The Post Social Age

The title of this article is very misleading but it does bring up a new twist on the same conundrum we’ve been struggling with around social media and social sharing.

Connected devices are set up towards “frictionless sharing.” Meaning once you set it up, it just spews data to whoever you’ve set it up to share with. This won’t be a regular or typical problem for people who live honest, boring, transparent lives (although security breaches will haunt these services) but it becomes a problem for people who have something to hide. And not only bad people, doing bad things have things to hide. 

But this guy deserves what he got. 

“They shared their activity between each other and she noticed he was active at 1-2AM, when he was supposed to be home,” our source told us.

BTW, I highly recommend reading Nick Harkaway’s The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World for context on the struggle and tradeoff’s that we’ll be making here. 

These shifts are happening at a tectonic level. They’re huge and invisible to your average user. Invisible until a new mountain range pops up that is. 

Data centers are being supplanted by cloud infrastructure. On-premise applications will be surpassed by software as a service (SaaS). And, thanks to the rise of mobile, PCs will become increasingly marginalized. These three shifts are dramatic, real, and they’re enlivening a sector of computing that a decade ago everyone thought was dead.

“In my 25 years in this business, I’ve never seen three simultaneous shifts of this magnitude,” says Levine, 

Full disclosure, Microsoft, whose mentioned extensively in the article is a client.