A week or two ago I wrote about Google’s Chrome web browser to complain that the first three Chrome web “apps” I “installed” turned out to be nothing more than simple bookmarks to Flash-enabled sites available on any web browser.  What really bothered me, though, was Chrome’s disingenuous user interface.  The “app installation” process was in fact nothing more than the simple and instantaneous saving of a URL string as a bookmark – yet in an apparent attempt to convince the user there was more going on than there actually was, Chrome went as far as displaying a spinning progress wheel for a second or two.  It’s my suspicion this progress wheel was merely a ‘prop’.

And this illustrates the challenge facing Chrome as it transitions from the ‘browser-as-application’ it is today to the ‘browser-as-operating-system‘ of tomorrow:

While Chrome OS will enjoy certain thin-client advantages (instant-on, greater ease-of-use, and near immunity to malware), these advantages alone aren’t enough to make for a compelling product (or it would have already happened). As the essence of the operating system, the Chrome browser will also have to differentiate itself from all the competing standalone browsers out there running Flash (and in a few years, HTML5).  In other words, Chrome must evolve beyond the conventional browser paradigm: there has to to be some degree of Chrome value-add in terms of increased functionality and/or performance.

Well, this week Google made a step in that direction: Chrome web apps can now run in the background as processes, even when all Chrome windows are closed.  This will allow for asynchronous user notifications and the preloading of content into local memory – but more importantly, with Chrome OS devices expected to launch later this year, it’s an indication Google is hard at work after all on the kinds of ‘browser 2.0′ innovations required to make Chrome OS a success.

I’ve just gotten back from my first ever digital vacation—I spent five days in the Caribbean offline. Well, I’ll admit—I didn’t go completely offline. What I did was commit to 5 days of zero digital communication, and I didn’t answer or use anything on my phone. (It helped that I was abroad, so I didn’t want to pay insane roaming fees associated with both voice & data service.) The place where I stayed had free wifi, and I had my laptop with me so that I could write. My Kindle also has 3G and wifi. Ultimately, it was a matter of choice and then self-discipline to be out of touch. Some observations:

1. I wrote in my journal a lot more. All the things I might have tweeted or posted to Facebook went into a personal journal. It made me realize that since I don’t share deeply intimate details online, I have a lot of thoughts & experiences that don’t get documented in any way anymore. I have been, at most times of my life, an extreme self-documentarian (it’s probably what makes sharing random bits of it not that big of a deal for me), and even though I download Twitter backups, I’m wondering what I’ll be missing from this chunk of my life when I look back and see only the public bits. I still carry a paper journal with me everywhere; it just never gets used.
2. The only real urge to get onto Twitter and Facebook I had was when Mubarak was rumored to be leaving, and then actually resigned the next day. Social networks have become my lifeline for news & analysis, and though I had CNN International, Al Jazeera English and MSNBC at my disposal, I missed jumping into the breaking-news frenzy with my friends and colleagues.
3. Email, on the other hand, was a daily challenge not to think about checking. I didn’t necessarily want to know what was going on with work, but I had the nagging feeling of, “Does anyone need me?” It’s a big part of my identity, both professionally and personally, to be useful. I had to know that I was needed or missed. (Something I’d learned earlier in my online life, by the way, is that you cannot rely on social networks for this. Once you drop out, it’s “out of sight, out of mind.”) I need to work on this being such a big part of my identity, I think. A friend of mine says, “Truth is, you’re not needed. You’re completely replaceable,” at least in the professional sense. Accepting that is an exercise in a zen kind of freedom.
4. I was irritated by the feeling of not knowing what was going on in the world when I woke up every morning. I compromised by continuing to abandon the immediate picking up of my phone to check my social networks for news, but instead picking up my Kindle and going to the New York Times’ mobile site.
5. Sometimes my desire to get online really did feel like addiction. It reminded me of when I quit smoking, and my brain would try to make these little deals with me to have a cigarette. Luckily, I read a really good book to quit smoking that also helped me with answering those deals (except for the above news deal, I caved on that one). There’s a study that shows that stuff that happens online releases oxytocin in our brains, the same chemical that’s released in cuddling and affection. I suspect I was feeling a real lack of that experience and my “addiction” was trying to make it happen. “Just a little bit,” my brain would whimper.
6. I also fought urges to get just a little bit of work done. I would imagine for a second that I could just do that one writeup that was waiting to finished, and then I’d walk away. But just as I’m not a casual smoker, I know I’m not a casual worker. Just one and I’d be hooked, and back in the deep end. I chose to stay away and it worked for me.
7. Ultimately, all those urges were about self-discipline, something that’s lacking from the bigger discussions of, “Are we spending too much time online?” We worry that Facebook is going to suck us in and eat up all our time. It’s not Facebook (or Twitter), it’s you. You are choosing to go there and spend time, and you need to choose how long you’re going to be there. You do it with TV, you do it with going out with your friends, you do it with reading books. These tools are no different, except that you’re getting different chemicals into your brain that you are with some of your other free-time activities. Self-discipline is needs to be a part of our daily digital diet. (And if you have a problem with it, as I do sometimes, download a helper like Self-Control for Mac.)

PS—Things I did do on my vacation: ran a lot, did yoga, ate relatively well (no peanut butter M&Ms all week!), watched a few Oscar contenders, read Girlbomb’s amazing memoir, drew comics, napped, drank margaritas. Other random analog things, too. It was utterly fantastic.

The Honorable Justice Clarence Thomas has been a judge on the U.S. Supreme Court since 1991. The last time his voice was heard during proceedings was five years ago. According to court manuscripts, he has since not asked any in-court questions or engaged in dialog while on the bench.

According to the Pew Research Institute, young online audiences seem to be taking a similar approach.

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The New York Times continues to improve upon its already exceptional technology reporting – for example, consider this recent piece on Nokia and the reasons behind the company’s major fail in the smart phone market.  The primary culprit?  Something we’ve written about several times: an inability to understand the value of consumer electronics product design relative to engineering (digitalmissive’s recent case study: Sony).

For an articulate (and fun-to-read) description of  a ‘big picture’ academic subject, check out Lev Grossman’s recent piece on Ray Kurzweil and the concept of “Singularity” in Time Magazine.  Regardless of whether you agree with the central premise that exponential technological progress will result in machines superseding the human brain in a few decades (and all that implies), the writing is superb and worth your time.

The Atlantic is a publication that can boast of history of great writing – whether technology-related or not.  Here’s a good article on how internet privacy (and the ‘memory’ of the internet) is viewed fundamentally differently on either side of, well, the Atlantic.

P.S. Lastly, from several Apple rumor sites comes word that the company could be considering creating an “Apple television“.   The evidence for this claim is a recent Apple job position posting mentioning a “next generation of Apple devices”, including “TV”.   This is something we’ve been speculating about since 2009.

Digitalmissive welcomes Deanna Zandt! A media technologist and the author of Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, Deanna is a leading expert in women and technology. As a frequent guest on CNN International, BBC Radio, Fox News and more, she ranks among today’s most prolific social media experts.

Well, it’s exactly her unique commentary and outspokenness that attracted us to her writing. With that in mind, we’re excited to welcome Deanne to digitalmissive, and we very much look forward to presenting her take on technology and media in upcoming posts. In the meantime, for more about Deanna’s background and upcoming appearances be sure to check out her site at www.deannazandt.com

Former MSNBC political show host Keith Olbermann has just announced his new show will air on Current TV.

No secret – I have long been a fan of Current TV.

The S.F.-based (partially) user-generated cable programmer has long been on the forefront of innovative journalism.  Side by side viewer-created short “pod” submissions, Current has its own group of young vanguard journalists. Audiences help to determine at least part of what’s to air, most of which then gets plenty viral distribution up and down the participatory Web.

Next in, Keith Olbermann will be the first veteran broadcasters to join the citizen journalist crew.

It should be interesting to see if and how Mr. Olbermann and Current TV’s participatory media will blend to something greater than the sum of the individual parts.

AOL just paid $315 million for ‘uber blog’ The Huffington Post. Social network giant Facebook seems worth $50 billion. And global media powerhouse News Corp. relies on what’s likely the world’s most popular consumer electronics designer, Apple, as their next exclusive content distributor.

Clearly, the face and valuation of media continues to be in major flux.

In this highly dynamic environment, let’s see where Current and Olbermann can take things next.

Last week we wrote about dropbox, and how business concerns can sometimes muddy the waters of what (in a perfect world) should be a transparent and open relationship – the relationship between technology and us humans.

The week before, we wrote about Chrome OS, Google’s view of a cloud-based, thin-client future of personal computing.

Here then, is a post combining these two themes.

The other day, I started playing around with the Chrome Web Store.  We’ve been interested in the Chrome OS since it was a just a twinkle in Google’s eye, and now that devices running the new ‘browser-as-operating system’ are just a few months away from hitting the market, it seemed like high time to check out  these Chrome “apps”.

So I “downloaded”‘ and “installed” a few of these “apps” onto the Chrome browser: a few from Aviary having to do with photo and audio editing, and a music streaming service from from a company called Grooveshark.  Initially, I was pretty impressed – I got it.  Then I started seeing  Adobe Flash prompts popping up when I tried to use the <back> key, and a thought occurred to me – was I looking at a brave new world of Chrome web apps, or was I looking at merely a few simple bookmarks to Flash-enabled websites masquerading as Chrome-specific “apps”?  The obvious thing to do was to try accessing these same URLs directly from a different browser, so that’s what I did – and lo and behold,  my shiny new Chrome “apps” functioned identically on Firefox - without having anything to do with Chrome.  At all.

So mere months before Chrome OS devices are slated to start hitting the market, all three Chrome ‘apps’ I tried out were really just bookmarks to Flash-enabled websites available on any browser.  If you’re Google, that’s a problem.  What bothered me more, though, was how Google chose to handle that problem: by misrepresenting a simple bookmark as an “App” that “requires Chrome” that’s saved via a button labeled “Install” – all of which is followed by a few seconds of a (completely bogus?) OS X-style spinning progress ring!

In short, the simple saving of a generic bookmark is being made to look like a Chrome-specific “application installation”.

I do want to like the Chrome OS, I really do – but that kind of thing, well, it ticks us off a bit (we hate it when our software is being – let’s say – disingenuous with us).

P.S. Maybe the more interesting aspect of this whole story, though, is how Google will differentiate the Chrome Flash (and later, HTML5) user experience from the Flash/HTML5 user experience offered via competing browsers – because if the Chrome OS is going to gain real traction, there’s going to have to be some additional ‘value add’ to the Chrome browser proposition.  In other words, Chrome will have to become extensible in such a way as to allow for optimized (Javascript/HTML5) performance and for more native-feeling (and standardized)  user  interfaces and control sets than those offered by other standalone browsers.

Have you been to a book store lately? No, not online, not the virtual kind. I mean the real thing. The old-fashioned brick-and-mortar version. The real McCoy.

This past week I went book hunting up and down Manhattan. Apparently, I had forgotten exactly how tedious the process was compared to the comforting efficiency of an online shopping experience.

Well, five! store locations and several book-hunting hours later, I finally did walk away with my priced copies.

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