Like so many geeks these days, I’m living my life inside of plain text files. Rather than rehash all the benefits, I’ll just link to Michael Schechter, but the biggest benefit is portability. I’ve found a system that works, for the most part, to keep my life in sync, based around Dropbox, nvALT, and any of a growing number of Dropbox-enabled iOS text editors. [1] As long as I don’t try to futz with it, it works fine.

Like any geek, however, I find excuses to futz.

It all started when I decided I wanted to give Simplenote a second chance, after seeing Patrick Rhone endorse it on App.Net. I quickly realized it didn’t work the way I wanted, so I decided to ditch it. It’s perfectly possible to live in Simplenote if you don’t want to use anything else. The moment I tried introducing other applications into this, all hell broke loose. The first problem came when, while trying to extricate Simplenote from my workflow, it populated my note folder with duplicates upon duplicates of files, because of a quirk in the way nvALT stores its synchronization settings. I ended up having to pull the recent documents out of the folder, and restore my text files from a Time Machine backup. Thinking this was the end of it, I happily went about my life for a few weeks, until I wanted to do some editing on my iPad in WriteRoom.

Apparently, the way WriteRoom synchronizes documents involves keeping a copy of everything on my device. Launching WriteRoom to do some work on a document I’d created in Drafts resulted in it trying to synchronize over 1,000 plain text files into my Dropbox folder that it had picked up during my tryst with Simplenote—though I failed to realize it at the time. I just figured that, since I hadn’t launched WriteRoom in a while, it was taking its time synchronizing all the stuff in my Dropbox folder. Eventually, fed up with the time it was taking, I reinstalled Byword, and did my editing in there. The magnitude of the problem didn’t hit until I got to work and found an error message form nvALT about being unable to load my files. Near as I can tell, Writeroom not only dumped 1,000 some odd text files—mostly duplicates—into my Dropbox, but it also overwrote nvALT’s settings file.

All this shows the shortcomings still inherent in keeping data, any form of data, in sync across multiple devices and applications. I don’t envy developers who have to muck about with either iCloud, or writing their own solution. [2] The myriad of things that can go wrong, handling every potential exception, even the best team of developers will have issues. Frustrating as it is to be Bare Bones Software, and unable to hook Yojimbo up to iCloud and have it work, it’s a minor miracle that even the stuff that does work, like Dropbox or Simplenote, actually works. Just make you back everything up, regularly.

I recently read an article on The Atlantic proclaiming the Internet has spawned a narcissism epidemic. [1] The article has some good points wrapped in a veneer of technological fear, but that’s how you get people to read articles of that nature. There maybe an uptick in narcissistic behavior online, but the study may be conflating correlation with causation. It stands to reason that a more narcissistic person would use Facebook more. If you want attention from people you know, that’s where to go. This is the nature of the beast. [2]

Social media enables the latent narcissism in (almost) all of us. We want to be loved by some number of people, typically more than one. Suddenly, we have the ability to speak to a huge audience, and we’re all too happy to oblige them. Or, to quote my friend Jonathan Pfeffer, “The Internet is a void.” Nature abhors a vacuum, and so the empty spaces of the Internet created by free, open publishing platforms are going to get filled with “content,” and not all of it is going to be of value to us. Fortunately, we don’t have to see it if we don’t want to. [3] The narcissists also have their enablers. These enablers are not the platforms, but the people on the platforms who read, like, share, and comment on what gets posted. If they’re rewarding junk, then junk will get posted. Nobody would be posting pictures of their lunch on Instagram, if other people didn’t approve of it somewhere, no matter how much mockery they get.

When you’re in a creative field, seeing this can rub you the wrong way. Comic artist Spike refers to it as The Backpat Delivery System, wherein artists talk up a big game about what they’re going to do, maybe post some work-in-progress stuff, and rake in the kudos without actually producing any completed work. The backpats are, it seems, enough to satisfy the craving for attention that any creative project unleashed on the world is seeking, so the actual project goes undone. Then, there’s the cottage industry around criticizing everything under the sun to consider, as it’s easier to tear down than build up, and the backpats will be delivered just as often.

The real problem of Internet-enabled narcissism is its potential to divert someone’s attention from creating real, good, interesting things, into the ratholes of unfinished show-off projects at best, or trolling at worse. The Instagram-lunch posters are not the problem, nor are the people who build empires of the self among their own friends, real or “Internet.” The short-circuiting of our reward system by the Internet’s Backpat Delivery System can too easily keep a creative individual from producing what they’re capable of, when they’re too busy rolling in their potential audience’s premature adoration.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check my URI.LV stats.

Apple Rumors from a Apple-Friendly News Site

This blurry, out-of-focus shot from our agents in Shenzhen shows that Apple is hard at work on the latest new iPhone and iPad. The part looks extremely similar to a part in the current iPhone and iPad, but different in subtle small ways that may mean Apple is adding a new, cool hardware feature. My current iPhone and iPad now look and feel as obsolete as a Palm Treo or a Windows for Pen Computing tablet. Clearly, Apple will make a new product announcement any day now.

Apple Rumors from an Apple-Unfriendly News Site

This blurry, out-of-focus shot we copied from an Apple rumors site shows that Apple is hard at work on the latest new iPhone and iPad. The part looks extremely similar to a part in the current iPhone and iPad, but different in subtle small ways that may mean absolutely nothing. It looks completely out of date next to the Android smartphone and tablet I promoted in my recent product review. Clearly Apple is falling behind in the smartphone and tablet markets.

Apple Rumors from a Financial News Site

Apparently, Apple is making another iPhone and iPad. This news has had a negative effect on Apple’s stock price, because the spy shots of the new iPhone and iPad parts show that the new iPhone and iPad look very similar to the previous iPhone and iPad, and will not have the trendy new feature in the latest Android phones. This shows a lack of innovation compared to Samsung. A Wall Street Analyst for some firm has lowered the outlook for Apple in response to these rumors.

Apple Rumors from a General Audience News Site

Is Apple working on a new iPhone and iPad? You may be surprised to know that the answer is yes. The next iPhone and iPad will feature an amazing new feature, according to a report from an analyst that is in no way connected to Apple. Possible features include: a bigger screen, NFC, support for the Apple iWatch, holographic projection, or a physical keyboard. Apple has yet to announce the new iPhone and iPad, but when they do, you can expect there to be lines around the block to buy it.

I used to be the sort who hung on every crazy Apple rumor that came down from the big rumor sites. For a while, I even ran my own parody Apple rumor site, until I found that I couldn’t keep bringing the funny with the time available, and that there wasn’t much to joke about anyway. Once I realized how every rumor story was almost completely the same, except with a few minor details, I quit. Mostly. Apple’s good at this secrecy thing. There are only two real, solid details come out early about any new Apple product. Either there’s an event in the next day or two, or some engineer left a prototype at a bar. Only one of those is likely to happen again.

Nearly fourteen years ago, two teenagers committed an unspeakable act of brutal violence against their fellow high school students. That day, seventeen-hundred or so miles from that tragedy, I was in my own high school, unaware. This was before social media as we know it was even a dream, and before even a high school student had an Internet connection in their pocket. Still, somehow, word got around about what was happening in Colorado. As we left that day, I noticed a number of odd looks in my direction. I was already a bit of a loner in my school, and for some reason that morning, I’d opted to wear army fatigue pants and an olive drab t-shirt to class. Still, confusion mostly reigned that day.

It wasn’t until any of us got home that we could see the disaster unfolding. Pictures of students running from a sprawling suburban high school, rumors of bombs under cars, gunshots, terror. The next day we had names, faces, reports of last words, and scapegoats to pin the actions of two who would be forever unable to speak for themselves again. In its wake, metal detectors and X-ray machines were stuffed into my inner-city school’s entryway, more to assuage the fears of parents and administrators than our own. Our student fears were more grounded, knowing full well that if anyone tried to shoot up our school, to “Pull a Columbine” in the parlance, would find the new security measures to be a nuisance at best.

In the intervening decade and a half, we’ve seen countless tragedies on scales as grand as 9/11 and as seemingly small as the man who crashed his plane into an IRS field office in Texas. Each time, it seems the reaction cycle becomes shorter and shorter. It used to be that we wouldn’t know anything that we had not seen with our own eyes until we read the newspaper the next day. Radio and then television shortened the time span so that for decades, we could learn the horrors of the day over dinner or just before bedtime. The earliest days of the Internet made breaking news all the more immediate, but until only a few years ago, it was largely a one-way communication medium.

I first heard about the Boston Marathon explosions on Twitter, while posting something on my company’s social media feeds, and immediately thought “I’ve seen this film before.” Whether it was the Newtown massacre, Aurora, to whatever else you care to name in the last few years, I knew there would be finger-pointing, false reports of further horrors, and tasteless jokes written to deal with the tension of not knowing. In darker corners of the Internet, there would be claims of “false flags” and conspiracy. None of this is new. It’s a quirk, to put it mildly, of human psychology, where in the face of ambiguity, we fill in the details with our own experience and knowledge, or the lack thereof.

The instant nature of modern communication, the disintermediation of social media, and the even footing these technologies offer our voices has made it easier for misinformation to spread and blame to be assigned. The biggest difference between now, and then, is that they spread at exponentially faster speeds, to exponentially larger audiences. And yet, there’s an upside to this. Starting with the Aurora massacre, and continuing today, citizen journalists on Reddit and elsewhere have taken on the task of sorting the misinformation from the information, posting as many facts as they can verify, and keeping people up to date. They do a service that is all too necessary these days, with no recompense.

For the rest of us, it comes down to this: be prudent about what you read and be prudent about what you post. Technology is a transformative tool, but the fundamental decisions of how we apply this tool have not changed. There’s no reason, no excuse, for us to use this tool to bring harm, deliberate or otherwise. The facts of what has occurred will shake out in time. Patience is what we need most in trying times, a patience that seems almost contrary to the nature of things. Yet, if we can tolerate that ambiguity, trust ourselves, and trust those we’ve tasked with the job of answering our questions, we will be all the better for it.

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?