addition, VMware's acquisition of Zimbra might be seen as the first step towards acquiring internet data assets of the kind described in this article. Zimbra is an Exchange-compatible email platform; in the right hands it might be used to unlock Microsoft's business-oriented social graph.

VMware's acquisition of SpringSource is even more significant. Roman Stanek, CEO of cloud business-intelligence provider GoodData (in which I am an investor and a board member) remarked to me that for corporate cloud developers accustomed to programming in Java, Springsource is a kind of "Goldilocks" solution. Amazon's cloud APIs are too low-level; Google's and Microsoft's too high, with too much buy-in to Google's or Microsoft's systems; VMware's are "just right."

Maritz' long experience at Microsoft drove home to him the importance of developer tools. He understands how platform advantage is built, brick by brick. You can have the best platform in the world, but developer tools are what makes it stick.

VMware's weaknesses, of course, are many. They lack assets in media, in search, in advertising, in location based services, in speech recognition, and in many other areas that are going to be the currency of developers in future.

But that may not matter. Because there's another competitor in the mix.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Apple, Google, and Microsoft all seem to be plausible contenders to a one-ring strategy. Facebook too may want to play that game, though they lack the crucial mobile platform that each of the others hopes to control.

But it seems to me that one of the alternative futures we can choose is a future of cooperating internet subsystems that aren't owned by any one provider, a system in which an application might use Facebook Connect and Open Graph Protocol for user authentication, user photos, and status updates, but Google or Bing maps for location services, Google or Nuance for speech recognition, Paypal or Amazon for payment services, Amazon or Google or Microsoft or VMware or Rackspace for server hosting and computation, and any one of a thousand other developers for features not yet conceived.

This is a future of horizontal integration, not vertical integration. This integration is already happening at many levels. Consider music. Virtually every device that reads a music CD relies on Gracenote's CDDB to look up the track names; this is one of the net's oldest and most universally deployed data services. SonicLiving provides sites from Facebook to Pandora and Loopt with the ability for their users to find upcoming live concerts for artists they like - and to add them to their own calendars via "Universal RSVP."

Now it's certainly possible that Gracenote and SonicLiving (both private companies) might be acquired by someone looking to consolidate their hold on the infrastructure of online music, but evidence is strong that there will be countless "point" solutions like these that will be consumed by developers.

The Internet Operating System may end up looking more like a Linux distribution than a Microsoft or Apple PC or phone operating system. VMware might perhaps provide a cloud computing "kernel" while Facebook provides a social UI layer, Google or Bing provide alternate search subsystems, Android and iPhone and Nokia and the next generation of Windows Mobile provide mobile phone front-ends, and so on.

The VMForce announcement, which combines elements of VMware and Salesforce's respective offerings into a single developer platform, is a good sign of things to come, as companies who aren't holding on to the vision of a single vertically-integrated platform find it in their interest to work together.

As Benjamin Franklin so memorably said, just before signing the American Declaration of Independence: ""We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." Developers will need to make a choice between adopting any single platform, or pushing for open systems that allow interoperability and choice.

In the short term, I believe we'll see heightened competition, shifting alliances, and a wave of innovation, as companies fight for advantage in delivering next generation applications, and then use those applications to drive adoption of their respective platforms.

The key question, to my mind, is which of the "big four" (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook) will most strongly adopt the horizontal, open strategy.

Apple is the least likely. They have made a compelling case for vertical integration; what's more, they have made it work.

Microsoft seems like an unlikely ally of an open internet strategy given their history and heritage, but necessity is a good teacher.

Facebook has made selective moves towards openness. As their partnership with SonicLiving demonstrates, they consume web services from others as well as produce them. And while critics have argued that Facebook's recent open announcements don't go far enough, it's clear to me that Facebook gains more than it loses by cooperating with everyone from PayPal and VMware to Microsoft to strengthen their hand.

Google has made strong, public commitments to the values of the open web. Critics have pointed out, quite rightly, that For Google, The Meaning Of Open Is When It's Convenient For Them.

But frankly, this is true of any company balancing open and proprietary strategy. Does anyone doubt that IBM's commitment to open source software was gated on corporate advantage? Or that companies from Red Hat to MySQL have added proprietary elements to a core open source strategy?

In the end, companies make decisions about open versus closed and proprietary on competitive grounds. The art of promoting openness is not to make it a moral crusade, but rather to highlight the competitive advantages of openness, and to knit together the strategies of companies who might otherwise find themselves left out of the game.

This, by the way, is the backdrop for the discussion at this year's Web 2.0 Expo and especially Web 2.0 Summit. While the term "Web 2.0" has come to mean many things to many people, for me it's always been the story of what happens when you treat the internet, not any individual computer, as the platform. The Expo focuses on the technical infrastructure of the platform; the Summit focuses on the business models and the business strategy.

As John Battelle notes in his post Points of Control, "Fifteen years and two recessions into the commercial Internet, it's clear that our industry has moved into a new competitive phase - a middlegame in the battle to dominate the Internet economy. To understand this shift, we'll use the Summit's program to map strategic inflection points across the Internet landscape, identifying key players who are battling to control the services and infrastructure of a websquared world."

Handicapping the Players

I'll hope in future to provide a more thorough drill-down into the strengths and weaknesses of each player. But for now, here's a summary chart that highlights some of the key components, and where I believe each of the major players is strongest.

(Note that this chart is influenced by one that Nick Bilton of the New York Times put together last January.)

The most significant takeaway is that the column marked "other" represents the richest set of capabilities. And that gives me hope.