3 Easy Tools for Crafting a Great-Looking Personal Webpage

Need an online portfolio in a hurry? Not all of us have the time, energy, or skill to build something from scratch, or the resources to farm out the job to more capable hands. Happily, some great tools are available that make it a breeze to build a good-looking personal website without actually building much of anything at all. 

Something simple that looks good can serve as a placeholder - and you might end up liking the it enough to keep it around. Whether you need a basic resume page, a photo portfolio, or a springboard to your (or your brand's) profiles on sites like Twitter and Facebook, these sites get the job done quickly and easily - and free of charge. 

Fully Flexible and Socially Promiscuous: Flavors

Flavors has a lot in common with AOL-owned About.me, but the former was first and we've always been partial to it. Sign up for a free Flavors account and you'll get access to a social Swiss army knife's worth of webpage tools. It's dead simple to make an attractive site - particularly a sparse, modern one; less is more, after all. Add your essential info to a basic landing page and get to work tweaking the background image, fine-tuning the colors, fonts, and alignment, and you'll have a great looking result in no time.

If you spring for the premium version, you can mask the Flavors.me domain with a custom url and no one will be the wiser. Flavors connects to just about every social network we use (and some we don't), letting you display content from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and many more. Since the content dynamically loads on your new profile page, this is a great way to feature portfolio fodder like writing or photos that you can host externally (and easily). Cherry-pick your best work, publish it on a (less versatile) site like 500px, plug it into Flavors and voilà.

Eminently Searchable in a Snap: Google+

Google+ is the quick and dirtiest of the quick-and-dirty options. Want to fast-track your name to great SEO? Invest a little time sprucing up your profile page on the social platform crafted by the search king itself. Google tweaks its search secret sauce regularly, but you can bet that putting in the time to flesh out and maintain a Google+ profile page will pay off in search rankings. In our casual testing, we searched for a handful of folks we know, from both within and without our G+ circles, and a Google+ profile popped up in the top five results every time. (If you're one of the John Smiths of the world, well . . . good luck to you.)

Beyond its SEO advantage, Google+ is a pretty solid - if uninspiring - way to funnel people to your links and social accounts. The About section of a Google+ user page includes a tagline, an introduction section (your bio can go here) and a section dedicated to any links you didn't sneak into your introduction. But be sure to enable the "Profile discovery" option toward the bottom of the Google+ profile edit page (found just above the "Other profiles" link section) to allow search engines to index your G+ profile - that's how the magic happens. If you've got some kind of author page floating around out there on the web, Google+ would be happy to link up your profile with what you publish. You'll have to jump through a few hoops, but the result is a little pic of you that pops up next to your links in search. Photographers in particular will appreciate Google+'s attractive lightbox view and well-implemented photo sharing and organization features.

Social Data Infused with Style: Vizify

Vizify is the newest tool on this list, the least traditional, and definitely the most fun. If you're interested in an eye-catching, ultra-modern spin on a traditional landing page, this one will be right up your alley. Vizify is so new on the scene that you'll need to request an invite. But once you're in, it couldn't be simpler to set up. Choose which social networks you'd like Vizify's engine to cull data from, pick a flattering color scheme and you'll quickly be met with an elegant array of brightly-colored data nodes arranged into a web of personal info.

You can drill down and get as granular as you want, adding individual images from Instagram or highlighting your pithiest moment on Twitter, or just see what Vizify comes up with organically. It's untraditional, sure, but that's the point - all of the important stuff is there, from the links you want to highlight to your current position and location . . . it's just arranged more playfully than you might be used to.

Whether you want something flexible, practical or fun, between Flavors, Google+ and Vizify, there's likely an option here to inspire you to landing page greatness. Got a Web profile creator that didn't make this list? Let us know and we'll take it for a spin.

Apple Should Reinstate Drone+ & Stop Censoring Apps

I was hoping to wake up to different headlines this morning. Something along the line of "Apple Apologizes, Accepts Drone+ iPhone App" would have sufficed. Alas, last week's news remains a stubborn reality: Apple thinks that an app highlighting publicly available data about war is "objectionable" and refuses to allow it into the App Store. The event illustrates one of Apple's very worst tendencies.  

The app in question is Drone+, a project by NYU grad student Josh Begley that displays an interactive map of recent U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. After two prior rejections by Apple for reasons having to do with utility and design, the app was nixed a third time for containing "objectionable content." 

The decision was a bit of a head-scratcher, considering that a very similar feature was already included in the Guardian's iPhone app and that scattered information about U.S. drone strikes can be found throughout dozens of news apps that are readily available on the App Store. 

Quality Control vs. Censorship

To be fair, this decision is not as troubling as it would be if Apple were a government or a publisher in the traditional sense. Still, it's a new kind of gatekeeper, and it holds the keys to a platform used by millions of people around the world. While not as horrifyingly Orwellian as it could be, the fact that the biggest company in U.S. history makes decisions about which content is too "objectionable" for its customers is unsettling. 

Apple has every right to maintain strict guidelines as to what can go into the App Store. This is what keeps the experience so smooth and beloved by consumers. If a developer submits an app with crummy functionality or a confusing UI, Apple should reject it. But if a developer submits an app with politically sensitive words or pictures, so long as it's not obscene (pornography in the Apple Store is a debate for another day), in violation of copyright law or libelous, the company should back off.

This is a lesson Apple should have learned in 2010, when it rejected an app submitted by a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist because it ridiculed public figures. That, of course, is something newspapers have done freely for centuries, and the blatant disregard for free speech resulted in a PR headache for Apple.

In that case, the company reversed its stance and accepted the app. It should do the same for Drone+. Then it should tweak its submission policies to get out of the business of censorship. 

25 Billion Apps Later, Things Have Changed

Things have changed since Apple launched the App Store in 2008. For one thing, the platform has become wildly successful and iOS device sales now make up a huge majority of Apple's record-breaking profits. More than 25 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store.  

Meanwhile, we've seen social media and mobile technology play a crucial role in political uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Those events have been sparked by unrest due to economic and political conditions but, in case after case, networked communications have stoked the flames. 

Last year in Syria, antigovernment activists began using an iPhone app to disseminate news, maps, photos and videos about the conflict in a country that doesn't exactly rank highly for its press freedom. Mobile tech in the hands of Syrian dissidents proved enough of a nuisance that the government banned the iPhone in late 2011, presumably to quash content that the regime found, um, objectionable. 

This example raises a few questions. First, why are pins on a map more objectionable than photos and video clips from a war zone? Why does content that effectively agitates for one government to be overthrown make the cut, while content that may make another government look bad (depending on one's own perspective) doesn't? Is Apple taking sides in international conflicts? Perhaps more disturbing is the notion that, were Apple to apply these standards consistently, apps like the one used by Syrian dissidents - and perhaps some news apps - would be barred from the App Store as well. 

Apple Risks Losing Consumer Trust - For What?

Censorship doesn't help consumers, but it doesn't do Apple any favors either. Apple is at the top of the food chain when it comes to tech companies. Its profits are soaring. Consumers' mouths are watering for the upcoming iPhone 5, iPad Mini and whatever other polished, connected gadget the company may launch in the foreseeable future. People will stand in line for those products whether or not Apple accepts or rejects any particular app. 

Even so, the company would be unwise to take the trust of its customers for granted. People get queasy when they perceive censorship, no matter where they stand politically. A series of news stories highlighting Apple's insensitivity to freedom of expression could eat away at public trust, even in a brand as bullet-proof as Apple's.

Consumers' lives are increasingly connected, ever more deeply embedded in mobile devices and social networks. These are pretty radical changes, and they're happening more quickly than many people (not to mention industries and governments) can respond. Some consumers are already beginning to grow uncomfortable with Facebook's privacy policies, Google's targeted advertising, and other cases in which, whether justified or not, technology starts to feel a little creepy. Twitter takes protecting privacy and free speech very seriously, and even if most users don't notice or care yet, that stance will serve the company well as social media continues to part and parcel of our daily lives. 

Further, there's no business rationale for blocking apps like this. Does it really degrade the iPhone or iPad experience if people can download an app that shows them where U.S. drones are killing civilians in Pakistan? People who care about that information will download the app, and those who don't will continue playing Angry Birds and reading Flipboard. 

Apple is a stickler when it comes to design, user experience, legal concerns, and overall quality. It has a legitimate right to protect its brand by rejecting adult-oriented apps. But when it comes to news, commentary and hard data, Apple has more to lose than to gain from rejecting content it doesn't like. 

Drone photo by Charles McCain.

 

 

Java Is No Longer Needed. Pull The Plug-In

For nearly everyone, it's time to dump Java. Once promising, it has outlived its usefulness in the browser, and has become a nightmare that delights cyber-criminals at the expense of computer users.

 

Java Today

Sun Microsystems released Java in 1995 as a technology for building applications that could run on any platform, including Windows, Macintosh and Linux. In its heyday, major browsers embraced Java for running applets within pages. All anyone needed was a browser plug-in for executing programs.

Today, that plug-in has become a top security risk, along with Adobe Flash. Partly to blame for the problem is Oracle, which acquired Sun and its invention in 2009. The database vendor has heightened the risk by failing to launch timely patches.

The latest security meltdown is a case in point. Despite being warned in April of critical vulnerabilities, Oracle did not get around to releasing an emergency patch until last week, after reports that cyber-criminals were exploiting the flaws. Security Explorations, the Polish firm that first reported the vulnerabilities to Oracle, later said the patch contained a flaw that could be used to circumvent the fix.

The Latest Threats

In the meantime, criminals are having a field day. Atif Mushtaq, security researcher at FireEye, says the number of computers infected with malware exploiting the flaws is growing. As of Tuesday, up to a quarter-million computers had been infected. Hackers are at an advantage because computers users are laggards when it comes to applying Java patches. Up to 60 percent of Java installations are never updated to the latest version, according to security vendor Rapid7.

Over the just-past Labor Day weekend, the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center and Websense reported finding separate phishing campaigns trying to lure people to malicious sites capable of exploiting the vulnerabilities. SANS discovered link-carrying emails that copied a recent Microsoft message about service agreement changes. Websense found emails disguised as order verification messages from Amazon.

Security experts rate the latest flaws as critical, because hackers can use them to commandeer a computer and take whatever data they want. Risking that kind of damage for a technology with little purpose makes no sense.

What Security Experts Advise

Security experts are hard pressed to say what Java does for most people. While some online games and business applications need a Java plug-in to run, nearly all modern sites, including Facebook and Twitter, use JavaScript, XML and HTML 5, which run natively in the browser. Therefore, people could happily surf the Web for years without ever running Java.

Those who are using a Java application, should run it in a dedicated browser that's used for nothing else, Patrik Runald, director of security research at Websense, says. Another browser should be used for daily Web surfing. 'I've run a browser with Java disabled for years,' he said.

Supporters once believed that Java would play a significant role in running Web applications. That never happened. Instead, browsers became the operating system for the Web. '(Java) never took off the way it was anticipated,' Runald said.

So the verdict is clear. Disable Java plug-ins in all browsers, whether Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer. Java's glory days are over and it's time to pull the plug.

The Real Reason AT&T And Verizon Are Pushing New "Shared" Data Plans

A new iPhone this year may mean a new "shared data" wireless plan for you, too. They may or may not save you money - that's not the point. They're really designed to put the wireless carriers in a better financial position for the future.

Get Ready To Share

With Apple's new iPhone expected to launch in mid-September, expect to hear a lot of noise about newish, "shared" service plans from Verizon Wireless and AT&T, the biggest U.S. wireless carriers. The big idea: Instead of having separate pools of data allowances between different devices - an iPhone and iPad, for example - all of your family's devices draw from the same pool.

Verizon already requires these plans for new subscribers, and AT&T says it will require them for subscribers who want to use Apple's FaceTime video chat service over the mobile internet. (Translation: Eventually, you'll end up using one whether you want to or not.)

Here's how it works: For each device, you pay a monthly "access" fee. At Verizon Wireless, for example, this ranges from $40 per month for smartphones to $10 per month for tablets. This provides unlimited talking and texting on phones - no more minutes to keep track of. Then, you choose a monthly bucket of data that all your devices use, ranging from $50 per month for 1 GB to $100 per month for 10 GB.

The pitch to the consumer is that these plans are smarter for today's families, which often have multiple smartphones and tablets. If you're not using all the iPhone data you're paying for, why not be allowed to use it on your iPad?

The Business Motive

Perhaps this pricing realignment makes some sense for subscribers. But it really makes sense for the carriers.

Consider how much more time you spend using a smartphone's data signal versus making voice calls. Since I started using an iPhone in 2008, my data usage far has far outpaced my voice usage. Last month, I used 70 voice minutes, but probably spent over 50 hours using data. (Meanwhile, I've accumulated 3,900 "rollover" minutes on AT&T - a near-worthless benefit that made much more sense a decade ago.)

But while our smartphone data usage could now be 10 to 20 times our voice usage (if not more!), the amount of money we spend on voice is still usually half or more of our monthly bills. Below, I've charted the last 10 years' worth of Verizon's voice and data service revenues. Overall service revenue has more than tripled, but data is still only about 44% of Verizon Wireless's service revenue.

With faster wireless networks - the new iPhone is expected to work on Verizon's 4G LTE network - and services like Skype and Apple's FaceTime and iMessage, which "disrupt" the carrier voice and messaging services, it becomes even more important for carriers to shift billing toward data plans.

With more connected devices launching all the time, these new "shared" plans offer greater convenience to subscribers - at a potentially higher cost. But what they really do is insulate carriers from potential disruption to outdated service models, and provide a more stable, logical revenue model for current and future wireless usage.

Phone and tablet photo via Shutterstock.

ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch Update: The Unlucky 13

If there's one thing the DeathWatch knows, it's that all things must come to an end. So we're pausing to review the fortunes of our first 13 unlucky inductees. The fates of some of them may surprise you.

In reverse chronological order, here's a look at the initial baker's dozen and what they've been up to since joining the DeathWatch over the last three months.

Zynga

It's only been a week since the casual gaming company hit the DeathWatch on August 27th, but Zynga shares have dropped again on news that Chief Creative Officer Mike Verdu was leaving his post, along with other high-profile execs. This kind of churn is probably inevitable among staffers looking for a quick upside, since most Zynga stock options will be underwater for some time, but it should eventually level off.

On the upside, Zynga's first Partners for Mobile game just shipped, and it's completely different than any other Zynga title. Mobile gaming control options still kind of suck for first-person games, so the gameplay suffers, but that should get better over time. If Zynga can become the go-to software development platform for mobile gaming, it has a shot at reinventing the company and reversing its fortunes.

Motorola Mobility

It's official. Google is selling off Motorola's Home Division. That's good news for Google in the short term, but it could really hamstring plans for expansion into the market for TV set-top boxes.

Despite the loss of potential toys, Motorola keeps on working with what's available. New since August 20th, it looks like Motorola will be making a push with a new device line in September. The rumor mill seems pretty confident that the devices will include a Medfield-powered unit with rip-roaring specs, and marketing copy about 'taking it to the edge' implies an edge-to-edge display. With a decent form factor and battery, the phone could put Moto back in contention for #4 in the handset market. But is #4 really good enough for the long term?

Best Buy

After Best Buy hired CEO Hubert Joly to reject the Schulze buyout and swing the axe of austerity, investor confidence plummeted and the dreaded stock downgrade arrived. Investor hopes (and the stock price) got a bit of a bounce as the Schulze buyout got another chance, but experts think it's unlikely to go through. As the Wall Street Journal asked last week, the bigger question is Can Electronics Stores Survive?

Electronic Arts

After laying off staff in its newly acquired PopCap unit, EA has readjusted its Free-to-Play focus, venturing away from Facebook and attempting to cast a broader, multi-device net. It's a good and necessary goal, but we'll have to see how well EA can execute. Meanwhile, Madden 13 has the footall franchise back on the map with excellent reviews and record sales. It seems EA has bought some more time to figure out its social strategy. It will need it, as the company's overall challenges haven't softened since August 6th.

Netflix

Netflix hasn't made any major blunders or advances since joining the DeathWatch on July 30th, but the rest of the industry hasn't stood still. HBO fired a shot across the bow with HBO Nordic a streaming movie service available only in Scandinavia. The move puts the two companies in more-or-less direct competition for the first time, though there will be very little catalog overlap, to begin. More direct competition is inevitable, so Netflix may have to do something bold. Perhaps acquiring what's left of OnLive to leapfrog GameFly?

T-Mobile USA

Since being inducted into the DeathWatch on July 23rd, T-Mobile has done nothing to stop the bleeding. Earlier this month, it lost more than a half million conract-based subscribers. If Deutsche Telekom's infrastructure investments really happen, the company could be a technical competitor, but without subscribers, all that capacity could prove a liability. Here's hoping that the all-hands announcement scheduled for the day everyone else gets the iPhone 5 is a game changer.

Groupon

Since July 16th, a Barclay's downgrade and a patent infringement lawsuit have damaged Groupon's stock pretty substantially, but many experts still think the company remains overvalued. If Groupon has any shot at long term success, it has to move beyond traditional daily deals. There are some early signs that it may be doing just that with its move toward lower-margin but more sustainable retailing of physical goods. Better late than never.

Sony

Changing the course of a behemoth as large as Sony takes more than the couple of months that have passed since the company was inducted into the DeathWatch on July 6th. So far, the best thing to happen to Sony has been the OnLive debacle, which makes Sony's unrelated decision to jettison the service in favor of its own on-demand game competitor look downright brilliant. Product releases have been a mixed bag, including ho-hum smartphones, a respectable consumer camera, an affordable streaming music service, and a gutsy new lap-pad that shows Sony might be willing to take some risks. What's missing? A convincing living-room attack plan. The PS4 needs to be the crux of any recovery strategy, so DeathWatch is withholding judgement on any turnaround until we see a demo.

Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble - inducted June 29th - is making a necessary and aggressive push for the Nook overseas. The company is starting with the UK, but it's not alone. Building sales channels is half the battle. The rest involves filling that channel with the best possible hardware and content. To that end, the DeathWatch is waiting for something big to emerge from Barnes & Noble's Microsoft deal before predicting a reversal of fortune. In the meantime, profits remain out of reach.

38 Studios

In early August - just over a month after 38 Studios joined the DeathWatch on June 22 - the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation officially took hold of 38 Studios assets, including the games Kingdom of Amalur and the remains of Project Copernicus. All that's left now is to see whether some of that amazing intellectual property winds up in the hands of another publisher (DeathWatch is betting on EA). Until then, while we mourn the loss of a lot of good work, we're grabbing some popcorn and waiting for the latest round of It's Not My Fault.

Nokia

Samsung has just beat Nokia to the punch with a Windows 8 smartphone. On the surface, it's not a huge deal, but it showcases Nokia's weakness. Windows is Nokia's only gig going forward, but Microsoft isn't throwing the Finnish phone-maker any bones. Nokia's stock bump from the Samsung / Apple verdict was short-lived. If Nokia hopes to lose its junk status, it will have to crawl out of that hole on its own ' one smartphone at a time. That's going to take a lot more than price cuts. Things are arguably worse now for Nokia than they were on June 15th when it became a DeathWatch victim.

HP

HP remains committed to the PC and server markets, even as it those businesses wither on the vine. Still, while there's still cash on hand and customers who answer the phone, there's hope. A new tablet division looks like no more than a shot in the dark, but at least it displays a willingness to push the envelope a little. The new Envy X2 hybrid device shows some interest in redefining 'PC,' as well. But as promising as these developments seem, baby steps aren't going to turn around decades-old thinking for a company the size of HP that recently suffered a disastrous earnings report that included an $8 billion writedown of its Enterprise Services Business and the biggest quarterly loss in the company's history.

Research in Motion

When DeathWatch premiered on June 1st, Research in Motion was an easy choice. Today, the company is still reeling from missed numbers and massive layoffs. Sure, RIM has a slate of new phones and a brand-new operating system it hopes will turn things around. The only problem? They're still months from being ready to ship. Plus, it seems that even previously strong overseas markets may be weakening. Even with the Blackberry 10 operating system and shiny new hardware to run it, the best RIM can hope for is retaining existing customers while it eyes a sale.

So there you have it. A comprehensive update on the first 13 ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch victims. Stay tuned in upcoming weeks for some interesting new twists in the DeathWatch!

Email Will Never Die - The Man Who Invented It Reveals Why

Texting, instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter - we have dozens of ways to pass a message from one user to the next, and yet we keep coming back to email. Why? According to the man who sent the first one, because there's still nothing quite like it.

Possibly the most revealing statement that can be made about the power and perseverence of email is that - unlike almost everything else in the technology industry - how we use it has remained virtually unchanged for more than 40 years.

According to the Radicati Group, 144.8 billion emails are sent every day, and that number is projected to rise to 192.2 billion in 2016. There are about 3.4 billion email accounts worldwide, Radicati said, with three-quarters owned by individual consumers.

The youngest users of email, however, have an enormous number of different methods to choose from to communicate - and many of them prefer these methods for most communications.

This, in turn, has prompted to some to wonder whether email is a dinosaur, among them young people who say they actually mean 'Facebook' when they say 'email'. In 2010, comScore kicked off a fuss by noting that Web email use had dropped 59% among teens. So why would anyone continue to use email in the age of social media?

'Because none of them really fill the space that email serves, which is you have a specific audience,' answers Ray Tomlinson, a principal engineer at BBN Technologies and the so-called 'father of email."

'A lot [of the alternatives] are like a billboard, with limited utility - you put these things on the billboard, and if they choose to they [your audience] can look and see it.'

'But email has the time difference - that is, you send it now, you read it later - you don't have to have someone sitting there and ready to respond like you do with instant messaging to make it work and make it effective,' Tomlinson explains. 'You can use instant messaging that way, but if they're not there, nothing happens, and you gotta remember that there may be a message coming back to you and go back to the IM client and look for the response.'

 

The Birth Of Email

In 1971 Tomlinson worked as an engineer for Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a contractor that had been assigned to develop ARPANET, a communication network that would allow scientists and researchers to share each other's computer resources.

In the fall of 1971, Tomlinson sent the first network email, using the SNDMSG program that ran on the TENEX time-sharing program for Digital PDP-10 computers. Email on a single computer had existed since the early 1960s, the equivalent of a digital post-it note that could be left to another user. But Tomlinson tweaked the CPYNET file transfer program, then appended it to SNDMSG. That gave one user the power to send a message to another on a remote machine, and email was born.

The first email message has been lost to history; Tomlinson tells ReadWriteWeb that it was one of a number of 'entirely forgettable' test messages. But that first email message, sent from one machine physically sitting next to another, functioned as a sort of 'hello world' message explaining that, well, network email was up and running. The response was low-key.

'I don't recall any actual replies' to the first email, Tomlinson says. 'I did get some comments from people in the hall.'

Tomlinson was also the first person to use the now ubiquitous '@' symbol - a no-brainer, as it explained that a user was 'at' a given host, Tomlinson said. There was one glitch, however: 'I was later reminded that the Multics time-sharing system used the @ sign as its line-erase character. This caused a fair amount of grief in that community of users,' he notes on his own website.

Email began to take hold as both a cultural and a technical phenomenon in 1972, when the next release of TENEX was shipped - on magnetic tape via snail mail - to some 15 other sites scattered around the country. Users could then send messages back and forth. As each site came online, email's utility increased, Tomlinson recalls.

Even back then, though, email was used in much the same way it is now.

'I think it was mostly used as a replacement for telephone calls,' Tomlinson says. 'You got a more immediate response. With time zone differences you didn't have to have someone there to receive the call.'

Email Today

Forty years later, email use has grown to enormous proportions. But most of it is not legitimate communications and more than half of it never gets delivered. According to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (which has reformed to fight take on malware as well) between 88% and 90% of all email sent during the first three quarters of 2011 were spam, or unsolicited commercial email. For example, Microsoft's Hotmail alone processes more than 8 billion messages a day. But only some 2.5 billion messages are delivered to the user's inbox.

Several types of methods of dealing with spam have sprung up: blocking or 'blacklisting' domains notorious for sending spam; blocking everything except for approved'whitelisted' domains,' and various filtering techniques that use reputation or text analysis to try and block suspicious emails.

Tomlinson supports whitelisting, where only users who pass through some additional level of security are allowed to send email. 'If it's a person out there he'll send it again,' Tomlinson said. 'If it's a machine he'll move on and send it to the other five million.'

But the samp problem is also one of identity. When Tomlinson first sent networked emails into the ether, the address was a specific person. Today, email senders can use aliases, multiple accounts and even bots to communicate. Should users be forced to tie themselves to a single email identity? The debate has included both Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who has promoted user Facebook accounts as identity tokens, as well as 4chan founder Christopher Poole, a strong advocacy for privacy and anonymity online. Tomlinson takes a middle view.

'In some ways the lack of an official identity when using email has compounded problems like spam, but I think that's the convenience versus utility versus functionality,' Tomlinson says. 'It's more convenient if you don't have to worry about identifying yourself. You don't have to buy a [security] certificate, or authenticate the centers of email.

'I think completely anonymous email would not be a good idea,' Tomlinson adds. 'On the other hand, having email identities that you can link to very specific information is a definite problem. It's one thing to say I am who I am, but I'm not going to tell you my life history at the same time.'

The Future of Email

In many ways, the future of email is already here today. SMS text messages are archived; instant message windows can be left open, and Facebook Messenger treats an instant message to an offline friend as, essentially, an email. This latter model is what Tomlinson sees email evolving into over time.

'Whether the name will persist or not, I suspect email will be around for at least for a good long time,' Tomlinson predicts. 'We may find that these other forms of communication may be merged with email, so you send an IM to somebody, and if they don't respond it turns into an email-like thing without any intervention on your part.'

 

Tomlinson image courtesy of BBN.

Black and white image by Dan Murphy.

Lead, spam and @ symbol images courtsey of Shutterstock.

The Reimagination of Publishing

Last Friday I did a presentation at The Project [R]evolution conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I presented on a topic I've been writing a lot about recently: the reimagination of publishing. I haven't been this excited about innovation in Web publishing since the early, experimental days of blogging, when I started ReadWriteWeb circa 2002-03. In particular, three new products have captured my imagination: App.net, Medium and Branch. It's too early to tell if any of those three products will be successful, but I like them because they are doing something different - and as a result, shaking things up.

Although it's Web publishing that has fired up my neurons, I have also been tracking developments in digital books and magazines. I mentioned two iPad apps that have impressed me a lot over the past year: The Atavist and Citia. Neither aims to replace paper. The beauty of both The Atavist and Citia is that they complement traditional magazines and books (respectively).

The Atavist releases multimedia enhanced magazine stories for about $3 a pop. Citia creates digital versions of non-fiction books, using cards and stacks to condense each book into its essential ideas - a concept which fans of 1980s product HyperCard, for Apple Macintosh, will remember fondly.

Citia version of Kevin Kelly's book 'What Technology Wants'.

Summarizing where I think digital magazines and books are going, I listed some of the key drivers. But note the fifth point: people still love paper magazines and books (this author included). The digital publishing products that fascinate me the most are ones that complement paper magazines and books - they don't aim to replace them.

Next I talked about the transition from the first big wave of Web publishing, which I characterized as the Geocities era of the mid to late 90s - to the latest wave of 2012 (App.net, Medium, Branch, Svbtle). The Clipart-addled Geocities was the third biggest website on the Web in 1999, its peak. Nowadays, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and Tumblr rule.

But things may be shaken up, again, if two of Twitter's founders and a bolshy Twitter competitor have anything to do with it. I've identified five reasons why Web publishing is undergoing a sea change (see presentation embedded below for all five).

What's intriguing about these new products isn't that they have a decent chance of becoming as massive as Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress or Tumblr. Indeed, I will be surprised if any of the new era become even half as popular. What's of most interest to me is that each of these new products is challenging the "old" guard (if you can call services born in the mid-to-late 2000s as old!).

App.net is a direct challenge to Twitter's business model - especially now that Twitter is in the midst of tightening access to its API. Medium is, in a way, trying to make a categorized Tumblr (in other words, make a better Tumblr). Branch is trying to reimagine discussions, which strikes at both Facebook and Twitter. Svbtle is encroaching on the terrain of Wordpress, with its elite blog network and minimalist design.

These are exciting times for Web publishers! Here is the whole of my presentation, via Slideshare: