There’s a lot of hemming and hawing in the tech sphere about Facebook’s new Home for Android, and what this means for Google, and for Microsoft, and for Apple. If you’re Google, it’s Facebook sticking it to your “open” platform and your struggling social network. If you’re Microsoft, it’s Facebook taking your cool idea and making it not suck. If you’re Apple, well, you’re Apple and whether that’s a bad thing or not depends on who you ask.

I’m not seeing a lot of talk about what Facebook is actually doing to how we use our phones, except in terms of advertising, which is a discussion worth having, just not here. Maybe it’s because Facebook is refining what Microsoft thought it had nailed with Windows Phone 7, that of showing a user immediate, context sensitive information on the home screen with live, updating UI elements, and doing information at a glance. The screenshots of Facebook Home in action sure look nice. I’ve not used it, and nor would I because I am neither buying an el-cheapo HTC Android phone, or letting Facebook control my device. [1]

The dominant paradigm of the smartphone is still heavily influenced by two things, and the iPhone isn’t one of them. The first is the business world. Smartphones sprang from the convergence of phones, pagers, and e-mail. The earliest devices called smartphones were marketed at the business person on the go, the sort of person who needed to not only get an email anywhere in the world, but reply to that email ASAP, and maybe get on the web to find the information needed to do that. The smartphone was a tool to get business work done first and foremost.

The second idea is that of the smartphone as a general-purpose computing device, something that Microsoft helped push by designing Windows CE to look like Windows 95. Things that work in similar ways should be able to do similar things, and so, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, Microsoft established the idea that these handheld gizmos could be more than just a cell phone that does email. [2] You could, if you wanted, calculate a spreadsheet, write a memo, or view a PowerPoint presentation, that is if you enjoy the taste of your own blood. The smartphone was just another kind of computer, albeit a terrible one that could make phone calls.

Whoever decided to market the Sidekick to ordinary users (well, teenagers) was clearly some sort of mad genius. The same fundamental technologies that allowed the businessman in the field to get an urgent email were spun to allow the gossipy teenager to chat with all of their gossipy teenager friends. [3] It found a need where nobody had thought a need existed, and put instantaneous, non-voice communication in the hands and pockets of normal people. Still, as much as people loved the ability to text chat on their Sidekicks, and on the Blackberries that replaced them, Apple’s refining of the smartphone as computer—post-App Store—that defined the space. Who the hell just wants a phone to chat with people? I’ve gotta fling bird at pigs!

This brings us back around to Facebook Home, which takes a position that’s more along the lines of the Sidekick. Sure, you can play Angry Birds on your phone that runs Facebook Home, but you’ll really be using it to Facebook Message all your Facebook Friends, invite them to Facebook Events, update your Facebook Status, and Check In to Facebook Places. The UI of Facebook Home is designed to make these your phone’s primary functions, and all that general purpose computing stuff becomes secondary. Besides, wouldn’t you rather use Facebook Apps than Android apps? Where Facebook Home triumphs over Windows Phone 7 is that Facebook went all the way with the smartphone as social communication device, while Microsoft tried to bridge the gap between social-phone and computer-phone. What remains to be seen is whether this is what people want from their phone. Just because so many of us jumped from social-smartphones to computer-smartphones doesn’t mean a bunch of us aren’t waiting to jump back.

There are two main types of smartphone users: those who use their phone as a computer that makes calls, and those who use their phone as a phone, and maybe to check Facebook. [4] The people who use their phone as a computer won’t want Facebook Home because they want to do stuff that isn’t Facebook. It’s the latter group that’s the wildcard. I’m certain that the HTC First, with Facebook Home built-in, will quickly be snapped up by those hardcore Facebook users, and if the carrier incentives are good, be forced into the hands of clueless people who just want a phone. More than a few Android phone users will download Facebook Home and try it out of curiosity, though I don’t know if they’ll stick with it, unless they already spend all their non-calling smartphone time on Facebook. Until we know for sure, the only question left to ask is: how hard is it to uninstall Facebook Home?

Recently, I inherited the role of managing social media and community building for the startup company I work for. It happened quite suddenly—my boss found another job, and I got a battlefield promotion. As I’ve tried to find my bearings in the short time I’ve had this role (about 48 hours as of this writing), I’ve had one main, nagging, concern above all the others, even the “can I actually pull this off?” question. That concern is: How can I do social media and get people to use our product without being the canonical “Social Media Douchebag.” I’ve been paranoid enough about it that I even Asked MetaFilter.

The fears are twofold. First, a major part of our product’s target audience are not exactly tech-savvy. We’re not exactly talking the “have my secretary print out my email” types, but that’s not far off. Social media and social networking are not things they’re terribly up on. If they have a profile anywhere, it’s probably on LinkedIn. And, to come clean here, I don’t know much of anything about how to reach people on LinkedIn. The second fear is that, if I push too hard, or do the wrong thing, I will destroy any good will my company and its product has earned in this community.

By way of example, a user of our product sent us a very angry email after we linked to him in a broadcast that we send out to all of our users each week. It was merely his name, a link to his profile, the firm he works for, and his title—all required, and public information on our product that anyone could see. The pull quote from his e-mail is “I do not do business that way.” If so, then he clearly signed up to the wrong service. This is comparatively minor, but it’s a good example of the sort of slightly-paranoid, slightly technology-phobic audience I’m looking to woo.

There’s plenty of people who love us and what we do, but more who have only heard of us, but don’t know what we do. I’m making it my job to increase the number in the first column. However, I want to do it in an ethical, sane way that steps on as few toes as possible. This may be the initial problem. One way to know you’re succeeding is when you’re making people upset. It’s possible that my fears in this regard are an obstacle. Maybe I should ruffle a few feathers. No such thing as bad publicity, right? On the other hand, if I’m doing something I’ve explicitly railed against on this site, or elsewhere, [1] there’s an “it’s okay when I do it” moral relativism that chafes me when I see it in others.

I think it’s possible to do this. It’s not boiling the ocean. We can increase people using our product, actively, win paying customers, and maintain a good reputation, but it’s going to take some thought, some time, and some patience. I have all the tools at my disposal I need, including a small number of people who love our company and product passionately. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian made a brilliant observation about those passionate users of any sort of technology product in the modern era: “They are your website, not you.” The trick is to find them, and listen.

It’s Christmas time for Mac Nerds. The fourth annual Mac Power Users workflows show with Merlin Mann is live. [1] Though I’m not a regular listener to MPU these days, Merlin’s annual visit always provides me with a ton of inspiration to revisit, review, and improve my workflow in so many ways. In this particular installment, Merlin, Katie, and David talk up Evernote, text-based workflows on iOS, and some great GTD meta-stuff that really got me thinking about how I manage the things I have to do.

Take some time, today, and give it a listen. It’s always a good idea to find out how to do the things you do better. Thinking about the things we do over and over, the patterns we discover, and ways to break them and form better ones, is essential to how we use technology in our lives. And, when someone who’s great at that takes a couple of hours to share them with us, it’s worth that time to listen.

For a brief, shining moment in the 90s, multimedia and CD-ROMs were the hot technology. It was going to change the world, by putting knowledge in the hands of people, and mixing sound and video with text, in a new, interactive way. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon, from traditional software companies like Microsoft, to musicians as diverse as Laurie Anderson, Devo, The Residents, Queen, and Yes. A computer couldn’t be sold unless it had a 2x CD-ROM drive, then a 4x or 8x, along with a sound card, and enough RAM to make the darn thing go. Then, suddenly, this Internet thing showed up in people’s homes, and the interactive, multimedia CD-ROM became a curious, forgotten relic.

Grolier’s Encyclopedia was my first exposure to the idea of multimedia. In my middle school’s computer laboratory, on a creaking old 486 that was, even for 1995, behind the times, I got my first taste of the future, watching a grainy, blocky video of the [Hindenburg Disaster]. Around that time, my own aging 486 got an upgrade with a 2x CD-ROM drive and a SoundBlaster 16, followed by a hard drive and RAM upgrade to offset the increased load on the machine. Waking up one Christmas morning and unwrapping a five CD-ROM Encarta set, with encyclopedia (on two discs!), atlas, dictionary, and timeline was amazing. Now, I can get all of that through Wikipedia, and its sister projects in less time than it would have taken to put in the CD, let alone run the software and search.

Technology is an iterative process, and when looked at with enough distance and hindsight, it seems like a fairly straight line of progress. We went from teletypes and punch cards to video terminals and command lines, then to GUIs. We had 8086 processors, then 8088s, then the 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium II, III, 4… It’s easy to lose sight of what was proposed as the next big thing, then fell to the wayside: the Amiga, OS/2 Warp, CD-ROMs, VRML… If you zoom in closer, the history of technology is more of a finely combed branch, or feather, with a lot of terminating dead-ends, where we thought something would be great, and it wasn’t, or something else came along and proved to be better. Technology is full of little ratholes like these.

The Internet predated CD-ROMs, in one form or another, but in the days when the best you could hope for in terms of bandwidth meant it took an hour to download a decent quality image, CD-ROMs had the advantage of (near-)immediacy. Put the disc in, launch the app, wait for the drive to spin up and seek to the file, and suddenly, you had a video of a burning zeppelin on your screen. Unless you were on a college campus and lucky enough to have access to a T1, or if you were rich enough to pay for ISDN, video over the Internet was a laughable concept.

But things got faster. 33.6Kbps modems, 56k modems, home broadband that outstripped a standard T1 connection. Suddenly, it may not have been faster to look something up on the Internet, but it was fast enough that the flaws of a CD-ROM became apparent, not just in terms of seek time, but also clunky interfaces and high system requirements. The legacy of the multimedia CD-ROM now lies in landfills, artful mobiles of microwaved CDs, and every Flash-based website for a company or restaurant that insists on audio, video, and custom UI controls to display something that could be communicated faster and easier with text and images.

It’s why I try to maintain a healthy skepticism when someone proposes a new technology that will change how we do things. Whether we talk of ubiquitous motion-based computing, viz-a-viz the Microsoft Kinect, or just NFC based payment systems, I can’t help but think that these are ideas that look really cool in demo videos, but prove difficult, at best, to implement in the real world. Something already out there could suddenly catch up and surpass the newest, latest thing. Something else newer, later, and cheaper and faster, could nail its proposal to a venture capital firm and get a ten million dollar investment, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s happened before.

The Onion AV Club recently posted a gossip piece concerning members of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom, aka “Bronies.” The gossip piece in question was reprinting an excerpt of a letter sent from one “Brony” to another, concerning sexual fan art of a character he considered his fiancée. Leaving aside, for the moment, the idea of being engaged to a fictional character, or drawing sexually explicit fan art, the reaction of the Internet was swift—complete mockery of both parties, and of the My Little Pony fandom in general.

I am not a “Brony,” and, while I do read The AV Club, I do not partake in its more gossip-oriented articles. What raised my ire enough to write this piece was the sheer dumbfoundedness of people to this behavior, including people on sites like Metafilter [1] which tend toward a higher standard of discourse, and the immediate jump to mockery. It’s as if these sorts of people—adult fans of children’s shows, creators of erotic fan art, and people with romantic attachments to fictional characters and inanimate objects—are creations of the Internet, and, as such, aberrations. The truth is, these sorts of people existed long before the Internet. It’s just that the Internet has given them a way to communicate with like-minded people in a way that no technology has before. It has all given them a way to communicate with a larger audience than they ever had before.

After all, it’s one thing to be the only person you know who is into, well, anything unusual. In the pre-Internet days, about the only way to meet like-minded people if you were into anything outside of the mainstream, was a college campus or, maybe, a major city, and even then, only if you were lucky. The weirdest of the weirdos occupied the fringes of groups and their conventions, and maybe publishing their near-samizdat fan zines. Come the arrival of the first online services, BBSes, Newsgroups, and IRC, it became easier. With the arrival of modern social networking, however, the gates fell for good. From LiveJournal, to DeviantArt, to Tumblr, subcultures of like-minded people with their own unique interests have been finding each other, connecting, and socializing.

And, like every other organized group of people, they have their own rules, their own sub-groups, and their own conflicts. Whenever something like the aforementioned letter emerges, the most vocal members of the subculture quickly speak up to say that “We’re not all that way!” Fundamentally, the populous at large knows this already, easy as it may be to stereotype. And, let’s be fair, nobody wants to own the person who draws sexually explicit fan art of children’s cartoon characters, or the person who is engaged to marry the same character. They’re disowned by the same group they thought would let them in, which does nothing to help the issues that already come from being that far outside the norm. These people have a hard enough road to travel already. Taking their issues public doesn’t help, especially when it’s presented in the way the AV Club has, to make light of everyone involved—which is, by extension the entire fandom.

What are we getting out of this besides the cheap, visceral thrill of watching a train wreck? Can we step back, for even a moment, and evaluate the effect that bringing these people’s actions to a public audience will have? The thing about most of these subcultures of like-minded people, is that their behaviors aren’t really hurting anyone. The worst harm you’ll have from the sexually explicit fan-artist is needing a bit of eye or brain bleach if you accidentally come across their work. The man who seeks to marry the cartoon character? He’s not hurting anyone, either. Bringing their private feud, even if it happens in a public space, to the world-at-large is shameful at best. We have better things to do with all of our time.