As we wrote about earlier this week, Klout has reworked its algorithms, and your scores have changed. Some have gone up, some down. Despite claiming more transparency with their algorithms, they are still mostly opaque and mysterious. As one of our readers commented, "Klout just pulled a Netflix, taking trust off the table."

So while they tinker with their code, you might want to explore other alternatives that can help you measure your social media effectiveness. We have come up with 17 different services, some free, some fairly expensive. I have tried most of them and will give you my impressions so you can have a head start with your own explorations.

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Before I run through the services, let's discuss eight different issues with social media metrics and how the ideal metric should be constructed.

There is no single number that can really be universally useful. It isn't like wining the World Series, where you have to score more runs by the end of the game. There are a variety of actions that you want to examine, and you can win in one area and be off elsewhere. My impression is that we place too much emphasis on the final number without really understanding the reasons for its calculation, as the recent changes in Klout have shown.

You are also measuring two grossly different activities: giving and taking. This is more than just what you post and what you consume, and there are many subtleties to both. Just because you have tons of followers and friends doesn't mean that you listen to any of them, nor they listen to you. And some of us, such as myself, are more givers (in that we are focused on outbound actions) than takers (collecting information from our networks). Or vice versa. The ideal social media metric should understand both directions and make appropriate adjustments.

How transparent is their algorithm, really? By that I mean can you understand how they get the results that you see, and does the scoring make sense to you? Of course, one issue is having something so transparent that the service can be easily gamed or fooled.

Can you examine any time-series? Klout has time series data but doesn't label its axes very well, which can be very annoying. The others don't have as much here as I would like. Sometimes you can understand the algorithms better if you can see how they track you over time.

How much does the service care if your content is original vs. copied? If you most of your Tweets are retweeted content, is that as good as someone who comes up with original thoughts? The ideal metric should take this into account, and most of them have focused in this area, generally because it is easier to measure than some other things.

How many different social networks should be scanned to derive your total score, and how should they be weighed? Klout has done a decent job of expanding their sources beyond Facebook and Twitter, but some of the other services haven't gotten much beyond these two networks yet. Obviously, the wider the reach the better the view into how you are interacting across many networks.

Does the tool provide qualitative suggestions in addition to just scores? The ideal metric should provide insight and suggestions for how to improve your engagement and increase your value to your chosen community. Some of them have overly general suggestions that don't really tell you what you really need to do to improve your use of social media.

Does your audience really, really like you? Often called sentiment analysis, it isn't enough just to retweet your bon mots but approve of your point of view. There are tools that are beginning to measure this too.



So what alternatives to Klout are out there, and are any of them any better at capturing what you should be doing better for your social media activities?

Twitter-only metrics
Twitter Score gives you a single score (I got a 2 out of 10, which seems somewhat low).
TwitterGrader is another service that gives you a single simple score. I don't think the score is very meaningful: I got 97.5 out of 100, and I know I am not that good.
Tweetlevel was built by the Edelman PR firm and it gives some good explanations of its assessments and recommendations, although they could be more fine-grained. It tries to provide historical information but there is no way to manipulate the charts timelines.
Tweetreach shows who retweeted you and some summary stats, and is useful to search across trending topic areas and not just specific Twitter accounts.
TeraMetric Optimizer for Twitter. This gives you qualitative recommendations on what and how to Tweet. It costs $99/month and has a free trial but requires your credit card info up front.

Facebook-only metrics
Booshaka looks at top contributors to your Facebook page

Google-owned metrics
Google has been buying up lots of companies this year, and there are probably others that I missed that are in this space. Here are two important ones:
SocialGrapple has paid accounts starting at $6 a month and going up to $125 a month and is used for really deep dives into Twitter.
Postrank. We have written extensively about them here, which is used to analyze RSS feeds.

Multiple site focus
PeerIndex is probably the closest competitor to Klout and examines three areas: Activity, Authority, and Audience. They cover multiple sites but are slow to update their scores and don't have much in the way of time-series data.
Proliphiq which we wrote about earlier in the month has a wide array of measurements and explanations, trending hot topics and more.
Twitalyzer shows Klout and Peerindex values and costs $5 a month.
How Sociable is more a general search tool across many sites, and it isn't very accurate since it doesn't tie the search to a particular Twitter username.
Empire Avenue has lots of games and points for various activities, but underneath all this frilly stuff is some interesting analysis of multiple social network sites.


Sentiment Analysis tools
We wrote about Viralheat's sentiment analysis for Facebook and Twitter here.
mBlast mPact can monitor multiple networks and provide some sentiment analysis.
Kred.ly is still in limited beta but offers some promise in terms of looking at sentiment for Twitter initially.
Traackr is another sentiment analyzer and at $500 a month is one of the more expensive tools in this list.

Really, all of these tools are somewhat flawed, and we are just beginning to see some consolidation and improvements, such as what Klout is trying to do. And certainly, Google will help here, as they have purchased two companies this year alone in this space. If any of these tools can help improve your social media methods and increase your influence, then stick with what works and what will motivate you to become a better participant in this genre.

Discuss

One of the most frequently asked (and smartest) questions about the supposedly forthcoming Apple television is: Why does it need to be an actual TV set? Why can’t it just be an accessory like today’s $99 Apple TV thing?
That line of thinking generally goes like this: If the Apple TV remains an inexpensive add-on device, more people could buy it for less money, and Apple could get more users. Then, in theory, it could potentially disrupt the TV industry — the content and distribution side, that is — more effectively.
Plus, who wants to buy another new TV already? Many people just bought one within a few years to upgrade to HD. And isn’t the TV itself just a giant monitor, which Apple’s software can easily take over via an external box? (You can listen to Instapaper’s Marco Arment articulate something along these lines in his most recent podcast episode.)
That’s a fine argument, and it has been a decent way for Apple to practice its living room “hobby” so far. But here’s why I think Apple will eventually make an actual television set:
Apple sells complete experiences, not just devices.
That’s everything from the box it comes in to the status and emotion that owning and using one of its products provides.
There’s not much special about plugging an Apple TV box or Blu-ray player or game console into your HDTV, turning the TV on with one (obnoxiously complex) remote control, toggling over to the right HDMI input, and then resuming with the Apple remote.
Watching Apple TV on an off-brand display is the equivalent of running Mac OS on a Dell laptop. It works, but it’s not as magical. Apple sort-of tried this with the Mac mini — hook up your old PC monitor, keyboard, and mouse to this tiny new Mac — but I don’t think it converted as many people to the Apple brand as, say, the cool all-in-one MacBook.
Apple wants to be your primary interface.
Right now, the Apple TV box is aiming for “input 2″ on your TV — most people still reserve “input 1″ for their cable or satellite box. (Believe it or not, the average American still watches more than 5 hours of TV per day.) If you have a game console, maybe Apple TV is even input 3 or 4 — if your TV even has that many hi-def inputs. This was smart on Apple’s part, because for most TV watchers, today’s Apple TV box is still only a part-time solution.
But long-term, Apple probably wants its TV platform to be “input zero.” That is, the first thing you see when you turn your TV on. The only thing you need to watch video, make FaceTime calls, download apps, play games, and maybe even use Siri to order a pizza. The only remote control you need. The heart and soul and brain of your living room.
Importantly, the opportunity is growing for Apple — and Google, Microsoft, and others — to become the primary TV interface, as more cable companies test and deploy IP-based TV service. (Meanwhile, the first Google TV device already aimed for “input 1″ and flopped. But it had a bunch of problems, not just being too early to market.)
Apple sells tightly integrated software, hardware, and services.
Let’s say Apple wants to enable FaceTime calls and Siri voice controls in the living room. Is it going to sell you an iSight camera/mic add-on to stick on top of your Vizio and run another cord into your Apple TV box? Is it going to rely on your having another camera and mic — say, on an iPhone or iPad — handy at all times?
Or is it going to make the most gorgeous HDTV imaginable with a built-in HD camera and amazing speakers? Over the long run, my bet is on the latter. It’s not like the 27-inch iMac is even very far away from that!
Selling TVs could be the better business.
Recall that Apple makes its profits by selling hardware, not by selling apps or iTunes rentals.
It may be harder and take longer for Apple to sell 10 million television sets at $1,000+ than 10 million set-top boxes for $100. But the opportunity for Apple to generate several hundred dollars in gross profit per device is greater than it is on the existing Apple TV, where profits are probably in the tens of dollars per device. (And competitors like Roku are driving market prices down.)
So far, the Apple TV set-top box is not enough of a business for Apple to even break it out as its own category. But selling high-end televisions could potentially become a multi-billion-dollar business for Apple.
Don’t expect anything crazy.
Expectations seem to be insanely high for this device, and they shouldn’t be. Apple rarely leapfrogs — it usually just makes great products using the Apple formula.
The iPod wasn’t actually that different of a concept than existing hard drive-based MP3 players — it just had a novel and simple user interface (the wheel), better software, a neat name, and Apple’s intangible cool-factor. The iPhone, yes, was a complete leapfrog. But the iPad mostly applied Apple’s formula to the tablet format that had existed for years.
An Apple television may not look or work that much different than today’s TVs. (Then again, it might — I have no idea.) But Apple’s combination of hardware design, software and platform depth, services like iCloud, a novel user interface like Siri, and the overall Apple experience could set it apart from today’s TVs.
And that’s what’s so attractive about the idea — and why I think Apple will eventually make an actual television, and not just more set-top boxes.
Previously: Here’s how Apple could finally put the “TV” in Apple TV

Anything that can be measured can be optimized, and sometimes that optimization can lead to competitive advantage in inefficient markets. That's the lesson of the book and popular new movie Moneyball, about the Oakland A's baseball team and its use of statistics to overcome the limitations of its budget. It's a seductive proposition.

What if everything were run like that, though? What if measurement and optimization were the fundamental strategic approach brought to bear on all kinds of endeavors? That may be exactly what's happening with the rise of what's called The Internet of Things, the emerging network of web connected streets, buildings, sensors, objects and devices expected to dominate the Internet in coming decades. But the same approach is also being taken with regard to some of our most fundamental human activities: growing up, healing our bodies and spending time alone. Three examples in particular help shed some light on the good sides and the bad sides of a Web that would make all things measurable and subject to optimization.

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Becoming Human

By the time a child enters school, experts say there are about 1,000 basic words that they need to know as a foundation to maximize their reading comprehension and intellectual growth. Studies show that children from more marginal social-economic backgrounds enter school already in a vocabulary deficit relative to others.

In order to optimize the preparedness that children bring with them into school, a new class of software is becoming available to parents that combines educational play with analytics reports. New mobile apps aim to help children learn new skills and report their measured progress to parents behind the scenes.

Two recent entrants into this space are Stickery, which this month announced funding from Google Ventures, and Footsteps2Brilliance, an iPad app that has already reported substantial increase in reading comprehension by pre-schoolers.

Stickery is lead by a team with extensive backgrounds in gaming, but Footsteps2Brilliance is already performing pilot tests of its more staid software for the iPad and getting good results. One pilot test of the call-and-response, assisted reading iPad app with pre-schoolers reportedly increased reading comprehension scores from 58.5 percent to 76.4 percent.

Stickery aims to offer analytics to parents as well. The company isn't ready to show off what it's doing, but in a world full of games - the Stickery says the popularity of "babysitting apps" represents a huge missed opportunity.

Not everyone sees it like this, though. In a recent write-up of the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, in the heart of Silicon Valley but dedicated to avoiding technology's influence over children, a contrary perspective was articulated vehemently.

"The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that's ridiculous," Alan Eagle of Google's Executive Communications team told the New York Times.

Critics of this kind of approach have also raised concerns regarding lost connection to nature, to unstructured free exploration and creativity and to the parts of life that cannot ever be measured but that warrant substantial investment for the good of a whole child and adult.

It's hard to know how many of these critiques are really new, though, and how many of them are timeless, ideological and at risk of missing out on progress through tools. It would probably be just as big a mistake to reject all measured, technology driven education as it would be to presume that technology was sufficient for the whole of a person's education.

Heal Thyself

Insurance actuaries were some of the first people put out of work by computers. Where money and well-being come together has always been a place where numbers people have sought to measure and optimize. Historically, there's been an emphasis on mitigating risks. Today, preventative wellness programs are growing in popularity when it comes to minimizing health problems and insurance claims.

Where the rubber hits the road - in hospitals - numbers are playing an ever greater role as well.

Health care institutions are increasingly interested in adopting health care performance metric dashboards, industry watchers say.

In a recent article on HealthDataManagement.com, a survey of different institutions' use of health data dashboards offered a broad look into the control room experience of modern hospitals and other health related institutions. It's "a wave everybody is jumping on," on interviewee said.

Doctors, nurses and administrators are widely adopting real-time data dashboards from companies like McKesson, CareFX and Tableau. These dashboards integrate streams of information and alerts from multiple different data sources, making the information easy to quickly visualize.

Who doesn't love dashboards? Medical institutions use them to measure and optimize things like:
How long each doctor's patients are staying in the hospital and what percentage of them come back within 30 days.
Which hospital office workers can get the most patients processed in through the door and with the most complete initial information. Also, which of them can get the most money out of patients on their way out the door. "Bill me," is not a phrase hospitals like to hear because medical debts are so often ignored.
Doctors report what medications they use in each procedure they perform, but those reports don't always match up with a hospital's inventory. Keeping an eye on both enables institutions to monitor for anomalous use of medications in order to maximize treatment efficacy and doctor accountability.

"Notice that none of those use studies focus on what health dashboards are supposed to focus on, health," says enterprise technology journalist Dana Blankenhorn. "Only $$$."

Indeed, optimization presumes a particular party's interests are being optimized for and while some critics might see in the aforementioned children's education app analytics something other than the best interest of children being served - the matter of measuring medical metrics seems even riskier for the interests of patients.

There's no reason why accountability, efficiency and institutional self-awareness have to be bad things from a patients' perspective though. To presume so seems superficial to me.

Solitude no More

What could be more archetypal a solitary action than curling up with a good book? Now that our books are backlit, of course, things are different.

New apps measure adult reading, too, now. Yesterday Alicia Eler wrote the first coverage of a new Betaworks company called Findings, which lets you import your Amazon Kindle annotations and share them in a stream with friends. Once the highlights of what you've read are captured in data form and published to the web, there's a whole world of recommendations, popularity contests and more than can be performed.

The forthcoming startup Hypothes.is brings that kind of paradigm to the whole web and beyond. It's team of Web-scale heavy hitters want to create a "peer review layer for the internet" complete with reputation scores and a rich set of feedback from readers about everything.

There's no doubt that such measurements could deliver some very real value - but what about the solitary relationship between a reader and an author's work? What about unaccountable, uncounted free and independent thought about the things we read? Reading has worked very well for a long time without being subject to monitoring, measurement and automatic recommendations.

Some people, many people, are likely to enjoy the value that a layer of quantification put over or beside their reading experience can offer.

None of these instances of the increasing measurement of life seem clearly and unconditionally good or bad. They have incredible potential but also seem to post some risk of alienation, of coldness, of dehumanization and of rendering our experiences less complete than we need them to be in order to be completely human ourselves.

Hopefully we can maximize the upside of this paradigm while guarding against its dangers.

Discuss

Things are unquestionably messy for Netflix right now. It is losing subscribers. It is still in clean-up mode after a PR disaster. Its stock price is getting hammered. Is is making an expensive bet to grow overseas.
But despite all of this, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ master plan — to eventually kill the DVD and push his customers and Hollywood toward streaming video — is working.

Netflix said in its earnings Q3 report today that “only 7% of new streaming subscribers also currently sign up for DVD.” (Netflix doesn’t specify what percent of new subscribers are signing up for DVD-only plans, but I assume it’s very small.)
I have also broken down Netflix’s 23.8 million, end-of-Q3, U.S. subscribers by type. While 90% are streaming subscribers of some sort, only 58% are DVD subscribers of some sort. And it’s only been a few months since the big switch.
During the current quarter, the percentages will likely change further. Netflix is predicting a much sharper drop in its DVD subscriber base during Q4 (about 3 million, or ~20%) than its streaming base (about 700,000, or 3%).
“As of today, less than half of our streaming subscribers also subscribe to our DVD service, and we expect that number to continue to fall, given that only 7% of new streaming subscribers also currently sign up for DVD,” Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders (PDF).
Hastings may have moved too fast, and Netflix may have scared its loyal customers with price increases and that whole “Qwikster” thing. But the big-picture shift seems to be working. Now it’s just going to take a while to clean everything up.
Related: 10 things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster

This week the Diaspora Project put its hand out to ask supporters for "$25 or whatever they can spare" to keep the project going. Raising money is not a particularly effective use of developer time. Instead of seeking funds from the userbase, the Diaspora folks should be knocking on Mozilla's door instead – and Mozilla ought to answer.

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Last week, Mozilla issued its financial report for 2010. There's a huge lag in Mozilla's financial reports, so we don't have much visibility into how Mozilla is doing in 2011. But if we assume it's on-par with 2011, Mozilla is not cash-poor.

Mozilla Can Afford It

Diaspora, on the other hand, is out of Kickstarter cash – and not surprisingly, given that $200,000 is very little money to run a shop with four developers. Mozilla could easily afford to kick in five times that on an annual basis, and still be sitting pretty.

It's not unheard-of for Mozilla to donate to other non-profit open source projects. For example, they've donated tens of thousands of dollars to the GNOME Foundation for accessibility work. (Accessibility being features that benefit users that have physical limitations that make computers more difficult to use.)

Alignment

While Mozilla hasn't shelled out any seven-figure contributions that I'm aware of, it wouldn't be a bad idea for Mozilla to promote a social network that fits well with its goals for the open Web.

Mozilla's Manifesto calls for the Internet to remain "open and accessible," promotes open data formats, open source and says that "individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet."

Diaspora fits very well with the Mozilla Manifesto. Its distributed nature means that anyone can host a Diaspora pod. They can opt to connect to other Diaspora pods, or just host private pods with an exclusive user base. Users control their data, and will eventually have the ability to export data to another Diaspora instance.

It's also open source, and the project has gained a fairly impressive contributor base in the short time Diaspora has been in development.

Alternative to Closed Social Networks

On the other hand, the dominant existing social networks are not well-aligned with the Mozilla mission. For a really rich Internet, Mozilla needs to look beyond the browser.

Diaspora may never overtake Facebook, but at a minimum, it can at least provide a solid alternative to proprietary walled garden social networks. A strong showing for Diaspora would also nudge Facebook, Google, and others towards more user-friendly policies.

Avoid Distractions

As the Mozilla folks are aware, a quest for a business model can be a hefty distraction from the job of creating a compelling project. Consider, for example, the gear-grinding that went on with Mozilla Messaging.

Mozilla tried to split out Thunderbird as a separate self-sustaining project. Eventually, it folded Messaging back into the main foundation because it couldn't find a business model that would sustain it. Search works well (right now) for Firefox, but it just didn't fit with Thunderbird.

But Mozilla continues to fund Thunderbird because having an open mailer is important. I'd argue that having an open competitor to Facebook is every bit as important.

The Diaspora guys have their plates full managing the project. Funding from Mozilla would let them focus on that rather than trying to raise funds.

Guidance

Another reason, in fact a primary reason, that I think that Mozilla should invest in Diaspora? It's an opportunity for an established project to advise an upstart.

I'm impressed by the success of Diaspora so far, but that doesn't mean that the project hasn't made mistakes. The feedback I'm seeing is that they should have prioritized getting more users into Dispora before asking for more money. The founders told me they have about 500,000 people waiting to get in – that's a problem.

Mozilla could also help Diaspora scale as a project, and deal with issues that they're likely to run into with regards to security, translation and so on. The Moz folks have dealt with all this stuff before.

The Diaspora project got a lot of attention very quickly. That means that the pressure is on to perform, very quickly. Having Mozilla as an older sibling to help Diaspora along would be a very good thing. I'm not saying the Moz folks have never made mistakes, but they do tend to learn from them. Working closely with Mozilla would also give Diaspora additional credibility.

Problems

I'm glossing over a lot of details here. For example, I suspect that Diaspora would need to be an official non-profit before Mozilla could donate a significant sum of money to the project. The Diaspora folks should probably look to the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) or Software in the Public Interest (SPI) as an umbrella organization rather than trying to set up their own.

Diaspora isn't the only open source social network in town. However, it's one that's managed to capture public attention (and press) better than any of the others. It would be a shame if the opportunity is lost while the founders get bogged down in fund-raising.

Discuss

About 18 months ago, I came across Lalit Pant, the brain behind the Kojo desktop learning environment, working as a volunteer math teacher at the Himiyota School in India. Lalit, like myself, is a programmer and I discovered we have similar goals: making computer-programming fun, simple and easy to learn. What I really enjoy is that Lalit has committed his time to doing this for children.

Lalit spent the first six years of his career as a software engineer in India, most of them at TCS , then in the US for about 11 years, working at a startup in Pittsburgh, and subsequently at Sterling Commerce in Dallas. Increasingly unhappy with where his life was going, and eager to apply his experiences to accomplish something more meaningful, Lalit moved back to India with his wife and children to become a teacher.

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Martin Odersky is Chairman and Chief Architect of Typesafe and creator of the open source Scala programming language; this post was co-authored by Lalit Pant, the creator of Kojo .A Shared Vision

"A little while after arriving in India I started teaching at Himjyoti school. It was a super experience; working with under-privileged but very bright girls was tremendously satisfying and rewarding," recalls Lalit. "I found I really enjoyed teaching!"

However, like me, Lalit was dissatisfied with traditional approaches to teaching math and science. He found many of the accepted methods to be dry, abstract, and counter-intuitive for many children. He explains that there were major elements missing from the education process, like interactivity, creativity, and the ability to work at your own pace. Being a math teacher who also loved computer programming, Lalit decided to create an environment where learning could be fun- so Kojo was born.

Making Math and Programming Fun

Kojo is a Scala-based learning environment in which children study mathematics using computer programming while practicing logical and creative thinking. With Kojo, students get to play with math, science, art, and music in an interactive hands-on way.

"Over the past year and a half multiple batches of girls at Himjyoti School have been learning Math with me on Kojo, each group for about 3-4 months," says Lalit. "We first focus on the core Turtle commands, skipping any formal language training. The girls get to think of Kojo as an environment where they can control a turtle. They become familiar with a few basic commands, and then they just code. They create art, they solve puzzles, they do some geometry-based sketches, they compose music. At the end of the day, they have used the computer as a tool to play with ideas, and practice logical and creative thinking. They learn about the programming language naturally."

Lalit discovered the students soon sharpen their skills and progress well beyond the turtles-only point. The enthusiasts want to start writing Kojo stories, tutorial or teaching worksheets for other students follow while using Kojo. These too are written in Scala--and results have indicated that the girls really get it! "The girls are tremendously enthusiastic about Kojo. When the summer vacation arrived they pestered me to make them Kojo CDs to take back to their villages, so that they could install and continue to use it at their village school."

When I asked why Lalit chose Scala as the programming language for Kojo, he says it's pretty simple- "Scala works well because it's a language with a low entry floor for beginners and a high ceiling for students to grow." In practice, kids find it easy to just start programming in Scala and use only the features they need. Since beginners start with a very small and simple subset of the language and progress to a level of desired proficiency, there's a lot of room for them to go as far as they like.

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of watching Scala gain traction on a broad scale--from social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, increased adoption in the financial services sector, and even NASA utilizing Scala's power as they deploy rockets into space. But for Lalit and me, education is where it all begins. When we enable children to program naturally, embracing writing code with enthusiasm and creativity, they will grow beyond the stereotypes of dry, abstract, and intimidating programming. We strive to create the motivating environment that prepares and sharpens their minds for tomorrow's challenges, building the web frameworks and applications of the future.

Photo of Himalayan students by Steve Evans | Haridwar photo by McKay Savage

Discuss

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is what everyone expected: A small tablet, mostly for consuming media, watching video, playing games, reading Kindle e-books, browsing the web, and goofing around in apps. It is also cheaper than expected, at $199 — less than half the price of Apple’s iPad.

There are some nice touches, like the “Silk” web browser, which does some of the page-crunching in the cloud, so web pages should theoretically load faster. And the software actually looks decent. Amazon isn’t screwing around.

So: How big of a threat is the Kindle Fire to the iPad?

I don’t see the Kindle Fire significantly disrupting Apple’s iPad business. I think both devices will sell well, and can easily coexist. I don’t think Apple will have any trouble finding iPad buyers, and I think the $199 price tag will attract many people to the Kindle Fire.

For now, the Kindle Fire isn’t as useful of a device — it’s a simple entertainment pad, whereas the iPad is already shaping up as the PC of the future. They will probably attract different buyers, and right now, the market is so small and nascent that there is easily room for both of them. Some people may buy a Kindle Fire instead of an iPad, but many others will want the richer iPad experience, and some may buy both and use them for different things.

Looking forward, we’ll have to see how much Amazon can do with the Kindle Fire software platform — both the OS and app ecosystem — and how tablet pricing shakes out.

My hunch is that Apple will remain well ahead of Amazon in software, hardware, and ecosystem, and therefore the iPad will continue to be the “premium” tablet indefinitely. Amazon may help force Apple to lower entry-level iPad prices, and Apple may even have to make a smaller iPad someday. But Amazon is not likely to take over Apple’s spot at the top of the tablet market.

Bottom line: The Kindle Fire isn’t much of an iPad threat yet. The real trouble will be for companies like Barnes & Noble, RIM, and Samsung, which are trying to sell 7-inch tablets that either cost considerably more or have poorer content and apps ecosystems.

Also: 500 days with the iPad

Remember the last time when an Internet site tried to be all things to all people, limit the way that they accessed their content, and tried to make themselves into the default go-to platform for social networking? Yes, Facebook has aspirations to become the new AOL.

This week's F8 announcements are certainly exciting for Facebook, extending the site into just about every nook and cranny of our lives. But here's the rub: it could be going too far. Do we want to really be that social? It is ironic that the service is developed by the most anti-social beings on the planet, those nerds that code by night, stay home by day, and whose preferred method of communications is typing, not talking f2f (face to face, if you have to ask).

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So would you rather have your social networking as a platform, FaaP as it were, where it is part of the warp and weft of your Internet experience, baked into everything that you do? (Okay, enough metaphors.) For those over-sharers that post 34 status updates each hour, yes, yes, and more yes. But for the rest of us, who want some balance in our lives, the choice is to layer social networking on top of our existing Internet pathways that have been well worn into our computers. This "front end" social networking is what Microsoft and Google and the rest of the vendors are counting on, with Google+ most notably but with hundreds of others from Cisco's Quad to Salesforce Chatter to IBM's Connections trying to almost desperately add that social context to their products. Soon, your IT staff will have a social network to share amongst them tips on how to best configure their firewalls, and so forth. (Note to potential investors: I have the term sheet almost finished.)

When I stated using Google+, I noticed that all of my Picasa photo albums were shared with my peeps. Now, many of the photos in there aren't all that exciting, such as screenshots that I took for many of the articles that I have written. But some of them are personal and private, and I raced around clicking here and there to ensure that they would stay that way. That was an early consequence of over-sharing for me. And there are going to be plenty more as Facebook turns on this new feature and that. They never have been very respectful of my - or your - privacy. And perhaps all these complaints are just sour grapes; I still have fewer friends than my 20-something daughter, and probably always will. (She was and still is one of the Popular Kids. I was and still am a nerd.) But at least now I don't feel as bad about it.

So the choice is clear: login to Facebook and be more open about your life's choices. Or get left behind with the non-social Internet and become an online hermit. I want more choices; it shouldn't have to be as binary as that. It seems like that's where we are now.

But if enough of us opt out, Facebook could become like AOL in a few years: an overgrown walled garden that no one wants to visit. Instead of a quaint anachronism of people who still use dial-up modems and like using a 90's-era Webmail service, we'll have those over-social folks that spend their days with their updates on Farmville.

Discuss

standardiz

Usain Bolt’s wonderful run in the Olympic 200-meter sprint reminds us that the normal distribution — the familiar bell curve beloved by economists and statisticians — can be wildly inappropriate when analyzing extremely selected samples

A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers.

Amazing indepth analysis of the world's biggest blog.