*michael parekh on IT*

ON GOING FROM 9/11 TO 9/12

IT'S TIME

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman had one head-turning title for his op-ed piece:  "9/11 is over".  And it's got an editorial to match.  A lot of the piece resonates for me, but this bit most of all:

"We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate.

What does that mean?

This: 9/11 has made us stupid.

I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

It is not that I thought we had new enemies that day and now I don’t. Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers.

But we also need our old habits and sense of openness. For me, the candidate of 9/12 is the one who will not only understand who our enemies are, but who we are."

I'd add that I honor, and weep for all the casualties we've incurred since 9/11, and humbly thank their families for an immensely unthinkable sacrifice.

It's time for someone to say this off a very public bully-pulpit. 

We wrote a blank check as a country to our politicians after 9/11 over half a decade ago. 

It's time to put a stop order on it, and write a new one with a much more considered number instead.

It's just time.

ON iPHONES AND BRICKS

TO BRICK OR NOT TO BRICK

That is the question.

Especially after reading about the battle brewing between Apple and the geekiest users of it's iPhone (aka Godphone).

The brouhaha seems to be really heating up, at least if you judge things by the front page of Techmeme today.

Uber-geek site Gizmodo kicks it off with a "re-review" that gives a thumbs down to the iPhone, primarily for Apple's policy of:

1.  Not allowing hacked unlocked phones to survive it's firmware updates, and

2.  Not allowing many third party software applications to  also survive these firmware updates.

Lot more bricks fly in the review, which is worth a read.

At heart here is a wide-spread desire by early adopters (or "Surly Adopters", as Valleywag calls them, channeling a New York Post headline), to do with the iPhone, what they were able to do with the multiple generations of the Palm Pilot.  Use it as a mobile platform much like a PC.

From Apple's point of view, although this may be desirable in the long-run, it comes with some serious short-term issues, including:

1.  Guaranteed reliability of the iPhone for mainstream users, especially in wireless communications, an area where this is but a first step for the company.

2.  Maintain a working partnership with AT&T/Cingular, who has even a more draconian view of how closed the network should be.

3.  Keep customer support costs in line for Wall Street, especially in the face of growing mainstream popularity of the iPhone.

4.  Genetic desire by Apple to be control the overall user-interface and ease-of-use experience on all Apple products.  They can't help themselves here.  It's who they are, have been, and probably always will be.

Here's a glimpse at the true nature of this power struggle from Gizmodo's bottom line on the subject:

"Smart iPhone users, geeks or not, are hacking the iPhone; this is how people are choosing to use it.

So, Apple, even if you have to fight the unlocks, the apps deserve to live. It's what we all want. I hope we can work it out."

While some may consider this petulant, it's important to remember that Apple early adopters have always had a love-hate relationship with Apple. 

They've loved the company's products but hated the relative lack of control and freedom. 

It's how it's been and probably always will be.

One bright light in all this, is that the English language will likely gain a new word from all this, an entirely new twist to the age-old word "Brick"; as in, "Did your iPhone get Bricked after the last update?"

ON A YAHOO! TOOLBAR PROBLEM IN FIREFOX

S.O.S.

Thought I'd deal with a minor frustration that'd been building up the last few days with my Yahoo! Toolbar, which I've been a long-time user of on all my Windows and Mac PCs.

Over the last week or so, I noticed that the Firefox plug-in version of the Yahoo! Toolbar (latest version 1.4.1), was not displaying any buttons at all.  I'd go into Toolbar set-up and customize it with all the buttons of Yahoo! services I use, hit Finished, and then hit "Refresh" toolbar.

No joy...no Yahoo! buttons on the toolbar.  Totally blank.

Uninstalled the plug-in, closed Firefox, opened Firefox, re-installed the plug-in and again, nothing.

Again, went into the Toolbar set-up and added all my favorite buttons, and tried refresh again. 

Nothing.

Repeated this whole process on another Mac, and two Windows machines that I've been having the same problem on, with no happy results.

Considered that this might be a function of some other piece of software I'd installed on the first machine that was causing a potential conflict, and this frustrating effect.

But am having the same problem on all my computers, using both Windows and Macs, with the Yahoo! toolbar plug-in installed in Firefox, which is my primary, every-day browser.

Next, checked online to see if other people have had the same problem, and didn't find any conclusive suggestions or options.

One suggestion did crop up in a computing forum,  asking that I log-in to the toolbar again.

Unfortunately, the Firefox version of Yahoo! toolbar doesn't seem to have a "log-in" button or choice.  At least none that I could find after fifteen minutes of diligent search.  Since I'm already logged into other Yahoo! services like My Yahoo!, in the open Firefox window, I assume that I'm logged into the Toolbar automatically.

Next, decided to contact Yahoo! support, and started to fill out a lengthy form, that asked for my name, my Yahoo! ID, the version of toolbar I was using. 

Unfortunately, the answer to that question could only be input via a "pop-down" list of selections.  And the version numbers started at 5.x.

It then occurred to me that this support input field had been set up with the assumption that users would ONLY be having problems with the Microsoft IE version of the toolbar.

There were no options that I could find to report a problem with the Firefox version of the toolbar.

Not sure why Yahoo! wouldn't offer a way to automatically detect the Yahoo! software I was using, including version numbers, and input them in it's customer support reporting system.

So gave up trying to report this to Yahoo! and decided to write this post.

Thanks for indulging me so far.

Want to see if any suggestions come in via this route of sending out a general S.O.S. (save our software), instead.

In the meantime, I've turned off Yahoo! toolbar in all my Firefox browsers to re-claim valuable screen space on all my machines.

ON IMMIGRATION IMPACT IN LOCAL TOWNS

ABOUT TIME

The New York Times has an article titled "Towns rethinking laws against illegal immigration" that's worth a read.  Here's an excerpt:

"A little more than a year ago, the (Riverside) Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again."

Money quote from the mayor here:

“I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden,” said Mayor George Conard, who voted for the original ordinance. “A lot of people did not look three years out.”

It's not just this town of Riverside, New Jersey that's had this experience, as the article goes on to explain:

"Muzaffar A. Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit group, said Riverside’s decision to repeal its law — which was never enforced — was clearly influenced by the Hazleton ruling, and he predicted that other towns would follow suit.

“People in many towns are now weighing the social, economic and legal costs of pursuing these ordinances,” he said..."

"In the past two years, more than 30 towns nationwide have enacted laws intended to address problems attributed to illegal immigration, from overcrowded housing and schools to overextended police forces.

Most of those laws, like Riverside’s, called for fines and even jail sentences for people who knowingly rented apartments to illegal immigrants or who gave them jobs."

I've brought up the issue of immigration and our economic well-being as a nation for some time now, emphasizing that dealing with illegal immigration is not just a security issue.

Now that we're seeing some of the impact of our recent immigration policies and attitudes at the local level, it'll be interesting to see how much longer it'll be before we see it at the State and National level.

And start to do something really constructive about it, to bring the pendulum back to the middle.

ON THE PRIVACY DILEMMA

DEAL WITH THE DEVIL?

In a post a couple of days ago, I talked about the slippery slope we face as a society, as we struggle with the tug of war between the wonderful conveniences that come from giving up certain aspects of our privacy both online and off, and the increasing privacy trade-offs that are implicitly entailed. (image source). 

These privacy trade-offs are not always with the "Big Brother" governments of Orwellian fame, but with lots and lots of little brothers all around us.

Today, the Wall Street Journal, has an interview with Cory Doctorow, who just released a short, sci-fi story titled "Scroogled", which tells a cautionary fictional tale about this slippery slope, using Google as the future catalyst for near-evil outcomes.  Both the story and the interview make interesting reading.

But in the interview, Cory tells the story of a meeting, that reminded me of a historical story that I'd read long ago as a World War II history buff, that is hugely relevant in our current societal dilemma:

"I had a really interesting meeting a couple of years ago with some of the [chief information officers] of Danish ministries. We sat down to talk about data interoperability and document retention.

Document retention's a really thorny one, because hard drives are cheap, and governments don't really understand why they shouldn't just save everything. Who knows when it will be useful?

I started to talk to them about this, and a gentleman put his hand up and said you know, you may need to talk to people in other countries about this, but you don't need to talk to the Danes about this.

Because after the Nazis occupied Copenhagen, they went down to the police station and got from the files all the addresses of the people they wanted to round up and stick in boxcars, and they took them away. We don't retain anything here.

As soon as we're done with it, we throw it away because we understand that you can't always predict how information will be used, and the only way to ensure it's not misused is to get rid of it when you're done with it."

The reality is that there're too many opportunities to both provide new services around what I'd call the "privacy dilemma",  that mainstream folks are going to like and use, AND for companies to make money doing so. 

So we'll keep doing it until there are catastrophic events that are personal, institutional, national, or just plain human, that'll give us reason to pause and possibly re-consider the trade-offs.

ON WHY MICROSOFT/FACEBOOK IS DIFFERENT THAN YAHOO!/GEOCITIES

A ROAD WELL-TRAVELLED

The Wall Street Journal tells a cautionary tale around the reported discussions of Facebook potentially negotiating a 5% investment stake from either Microsoft or Google, at a valuation upwards of  $10 billion. 

It compares the potential Facebook transaction with the acquisition of Geocities in the mid 1990s by Yahoo! for $4.7 billion.

Even though the Geocities of 1994 may be portrayed as an early version of the Facebook of today, the two situations may be apples and oranges.  Geocities was acquired in whole by Yahoo!, whereas Facebook is reportedly contemplating a minority investment by a major incumbent on it's way to a presumably successful IPO.

To me the potential investment by Microsoft is more like a similar investment in 1995 by Microsoft in UUNET, a leading ISP, before it's successful IPO later that year.  The minority investment, along with an agreement for UUNET to help build out the dial-up  network for Microsoft's budding MSN service, helped UUNET become the leading ISP in the U.S. over the next few years.

By way of background, I was closely involved with the Geocities, UUNET and Yahoo! IPOs as the lead equity research analyst, and covered them all after their IPOs as a research analyst.

The Wall Street Journal does a good job characterizing Facebook founder Mark Zuckberg's ambition in all this:

"Mr. Zuckerberg isn't gunning for just wealth. He's gunning for wealth and legacy"

In that context, the steps Facebook may currently be taking in seeking a minority investment en route to a future IPO, is a path that has good precedent in internet history.

ON REASONS TO LIKE AD-BASED INTERNET CALLS

A STEP TOO FAR?

(Note:  Re-published from an earlier draft.  Original post was lost in Typepad)

There seems to be a pre-dominantly negative reaction on Techmeme today, to a new service offered by a startup called The Pudding.  Here's the back-ground from the New York Times story:

"Companies like Google scan their e-mail users’ in-boxes to deliver ads related to those messages. Will people be as willing to let a company listen in on their phone conversations to do the same?

Pudding Media, a start-up based in San Jose, Calif., is introducing an Internet phone service today that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls. The Web-based phone service is similar to Skype’s online service — consumers plug a headset and a microphone into their computers, dial any phone number and chat away. But unlike Internet phone services that charge by the length of the calls, Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.

The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking."

The company is addressing the obvious privacy concerns in it's model:

"The company’s model, of course, raises questions about the line between target advertising and violation of privacy. Consumer-brand companies are increasingly trying to use data about people to deliver different ads to them based on their demographics and behavior online.

Pudding Media executives said that scanning the words used in phone calls was not substantially different from what Google does with e-mail.

Mr. Maislos said that Pudding Media had considered the privacy question carefully. The company is not keeping recordings or logs of the content of any phone calls, he said, so advertisements only relate to current calls, not past ones, and will only arrive during the call itself."

The reaction on Techmeme seems to be overwhelmingly negative.  GigaOm's Om Malik had this representative post about the offering:

"Technology business often goes through periods where rationality and reality are suspended. We just might be in that phase, and nothing highlights that than the launch of ad-supported phone services.

In UK, Blyk, an ad-supported mobile service we wrote about eons ago launched. Given the high tariffs in Europe they might have a prayer of a chance, but don’t hold your breath.

Want to know what’s more stupid: this ad-supported experiment called The Pudding, which is getting a lot of attention. it is one of the more inane ideas out there, worse than say yet-another-social-bookmarking service.

Never mind, that over here calls are cheap enough that most of us don’t really want to put up with the extra steps to save a few pennies."

At first blush, I had the same first reaction.  One needs to mentally filter the discussions around this issue  for charged and provocative words like "eavesdropping", "Big Brother",  or "spies on your calls".  Only then do the issues become more clear.

So on further thought, the whole thing seems a lot more plausible to me, both in terms of customer acceptance and from an economic perspective.  Here are some initial thoughts:

1.  PRIVACY CONCERNS:  On a broad, philosophical level, we're less concerned about privacy online than ever before, for better or for worse. 

This is yet another "logical" step in the progression of mainstream internet users trading privacy for convenience and functionality. 

It may be a step down a pretty slippery slope, but as the NY Times piece indicates, we've already accepted something very similar in our web email services like Google Gmail, not to mention in all our searches online.

In less than a generation, we've gone from freaking out over our privacy concerns regarding our social interactions, to letting it all hang out on social networks like MySpace, Facebook and the like.  And much to our surprise and occasional consternation, older folks seem to be following younger adopters of these services, throwing  traditional caution to the winds.

We've come to implicitly put aside privacy concerns, for the benefits and new functionality these new services offer.

2.  SPOOKY TECHNOLOGY:  That we can do this from a technological perspective is a given.  The underlying capabilities here have been developed and fine-tuned by government security services in many countries including ours.  In fact the founders in this case, have intelligence backgrounds in Israel.

We've also gotten used to the notion that our overseas wired and wireless calls may have been electronically monitored by national security services at various times in the past few decades, notwithstanding the recent attempts at domestic monitoring by the current US administration.  And at various times, this has been accepted as a "good for our security" especially, when we've been scared by Cold War or terrorism threats.

So a private sector version of this service that offers tangible benefits to us as individuals, may not be as "freaky" as it first seems.

The Internet itself was initially developed for military purposes, not to mention technologies like GPS.  As a society, we've gotten used to seeing these technologies migrate to the private sector and being massively commercialized.

3.  THE SERVICE:  What's particularly interesting about this service, is not the destination-based service the company is offering, but if the company worked aggressively with third-party websites large and small, carriers, ISPs, VOIP and media companies, to make this capability broadly available.  Much like Tellme wdid with voice recgonition technologies a few years ago. 

Whether Pudding does this or a bunch of other startups and/or internet incumbents, the technology is out of the bag.  The question now if this can be made to work from a commercial and cultural perspective.

4.  THE BUSINESS MODEL:  While this technology doesn't seem to offer much of a price advantage over traditional WIRED internet phone calls (VOIP), there's a much more massive price umbrella on the wireless side, which COULD be exploited by an ad-based pricing supplement.

Wireless voice calls, which cost carriers pennies per minutes, are still being offered at prices that are ten times or more higher. That's a big pricing umbrella.

Initially, it may give the whole MVNO service providers an alternative way to monetize their services.  Imagine if a service like Helio, or Virgin Mobile could offer much cheaper voice plans to supplement their current offerings.  Or if pre-paid phones could bundle this ad-supported technology and thus offer much cheaper cell phone minutes. 

The traditional wireless carriers would of course be loathe to experiment with something like this, because it could seriously disrupt their pricing models.

What if Google offered it's long-rumored GPhone with this capability?  Would consumer trust and accept it since they already trust Google?  It's not as crazy as it sounds.  We know Google has long experimented with voice-recognition driven ad-delivery systems, starting with traditional radio.

A lot more needs to be thought through here, not to mention executed on by a whole range of companies.

But the initial idea is not as crazy as it first sounds.  The Pudding may not be the first incarnation of this type of service that works, or even the second.  But the underlying idea may see mass application and adoption in a very modified form, that may surprise us all. 

IMHO.

ON TYPEPAD LOSING PUBLISHED POSTS

LOST

I had a post titled  “ON REASONS TO LIKE AD-BASED INTERNET CALLS”, published for this monday, September 24th, 2007.   The link to that post is now attached to my Tuesday post somehow.

The original Monday post is missing and I'm trying to recover it through Typepad support.  This has happened several times over the past few years that I've been using Typepad to publish this blog.  Have not been able to recover these lost posts in the past.

The missing posts somehow re-connect to later posts, along with any comments that were made on the original post.

In this case, I had a comment by Alex Tolley, which is now attached to my Tuesday post.

I've re-published an earlier draft of the original post until I can hopefully recover the lost post with Typepad's help and get the right comments re-attached to it.

Thanks for your patience.

ON LATENT SOCIAL NETWORKS IN TODAY'S ONLINE APPS

NEW VEINS OF GOLD

Fred Wilson has a post on a recent trend bringing social networking features to online financial investing:

"A big theme at TechCrunch 40 was social/web financial services. Mint and Cake launched there and Mint came away with the top prize.

To many, it seemed that these two companies were the first movers in their respective market spaces. But that is far from the case. In the case of Mint, there are at least three services already in the market, Wesabe (which Union Square Ventures is an investor in), Geezeo, and Buxfer.

The social investing market is even more crowded with dozens of companies trying to become "a social Bloomberg".

The twist that Cake brings to the social investing field is that they use real transactions to build your profile by accessing your online trading accounts."

The "social Bloomberg" quest is something I've long been on the lookout for, for over a decade now, starting in the "Web 1.0" age.  It's been a particular focus, since I've had a chance to closely watch how Bloomberg became Bloomberg on the global financial scene.

Most of the current companies though seem to be focused more on the trading prowess of it's members, which to my eye is a long way from what made Bloomberg really successful.

The real Bloomberg service has always started with the content and tools around almost every type of investment vehicle imaginable.  And then the communities that built ad-hoc around these content and tool hubs became the major icing on the cake.

And then of course, the thing that really makes Bloomberg Bloomberg is it's impressive subscription-driven business model, where each terminal can bring in over $1000/month.

Nothing  like that is likely to happen on a consumer-driven social Bloomberg.  But it could still be financially interesting.

If anything, it's almost something Yahoo! Finance, the leading online financial destination, could do if they selectively added social networking features to it's venerable service.  Yahoo! Finance already has one of the densest collection of financial content and tools, with one of the highest following by mainstream users.

As many of us might imagine, social networking features can be useful in a whole host of prosaic, online applications. 

A good example of this is Xobni, another startup that made it's debut at the TechCrunch40 conference last week.  Here's how TechCrunch's Duncan Riley described the company:

"Xobni creates a profile of all the interactions you have with your contacts. It appears to be a plugin for your email client - sits on the right-hand side of the client as you browse your email. Gives context to each message that you view; you can browse your messaging history with people, see their portrait, look at connected people (social networking), import calendar openings into email text, search your email by people and keywords. Xobni automatically extracts phone and email contacts from email messages.

You can also view upcoming appointments, to-do items, and a “stay in touch” area (a list of people who used to email you but haven’t in awhile - the “ex-girlfriend” feature).

Currently available for Microsoft Outlook, others soon.

Main points: view threaded conversations, find attachments, use email’s social network, and search email and people."

Yahoo! President Sue Decker recently commented that Yahoo! Mail had the potential to be a social network, a la Facebook and others. 

Presumably Microsoft will soon wake up to the opportunities it has to do the same with it's global Outlook franchise.  They even have Ray Ozzie has their chief technologist, who brought us the original social networks with Notes (later Lotus Notes), and then with Groove.  It's pretty extraordinary to me for some time now that they've not yet tried to leverage the latent social networks opportunity within their Outlook franchise.

Companies like Xobni point the way to these opportunities across other email platforms.  Today's news that Google is updating it's popular Gmail application, is yet another opportunity to do the same.  Indeed, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington recently reported that Google is preparing a broader offensive against social networks like Facebook on November 5th.

So the opportunity to leverage existing online applications, be they in email, or verticals like Finance, is one of the next near-term Holy Grails of the Web 2.0 trend.  We'll see if they bear fruit.

ON ACKNOWLEDGING SOME WONDERS OF THE WORLD

PROSAIC WONDERS

During some late-night channel surfing, I chanced upon a travel show on TV showing the wonders of Northern Ireland. 

Normally, I would probably have clicked right through it, in my partly insomniac condition.  But this show was in glorious HD, and the story had to do with some pretty amazing images of a UNESCO World Heritage site called the Giant's Causeway. 

Of course, the information provided by the narrator wasn't enough, since the program quickly moved onto to other points in Northern Ireland.  But I quickly typed in "Giant's Causeway" into a Wikipedia search window on my laptop, and was rewarded with this:

"The Giant's Causeway (or Irish: Clochán na bhFómharach^[1]) is an area of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns resulting from a volcanic eruption. It is located on the North East coast of Northern Ireland, about 3 kilometres (2 miles) north of the town of Bushmills.

It was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986, and a National Nature Reserve in 1987 (by the Department of the Environment for Northern Ireland). In a 2005 poll of Radio Times readers, the Giant's Causeway was named as the fourth greatest natural wonder in the United Kingdom. The Giant's Causeway is owned and managed by the National Trust.

The tops of the columns form stepping stones that lead from the cliff foot and disappear under the sea. Most of the columns are hexagonal, however there are some with four, five, seven and eight sides. The tallest are about 12 metres (36 ft) high, and the solidified lava in the cliffs is 28 metres thick in places."

While seeing these images at first blush, one wonders how this could be a natural phenomenon and not a man-made structure, so long ago.  In fact, the Wikipedia entry even has a wonderful, local fairy tale legend on how the "Giant's Causeway" came into being.

A couple of decades ago, seeing something like this on TV, I would have chalked it up as something interesting, to be investigated further when I next had the time to look it up in the Encyclopedia in the library.  A decade ago,  I would have put it off until I had a chance to look it up in the Encyclopedia on a "multi-media" CD-ROM.

But this was 2007, and I had a laptop right next to me at 3 a.m., with a Wikipedia entry written by several contributors generous with their time and knowledge.  The entry went on to explain:

Similar structures

"Although the basaltic columns of the Giant's Causeway are impressive, they are not unique. Basalt columns are a common volcanic feature, and they occur on many scales (faster cooling produces smaller columns).

Other notable sites include Fingal's Cave in Scotland, the Garni gorge in Armenia, the Cyclopean Isles near Sicily, Devils Postpile National Monument in California, Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, Santa Maria Regla Basalt Prisms in Hidalgo, Mexico, the "Organ Pipes" formation on Mount Cargill in New Zealand, the giant "Rocha dos Bordões" ("Rod Rock") formation in Flores (Azores), at Gành Đá Đĩa in the Phú yên province of Vietnam^[8], and the "Columnar Cape" (Russian: Mis Stolbchaty) on Kunashir, the southernmost of the Kurile Islands in Russia."

Again, this being 2007, I opened up each of those sites mentioned in the entry above, in separate tabs in my Firefox browser.  And sure enough, these natural structures do seem to occur in quite a few places around the world.  No legends, no mystery...just some wonderful acts of nature. 

The picture above shows some place called "Devil's Postpile" National monument next door here in California.  This wonder had it's own man-made, folkloric story concocted around something that seemed so unique and unexplainable at the time.

These structures are yet another natural wonder that don't seem that way at all at first blush.  Kind of like the much larger structures I described in the post on the "Grand Canyons of China" back in July.

And it took me all of five minutes to learn about all these amazing places around the world, based on a random, chance, clicking through the cable channels on TV, on late night.

A decade ago, this might have take me 30 minutes to learn...two decades ago, an hour, maybe more.

There's no big deal about my experience.  Countless people today experience similar moments of serendipitous, sometimes mundane, insights via the internet every day.

But this experience made me step back and not take it for granted in this instance.  And recognize how far things have come, while most of us continue to click through the channels on late-night TV. 

It made me acknowledge again this man/woman-made wonder we call the internet and wonder how this experience might be different in another twenty years for someone else at three in the morning.