Clarifying and Explaining

Firefox 3 is out. Just go download it. It’s faster than version 2. The smart address bar suggests sites you might be typing, along with their descriptions. Del.icio.us and NoScript, my must-have extensions, have been updated to work with version 3.

And it’s pretty. The new Mac skin makes it look like a standard OSX app, much closer to the aesthetic polish of Safari. Check boxes are translucent now! I realize this doesn’t really matter, but… so nice. The Win and Linux skins are similarly appropriate.

Did I mention it’s snappy? Pages render noticeably faster. And it’s free!

You’ll be hearing a lot about this… and pretty much everyone will have a full-featured computer in their pocket as of July. Apple’s 3G iPhone uses a faster data network, has GPS, better battery life, a bunch of 3rd-party apps, and most important, a $199 price tag.

The 3G network is still slow, but it’s three times faster than the old service. Still slower than wifi, but hey, you’re not always around a hot spot. The GPS is integrated into a core location service so it’s easy for apps to access location data. Social app Loopt allows you to see which friends are close to you and arrange meetings, which is about half of what happens on my phone currently.

Battery life is improved to 10 hours talk time on the slower network, and an admirable 24 hours of audio playback. The new plastic back may have something to do with this, as metal tends to require stronger radio signals.

The iPhone App Store is launching in July, with a bunch of free and/or cheap apps to download. If they’re under 10 MB, you can download them right from the phone. Expect a lot of cool tilt-based, GPS-aware, and 3D-rendered apps.

Finally, $199? Sold. That’s a good price for just a mobile web browser.

Slate runs a piece by Reihan Salam on Facebook etiquette. Good stuff, especially for us geezers (born before the first Reagan administration).

What’s the right number of Facebook friends?

It all depends on context. Noted anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that the mean clique—a group of primary social partners—consists of around 12 people. Average maximum network size—a group of real friends plus friends of friends—is around 150. I don’t know about you, but most of my primary clique isn’t on Facebook. My social graph and my social life overlap, but not nearly as much as they would if all of my close friends were on Facebook.

That’s why college students find Facebook so addictive. An undergrad who doesn’t have a Facebook profile is regarded as a Luddite, the social equivalent of leading a survivalist lifestyle complete with flintlock rifle and bandana. In this case, Facebook works as it should. Even if you have 700 friends, the site susses out your real bosom buddies—they post on your wall, they trade messages with you, and they pop up on your News Feed way more often.

According to Techcrunch, Facebook will release the source code for its application interface (the Facebook Platform) in the near future. Currently, applications written for Facebook (such as my favorite Boggle port “Scramble“) only run on Facebook. If you have an app that you want to run on Facebook, you have to re-code it. Because Facebook controls the API, they effectively control who can and can’t write apps. They’ve shown that they don’t always use that power in the best interests of users, particularly back in March when they allowed CBS’s college basketball app to spam users with invites.

This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run [by] the Open Social Foundation. Facebook has been looking more and more like a walled garden of late, and they are being regularly out maneuvered by competitors. Time to fight back. [Techcrunch text, my link.]

Things to look out for next: other social networking sites implementing the open API and allowing you to use previously Facebook-only apps; being able to log into apps across sites (so maybe we can play Boggle against people who don’t have a Facebook account); and further down the road, improvements in the API itself, driven by apps, which extend functionality and improve reliability. As big an improvement as Google’s Open Social was, its biggest impact will be the opening of other protocols. At the very least, since you can give an app access to your profile information, it should now be easy to pull that data into other social networks via the API.

If you’re not limited by social lock-in to only using the apps available on the social networking site your friends use, you’ll pick the best apps and demand better ones. The market for socially aware web apps will explode and maybe the browser-as-operating-system we’ve been hearing about will actually take over. At the very least, it would be great if Facebook is indeed facing reality and shedding its proprietary approach. Let’s follow the rumors and see if they come through.

Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody, takes a point that should have been obvious and gives it the central treatment it deserves — social networking is about groups of people, not about individuals.

Web 2.0 theorists focus on how new technology connects us to each other, allowing us to become amateur journalists, critics, videographers, etc. Shirky makes the point that new technology changes the ease with which groups can form, which means that ad hoc groups will be a much larger factor in society from now on.

…[T]he costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent years, and not just by a little bit. They have collapsed. …Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, lots of new groups, and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.

…We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. …[W]e are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.

Now that we don’t need a bunch of organizational and media infrastructure to organize a group, the problems that we’ve tolerated with those institutions will no longer be the inescapable cost of organizing. They will be unnecessary, outcompeted by groups of people who choose economically, technologically, and socially cheap methods.

Shirky sees this huge change as something we can’t judge from within. In some cases, crowds pressure opaque institutions to change; in others, flash mobs take justice into their own hands, which could be good or bad depending on your politics. He takes a broad but heavily example-laden approach to the topic, put together with his characteristic articulate style. Highly recommended.