Great demonstration of who controls smartphones

One Simple Test
[Via Daring Fireball]

Watts Martin:

And if you don’t agree with Siegler’s assertion that Apple, for all their warts, has more of the end-user’s interest in mind than Google does, I’d just like you to do one simple test. Go into an AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint store and set out a few Android models along with an iPhone and maybe a couple “none of the above” smartphones they sell. One and only one of those phones is going to be entirely free of the carrier logo. Don’t be under the illusion that’s merely an aesthetic issue.

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I had forgotten that. Nothing displays the independence of the iPhone from carrier’s control than this.

I am sure the carriers would love to destroy this direct link between Apple and customer if they could. But it could take some time and require an uninformed group of users.

Thus the push to make them all seem the same. If they can commodify things, they win.

Messing with the horse that brung you

Antitrust+
[Via Daring Fireball]

MG Siegler on Google’s announcement today that they’re going to begin integrating Google+ with regular web search results:

But when they use that natural monopoly to start pushing into other verticals, things get gray. Travel, restaurant reviews, etc, etc. We see more of it each year.

But this, at first glance, seems decidedly worse. Google is using Search to propel their social network. They might say it’s “not a social network, it’s a part of Google”, but no one is going to buy that. They were late to the game in social and this is the best catchup strategy ever.

Count me in with MG here. This seems like classic antitrust behavior: using a legal monopoly in one market (web search) to gain a competitive advantage in a different market (social networking) through bundling. The idea from the outset was to frame “Google+” as an extension of Google, not something new. Hence the name.

It also occurs to me that there’s no company in tech with as many enemies as Google. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter — Google has taken the fight to all of them. In this sense they’re like Microsoft 15 years ago.

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Messing around with search, something Google has already begun doing, could be the beginning of the end of Google.

Search used to be fairly democratic – if you and i performed the same search we could get the same results. Then some companies started promoting certain sites if they paid for it. But not Google.

It won the space because the results it returned were much more useful than any other one.

Now, the results I get will be different than yours because I have different friends. The usefulness of search now becomes dependent on the usefulness of my social network, which may not be the best way to find things.

Sure, I can turn things on and off  for the moment –but the increasing external complexities added to search by Google serve only to make other search engines more enticing

Not not does it enhance the chances that I will only hear about the same things my group already knows, lessening the actual transfer of information, but – as mentioned above – adds a monopoly aspect to the idea of search.

I signed up for Google + but have refused to use it because I do not like giving Google so much access to my personal network. Now we see that Google has enough access to begin using that network for searching.

Glad I keep my social network separate from my search.

Remember – proper use requires only a single space after a sentence

by edinburghcityofprint

Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. | Slate Magazine
[Via danielmiessler.com]

Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men’s shirt buttons on the right and women’s on the left.

via slate.com

Fascinating.[More]

Typography for the last century has used a single space. That is because it used proportional fonts – ones where the width of each letter was different.

Typewriters initially uses a monospaced font – each letter was the same width. This added a lot of white spec between some letters like ‘I’ so the rule became to add an extra space after a period to make it obvious that a new sentence was starting.

But few people use monospaced types at all anymore. So the need for two spaces is pretty much gone.

Use a single space. It looks better. and there is no need for wasting that space which could be filled with lovely text.