So whilst the UK was recovering from over-indulging in chocolate eggs; across the Atlantic, Facebook were splashing out $1 Billion on Instagram. And still the world continued to spin and orbit the Sun. So what does this mean to us all; there will be a lot of soul searching and discussion but ultimately this just continues to productise your life and your experience.
I watched the Google’s Project Glass video prior to the Facebook announcement and was thinking if Google were to buy someone like Instagram; the anonymity of the crowd has gone, the glasses could identify the person you were looking at immediately. Of course Facebook could do the same thing and create their own Project Social Glass. You will no longer be able to sit in coffee shop quietly unrecognised, you would be instantly identifiable. Would you be entirely comfortable with that? I know I won’t be.
There are times in our lives where we just want to want be alone and not identified; to remove that opportunity and to have that constant feeling that you are being watched will change our natures. In our allowing of our lives to productised, we may lose something which is essential to our well-being; Facebook is arguably already removing the right to make mistakes and the ability to forget.
Could it remove the right to be anonymous? Are we heading towards the perfect storm which shatters our illusions of privacy? For even if it is an illusion, it is an important one.
We have to be very careful as to where this road takes us.
Of course Facebook could have just spent $1 Billion on an app to make crap photos look like they were taken 40 years ago.
Storagebod: a refreshing call to acotin!As a longstanding SNIA watcher, the end-user involvement is clearly lacking. Ambitions have been high, but participation did not reach the heyday of GUIDE and SHARE as an example.Conversely, imagine storage networking run in isolation by proprietarily minded vendors: truly dreadful. So SNIA made a very positive difference.But committee work is slow and cannot keep up with innovation. Hence it ended up being a vendor club, as customers ran out of steam to volunteer.Rereading the vision and mission statement, it appears to confirm the vendor focus. And certification never really took off, as I recall.The European Academies are good and so is the idea of nurturing social networking. If this is valuable enough, then peer-to-peer pressure could re-ignite the SNIA end-user contingent.Having experienced the energy of the un-conference and un-panels of CloudCamp, SNIA should learn from these initiatives which are very much in the spirit of modern social networks. And #storagebeers does not need to be invented, it is already there!