My first order of business looking back on 2010 is to admit that I was wrong about the iPad.
In January, shortly after Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the device, I wrote that I was “underwhelmed” and argued that the new device was “not a game changer.” Boy was I wrong. The iPad has been an incredible success and a major game changer. For the record, once I got my hands on an iPad, my review was quite favorable.

Wherever I go I see people using iPads where they might have otherwise been using a laptop, reading a Kindle or just staring off in space. And it’s not an important product just for Apple. It’s spawning an entirely new category of computing devices. So far, no one has been able to come up with anything close to an iPad killer, but a few companies — including Samsung — are trying. Google is poised to introduce a tablet version of its Android operating system that will attempt to give the iPad the serious competition that Android phones have inflicted on the iPhone.

If the iPad was the big story for 2010, the second biggest was the success of smartphones running Google’s Android operating system, which in August overtook iPhone sales for the first time. Of course, whereas the iPhone comes from one handset manufacturer and (so far) one carrier in the United States, Androids are available from all major carriers and several handset manufacturers, including Motorola, which, thanks to the success of its various Android offerings, seems to have come back from the dead.

Google certainly had a good 2010. Not only did the company have excellent earnings, but so did its employees, who each took home a 10 percent pay raise and some hefty bonuses.
Google hasn’t yet made any money on its Chrome operating system and it didn’t even meet its goal of shipping a commercial version of the OS this year. But it did hand out thousands of test machines that boot directly into the Chrome browser without any other user interface.

Chrome is part of Google’s strategy to encourage cloud computing and Web-based apps rather than relying on a traditional computer operating system like Windows and Macintosh. Although Chrome machines are very different from iPads, they both indicate that the era of traditional PCs may be winding down in favor of lighter, thinner and more energy-efficient devices that use the enormous power of the Internet to make up for a bit less horsepower on the device. Don’t expect to see the PC disappear any time soon, but as Internet connectivity becomes more ubiquitous, we are starting to see devices that rely more on the power of the Internet, not just for connectivity but for software and computing power as well.

Microsoft didn’t make much news this year on the PC front, though it did sell 240 million copies of Windows 7 since it was released in late 2009. The most exciting news from Microsoft was in gaming with the release of the Kinect controller for Xbox. Using motion sensors and both speech and face recognition, Kinect isn’t just changing how people play games but also may eventually affect the way we interact with machines.

This was a big year for Facebook, culminating with Time magazine’s choice of 26-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as its Person of the Year. Another highlight in 2010 was that Facebook passed the 500 million member mark. But it wasn’t all good news for Facebook. Earlier in the year it faced a privacy fiasco after introducing “Instant Personalization,” which reignited concerns that the site encourages people to give up too much information.

The negative reaction caught some people at Facebook by surprise and, in an interview in May, Zuckerberg told me that the criticism convinced him that “people want simpler controls over how they share information on Facebook.” Facebook rolled out some more controls, but I’d hardly call them simple. We’re going to hear a lot more about Facebook privacy concerns in 2011, not just from privacy advocates and consumers but also from lawmakers and regulators.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was a runner-up for Time’s most important Person of the Year. Whether he’s a hero or a villain is in the eye of the beholder. But by facilitating the unauthorized publication of thousands of secret government documents, WikiLeaks has already had an enormous long-term impact the way the United States and most other governments conduct business going forward.

Ironically, WikiLeaks may be the crowning achievement of the U.S. Defense Department’s original goal to create an Internet protected from centralized control. When the precursor to the Internet was created back in the 1960s, it was built as a decentralized network, in part, to keep the Soviets and other powers from being able to disrupt traffic by knocking out a central server.

While it’s not clear if the U.S. would have the legal authority to knock WikiLeaks offline, it can’t do that because Assange’s supporters now have a redundant network of servers around the world to assure that the data remains available, regardless of what authorities try to do.

And that touches on a central theme of 2010. It was a year of disruptive technology.

This post is adapted from a column Larry Magid wrote for the San Jose Mercury News. Disclosure: Larry is co-director of ConnectSafely.org which receives financial support from Google and Facebook. He is also founder of SafeKids.com.

This is hysterical

Track Santa via NORAD

Video of Santa’s 2009 Journey

Despite what some politicians and pundits are saying, the FCC’s vote on net neutrality is neither a government takeover of the Internet nor a complete sell-out to the telecommunications industry. Like President Obama who appointed him, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is a pragmatist who fashioned a compromise that doesn’t go nearly as far as some would like while providing some protections for consumers and businesses against broadband providers discriminating for or against certain types of Internet traffic.

Immediate Republican Opposition

Net neutrality advocates ought to be able to find something they like considering that moments after the vote, Republican leaders, including incoming speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) condemned the vote while, according to Politico, Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the incoming chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, announced plans to bring all five commissioners before his committee to discuss net neutrality at “the first hearing out of the box” next year. Republican Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) reportedly warned the Senate that the Obama administration is on the verge of nationalizing the Internet

Commissioners Disagree

Prior to the vote, Republican FCC Commissioner, Robert McDowell, in reference to a major astronomical event that took place earlier, said “not only is today the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, but it marks one of the darkest days in recent FCC history.” He added, “to say that today’s rules don’t regulate the Internet is like saying that regulating highway on-ramps, off-ramps, and its pavement doesn’t equate to regulating the highways themselves.”

Even though he felt it didn’t go far enough, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat, reluctantly voted in favor of the ruling saying he “would have preferred a general ban to discourage broadband providers from engaging in “pay for priority”–prioritizing the traffic of those with deep pockets while consigning the rest of us to a slower, second-class Internet.” He also said “we should have done more to strip loopholes from the definition of ‘broadband Internet access service’ to prevent companies falsely claiming they are not broadband companies from slipping through. He also expressed disappointment about “something less than a bright-line nondiscrimination rule, keeping ‘reasonable network management’ within bounds, and the substitution of monitoring for the certainty of enforcement in too many areas.”

Copps pointed to what he called “the many improvements to the Order we achieved,” including his conclusion that “pay for priority” arrangements “would generally violate our ‘no unreasonable discrimination’ rule. He said that network neutrality supporters were able to “change the text of the definition of ‘broadband Internet access service’ to close a loophole that, while protecting residential customers, would have jeopardized the open Internet rights of small businesses, educational institutions and libraries.” He also praised the ruling’s expansion of transparency requirements “to give consumers the information they need to make an informed choice by requiring disclosure on the broadband provider’s website and also at the point of sale.”

Copps is one of many critics upset that the rules are not as strong on the mobile side as they are for the fixed Internet. “There is one Internet, he said, “which should remain open for consumers and innovators alike, although it may be accessed through different technologies and services.”

Health Care-like Progress

Just as with the health care bill, there were people on both sides who are unhappy with the final outcome because it either didn’t go far enough or went much too far. Personally, I agree with my Congresswoman, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Palo Alto) who expressed concern “that the FCC missed an opportunity today to set out strong rules of the road” and that “the order will allow loopholes for internet service providers to carve up the Internet into fast lanes and slow lanes to serve their private purposes, not the best interests of consumers.” But like Eshoo, I agree that “something is better than nothing.”

Just because the extremes disagree doesn’t mean that what the FCC came up with was correct, but it does mean that some progress, however, tepid, was made.

Facebook will employ face recognition software to make tagging easier (Credit: Facebook)

Just a few hours after Time magazine anointed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “Person of the Year,” Zuckerberg’s company announced yet another new service that will attempt to recognize pictures of your friends based on their facial characteristics.

Starting next week, Facebook will start using face recognition technology to assist its users in tagging pictures of friends.

Privacy Remains the Same

Facebook officials told me that the new service will not change the privacy settings related to tagging — users will still get a notice if they are tagged and can remove the tag of any photos. Also, users continue to have control over who tags them.

Another comforting fact about the new tagging service is that it’s not automatic. When you upload an album, Facebook will attempt to recognize the people in it. If it finds what it thinks is a match it will ask you to confirm. If you do nothing, the photo won’t be tagged.

As has long been the case with photos, you will only be able to tag people you are friends with and, presumably to improve accuracy, Facebook will only compare the pictures against a relatively small sub-set of your friends — perhaps as few as the 30 people you communicate with most often, which, according to computer scientists who study face recognition, can improve the accuracy.

Facebook will also be allowing users to opt-out of having their name suggested to friends during the photo tagging process. If you disable “Suggest photos of me to friends,” your name will “no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually,” according to the Facebook blog.

From a privacy standpoint this move should have little impact but it is yet one more example of how Facebook is encouraging people to share information, including photos

Hard to Do

Face recognition remain hard to do said Erick Learned-Miller, an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts whose research includes “machine learning” and “computer vision. And it’s especially difficult if you’re using a very large database. “The larger the number of people you are trying to identify, the more difficult the problem” he said in an interview.

“Up to now the reliability of face recognition is not very good,” he said. “if you could be right more than half the time that would be very very good.”

Learned-Miller calls Facebook’s plan to allow the user to confirm whether the photograph is accurately identified “makes a lot of sense,” referring to the process as a “human in the loop method where you don’t commit to a particular decision but you try to use the computer as a screen step that improves your own efficiency.”

It also helps that Facebook can take advantage of previous tagging. If a person has been tagged in multiple photographs, that improves the chances of it working, according to computer scientists I spoke with.

Rolling Out Gradually

Facebook will roll out the service to a small number of users next week and expand from there. It will initially only be available in the United States.

This announcement follows one in September when Facebook announced group tagging, an improved photo viewer and higher-resolution images. More than 100 million photos are uploaded daily, according to Facebook officials.

Larry Magid is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from several technology companies including Facebook.

I agree with Time’s selection of Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year.

With a membership approaching 600 million, there is no denying that Zuckerberg has — by some measures — direct influence on more lives than most of the world leaders. But that’s only a small part of what makes him an important world figure. He’s changing the way people think about relationships and, most important, how we organize and share the information and images that are the core of our lives.

Zuckerberg isn’t just the founder and CEO of an influential company; he’s also the architect of the notion that sharing information among a wide group of people can actually be beneficial. Like it or hate it, but Zuckerberg’s passion to get people to be at least semi-public with their name, photo, school and work place is an important part of his ideology. He wants people to be findable and truly believes that people’s lives with be enhanced if they use the Internet to interact with those they care about. Obviously, a lot of people agree. Just about everyone I know — even people who rail against Facebook’s privacy policies –is now on Facebook.

Growing Up and Evolving

As someone who has observed and interviewed Zuckerberg over the years, I can also say that he too is evolving. When I met him a few years ago, I found him not only shy but awkward and off-putting, but over the past few months I’ve seen a different Zuckerberg emerge. With a couple of notable exceptions, I’ve found him to be relaxed, direct and often funny. The guy who Leslie Stahl interviewed a couple of Sundays ago on 60 Minutes is the real Mark Zuckerberg — not the one depicted by Aaron Sorkin in The Social Network.

Sharing Not Necessarily Dangerous

The most controversial aspect of Zuckerberg is the way Facebook treats personal information, but encouraging people to share isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As someone who’s been involved in online safety since almost since the term was coined, I’ve put a lot of thought over the years about what information people ought to share and who they should share it with. There was a time when most of us in the online safety world believed that we — and especially children — should keep our personal lives personal and avoid going online to share where we live, where we go to school and what we look like. But Zuckerberg changed that by encouraging people to do just that. And it turns out, according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center, that sharing personal information isn’t necessarily dangerous, even for adolescents.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should share everything with everyone but, to his credit, Zuckerberg did build tools into Facebook that allow people to limit access to most of what they post. Some have criticized Facebook about the complexity of those tools and because users have to opt-out of some of some sharing, but at least the tools are there.

Zuckerberg didn’t just change the way we socialize. He changed the way many people do business (companies using Facebook to reach out to consumers) and has even influenced the way we evaluate and pick our elected leaders. And he’s not stopping. Even as I write, engineers at Facebook are working on new ways to get people to share information and photos. But Facebook isn’t all technology. In an interview a few months ago, Zuckerberg talked about how human interactions — people tagging and friending each other — can be more powerful than algorithms when it comes to bringing people together.

I don’t know if Facebook will even be around 10 years from now, but I do know that social networking — however we define it — will have an even bigger impact on our lives.
Larry Magid is co-author of A Parents’ Guide to Facebook (a free 34 page booklet) and co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from several technology companies including Facebook.

Google’s Cr-48 Chrome Notebook is for testing purposes only (Photo credit: Google)

In my long career as a technology journalist, I’ve reviewed many computers and, typically, when I review a new machine, I give myself at least a full day to set it up, install all my software and put it through its paces. It takes even longer if I’m using a machine with an operating system that I’ve never used before.

But I didn’t need anything close to a full day to configure and evaluate the Cr-48 running Google’s brand new Chrome operating system. After taking it out of the box, it took me less than three minutes to have the machine running and fully configured. That’s because, unlike traditional operating systems, the Chrome OS is Web-based, and since I already have a Google account and have used Google’s Chrome browser on my PC, there was almost nothing to configure.

The “out of box” experience consists of the following steps:

1. Open the box and take the machine out
2. Insert the battery
3. Open the lid and wait maybe 1 or 2 seconds
4. Select your language (i.e. English) and your WiFi network

5. Type in your Google account name (typically Gmail address) and password

6. Start using the web or Chrome apps

Experience the Same as Using Chrome on a PC or Mac

Because I use Chrome on my Windows machine and have already synced it to my Google account, there was nothing else to do. All of my bookmarks were there and even the Chrome extensions I use on my PC (Xmarks and Lastpass) were already installed and configured. From then on, my experience using the Chrome OS was nearly the same as my experience using it on my PC, so if you want to check out the user interface for the Chrome OS, just download the Chrome browser and you’re all set.

Chrome Apps

This column was written on the new machine using the Google Docs and Spreadsheets web app which has been available from Google that’s been available on the Web for quite some time.

Whether you have the Chrome OS or are just using Chrome on your PC or Mac, there is now a Chrome Web Store where you can find lots of free or paid applications that work within the browser regardless of whether you’re using it on the Chrome laptop or a PC. There includes games, productivity products, news applications (for New York Times and The Huffington Post, among others) and utility programs. I downloaded the Picnik Photo Editor, which enabled me to use the Chrome laptop to edit photos stored in my Picasa web album. It worked well, but I can’t figure out if it’s possible to transfer a photo from a digital camera to the device. Cell phone photos, of course, can be transferred via email or the Web.

Hardware and Bootup

I’m not going to spend a lot of time describing the hardware because the machine Google sent me (called the Cr-48) will never be available to the general public. Google commissioned an estimated 60,000 of these laptops which look a lot like the old black Macbooks. It has an excellent keyboard and oversized track pad which, like the Mac, is one giant button. You tap with two fingers to “right click” and drag two fingers to scroll up or down.

From a power-off cold start it takes 15 seconds for the machine to boot up. If you shut the lid, it goes into a sleep mode and wakes up less than a second after you raise the lid. Google says you get eight hours on a single charge and eight days in standby mode. I didn’t test out the battery life but it does seem to be running for a long time since I last charged it.

The device has both WiFi and 3G networking. The 3G, at least on the test machine, works only on the Verizon network. Verizon is offering 100 megabytes of free data per month and a number of other plans starting at $9.99 a day for unlimited use. That free 100 MB may seem like a generous offer but if you use it for more than a couple of hours, you’re likely to speed through it.

Both the keyboard and trackpad on the Google reference machine are excellent. I don’t know what the production machines will look like but, as a touch typist, I’m glad to have a full-sized keyboard on my test machine. What is odd, however, is that there is no caps lock key. Instead there’s a search key which, great surprise, lets you quickly execute a Google search.

The Chrome notebook seemed a bit sluggish to me so I compared it to my Lenovo X300 notebook that runs Windows 7 but has a far more powerful Intel processor. While the Chrome device boots and comes out of sleep mode a lot faster, the Lenovo is noticeably faster loading web pages even though both machines are connected to the same WiFi network.

Apply to Get Your Own Cr-48

Google is making these machines available to reviewers and selected people from companies, non-profits, and government agencies along with some consumers who can apply for the pilot program

Bottom Line

While I’m pleased to see an alternative to Mac and Windows notebooks and agree that many users will probably be happy with a device that can just access the Web and Web apps, I’m not convinced that the Chrome OS will take the world by storm. Unlike my first experiences with the Apple iPad, I’m not even close to falling in love with this new device. It’s useful, but it’s not fun and it’s not able to run many of the applications I depend on. Over time, there will be Web Apps to replace most of the Windows and Mac apps that many of us use, but I’m not sure that a web browser is necessarily the best place to run those apps. Still, hats off to Google for putting effort into this and making thousands of machines available for testing. Also, it’s important to point out that the Chrome OS is still in testing mode. I’m hoping that the commercially available machines from Samsung and Acer will be faster and that the operating system and Chrome browser will be a bit more mature when they finally ship mid-2011.