This is progress, although MG Siegler is right to doubt whether cable companies, many of whom are also internet service providers, would even consider such a deal.

At least HBO recognizes that the math won’t hold up against a la carte models forever.

Collin Fletcher of The Tech Block makes the solid case that the acquisition of iOS email app Mailbox by Dropbox signals the latter company’s push to build a “windowed ecosystem” on top of its core file syncing service. It’s worth reading the whole article, but I’d go a step further.

Victoria Barret of Forbes reported in October 2011 that, as Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told her in an interview, Steve Jobs called the company a “feature, not a product” when Houston rebuffed Jobs’ acquisition offer.

Steve was wrong, though. Dropbox isn’t a just product (although plenty of people pay for its core sync functionality), nor is it merely a feature (although it can be integrated into many different types of apps and services).

Dropbox is, at its most fundamental level, an infrastructure. What the Mailbox acquisition really signals is that Dropbox is confident enough in its core service that it is time to invest in ways to add value to that service. The Dropbox file storage and syncing infrastructure already undergirds the daily workflows of millions of people.

Email is the perfect product to build on that infrastructure. So is a personal music storage and player product. So is a task manager. So are innumerable other products that benefit from a powerful, reliable file synchronization mechanism that can functions flawlessly at scale.

Michael Lopp on the anachronism and true uselessness of titles:

When a company is small, everyone does a little bit of everything, so titles make no sense. My first title at Netscape was “Bitsifter”. Sure, there were some titles, but they were titles of convenience so external parties could apply their antiquated title frameworks to folks on our team during meetings. “Oh, I see, you’re the VP of Product… how very impressive.”

I give no one any respect whatsoever based on their title: they have to earn it. This can be done through genuine conversation, viable work product, or explicit demonstrations of effective leadership. There is no other way.

This is a great article, especially if you don’t know much about the history of Android. However, Adrianne Jeffries of The Verge ends her article with a silly quote from Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg. Perhaps analysts have a legitimate role to play in the consumer electronics industry, but this statement doesn’t support that thesis:

"I think Google doesn’t necessarily know what it’s going to do until Google has done it," said Gartenberg, the Gartner analyst. "I’m sure there’s going to be some experimentation here."

Google, the data-driven engineer’s paradise knows what it’s doing before it has done it. Experimentation is not, in Google’s world, akin to musical improvisation. Experiments in any setting are, if done right, rigorously planned and researched, and then executed with careful precision.

Google will heed the data, and the market climate, and the reaction to rumors about a commingled Android/Chrome OS, and myriad other factors. And they will definitely know what they’re doing before they do it.

It may illustrate your shopping habits and your life events, but the data about what you do online and with customer loyalty cards effectively belongs to the companies that sell it. And it makes them a lot of money.

Don’t forget that.

Geek.com's Russell Holly:

Google’s recent decision to block non-native XMPP requests is the first step towards building their own closed communications platform. In order to use Google’s chat service, especially the new Babble service, you’ll need to be using it the way Google wants you to use it.

This doesn’t sound very open. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has been tracking this issue for a while, most recently citing Google’s abandonment of CalDAV.

Google isn’t doing themselves any favors on the “open” front. I wouldn’t be surprised if they abandonment that mantra altogether going forward.

WSJ was wrong to pretend potential Facebook hashtags are news, and everyone reporting about a similar move by Flickr is just as wrong.

What makes this even less news is that Flickr has so far only started calling their longtime tags feature “hashtags” in their iOS app.

This stuff just gets better and better. It feels like Lady Justice Herself is suddenly trolling the trolls.

Google+ architect Yontan Zunger meant well, but Google+ will never be sufficient as a reader. Brands maintain a curated presence there for audience outreach and building purposes, not to provide readers with a convenient way to determine what content in that brand’s firehose of updates readers may wish to read further.

Note: I cross-posted this from a comment I wrote on Google+.

Earlier this week I mentioned that the EFF was going to represent a couple of anti-trolling websites in a case brought by porno copyright troll Prenda Law.

The Ars Technica article by Megan Geuss is well-written and really conveys the absurdity of the situation in which Prenda has put itself. I urge you to click the link in this post’s title to go give her piece a full read.

Also, if you’re interested in keeping up with the latest in potential troll-stomping, consider keeping an eye on the Ars series "Who’s behind Prenda Law?". They always do great work at Ars and this series is no exception.

From the Feedly blog:

We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.

Feedly is my top contender for a Reader replacement right now: multi-platform, ready to clone my Reader feeds, and prepared to essentially take over much of Reader’s core subscribe-and-sync functionality when Google pulls the plug.

Also, I can’t help but assume that they’re calling it Normandy because there are tens of thousands of Google Reader users suddenly storming their shores.

I love that this is “news” at the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps the only news-worthy aspect of this story is that it’s one of those rare instances where Facebook is the one keeping up with the Joneses, instead of the other way around.

When will this vaunted hashtag implementation be completed? No one knows, despite WSJ's having talked to some of those ubiquitous and ever-informative “people familiar with the matter.”

What I think is really wonderful about this non-story is that it took not one but two people at WSJ to produce it, Evelyn M. Rusli and Shira Ovide. I don’t pretend to know the usual caliber of those journalists’ work, but I hope, for their sake, that the topic of this blurb is uncharacteristically dull.

I’m not being snarky: he writes at Lifehacker about how he never “got” Evernote, until recently. It’s a great article and I can say I’ve made at least some use of every technique Gordon discusses. The most important? Use Evernote all the time, for everything, and it will become a powerful part of your workflow.

I don’t even know what to say about this. Reader is an integral part of my workflow and I need to figure something else out. If you have any alternatives to suggest, please let me know.

Evening Edition is a wonderful way to catch up on news that doesn’t include a Kardashian or an Apple rumor. Now, they offer a five-minute daily podcast featuring the stories of the day. I tried reading Evening Edition via their email newsletter, RSS, and the website itself, but I miss a day or two each week. I have found the podcast much easier to fit into a hectic schedule. I highly recommend it.

Copyright trolls sue lots of people to extract settlements from those who can’t afford to litigate in the face of potentially massive statutory damages. Their claims are often facially lacking in merit and instead leverage intimidation and poorly-constructed federal copyright damages provisions to bankrupt people for profit.

I’m impressed by Wordpress’ parent company, Automattic, who refused to respond to the troll’s fishing expedition. And it’s good to see EFF lend a hand here in the form of representation, but eventually Congress needs to step in and fix the statutory damages provisions that incentivize copyright trolls to this vile abuse of our legal system in the first place.

For some great background and reporting on trolls and those who fight them, read this Ars Technica piece by Timothy B. Lee.

If you’re composing an email you don’t want someone to see, consider picking up the phone instead. Your assumptions about the privacy of email are inaccurate.

Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Ted Poe (R-Texas), and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) are pushing an amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that would require a warrant for authorities to obtain any email, instead of allowing free access to messages older than six months.

I wrote in January about Google’s decision to require a warrant even where the law does not, so the ECPA’s shortcomings in the digital age (the law is more than twenty years old) are sometimes mitigated by responsible corporate policies.

But a legitimate amendment like Lofgren’s would apply Google’s common sense approach to 4th Amendment rights to all such service providers. There’s simply no excuse not to get this done.

I admit, squeezing the entire post into the title is lazy, but at least it’s informative. I’ll link to Twitter’s death notice for Posterous and call it a post.

I’ve been doing this from my Galaxy Nexus for a while now. I paired my phone to my Xbox 360 so I can pull videos up on my phone’s YouTube app (which is much easier to use than the Xbox app) and then send to my TV via the console. It’s a great experience.

If you need some YouTube content to try this out with, consider the massive Slenderman collection I linked to at my personal blog yesterday.

I was hoping Marisa Mayer would bring Yahoo¹ into the twenty-first century.

This is one piece of evidence that tips the scales very far in the opposite direction, and will probably cost Yahoo a few good employees.