Steve Jobs personally hates me. Specifically, he goes out of his way to spite me by doing things like writing the tethering code on the iPhone. Seriously. Look it up on Wikipedia. What Steve Jobs (nor anyone that added 3G to a netbook) thought about was how these changes impact the wild and exciting world of NAC.

Take a peek at http://tek-tips.nethawk.net/blog/steve-jobs-hates-me where yours truly took a stab at guest blogging to prove this point.

This year, I attended O’Reilly’s Velocity conference in San Jose. I was there to present on web monitoring, and we’d just released Complete Web Monitoring, but conference organizer Jessie Robbins had a different idea. On short notice, he asked me to present something before the lunchtime break. I slapped together a presentation based on a Bitcurrent post written a while back.

Dr. Neil Gunther of Performance Dynamics, who was attending the event, approached me after the presentation. He had a number of questions about the math (or pseudo-math) in the slides, and offered to try to work out something less nonsensical than what I’d presented. Neil’s a rocket scientist (pretty much literally) and he’s been working in capacity and performance for decades, so he did a great job.

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Today, social networking was attacked. The two biggest networks, Twitter and Facebook, have been subjected to denial of service attacks, causing difficulty for millions of people around the world. Other sites including FriendFeed, LiveJournal, Posterous and su.pr have also experienced outages or slow response times. Social networking services have failed before, but never all at once.

While the precise causes have yet to be established, it’s clear is that today’s events have had a measurable effect on people across the globe, and the loss of multiple social networks at the same time has highlighted some serious issues and limitations

Disconnect, reconnect

One of the first things that happened is that people flooded to other mediums such as e-mail or instant messaging to discuss what was happening. [Read more]

I’ve read a few books this summer that look at non-traditional economies. Chris Anderson’s Free deals with “the future of a radical price”; Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor looks at the currency of reputation; and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody talks about the power of self-organizing systems.

Chris and Tara’s books, at their core, deal with a single concept: that a connected society has three distinct economies — money, reputation, and attention — and that businesses depend on their ability to move value between the economies. And Clay’s book shows us that these economies can emerge by themselves without formal organization.

None of these economies are new. It’s just that in an online world, we have more ways of tracking them and understanding their exchange rates. Many of today’s most interesting companies are focused on exchanging value between the three economies, giving rise to many new business opportunities and forcing us to think with a “triple bottom line” mentality.

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Apple’s increasingly restricting what consumers can do with their devices. Now those policies put the company in a battle for openness against the likes of Google.

It’s a competitive dilemma that comes from being in both the platform and the content business. And it’s one Apple should have handled better, because it’s the same mistake another company made that let Apple dominate the portable music market: Sony.

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