Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

Lytro Shuts Down Its Light Field Photo Sharing Website:

I wrote about Lyrtro here in 2012 and it seems I was right to wonder. Lytro’s folded their publishing service never having offered a way for camera owners to publish images where the light field remained interactive rather than flattened to a jpg (what they called a “living picture”) in any other way than through their own service. 

What they offer now is the right to link a person to download your file and their desktop application. We call this the bare minimum and hardly useful.

So, as I politely and, I’d hoped at the time constructively,  predicted, if you own the camera and relied on them to keep what made the images special available and fully functional, guess what? You’re screwed now because they never did release an open source .js based Living Picture tool for content creators.

The lesson? If you buy a product, own the product and whatever you can make with that product, fully useful. If you buy a product and the seller is trying to make that a product actually a service, they want you to pay them to own you. Don’t do it.

The company is doing what the Phred the Venture Capitalist would call a pivot into VR and CG. I make no predictions and express none of the doubts about that future for them that my post about their consumer offerings implied. I just can’t make the same kind of informed guess. I will say, that VR thing sure has taken off in a big way. Everybody you know has VR googles. Right? (Ok so I lied about not making predictions.)

A final note: Long after I wrote the original piece I bought a first generation Lytro camera when they were available at closeout prices. I unboxed it, shot a few images and decided to box if back up and return it in less than an hour’s time because image quality was just that bad except in the most idealized conditions where it rose to the level of parlor trick. 

 

Some background links here:

Apple’s Press Release

Gigaom:
From inside Apple, the Scott Forstall fallout which includes links worth following for more good commentary.

I’m optimistic. Very optimistic. Note the headline of Apple’s Press Release, it’s telling: “Apple Announces Changes to Increase Collaboration Across Hardware, Software & Services”

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed several opportunities to work pretty closely with various people and teams at Apple, in particular the QuickTime team but others I can’t mention and in all those experiences, I’ve found Apple to be staffed by shockingly smart people. Smart in ways that, to my mind, are vastly superior to the obvious brilliance of the Google and Microsoft employees I’ve worked with.

Anyone fairly senior in a tech company, especially in engineering, has to be smart and often a hell of a lot smarter technically than me, but smart is a much deeper thing than the ability to calculus in your head or or keep a mental map of all the personal information Google can collect about you and how it can be used to exploit you, provide you better services. The smart people I’ve enjoyed working with at Apple (and some at Microsoft too actually) play musical instruments, cook gourmet food, race cars, do creative and challenging things deeper, more personal interesting than just code. The smart people I hire when I make my better choices are content-smart, user-smart, life-smart. Apple is overwhelmingly well staffed by this more well rounded kind of smart, the better kind of smart.

What’s always stymied these smart people I’ve worked with, and some have told me outright and others done a great job of ‘not telling me’ by answering questions with the word “So…” followed by a long pregnant pause and careful control of eye contact when the answer in an officially acceptable way is that collaboration is a problem between teams at Apple.  They tell me, particularly since the return of Steve, the policies of secrecy and the inter-group competitiveness engendered by Steve’s style made collaboration difficult. I’m bound by personal NDA’s (as in, ‘don’t talk about this or you breach our personal trust’ NDA’s which are far more binding than the NDA’s of ‘don’t talk about this or I’ll sue you’ NDAs) not to be specific here but if you read between the lines in interviews with and even sometimes in public documentation, one group who relied on another for the ‘plumbing’ didn’t get to see the actual plumbing until late in the game and the product suffered for it or was unable to get the resources to invest in plumbing that an App needed to function.

‘Increase Collaboration’ Sure, sounds like corporate-speak. Apple’s not normal. They don’t tend to do ‘corporate-speak’. Read their contracts. Read their PR. Listen to them in interviews. There’s always the overt and the veiled message. The veiled message is often quite clear if you pay close attention. Here, the surface and underlying messages are congruent completely and that makes the message all the louder and, therefore, likely sincere: “We’re done with infighting and jockeying for position. We’re done with the platforms and system services groups having to compete with the applications groups for resources.  We’re done core services groups having to justify their own bottom lines when they are essential to initiatives that serve the whole bottom line. We’re done with MBA-old-school approaches to retail staffing and management. We’re going to work together to do what we do best starting right-the-#$%^-now.”

Now, I see a plan. I see Tim Cook saying “These guys (and it’s a shame it’s all guys and no women) are large-and-in-charge and they are the adults. They can and will work together and enjoy doing it and our products will be better for it. When our products are better, customers are happier. When customers are happier, we make more money. When we make more money, shareholders are happier and we keep our jobs.” I see Tim being the adult supervision and choosing people with visibly impressive track records for being capable,  mature and collaborative to act as his lieutenants in making Apple better.

I’ve met with Phil Schiller several times and even had to go to him once to pitch him with a problem I saw and while we didn’t agree when we spoke, I’ve seen the feedback I’ve given him (and no, it wasn’t just me, I was one of hundreds of people Apple was working closely with at the same time were saying the same things privately) manifest itself as positive changes every user saw and benefited from. I’ve met Bob Mansfield and he’s a very reflective and deep thinking guy. Those are the two I’ve met and can tell you from my gut are brilliant, effective at their jobs and genuinely interested in doing ‘the right thing’ for customers as the means to make Apple succeed.

I see meaningful thoughtfulness in every word I’ve read and heard from Jony Ive. He passes my bozo-stink test even as he waxes rhapsodic about idealistic views of design. He’s the real deal. I’ve been told by people I trust who work with him that Eddy Cue is surreally capable and a truly decent guy in a meaningful way. (Apple doesn’t need iTunes U as a profit center. Why do they bother?)

It’s clear to anyone who regularly engages with Apple Retail that John Browett was screwing that operation up badly and making employees miserable. Miserable people who’s entire job is representing the company face to face with customers can’t be fully effective no matter how hard they try. I’ve actually been amazed at how good the Geniuses I’ve dealt with as things were getting rough managed to be but there was increasingly visible strain on their faces and in their tone.

My wildly optimistic and likely to be mocked by my ‘in the know friends in the industry’ predictions are as follows:

1- We’ll see long-standing broken things start to get fixed. Think of the evolution of FinalCut X from innovative and interesting but customer-alienating-disaster to iteratively improving new tool. Think of that incremental and positive attention starting to get applied to OS X and OS X Server. Consider that it’s already started. Mountain Lion is the “Oops, we’re sorry” follow-up release to Lion in much the same way Snow Leopard was to Leopard. Here’s hoping the next big cat won’t need an “I’m sorry” release. We’ll see Apple do a better job of keeping the software up to the same standards of ‘build quality’ they have for the hardware.

2- We’ll see changes in how Apple manages secrecy. No, Apple will never do the kinds of roadmap press events and developer briefings Microsoft does but we will see them bringing back some of the kinds of programs they used to have that had selected customers briefed under ironclad NDAs. We’ll see indications that within Apple, teams can actually talk to each other in ways that improve the products.

3- We’ll see Apple do more for the Enterprise. We’ll see another Mac Pro with Thunderbolt because Apple recognizes that low volume ‘pro’ products keep them from being forced out of managed I.T. environments. We’ll see Apple act like they know I.T.-friendly, Pro-Friendly tools and give them much needed toe-holds in the “I use it at home and I use it work” two way street that made Windows the dominant platform and continues to make it the market leader today.

That’s my optimism about the meaning of this management re-organization.

Ok, I lied, I’m not quite as optimistic as I seem. Yes, I do see real hope from this management change, but really this piece is my little foray into the game of two messages in one. The first is to you, dear readers, to inspire you to look for the positive and also demand it from Apple, the second is to Tim Cook begging him to make me right.

P.S. It’s weird to me that nobody in the press I’ve read so far seems to have twigged to the fact that if Bob Mansfield was ‘un-retired’ he must have been somebody very highly regarded. It’s spun negatively that he had announced leaving and is now an even bigger kahuna but I see this is an indication of Tim Cook’s strength as a manager. Be willing to make it worthwhile for a good person who could retire to stay on and do more.

**** UPDATES: See Bottom of Post *******

Facebook just bought Instagram for one billion dollars. What did they buy? An iOS/Android app that lets you apply ‘very quickly get tacky’ photo filters to your cell phone snaps?

Nah…ugly, hopelessly hipster photo-effects does not a billion dollar business make.

Did they buy a tool that lets users upload images to a free service and share those pics on Facebook and Twitter from their cell phones?

Nah… it’s not that hard to do.  Facebook and Twitter phone apps already support this functionality and that’s not worth one beeeeelyon dollars.

Well if they didn’t buy these two defining features of Instragram what did they pay a billion dollars for? Facebook paid a billion dollars to own more of you. Well, dear readers, I hope not literally you because I hope you, like me, were smart enough not to sign up for Instagram in the first place but a lot of other people did. A lot of people I sincerely respect as technologists did. Even a lot of real photographers I know did and, from day one, it baffled me.

Well, now the bill for the ‘free’ they enjoyed comes due.

Now, Facebook, who many ‘digerati‘  have managed to completely avoid (or, who, like me, regret joining and now try to manage more closely) owns all the information you uploaded to and shared on Instagram. No, they don’t own the copyright to your photos. They don’t even really own the metadata but they own you in the  l337 sense of the word ‘own’ or should I say p0wn you.

They’ve now dominated, defeated, fragged you and made you their… Well you get the idea.

Cameras, your phone cameras included, store  time, technical and often (usually on a phone) location metadata. Metadata is data about data. In this case, data about your pictures. Not just data that could be extrapolated with facial recognition or some other high tech fun, it’s simple and highly revealing data attached to the digital photo. It’s metadata uploaded right alongside the retro-sepia-lomo-shot of  your latest achievement in home canning. The metadata can often be extracted, aggregated and analyzed and, if it included GPS data (and again, on a cell phone camera, it usually does), you’re ‘checking in’ every time time you upload a picture.

All the metadata from GPS data you may have allowed to have stored and uploaded with your photos to whatever contexts you’ve shared them in, to the kinds of content you’re keen to photograph, to when you tend to take pictures to share. All of it. Owned.

The metadata Instagram have uploaded from your phone with your photos. The choices you’ve made about content. The pictures you took of every craft-brewed beer you’ve drunk. All of that is now in Facebook’s hands.

If you use Facebook, if you’ve shared your Instragram pics on Twitter, that’s all correlatable into one more-disturbing-than-you-can-likely-imagine profile of who you are, who you interact with, where you go, when you go there and, given the proclivities people have for the content of cell phone photos, what you eat, drink, smoke or otherwise ingest.

Now all that information is right there in the same mine-able cache of data along with everything you told Facebook about yourself, your friends and your family. And, worse yet, right in the mix along with everything your less than cautious friends might have decided they thought was ok to share about you.

“Big deal Jon you paranoid recluse, get a life!”

Oh yeah? Read this: This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy and when you’re done and you say “But Jon, I don’t check in with Foursquare and besides, they took down that nasty stalker app.”. Bzzt… wrong answer. No Winnebago for you.  No autographed picture of Randy Mantooth either. They know more, not less than you think.

A decision or an accident by Facebook that shows this data to anyone able to access your page and a web scrape will make a “Girls Around Me” level of resolution and tracking  easy work for for any serious but average developer. By serious but average I mean the guys who work in your employer’s IT department. The PI your soon to be ex-husband’s lawyer hires. The PI his lawyer uses to build his case in effort to use custody of the kids as a cudgel. The kid who gets mad at you, teacher, for failing his plagiarized term paper. The stalker with resources. Your political opponent. Anyone with, frankly not especially hard to come by, resources who wants to do you harm or who wants to look in a general geographical area for somebody to do harm.

Never forget dear readers, we’d all be much better off if we started thinking of our personal information as currency and our opinions as monetizable content. Even if you’re not worried about any of the above, and the truth is, really most of shouldn’t. All of this makes you more the target for advertisers including charities and political campaigns. It’s more information about you that search engines can use to skew what results you get to help support your preferemces, or preconceptions.

The real lesson here is, a free service to help you share your content isn’t free. It’s costing you every time you use it. Start choosing more carefully. Start taking more control of your data.

 

***UPDATES 4.11.12***

Check out Andy Ihnatko’s piece in the Chicago Sun Times

I’m told by a reliable source that Instagram defaults location data to “off”. I didn’t remember. While I do actually think that’s good behavior, I’d guess many users turn it on because they like the ability to define place as part of what they post. I know there’s a lot of EXIF and other photo metadata to be mined all over the web.  It’s also not an Instagram-only issue. The point above is that you should know what you reveal where.  See this post on Aperture’s lookups though that post isn’t about what you post but rather how Apple looks up location info from GPS coordinates.