billpalmer.net

After CNN was widely lambasted for airing mostly pre-taped domestic non-news over the weekend of June 13th while the upheaval in Iran was being documented in an up-to-the-minute fashion via social networking sites like Twitter, the television news network attempted to atone for that error by mostly staying live with the story during this past weekend of June 20th. The circumstances, however, were still the same: the Iranian government was preventing outlets like CNN from being able to do any first-hand reporting, and social networks were still the only source of up to date information. This put the network in the unenviable situation of having little choice but to "report" what already being publicly posted to these sites while making an attempt an attempt to provide the kind of analysis and perspective that would make watching CNN more valuable than simply keeping ones eyes glued directly to Twitter.

While I continued to follow the Iran situation on Twitter this weekend as I had the last, this time I went ahead and left CNN on in the background, mainly out of curiosity over how the network would approach such a unique situation. Considering the manner in which its own reporters were handicapped from being able to do their jobs, I thought CNN's coverage was at times admirable and at other times self-serving, and yet I kept watching. Having taken in most of it, I've come up with a few pointers for CNN that might help their coverage to come off as more legitimate the next time they find themselves in such a situation, which is likely to happen more and more often as citizen journalists continue to find their way into situations where full-fledged reporters can't officially tread:

1. Having your reporters people's Twitter posts on-air in real time, and mentioning that there's no way to guarantee that any of those posts are accurate, seems fair enough. But you don't need to repeatedly remind us of the debatable authenticity of such posts every few minutes, as it gives the appearance that you're simultaneously relying on Twitter as a source and telling us that Twitter is not a legitimate source. Whether you're intending it or not, the implication is that someone listening to a CNN employee reading random Twitter posts about Iran is somehow more legitimate than someone reading those same posts directly on Twitter. It comes off as nothing more than you guys hoping we won't connect the dots and turn off the television and fire up Twitter.com ourselves. If that's not your intention, then tone down your rhetoric about how unreliable these Twitter posts are.

2. At one point this weekend you reported what Mousavi had posted to his official Facebook page as being something that he "allegedly" said, as if the mere fact that he had said it through Facebook meant that it was automatically suspect. It's been well-documented that Mousavi's page on Facebook really is him, so where does the questionable authenticity come into play? If you have reason to suspect that his Facebook page has been hacked or compromised, then report on that. Otherwise, stop using the word "allegedly" in an attempt to imply that the words Mousavi posted to his Facebook page aren't necessarily his words. Are you just upset that he bypassed you guys and posted his announcement directly to the internet instead of calling you guys up on the phone and allowing you to report his words on his behalf?

3. You also need to let go of the idea that any video shot by someone other than one of your own cameramen is automatically of dubious legitimacy. We all know that videos can be filmed out of context or downright faked. We've all gone to the movie theater and watched aliens knock down the Statue of Liberty, and we don't walk out of the theater believing that it really happened. We get it. So when you aired a video of a house being raided, you didn't need to refer to the house as being "allegedly" raided. We understand that you want to play it safe in terms of hastily accusing someone of doing something, which is why you refer to someone as an "alleged murderer" if they haven't yet been found guilty, because maybe it turns out someone else did it and the guy was innocent and you've unfairly branded him as a murderer which ruins his life, and he sues your pants off in return. But how does that apply to a video of a house being raided? Are you afraid that after the house raiders are done raiding houses, they're going to come over here and sue you? It's fine that you want to differentiate to viewers whether the video being aired is from one of your own cameramen or from an unknown third party, but acting as if what's happening in the video isn't even real, and then slapping the words "Amateur Video" in the upper right hand corner, suggests that you're just a little bitter over the fact that you couldn't get your camera crews in there to film it yourselves. How about taking a more diplomatic approach by labeling such clips simply as "Third Party Video" or some other such phrase that doesn't imply that the video came from an untrustable thirteen year old kid.

4. The long-standing system of professional journalists relying on their own pet sources for information, in which a source's willingness to provide information is directly proportional to the reporter's willingness to keep their identity a secret, has long allowed professional journalists to be the arbiters of what we get to know about. We're all aware that journalists routinely have off the record conversations with sources, and we all know that what they actually report to us is often a mere fraction of what they actually know. We grudgingly accept it only because if a journalist reports the full story and betrays a source in the process, that source and other sources will be less likely to share any information with that journalist in the future, and maybe we lose out on a more important story down the road. But none of that applies when your "sources" are posting their information to a public website and we're getting the information from the sources at the same time the journalists are. The long-standard voodoo of "this is what we can report to you, we can't tell you where any of it came from, but trust us because this source told us the truth once before" doesn't apply when the source material is immediately available to the public. In these situations you don't have any more access to information than we do, so don't pretend you do. Your best bet here is to help us make sense of that information, not to try to sell us on the phony notion that we can only get the information from you.

5. Furthermore, when sources are public, there's no need to protect their identity. There was one embarrassing episode in which your reporters were displaying Twitter posts from inside Iran but blocking out the Twitter usernames and saying that you were doing so in order to protect the identities of those individuals. Anyone familiar with Twitter knows how easy it is to search for a chunk of text and very quickly match that up to who posted it. Are so you completely unfamiliar with the concept of Twitter search that you really think you're protecting these people's identities, or are you just trying to sell your viewers on the vague notion that you're somehow exercising discretion?

6. It would cost you a ton of money to stay live on the air 24/7, and in a lot of instances your live late-night coverage would consist of little more than a re-reading of the same stories from earlier in the evening with no change. So it's understandable that not all of what you're airing is live, and some of it is just a rebroadcast of your earlier coverage. But while that coverage might still be up-to-date two hours later, it might not. So if you're airing a rebroadcast of your earlier coverage, it's only fair that you clue us in on that by tagging it as "prerecorded" somewhere on the screen. We've seen you do just that when you rebroadcast Larry King's show in the middle of the night, but that's only because you don't want people trying to call in to the show hours after it's already concluded. How about giving us the same fair warning when you're airing a news report that might no longer be up to date? Yes, that might drive some of us over to Twitter at 2:00am to get our hands on more updated information once we realize that what we're watching on CNN is hours old. But that's the risk you take by being up front with your viewers. And going down that road only works if you go all the way down that road.

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In all I thought CNN's coverage this weekend was a largely admirable effort, under conditions that were far less than ideal and far different than a television news network is typically accustomed to dealing with. It was particularly interesting to watch the on-air reporters honestly trying to figure out how to proceed into this new territory, and seemingly getting more comfortable with it as the weekend went on. More of the population finds its way onto the social networks by the day, so if television news networks want to survive then they'll have to learn how to coexist in a way that adds value and quality to the freeflow of news and information that comes from social networks rather than merely watering down that information while disparaging the source.

If that is indeed the future of television news networks, then what we saw this past weekend on CNN may have been an awkward first step in the right direction.

It's been a banner week for Twitter, hasn't it? Not only did Twitter's user-generated reporting of the unrest in Iran over the weekend manage to outclass the comparatively weak coverage provided by the television networks, it turns out Twitter is playing an even more important role in that unrest. While most of the public internet in Iran has been shut down, protesters are finding ways to communicate with each other over Twitter in a manner that's so vital that yesterday the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to move its planned hour of late-night maintenance to the middle of the day, which is the middle of the night in Iran, so that the protesters wouldn't be hurt by being without it. So if Twitter has now become such an important tool for the world at large, how is it that using Twitter has suddenly become one of the least enjoyable parts of my day?

I've long felt that the real value of Twitter isn't so much in the ability to read what other people post as it is the opportunity to respond to what others are saying in real time and generate an instant dialog that potentially leaves both sides enlightened. And in the two years I've been using Twitter on a daily basis, it's generally played out that way. In fact, when I'm having a busy day and don't have time to read everything that's posted by the people I follow, I make a point of at least keeping my eyes on the replies tab so that I get to read any responses that are directed at me, allowing me to reply back to them as appropriate. But too often lately those exchanges, which have in the past tended to be productive or at least thought provoking, have instead devolved into exchanges that are pointless at best and in some instances injurious.

I thought maybe it was just me. Perhaps I'd drifted off onto a hostile streak without being aware of it. But I've looked around, asked around, and it turns out I'm far from the only one who's reached the same conclusion: exchanges that were once civil and productive are now often counterproductive. I'm not sure it makes me feel any better to think that the problem might be endemic and not just local. In any case, after several days in a row in which I felt my time spent on Twitter had been more waste than worth, it finally came to a head today when I realized I was embroiled too many different simultaneous exchanges to count, most of which had no point, several of which were too heated, and some of which didn't even make any sense. Frustrated, I posted the message "I wonder if we're wasting our time on here, too difficult to open others' eyes to your points of view in 140-character doses," and then I got up and walked away from the computer and haven't so much as looked at Twitter since.

No, I'm not done using Twitter. But something has gone off the rails. During my time on Twitter I've witnessed a number of evolutionary aspects, and as intrigued as I've been at people's willingness to publicly post details about their lives that they would have previously kept private, I've been even more fascinated at their willingness to have conversations in public that would in the past nearly always have taken place in private. In the early days of this trend, those conversations were civil, restrained, often carefully metered by an awareness on the part of the participants that the world was potentially listening in. More recently though, those participants, myself included, seem to have collectively grown less concerned about which third parties might overhear what, or even which third parties might attempt to jump into the fray.

I'm often tempted to pin it on the election, which was the Twitter's first real opportunity for divisiveness. People you respected overall turned out to have political views which while you respected their right to have and express those views, you couldn't necessarily respect them for having those views. Still, things seemed to stay remarkably civil across the board throughout the electoral process, perhaps if only because those who disagreed with each other on the most fundamental levels knew better than to even attempt to debate each other.

Jump ahead eight months to the present, however, and the landscape on Twitter appears remarkably different. Post an opinion of any kind, and you'll receive knee-jerk responses across the board. Which isn't necessarily the end of the world, except that a good proportion of those responses are tangential to what you've posted at best. Even when a productive debate does start up, a third party can come along and break it up by confusing the issue. Find yourself in the middle of a healthy debate with someone over whether Palin's response to Letterman was intentionally libelous, and someone else comes along and wants the debate to instead be about the appropriateness of Letterman's joke.

Or for something far more controversial than politics, just try discussing technology. State that you're glad AT&T finally gave some ground on its previous attempt to charge some people twice what the iPhone is supposed to cost, and you'll get barraged by people throwing around the word "subsidy" who think they know more about the issue than you do. If someone is so naive that they aren't aware that "subsidized pricing" is nothing more than the carriers making up imaginary "unsubsidized" pricing in the hopes of suckering you into feeling good about paying a price that's still outrageous but lower than the imaginary "full price" they've invented, then I'm happy to explain that to them. But I'm not about to waste my time trying to have that conversation with someone who has encountered AT&T's party line about subsidized pricing, swallowed it whole, and thinks they're more knowledgeable on the subject than anyone else because they can recite the party line by memory. Turns out they're far bigger suckers than those who have no knowledge of cellphone pricing at all, but just try explaining that to them; they're too busy running around misguidedly throwing around words like "subsidized" in the false belief that they're impressing you with their inside knowledge.

Actually, it's not impossible. While there are few things more difficult to swallow than being told that what you thought you knew is so invalid that it's left you less able to understand a certain situation than someone who knows nothing at all about it, coming to that difficult realization can be of great benefit to you. The problem is that you're not going to be particularly thrilled with the person who's trying to convince you of this, particularly not while the light bulb is still coming on over your head, and perhaps not even after the fact, as no one likes to feel embarrassed. So it's the kind of conversation you only enter into with great caution, usually if the person is a close enough friend that they can forgive you for the embarrassment you're bringing them, and it's certainly not a conversation you'd have with that friend in public.

Now imagine trying to have that kind of delicate conversation while being limited to a hundred and forty characters at a time, with people you probably think you know a little better than you really do, in a format in which conversations not only generally take place in public, but are prone to being hijacked by others. In trying to squeeze your thoughts into a series of twenty-word mini-manifestos, there is no room for the kind of platitudes that can soften otherwise divisive exchanges, no room for the kind of nuance that can keep those with differing viewpoints open minded to other possibilities. There's room for your point, nothing but your point, and most definitely not your whole point, which can give the entire debate the feeling of a shouting match whether any of the participants are actually shouting or not. Compare this to a phone conversation, where the point of contention is usually the third item you discuss, or even an email in which you at least have room to open your statement by saying hello and close it by saying thanks.

Debates on Twitter really go haywire, though, when several people get in on the same discussion at once. Every large scale group discussion inevitably includes three groups of people: the ones who are knowledgeable, the ones who aren't, and the ones who only think they are. The first group can help educate the second, and can even help re-educate the third, but not both at the same time in the same conversation. But try keeping those two conversations separate on Twitter. And the biggest obstacle, of course, is that everyone in the third group thinks they're in the first, so you end up with the first and third groups arguing over what the facts of the matter really are, which merely manages to confuse the second group or turn them away out of disgust. Again, these issues are by no mean specific to Twitter and can be routinely encountered at any real-life cocktail party. But try having one of these tri-group conversations in 140 character doses, and it'll stand even less chance of being productive than it would in the real world.

That's to say nothing of the doomsday scenario in which you realize you're engaged in debate with someone has such a (from your standpoint) warped view of the world that you're best off not engaging them at all on any related topics. If someone believes large corporations should be allowed to get away with anything they want and that the individual victims of those corporations are at fault for being weak in the first place, then that belief is going to find its way into that person's opinion on just about any issue of substance, which means there's no point in me even trying to have a substantial conversation of any kind with that person. If you spent all of Star Wars rooting for Darth Vader then that's your prerogative, but there's no point in me trying to have a conversation with you about health care or even cellphone pricing. Not because I don't want to hear what you have to say, and I want to be as clear about this as possible, but simply because there's nothing productive that I can say in response. It helps to understand the viewpoints of those whose core beliefs you can't fathom, but attempting to debate them on those viewpoints isn't going to change your mind or theirs.

In elections we have just such debates between candidates, but those debates are for the benefit of the viewers who are trying to ascertain which of the two participants is on more solid ground. Rare is the public debate between politicians in which the two are genuinely trying to change each other's mind or sell each other on their viewpoints; most often they're each merely trying to sell the audience on their viewpoint in the hopes of defeating the person they're debating. And I can't help but wonder if that's what's gone wrong with discussions on Twitter as well. Too rarely these days do we see debates and discussions on Twitter in which we're genuinely trying to convince the other person to see it our way. Instead, lured by the presence of an audience and the desire to win them over, we attempt to convince the audience that the person we're debating is full of it. And if you think those kind of audience-oriented debates are insufficiently nuanced or civil in the real world, just try having those debates in a format that severely limits the potential for nuance or civility.

I don't know what the answer is. I do know that I'm at a crossroads as far as how I use Twitter each day. That's not necessarily as surprise, as it's a platform that comes with no instruction manual and was originally invented for nothing more than small scale private conversations among a handful of coworkers. But at a time the platform is evolving into something so meaningful as to directly influence major events around the world, I now have to step back and figure out how to once again make it meaningful to me. I used to think that the way to make Twitter work for me was to respond every time someone said something that I had a viewpoint on, and to put extra emphasis on responding back to those who responded to me. But perhaps I've taken that philosophy too far, or maybe it's just not as valid as it used to be, with thousands of people now in my Twitter network and most of us now caring so much less about what we say in public than we used to. Maybe I should just read what others are saying without replying myself, and say what's on my mind without reading the replies that others feel the need to throw back at me. That's not what I've ever thought Twitter was about. But as with all things that evolve, maybe those days are over.

I'll be severely disappointed if anyone tries to hijack the comments section by opining on the real-world topics I've arbitrarily used in this article as mere examples of hot button issues (and in fact I'll take the step, rare for me, of deleting any such attempts). But I'm interested in discussion of whether you've seen the same trends play out in your Twitter sphere, whether you're finding it harder to maintain productive discussion or civil debate in amongst the fray, and how you're (or how we all should be) dealing with it. I'm open to ideas. And of course there's no 140-character limitation here.

We should have known it was all too good to be true. Here was Apple using its WWDC keynote address to roll out a new iPhone "3GS" with improved speed, capacity, photo taking ability, processing speed, and even built-in video functionality, for a very reasonable $199 and $299. The existing iPhone 3G was sticking around for a mere $99. And even Apple's laptop computers and Mac operating system were receiving substantial price cuts and feature upgrades. Even with the annoying but temporary caveats that tethering and MMS messaging wouldn't be available on AT&T until later, nothing could change the fact that this past Monday was all set to go down as one of the more beneficial Apple product rollouts in some time.

And then the bombshell dropped.

It started when someone spotted the fine print at the bottom of Apple's iPhone sales pitch page about "unqualified" iPhone 3G customers having to pay $499, $599, or even $699 for the new iPhone 3GS. But what initially appeared to be an absurd typo was quickly confirmed Ð sort of Ð when customers started looking up the upgrade pricing for their individual accounts and found that a 32 GB iPhone 3GS would indeed cost them $699, according to wireless.att.com. Or perhaps $499, if you believe apple.com. No matter. Word simply spread that existing iPhone 3G users were about to fall victim to the screw job of the decade, and those 3G users who'd been following the day's news on Twitter suddenly shifted their tone from an excited "I can't wait to upgrade to an iPhone 3GS!" to a cynical "nah, I can live with my iPhone 3G just fine" along with an outraged "when did Apple suddenly decide to let AT&T rape half the iPhone user base?"

The top trending topic on Twitter for the remainder of the day? Not "Apple" despite all of its impressive announcements. And not "iPhone" even though the new model was impressive. Nope, the top trending topic of the day, right at the top of the list, was "AT&T" and suffice it to say that none of the discussion was of the favorable variety. In an instant, AT&T went from being the iPhone's long-time humorously unimpressive partner, one we've all learned to live with, to an anchor chained to the ankle of the iPhone and threatening to drag the whole platform into the depths.

You have to wonder where it all went wrong. Getting raped by cellphone carriers is nothing new for U.S. customers, as almost since the inception of the cellphone industry the carriers have been able to get away with doing more or less anything they've wanted to customers, as our government has done nothing to protect us from it over the years. But that's not the way it's worked on the iPhone platform, as anyone buying an iPhone 3G last year was going to pay the same price whether they were a new customer or upgrading from an original iPhone. And that's certainly never the way it's worked in the eight year history of the iPod, and to this day many if not most iPhone users see their iPhone simply as the latest iPod model that also happens to be a cellphone with a bunch of other features. While this kind of fraudulent pricing has been commonplace on other platforms, it's been entirely to the iPhone platform Ð until now.

So just what was Apple thinking when they agreed to this nonsense? It's been widely documented that AT&T is a mess overall and that its iPhone exclusivity in the U.S. is the only thing that's been propping it up. And even the least capable of businesspeople knows that when you're in a position of strength, when you're the one propping up your sagging partner, when your partner needs you a lot more than you need them, you either leave things they way they are out of benevolence and future goodwill or else you renegotiate things so they're more slanted in your favor. But Apple has instead managed to end up with the shorter end of the stick this time, left with significantly lower sales of the iPhone 3GS and an upcoming public relations nightmare that will overshadow the half a dozen positive things Apple rolled out this week, wiping out the untold millions in free advertising that the company is typically able to milk the media for in a cycle like this one.

Instead, by the time the iPhone 3GS launches on June 19th, a fair amount of existing iPhone 3G users will have decided to just stay home. But a much larger chunk of them will not have gotten word that they're about to get screwed, and so a rather large percentage (possibly as many as half) of all the people lined up to buy a 3GS on the 19th will not only go home empty handed, they'll exit the store screaming and swearing and making the kind of threats that'll result in mall security having to get involved Ð and it'll all play out right there in front of the TV camera crews that always gather outside Apple Stores on iPhone launch days. Because while we've come to expect that we're about to get abused any time we set foot in one of those organized crime headquarters known as AT&T Stores (or any other cellphone carrier store), no one goes to the Apple Store expecting to get raped. And it'll come as such a shock to the victims that they'll go out of their minds right there in the store. It's the kind of scene that'll only be fun to watch if you're a tabloid journalist. I don't know about you, but fistfights between Apple employees and existing iPhone users don't qualify as entertainment to me.

Even if Apple comes to its senses beforehand and decides to go ahead offer the iPhone 3GS to existing iPhone 3G users at normal prices come launch day, the damage will have already been done. Some existing users will hear through the grapevine that upgrade prices are fraudulent and stay home even if Apple has since rectified it. And in such case the big story of launch day wouldn't be about how great the 3GS was but instead about how Apple screwed up the pricing and had to fix it due to public pressure.

Either way Apple loses on this one. Which is stunning, considering how they'd seemingly set themselves up for a big win. Even if they do relent on pricing, you have to wonder what made them think they could get away with it in the first place. Like any other cellphone carrier, AT&T is going to go for the short-sighted customer gouge at every opportunity. That makes Apple the only adult in the room, the one that has to prevent these kinds of self-defeating scams from seeing the light of day. And with Apple holding all the cards when it comes to offering the iPhone to additional U.S. carriers when the original exclusivity deal is up, you really have to scratch your head at the notion that Apple appears to think its only recourse is to take subversive potshots at AT&T's incompetence all throughout the product rollout. That the pricing fraud wasn't even addressed during the keynote suggests that Apple has no idea how to deal with it, content to cross its fingers and hope no one noticed instead of addressing it head on either by trying to spin it during the rollout or by dropping the hammer on AT&T's toes behind the scenes beforehand.

The only thing I know for sure at this point is that Apple and AT&T are now officially at war with each other. To publicly trash your exclusive partner is to publicly trash yourself in the eyes of consumers, and Apple knows this. So there's no way Apple chooses to hurt itself in th short term by hurling those public potshots at AT&T on Monday unless it has no intention of keeping its exclusive arrangement with AT&T one minute longer than it absolutely has to. While that might be good news for U.S. customers on other carriers who eventually want to join the iPhone revolution but haven't had the wherewithall to migrate to AT&T, it's bad news for those of us who will be stuck with AT&T contracts for long after the iPhone has presumably made its debut on other carriers.

If ever there was a contract worth buying ones way out of, the ones that existing iPhone customers have with AT&T just might be it once the iPhone can be used with other carriers. Let's be as clear as possible: all U.S. cellphone carriers are evil. None of them are companies that you would ever want to do business with unless you had to. But count me among the first to jump ship to a theoretical Verizon iPhone the minute one becomes available. The irony is that due both to my yesteryear experiences as a Verizon cellphone customer and to my the recent fiascoes surrounding my current EVDO account, I hate Verizon. But what AT&T is doing here is a significant step beyond the evil we've come to expect from cellular companies. Its behavior isn't merely short-sighted, it's suicidal. There was only one thing propping AT&T up, and the company just threw that out with the rest of its slimy bathwater. AT&T is a sinking ship, and clearly Apple wants off of it, and so do I. Until the time comes, I'll just have to limp along on AT&T with the rest of you.

But this leads to a serious question about the bigger picture for Apple. Pundits (including me) have pointed out that the people running Apple seem to have done alright, or even more than alright, in the absence of Steve Jobs. But all that comes under greater scrutiny now that we've seen the way in which Steve's proteges have apparently dealt with AT&T in such a weak-willed "we own your ass and so we'll give you whatever you want" manner behind the scenes, and in such a cowardly "we hope no one notices" manner when announcing the resulting bad deal to customers. That's no way to run a company, and it leaves me convinced that the return of Steve Jobs to Apple can't come soon enough.

Just as the biggest story of the football offseason has been centered around whether a certain retired star will unretire, the questions most often asked in the consumer technology space so far in 2009 have also been centered around a star who's spent the entire year away from the game: when, if ever, will Steve Jobs return to Apple? And if so, does Apple even still need him? At this point, unless we're being bamboozled by everyone from Steve Wozniak to Apple's board of directors, all signs point to Jobs returning to Apple by the end of the month. But the company hasn't exactly fallen apart in his absence. It hasn't run out of money and asked the government for a bailout. It hasn't discontinued the iPhone and replaced it with an Apple-branded line of surfboards. Despite the lack of a major new product launch so far in his absence, Apple has done okay without Steve Jobs. But nonetheless Apple still needs him back, perhaps more so now than ever. And the reason can be summed up in two words, though not for the reason you might think: Palm Pre.

That Apple has survived, even prospered, in Steve's absence shouldn't come as a surprise. Though he's not at Apple on a daily basis, he's reportedly been included in all of Apple's major decisions. And even if he were completely out of the loop, what makes Steve's current absence different from his last one is that this time the company is still being run by his people. People that have been hand-selected and groomed by Steve over the past twelve years. People who, if not necessarily seeing the world as he does, nonetheless understand that Steve wants things done in a certain way. People who, over a stretch as short as six months, are going to run the company (at least from a business aspect) in largely the same manner without Steve looking over their shoulder as they would if he were.

Contrast that with the last time Steve Jobs departed from Apple, back in 1985. Steve was unceremoniously tossed out of the company by people who thought he was either an idiot or a lunatic or both. Those same folks promptly drove Apple straight into a ditch, and then spent the next twelve years limping along through that ditch, wondering where it all went wrong. By the time Steve finally came back to the company in 1997, Apple's products had barely advanced in any meaningful way since he'd left, and the only reason Apple was still around was that its sole competitor had spent those same twelve years somehow not being able to catch up despite Apple spending the whole time spinning its wheels. So it's no surprise that Steve's current departure from Apple has been more successful than his first one, and you have to imagine that even if Steve were to stay away for twelve years this time, the company would do far better in the hands of his proteges than it did when it was in the hands of his clueless ideological opposites.

But if you want to know how Steve's proteges at Apple are performing in his absence, it might be helpful to take a look at Steve's most notable protege no longer at Apple. The Palm Pre, a desperate attempt on the part of an almost-gone company to get back into the game (or at least out of the ditch) with one swing, is largely the work of Jon Rubinstein. After retiring from Apple he ended up becoming chairman at Palm, giving us the chance to see one of Steve's former right hand men now running his own show. Not surprisingly, Palm has thus far followed the same path that Steve Jobs laid out when he returned to a dying Apple: let go of everything that isn't working, salvage the rest for parts, and then double down and bet the company on one notable new product launch that has to succeed. For Steve, it was the iMac. And after that succeeded, it was iLife, MacOS X, the iPod, the iPhone. For Palm it's the Pre. So at least we know Rubinstein was paying attention all those years.

Look closer at the Pre, though, and you'll understand the difference between the two men and their line of thinking. Steve focused on choice of computer colors (which was a radical idea back then), easy access to the internet (which in those days was a pain for most people), and lack of cable clutter (which is still a pain to this day). He went hard after the mainstream, focusing on features that the average user would see as a turn-on. More intricate details, like overhauling the aging Mac operating system and developing core Mac software applications, while being worked on at the time behind the scenes, would come later. But first Steve wanted to remind the world that Apple still existed, and that it could still come up ideas that had never occurred to anyone else in the industry, even if it was something as superficial as blue and pink computers that didn't require a minitower sitting on the desk.

Rubinstein's first swing out of the gate has been decidedly different. While a smartphone is the most logical new product for Palm to pursue when you weigh its historical strengths with what the market currently wants, the specifics of the Pre are what gives away his philosophies. Nevermind that the mainstream success of the iPhone has already proven that the average user doesn't care about a physical keyboard; the Pre has the added bulk of a slide-out keyboard with thirty-five different keys on it. Nevermind that the average user doesn't even know what "multitasking" means, and even those few who are familiar with the concept tend to understand that a device with such limited hardware power shouldn't allow wide open multitasking among third-party apps; the Pre does so anyway, favoring theoretical power over practical usability. The features that Jon Rubinstein has chosen to focus on tell us exactly how he views the world: the iPhone would be a great product if only it were a lot geekier. And breaking new ground isn't nearly as important as steering the technology market away from its recent flirtation with what the consumer actually wants, in favor or returning the market to its original geek ideals. Which is a shame, because anyone who's ever heard Rubinstein speak knows that he's a brilliant computer engineer.

By all accounts the Pre isn't a confusing inconsistent mess like you'd get from Blackberry. It isn't a buggy incompetent joke like you'd expect from Microsoft. Instead it's a fully competent product Ð yet it'll still fail to find any traction among mainstream users whatsoever. And its only apparent sin is that instead of trying to give the mainstream what it wants, the Pre tries to give geeks what they want, either in the hopes that the other ninety-nine percent of the population can be retrained as geeks, or in total ignorance of the fact that the other ninety-nine percent of the population even exists.

The Pre demonstrates, once and for all, that technical competence alone is not enough. Rubinstein had all those years of direct tutelage under Steve Jobs, and yet it didn't prevent him from eventually branching out on his own and launching a product aimed at no one but fellow geeks. That tells us that Rubinstein wanted to create geek-only products like the Pre the whole time he was at Apple, and Steve was the only thing that kept him on track and motivated him to create mainstream-oriented products instead. One has to assume that the geeks who are still at Apple, and ostensibly running the show in his absence, are no different. It merely serves to further the notion that Steve is alone in the universe as the only person who can command the geeks under him to make products that are not only technically competent but also geared toward what regular users want from such a product, the latter of which goes against every instinct in a geek's mind and body.

If Steve were to never return to Apple, the fear is not that the company would eventually become incompetent. No, the real fear is that Steve's proteges would eventually turn it into one big episode of "geeks gone wild" by cranking out products that are only suitable for the geekiest one percent of the population and seen as mere necessary evils by the rest of us. That's exactly what goes on at every other technology company on the planet, and now we appear to know that Steve's continued presence is the only thing that's preventing the same thing from happening at Apple. After all, we've just learned that no matter how many years a geek might spend under Steve's command, he's going to revert to his geek-only instincts the moment he's no longer under Steve's thumb. And for that reason alone, for the other ninety-nine percent of us, Steve's return to Apple can't come fast enough.

A few days ago I randomly came across a Twitter account named @TheConeZone which claimed to be that of Conan O'Brien but was almost immediately recognizable as being an impostor. The tweets supposedly posted by Conan didn't come close to the kinds of things you'd expect Conan to say, so much so that the account only had about twenty thousand followers. Contrast that to @JimmyFallon which really is Jimmy Fallon and has more than a million followers. Wherever one might rank Fallon's potential for popularity among Twitter users, Conan's is that much higher. Want proof? While his debut episode of The Tonight Show was airing this past Monday, half of Twitter's top ten trending topics were directly related to it. In other words, if Conan really were on Twitter, he'd easily have a million or more followers of his own. Such a high percentage of Twitter users were able to pick up on the fakeness of @TheConeZone and thusly ignore the account that it only had three times as many followers as I do - and I'm nobody. But as it turns out, someone managed to fall for it after all.

This week Time Magazine revealed a new cover story featuring Twitter, which is all well and good, but these kinds of mainstream traditional media forays into new-fangled stuff always make me instinctively recoil just a bit because they're so prone to getting the basic facts and realities of the matter blatantly wrong. Presumably none of the editors at the publication know enough about the new-fangled subject matter for any red flags to go off - and the staff writer, knowing this, can afford to be lazy since no one within the publication is going to know better anyway. In fact, despite the fact that they've all been positive in tone, every single mainstream newspaper or print magazine article written about iProng or any of my other ventures over the years has contained at least one glaring factual error. Every single one of them. And in the age of traditional journalists rushing to keep up with their web-savvy upstart competitors, the trend has gotten even worse. But what I found today in the latest Time Magzine feature just might take the cake.

Within a profile of a couple dozen famous Twitter users, Time Magazine tells us all about @TheConeZone, the official Twitter account of Conan O'Brien, and even helpfully presents us with five of Conan's recent tweets (which all inexplicably come from April). None of them are remotely funny, one simply reads "love the hairdo @donaldtrump" and another suggests that Conan was taking a vacation to Ireland at a time when he was almost certainly knee deep in getting ready to launch his version of The Tonight Show. Another misspells "Finnish" as "finish" which is curious considering just how central Finland is to one of Conan's running gags, and also the fact that Conan isn't an illiterate twelve year old. The fourth post appears to be a reply to Tina Fey's @tinafey account, which is a bit curious because that particular account has never posted a single tweet. In other words, @TheConeZone is pretty much what you'd expect to see if someone were attempting to impersonate Conan O'Brien but was only modestly familiar with him.

And yet none of these curiosities apparently managed to set off any alarms with anyone at Time, who linked to @TheConeZone as if it were the real Conan O'Brien, which it obviously is not. How do I know? Well, as of today, @TheConeZone has been suspended. Twitter is so notoriously slow and unhelpful when it comes to eliminating impostors that baseball manager Tony La Russa filed a lawsuit against Twitter over an impostor pretending to be him (and remind me sometime to tell you the story of my own recently resolved eighteen month long dispute with Twitter over the impostor formerly squatting on the @iProng trademark and making broadly offensive posts while pretending to be me and using a doctored photo of me as profile picture). But despite its penchant for inaction on the matter, Twitter has pulled the plug on the phony Conan account without having to think twice. And yet Time still has the story on its website, complete with a link to a Twitter account that Time still doesn't appear to realize is fake, despite the fact that twitter.com/TheConeZone now reads "Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity."

It's unclear whether the account in question was suspended before Time published its feature, or was perhaps suspended afterwards due to the resulting publicity. But either way, Time Magazine doesn't seem to have a clue about it, still featuring the Conan/Twitter story unrevised at the time I'm writing this. And of course the print version would be a little bit more difficult to correct than the web version.

Is any of this a big deal? Maybe or maybe not. Time's failure to do any kind of due diligence before prominently presenting an impostor's work as being that of Conan O'Brien is more injurious to Conan himself than to any Time readers who might fall for it (particularly since the fake account has already been removed from Twitter). But it's a classic example of everything that can go wrong when traditional media tries to cover something they simply don't understand. Not only does the Time staffer who put that profile together apparently know nothing about Conan or his show, the staffer also appears to know nothing about Twitter. Even the most pedestrian of Twitter users is likely to be aware of the rampant number of celebrity impostor accounts, and to know that a world-famous celebrity whose name has been in the news all week couldn't possibly have a mere 20,000 followers on an account that's existed for months.

The next time a traditional media publication wants to do a feature on new media, perhaps they should assign it to someone who actually understands new media. If anyone on their staff even fits that description to start with.

Until now I've written next to nothing about the upcoming Palm Pre smartphone, and with good reason: it's probably going to be lousy, flop badly, signal the end of Palm, and have no effect on the iPhone one way or the other. And if that's all you've got to say on the matter then there's really no point in saying it, so I've kept quiet. The Pre is coming to market years too late to matter unless it was a category killer or a market changer, and it's neither of those. So it's just the Zune all over again, except Palm doesn't have deep enough pockets to continue propping up the Pre after it's already flopped.

So why am I finally bringing up the Pre now, a few days before it launches, instead of just letting it die in peace? All along there's been the fact that one of Apple's former top executives, Jon Rubinstein, is leading the charge on the Pre. In other words, Palm hired the guy who used to run Apple's iPod/iPhone division to help develop an iPhone competitor. That's juicy stuff when you consider that while the iPhone wasn't publicly introduced until eight months after he left, Apple has since admitted to have been secretly working on the iPhone for a few years before it launched. So you have to wonder just how much he knew about Apple's iPhone plans at the time he "retired" in the Brett Favre sense of the word before rather quickly finding his way over to Palm. At this point it may not matter, though, as you have to wonder if there's anything that Apple knew about the iPhone back in mid-2006 that hasn't already come out in the wash by now one way or the other. And even if he were pumping Apple's trade secrets into the Pre, that would ultimately be a matter for Apple's attorneys and Palm's attorneys, which couldn't be more boring. And any personal betrayal angle between Rubinstein and Steve Jobs would be the stuff of tabloids.

As it turns out , what suddenly has my interest about the Pre is a lot less sexy and more, well, nerdy, but I believe ultimately more substantial. Palm recently announced that the Pre will sync with iTunes. On the surface it sounds like a clever, if potentially limiting, shortcut. Palm cedes any ambitions it might have had in the area of selling digital content, but it's not as if Palm was suddenly going to become a digital music retailer anyway. Nearly all Mac users and a healthy chunk of Windows users are already using iTunes as their primary digital content player anyway (including millions on both platforms who've never owned an iPod or iPhone), so why not start off by accepting the dominance of iTunes and positioning the Pre as a device that fits right in with the iTunes universe. Almost as if it were the iPhone's long-lost stepbrother.

Except that in reality, the Pre is more like the iPhone's long-lost stepbrother's uncle's cousin's former roommate. Try syncing your Pre to iTunes and some, but not all, of the music you've bought through iTunes will work on the Pre. None of the TV shows or movies or music videos, as far as I can tell. Photos, I'm not even sure. But it doesn't matter, because you've already lost anyone who cares about music the minute they attempt to sync their Pre and are presented with the harsh reality that most of the music they've purchased through iTunes prior to 2009 is simply not going to end up on their Pre. Sure, you can screw around with burning the music to a CD-R and then reimporting it back into iTunes and then syncing it with your Pre, but only the geekiest of the geekiest of the geeks is going to play those kinds of games. And music isn't even the Pre's biggest iTunes problem.

Because no matter how much fine print Palm includes on the box, in its advertising, or in the script memorized by the salespeople, some portion of Pre buyers are going to hear "sync with iTunes" and assume that includes the iTunes App Store. Mark my words: you're going to see people buy a Pre expecting to be able to take it home and purchase iPhone apps from the app store and have those apps somehow magically work on their Pre despite the fact that it isn't within a country mile of being possible for too many technical reasons to list. If you think users aren't capable of making such an off-base assumption, keep in mind how many iTunes users download iPhone games and can't understand why they're not playable directly on their computer until they finally have the "well duh" moment of remembering that their computer screen isn't a touchscreen. And even if you think someone buying an iPhone app and expecting it to work on their Pre is the user's fault for being so clueless, it won't change the fact that those users are going to consider their Pre to be defective once it happens. In fact some of them will have considered it to have been their primary reason for purchasing the product, and will conclude they've been scammed. Nevermind that Palm plans to have its own app store, most Pre users won't even get that far. After they've spent $4.99 on Bejeweled in iTunes only to find out it doesn't work on their shiny new Pre, and that new Coldplay album they bought through iTunes last year doesn't work on their Pre either, they're going to be (rightly or wrongly) furious with Palm - and their brand new Pre is going back for a refund.

Not that it ultimately matters in the scheme of things. The Pre, being a geeked up smartphone that no one but geeks even seems to have heard about yet, is no more an iPhone competitor than the Blackberry is.The iPhone all along has been aimed not at Blackberry users but at the mainstream user who's been carrying around an iPod in the left pocket and a cheap generic flip-phone in the right pocket, which allows the iPhone to compete for nearly the entire population while Blackberry remains confined to the niche it's already carved out for itself. And the Blackberry Storm, if anything, merely served to demonstrate that Blackberry has no idea what it is that people like about the iPhone. So if Apple gets to gradually swallow up the mainstream cellphone market, and Blackberry gets relegated to geeks and raw power users, that leaves Palm and its geeky Pre in a position where the best it can hope for is to salvage just a little meat off the bones of the carcass that was once the Palm-based Treo platform, and to steal away a little of Blackberry's growing-but-inherently-limited market base. And so in the end, whether the Pre ends up with a few percentage points of the smartphone market and allows Palm to limp into the next decade, or whether the Pre ends up with zero percent of anything and finally puts Palm out of its misery, it doesn't affect the iPhone one way or the other. And it wouldn't even be worth writing about if not for the irony of the fact that the Pre's attempt to directly piggyback onto the success of the iTunes ecosystem could very well be what takes away any chance the Pre might have had of not flopping.

And that's before we even get to the fact that two days after the Pre launches, Team Apple will be delivering a keynote address in which they'll probably introduce both the new iPhone 3.0 operating system and the new iPhone hardware model.

Not that we'd ever get an answer, and not that it could probably ever happen at this point anyway, but you do have to wonder if Jon Rubinstein is going to end up wishing he were back at Apple when it's all said and done. Well there is one way he could end up rejoining Apple, but if you haven't already figured it out them I'm not going to go all tabloid on you by spelling it out.

For those not familiar with Safari, it is, simply put, the world's best web browser for Mac or Windows. Of course "world's best" doesn't mean much when the other options consist of Microsoft's pitiful Internet Explorer (which was impressively mediocre at one time, at least on the Mac, but by all accounts is now dying a slow horrifying death), the open-source Firefox (which is almost literally nothing more than a collective volunteer effort by some geeks in their basements with too much time on their hands), and a host of independent browsers so obscure that I honestly can't recall a single one of their names. In fact Safari became the world's best web browser by default when version 1.0 launched five years ago, and hasn't come close to relinquishing the title since. And yet today I got rid of Safari... in favor of Safari.

Yeah, I should probably attempt to preface that one after the fact, as it were. The current official version of Safari is 3.0 (actually 3.2.3, for those who like decimals this early in the morning), and it's fast, solid, innovative, and inherently productivity-boosting. But about three months ago Apple released a beta version of Safari 4.0, and while I swore years ago that I would never again install any beta software from any company no matter how tempting, I broke that vow under the premise that whatever partially completed new features Apple was still working on for 4.0, there was no reason why any of them should get in the way of the solid interface foundation Safari has consisted of for years. Plus, hey, it comes with an uninstaller.

Oops. The first beta release of Safari 4.0 was something that I installed back in late February only to find that while it was plenty stable (read: it doesn't crash or freeze up), the new interface features Apple was working on were either bad ideas to begin with, or good ideas that were being implemented improperly, or good ideas being implemented well that were still too much in the early stages for their sageness to be detectable by the user. The new tabs implementation, which did free up a few pixels of screen real estate by absorbing the tabs into the titlebar of the browser window itself, caused needless excess mousing (and excess eye movement) all the way up to the titlebar and back, along with making it too difficult to re-order existing tabs and too easy to accidentally close a tab in the process. And the new home page implementation, which shows you thumbnails of your twelve most often viewed websites, turned out to be useless. Since it was a beta I could overlook the fact that the twelve websites it chose for me were sites I rarely ever visit. What I couldn't overlook was the fact that there was just no utility to it.

Of course turning off the "favorite places" feature (or whatever they ended up officially calling it) was easy enough. And while the new tab implementation was clearly an interface downgrade in my eyes (at least in its beta form), it was something that I could grudgingly accept for the short term if there was enough good stuff in there to make up for it. But there wasn't. The noticeably faster page rendering was nice, but it's unlikely to actually speed up your overall browsing experience. Even here in the days of widely adopted broadband (overburdened, not properly upgraded, and often officially or unofficially capped by the provider), bandwidth is still the biggest bottleneck, not rendering.

But it's one thing for the new features to either not be done well or not be of value; it's another thing to find that some of what's been consistent about Safari all along, what's been right about Safari all along, is suddenly flat-out missing. Like the blue progress bar that has always ingeniously flowed right through the URL bar, left to right, an immediate and clear visualization of the page's progress that takes place right where your eyes are already focused after you've entered a URL. Inexplicably, that blue progress bar completely disappeared from Safari 4.0 and was replaced by... well nothing, really, unless you count a little spinning circle at the far right of the URL bar that gives no indication of the actual progress. And if you think I'm being picky by complaining that Safari's best interface aspects have vanished, how about something a little more basic? Would you believe that there's no longer any "stop loading" button? Actually there is, but it only appears if you point your cursor right at the spinning progress circle, at which point it momentarily transforms into a stop sign. Which I didn't figure out until day two. And others didn't figure out until I pointed it out to them. Gee whiz, Apple, why don't you just start fitting us for dunce caps now?

If my reactions to something as incidental as an unfinished new version of a web browser seem over the top, it's simply because I'm sharing the thought process that led me to decide, after two or three days, that I'd been right all along: I don't know who "public beta" software is supposed to be for these days, but it certainly isn't me. Especially not with an app that I rely on every day, and certainly not with an app that I rely on to not clunkily get in my way every day. But as fate would have it, my new laptop suddenly had that video display problem and went into the shop before I even had a chance to run the uninstaller. And so I was back on my old laptop, back on Safari 3.x, by default. And sure enough, I could instantly see that 3.x was in fact the superior version - or at least the right one for me.

But when I finally got my new laptop back from warranty repair and it had 4.0 beta on it, I went back to using the beta almost unconsciously, somehow forgetting that I had already decided to dump it. By the time I remembered what I was doing, I'd decided that while I didn't like the beta any more than I had on day one, at this point I'd stick with it until the next beta version was released. And finally, we got our updated Safari beta, and so I dutifully installed it, and found... nothing. I can't find anything that's different. I didn't go through it with a fine tooth comb, though, because I was quickly able to determine that the criteria I cared about hadn't been met: the tabs are still the same half-baked mess. Still no blue progress bar. Still have to remind myself where the stop button is hiding. Still don't see a thing that would make Safari 4.0 more compelling to me in its current form than what I could get from Safari 3.x. And so this morning I ran the uninstaller. And now I'm back using version 3.2.3, the real Safari, the fully finished one, the one that works. And it feels good.

The whole shebang leaves two questions: what on earth was I thinking when I installed the beta? I don't know. Lesson learned, I guess. And no harm done, other than a little needless aggravation. But the other question is larger in scope: what on earth was Apple thinking by releasing this unfinished ugly duckling to the public? It's not as if Safari 3 were so outdated that Apple had to get something more modern out there, if incomplete, just to stay in the game. After all, nearly every Mac user uses Safari. While some single-digit percentage of Mac users do use Firefox, it's never been a threat and likely never will be. While the developers of Firefox probably do believe that their browser is geared toward the mainstream, the truth couldn't be further. In reality, Firefox is for computer geeks what a 1967 Pontiac GTO is for car geeks: fun to play around with, endless potential for tinkering, easy to trick out - but when it comes down to it, far more suited as a hobbyist experiment than as something to drive to work in day in and day out. In fact the very things that make Firefox so compelling to the geekiest of users, the interface aspects that are too clever by half, the endless layers of third party plugins, and the fact that its collaborative hobbyist development means that it always has been and always will be in permanent beta whether they want to tag it that way or not, are what ensures that Firefox will never have mainstream appeal. I've encountered Mac geeks who will swear up and down that they honestly believe that as many as half of all Mac users are somehow using Firefox, but that's so laugh-out-loud absurd that it merely demonstrates how insulated from the mainstream those geeks really are when their only "evidence" comes in the form of "all my (similarly geeky) friends use Firefox on their Mac" or the equally humorous "half of all the Mac users who visit my 'Firefox is the best.com' website are using Firefox" or some other such nonsense. I only bring it up because if I don't, someone else will launch an "every Mac user in the whole wide world uses Firefox because I wish it where that way!" rampage in the comments section. Consider this fair warning not to bother. And yes, for the record, I do resent the fact that you can't say anything about Mac web browsers these days without an army of Firefox worshippers hijacking the conversation and hammering you - not for criticizing their choice of web browser, but because you committed the unforgivable sin of pointing out the fact that statistically speaking, nearly all Mac users are using Safari not Firefox. Actually it's kind of sad that stating an obvious fact can get you in more trouble than stating an opinion, presumably because it's easier to simply pretend the fact isn't true than it would be to take the time to flesh out a detailed counter-opinion. But that's where we are these days.

Anyway, I can only hope that Apple's release of a not-even-close-to-being-ready beta wasn't a panic move or an overreaction to the non-threat coming from Firefox. In fact, the more I think about it, Safari 4.0 beta reminds me a lot of Firefox: too much in flux, too clever for it own good, more focused on whiz-bang and pushing forward recklessly at all costs than on being an effortlessly usable web browser. Maybe Apple's developers just hit a wall part way through designing the 4.0 interface and genuinely wanted some user feedback to get their juices flowing. In any case, I trust that all will be well with Safari 4.0 once they've actually finished making it, and that's the point at which I'll go ahead and re-upgrade, so to speak.

So here I am back on Safari 3, typing this in a Safari 3 browser window in fact (I know better than to type anything more than a few sentences long into a web form, but at the moment I'm just enjoying myself). I'll miss the predictive search in the google toolbar, and the tabs are taking up just a little bit more of my screen, but the interface of this web browser actually makes sense to me, and that's enough. Maybe I'm becoming an old man of a computer user, but so be it if I am. Or maybe I'm just maturing as a user. Either way, it works for me.

And what about you? Whether you're on Mac or Windows, if you're not already using Safari, you should be. And while I obviously wouldn't recommend the beta (unless you're the type who actually likes Firefox), the current official version of Safari, the 3.2.3 version that I'm now back to using, is available here. Or maybe at this point you'd rather just wait until the finalized, polished version of Safari 4.0 is eventually released. Then again, considering just how inept and/or inappropriate the alternatives are, maybe you shouldn't wait after all.

History will likely judge Google to have been the first reliable search engine. Prior to its launch, using most search engines was akin to digging through a landfill looking for something you inadvertently threw in the trash: inaccurate, time consuming, and messy. But in the Google era, searching the web usually gives you what you're looking for (or something close to it) within the first page of results. Lately however, Google's search prowess seems to have plateaued as the rush of new and constantly changing information onto the internet on an up-to-the-minute basis now means that any results more than a few months old tend to be sufficiently outdated as to be wholly inaccurate or useless. For instance, a year-old web page about Barack Obama, which would inform you he's still a Senator, would only be of value from a historical perspective; otherwise it's a lot like the old days of going to the library and trying to look something up in last year's encyclopedia. It's gotten to the point that I often include "2009" at the end of my search term in an attempt to push more recently published web pages higher in the search results (thanks to Chris Brogan for the tip), and if we can figure out how to manipulate search results to favor timeliness, then why can't Google?

Microsoft has yet to really deliver anything of any value to society (products like Windows and Word have been massive detriments to society's progress as a whole, but that's another story for another day), but the company's launch of its new "Bing" search engine managed to at least mildly pique my curiosity. Actually there's nothing new about it; Microsoft has had a search engine for several years that almost no one uses, and so the company periodically changes the search engine's name (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, etc, etc) and aesthetics in the hope of generating new interest in a perennially ignored product. Still, the launch of Bing seems to have generated far more buzz than any of Microsoft's past warm-overs of its search engine, so I figured I'd play with it just a bit. Even if it turns out to be a lame flop, its mere existence (and temporary buzz) just might convince Google to stop poking around on sideshows like Android and instead steer their efforts back toward the one thing they've ever proven they're great at: search.

Bing has just launched as a "preview" which means you shouldn't expect everything to work quite right. Fair enough. But you shouldn't search for "apples" and get a page full of results about oranges, so to speak. Most people start off by typing their own name into a new search engine to see what comes up, but in my case I'm more interested in the business ramifications so I dutifully typed "iProng" into the search bar so I could ensure that the results Bing delivers for my magazine are at least relatively accurate. In other words, iProng.com should come up first, then probably our official presences on major sites like Facebook and Twitter, followed by major sites that have linked to specific pages of our content, and so on. But here's the funny thing: searching Bing for "iProng" not only doesn't deliver iProng.com as the first search result, it doesn't even come up in the first ten results. In fact it doesn't come up in the first ten pages of results.

My first thought was that perhaps Bing simply hasn't finished indexing the entire internet. It would be bizarre for a major commercial search engine to launch in such a fashion, but after all it is labeled as a preview. But when I typed in "iProng.com" into the search bar, sure enough, iProng.com is the first result. That means Bing has in fact found the iProng.com website but doesn't think it's in any way relevant to a search for the word "iProng" - a word which, I should point out, is a fictional word that I made up several years ago and has literally no other meaning (in English or any other language) than in direct reference to my publication. In fact, of the first hundred search results Bing delievered for the word iProng, all one hundred of them contain links to the iProng.com website.

Here's a hint, Microsoft: when someone searches for a brand name that only has one meaning and has only ever been used in direct reference to one specific website, whose URL consists of that particular word, and when the top one hundred results churned out by your algorithm for that particular word all link to that same website, you just might want to include that website somewhere within those top one hundred results. Say, at the very top of those results. Just like Google does. And ask.com and search.yahoo.com and even circa-1995 search engines like AOL Search and Alta Vista, whose search algorithms were probably last updated years before iProng even came into existence. So there you have it, Microsoft: even Dogpile, whose name warns you up front that it's crap, delivers more accurate results than your shiny new Bing.

But here's the really fun part. After pointing out on Twitter that Bing can't figure out that people searching for "iProng" just might be looking for iProng.com, someone else on Twitter countered that by informing me that when she searched for "iProng" on Bin,g her results did in fact show iProng.com as the first result - and provided a screen capture to prove it. Is that one even explainable? The only differential I could find is that I'm in the United States and she's in Canada. And sure enough, I head over to the Canadian-specific Bing.ca and iProng.com does in fact come up as the first search result. In other words, Bing.ca is ahead of Bing.com. As a side note, Bing shares its name with Chandler Bing, the character from "Friends" played by Matthew Perry - who is in fact Canadian.

My conclusion? Microsoft clearly hates America.

I'll cut it some slack for still being in beta, but if this one embarrassingly absurd example is any indication of Bing's agility, then my guess is that the folks over at Google are letting out a collective sigh of relief right now and turning their attention back to their multi-year quest to make webmail somehow magically be something other than the crapfest that it inherently it is. Oh well.

Oh and by the way, now that I've visited Bing.ca, my subsequent attempts to using Bing.com ask me if I want my results to be worldwide or "only from Canada" - I'm telling ya, I think I'm onto something here :-)