I have to admit, Steve’s passing struck me in an unusual way. I never met him, he wasn’t part of my family, and yet I felt more personally connected to this loss than from any other celebrity or public figure. As someone mentioned in a tribute this morning, everyone in the technology world looked up to him, and for me that’s been the case for my entire professional life — since I first started creating multimedia in HyperCard in 1993 to yesterday, when I installed a pre-release copy of iOS 5 onto my iPhone for app testing. I’ve made my living from Apple’s products for almost 20 years.

I’ve told people that if the Mac platform went away, I’d change careers, and I’m serious. I can “do” technology, but the satisfaction of creating something well-crafted and elegant is what keeps me interested in my work. Other platforms are too focused on tech for tech’s sake. I suppose that’s Steve’s biggest contribution — melding art and technology, left-brained and right-brained — and my life is exponentially more interesting because of it.

Eventually I stopped worrying about websites collecting data that isn’t personally identifiable. In other words, if one website has a list of every page a user from my city visited, and another website has a list of every page a user from my city visited, but neither website can correlate the lists and neither website knows that user is me, I’m okay with that. I know that the data can be used to improve the operation of the website, but can’t be used to target or report on me specifically.

Something has happened over the last few years, though, that changes the paradigm of online tracking, yet I haven’t heard anyone talking about it. It’s called Gmail — the best free, web-based email service available. Unfortunately, it’s made by Google — the best search engine available. And while you don’t have to be logged in to use Google, you do have to be logged in to use Gmail. And whenever you’re logged in, your data is personally identifiable by both services.

This isn’t a problem for me because I rent my own web server space with my own email accounts. But I do post content on YouTube, and after Google bought YouTube, they merged those login systems as well. Now if I log into YouTube to upload a video, and while I’m waiting for the upload I use Google to do some web searches, my searches are being tracked as part of my personal account. It’s the difference between reporting on how many books were checked out from my local library, and reporting on which books I checked out. And that’s where I draw the line.

Now Facebook is trying to get into the same game, by partnering with websites to offer a “log in with Facebook” feature, and I expect the trend to spread. The appeal is obvious: personally identifiable data is much more valuable for marketing purposes. But if you value your privacy, I’ll make these recommendations. Use these services only as long as you need to, and then log out. If I need to stay logged in for a while — waiting for that large YouTube video to upload — you can log in with an alternate browser (e.g., Firefox vs. Safari) while continuing to use your main browser anonymously. Finally, remember that if you log into one site, then use another site owned by or partnering with that site, they can correlate their data to create a more complete picture of you than you would probably want them to have.

Well, almost. Over the last few years I’ve seen poor old email getting battered from a few different directions, and I’ve often wondered if it will survive. Here are the challenges I see, with ideas for reviving this essential tool:

• Spam. After using some addresses for almost 15 years, my spam to real mail ratio is about 10 to 1. I have good spam filters that bring this down to 1 to 1 or less, but that’s still a lot of spam. More importantly, I always have to remember that my own messages might not reach their destinations because of the recipients’ spam filters. If this doesn’t improve, I’d expect more people to start missing the messages that do get through, or giving up reading their email completely. Solutions? Check your Spam folder, and if your spam filter is marking good mail as spam, you can adjust its settings or replace it with a better one. And if you receive legitimate but unwanted messages (such as mailing lists you signed up for, or marketing messages from companies you’ve ordered from) you can unsubscribe, rather than marking those as spam, which confuses the filters. Beyond that, some of the biggest email providers, like Microsoft and Yahoo, have proposed charging a small fee to send a message. While it seems like a money grab at first, it makes sense: you wouldn’t notice a fee of $.01 or less for each of the legitimate messages you send, but the cost/benefit ratio of spammers who send millions of messages at a time would change dramatically. My dream scenario? The U.S. Postal Service, currently facing an increasingly doubtful future, implements a secure email system and jumps from the dying gasps of paper mail to the leading edge of electronic communication.
• Private networks. Perhaps because of spam, or easy media sharing features, or just because “everyone is doing it,” many people use social networking platforms instead of email now. I routinely receive messages through my Facebook, YouTube or MySpace accounts even though my direct email addresses are readily available. Although these accounts are mostly spam-free (actually, YouTube is pretty bad), a message received through these services misses some of the advantages of direct email, like control over the software I use to compose messages and the amount of mail I want to archive. Solutions? I usually either send my direct email address in the reply, or reply directly to the recipient if I already know his or her address, to move the conversation from a proprietary platform back to the standard Internet.
• Smartphones. Looking at a smartphone for a quick email update is convenient, but replying from a smartphone leaves a lot to be desired. I sometimes send a detailed message containing several questions, only to receive a one-line message that only answers one of the questions. One of the great advantages of email is that it can handle the dense communication required for large projects, but if you squeeze that density through the tiny screen and keyboard of a smartphone, most of it tends to get lost. Solutions? Users just have to think twice before replying. In most cases, it’s better to wait until you’re back at your desk and can send a thoughtful and thorough reply than to send an immediate one-liner from the grocery store line. I’m not sure about other smartphones, but my iPhone lets me read a message, then mark it as unread, so it shows up again on my desktop for further consideration.

So there it is. The good news is that while writing this, I found other articles warning about the death of email from 6 or 8 years ago, and it hasn’t happened yet. I’m personally keeping it alive for everyone I correspond with! And those proprietary communication platforms tend to turn over every couple of years. Hopefully email will prove itself as the “old faithful” of online messaging after all.

+ Viewing my photo library is marvelous. I expected this … I’d love to take this to a family reunion and pass it around when talking about my last vacation, house projects, etc.

+ Browsing the web is better than I expected. The iPhone version of Safari really works well here, scaling websites to fit the window in either orientation, and scrolling and zooming with the touch interface.

+ And reading e-books … I had never considered doing this, but the book reader is really cool and Project Gutenberg (30,000 classic books for free) is amazing. I immediately downloaded two books I’ve been meaning to read and I can’t wait to try this.

- No Flash for video. I don’t visit many sites that use Flash intros or animated menus, but I do watch a lot of streaming video and virtually all of that is in Flash. When I got up early Sunday to stream a European bike race, I grabbed my laptop because I knew I wouldn’t be able to use the iPad. HTML 5 is the next standard for web video, but I expect it will take 1-2 years to become prevalent enough to avoid this problem. (Regarding major motion pictures, I did stream a 90-minute movie through the Netflix app without a single hiccup.)

- Doesn’t replace an iPod. The iPad is much nicer than my iPod touch for viewing pictures and video, but I can’t put it in my back pocket to listen to music while I’m working outside, or slip it onto a dashboard mount to connect to the car stereo.

- Doesn’t work as a standalone computer. I would strongly recommend this to friends and relatives who need a zero-maintenance web and email computer — it’s the closest thing to a functional “web appliance” that I’ve used. But you still need a main computer to operate it. It wouldn’t even show the home screen without syncing to iTunes first.

One thing I haven’t tested much is the keyboard. My accuracy has been excellent for entering web URLs, but I haven’t tried writing email with it yet. I usually don’t even bother writing on my iPod touch, so I’m wondering how much more usable the iPad will be. If it doesn’t hamper writing messages, this could replace a laptop for many trips.

My personal bottom line is that the iPad is too expensive to add as a third device between my laptop and iPod, since it doesn’t do anything those devices can’t do. But for people who don’t already have those devices — or don’t need the production capabilities of a laptop or the ultra-portability of an iPod — this is a brilliant device for reading email and websites and viewing photos and movies.

Update, 5/12/10: I’ve spent more time with the iPad now. Typing is, well, easier than on an iPhone and harder than on a laptop. Apps take on a whole new potential in this larger format, and reading e-books is quite nice. One surprise is that holding the device or laying it on a table to read or watch videos gets uncomfortable, so Apple’s easel/case is an important accessory. But my bottom line is the same: it’s not distinct enough to fit between an iPhone/iPod and a laptop. I’ve given mine away as I had planned to do, and I’m enjoying getting re-acquainted with my iPod touch, which is almost as good for most of the things and better at a few of the things that I do with these devices.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

The premise is that because we now have instant access to a wealth of reference information online, we’re losing our ability to read long passages, concentrate and think. I disagree; here’s why.

Regarding access to reference information, I think that’s a quantitative rather than qualitative difference from the pre-Internet days. When I was reading books in school, I was always encouraged to look up a word in the dictionary if I didn’t know it. I never did it much, but I do it a lot more now that I can access a dictionary online with a few clicks. If that was good advice with a book, how could it be bad advice with a computer? Now I can not only look up vocabulary words, but local wildlife, art history and world politics as I run across them in my daily life. I would conclude that this makes me more intellectually curious — because it rewards my curiosity with new knowledge — not less intelligent.

As for reading long passages, I use the web as much as anyone, and (compared to other people I’ve browsed with) I’m quite good at seeing how the information is organized on a web page and jumping from one link to another. I also do a lot of skimming, as the author describes. But this is when I’m looking for something in particular, like a street address or a bit of programming code or a song lyric. I did the same thing in college when I was researching a paper at the library. Reading for enjoyment is a different skill, and I haven’t lost it. When J.D. Salinger died last week and I decided to revisit The Catcher in the Rye, I read it in two, three-hour sittings.

Perhaps a lack of concentration is the author’s real problem, but I don’t think that comes from using the web. Like a book, that goes at our pace and doesn’t interrupt our train of thought. That’s not the case with other technologies like television, telephones and instant messaging. I tend to use those as little as possible when I’m working, but if they were talking, beeping and flashing at me all day, I’d probably feel like the author does.

I guess my motto would be, tune out, turn off, log on!