I think we should apply the same model to the Web . Imagine if we all had to use the same development environment and tools, and that there was a single entity who could decide, arbitrarily, if the thing we just spent months building should see the light of day or not. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

If the internet has proved anything, it is that a closed, tightly controlled environment based on uniformity of tools and development environment, and a benevolent master overseeing everything is the right way to go.

As news sources moved to the web I started to read a wider variety of sources – BBC, Le Monde, Haaretz, NY Times, Google News, various Iranian publications, and so forth. I had a better view.

As RSS took over I started to spend more time in Google Reader, with a larger number of sources. The sources, however, were hand-picked by me and the topics they covered were much more niche.

Sure, I had the feed from the NY Times, BBC, etc, but they just couldn’t compete with the blogs. I would only read them occasionally, and finally I gave up and removed them from my feed.

Nowadays I hang out on Twitter, to the detriment of Google Reader.

My sources of news are even more niche, even more hand-picked, and the news itself is headline-only.

It strikes me that I’ve lost something valuable here. I went from being exposed to a world view, much of which I didn’t agree with, to a series of very short, niche, hand-picked news sources.

I have unwittingly self-applied blinders.

An odd and disturbing trend. Nothing is stopping me from regaining the world view, other than my own choices. Yet I remain mostly blind.

Of the entire screen only the area I’ve highlighted in orange is dedicated to the contents of the message. And this is with the app maximized to full screen.

The interface is unusable as a mail reader: I can’t read the email message.

How on earth did the product people agree to this? Where’s the customer advocate?

Why is it disturbing?

It’s important to understand that Google doesn’t directly make money on email. Think of it as a loss-leader of sorts.

Yes, I know there’s advertising on there. I also know a bit about advertising systems.

Gmail brings in a relatively a much smaller amount of revenue than Adwords and Adsense, and the margins are much lower. You have to pay for all that Gmail infrastructure, and click-thru rates on email ads (or ads placed next to most other compelling content) are very low.

Google is smart enough to know where their money comes from, and they go to great pains to ensure their search remains superior. They invest a lot in search.

But what do you do with properties that make money, but at small amounts and with much lower margins?

For example, Yahoo Finance, Small Business, My Yahoo, and many of the other businesses are nice, profitable business, but not large enough or high-margin enough to get a lot of love or resources.

You neglect them. You put resources on projects that move the top or the bottom line.

My concern with Gmail is the trend that looks like neglect. It’s a relatively large property for Google, but it’s been experiencing problems. I know fail happens, but I also know that if Google put their mind to it they could make it much more available than it has been.

As Google branches out into more new and different products, it needs to be very mindful of neglect. Rot at the edges of your systems deteriorate the overall perception of your offerings. And search market share is very dependent on perception: witness the studies that removed branding from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft search results and found nearly identical user satisfaction scores. 

So Google’s outlook has to be: if we’re going to do something we’re going to do it extremely well. The apple philosophy.

And if we’re not doing something extremely well, we need to fix it or shut it down. 

It’s a tough balance – how do you foster innovation and allow people to quickly create and launch projects, while maintaining a commitment to long term maintenance of quality?

It’s crucial to identify your core offerings, mark the rest as alpha, beta, “labs”, or any other label that signals the service might go away, and be absolutely fanatical about the quality of the core offerings on a continuous basis.

Here’s hoping Gmail gets its act together so I don’t once again have to switch providers.

The solution, seems to me, should be something like this: Select a number of pictures, right click on them, and have an “Upload to Flickr”, “Upload to FaceBook”, etc, button. Clicking the button should simply send the list of files to a background uploader and return immediately. The background uploader can take its merry time uploading the pictures.

I’m really tempted to go write this if only to stop being my wife’s “I need to upload photos to FaceBook” tech support guy. Looks like there’s a Picasa Button API (via picasa2flickr) so this should generally be doable. Now to find the time.

When I see people who are following 3000 or more people follow me, I have to wonder, do they have any legitimate reason? Or is their sole motivation to get me to follow them?

Is this one of those one-button-mouse things that make no sense but apple is committed to preserving?

And MacFuse has corrupted my windows disk not once, not twice, but three times so far. 

Bah. Humbug.

On the bright side the blog world is wide and deep enough to provide lots of interesting news sources, even if they turn out not to be the top blogs.

However, this analysis by Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who wrote “the book” on macroeconomics, is bringing tears to my eyes:

If there were no taxes, … then $1 earned today would yield my kids $28. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

Under the McCain plan, … a dollar earned today yields my kids $4.81. That is, even under the low-tax McCain plan, my incentive to work is cut by 83 percent compared to the situation without taxes.

Under the Obama plan, … a dollar earned today yields my kids $1.85. That is, Obama’s proposed tax hikes reduce my incentive to work by 62 percent compared to the McCain plan and by 93 percent compared to the no-tax scenario. In a sense, putting the various pieces of the tax system together, I would be facing a marginal tax rate of 93 percent.

The bottom line: If you are one of those people out there trying to induce me to do some work for you, there is a good chance I will turn you down. And the likelihood will go up after President Obama puts his tax plan in place. I expect to spend more time playing with my kids. They will be poorer when they grow up, but perhaps they will have a few more happy memories.

Meanwhile I was cursing Time Warner, Linksys, Apple, and just about everybody else whose hardware I own. The Linksys wireless router is 5 years old, but come on, it should still work!

This morning my wife complained of web access on the desktop being slow, so I sat down to take a look. Sure enough, very slow. It was odd that the computer itself wasn’t as responsive as it used to be, but then it is a windows box, so curse Microsoft.

As I was dialing Time Warner to schedule someone to come out and take a look I started to look for a bandwidth tester so I could prove how crappy their service was. Oddly the search results didn’t actually go to a bandwidth meter, but rather to an intermediary page with lots of links to bandwidth meters.

And that’s when I realized: I gots me a virus. Fantastic. It’s sitting there eating my bandwidth, probably spamming the world.

Point is, I was ready to blame everyone in the world instead of thinking it’s a virus. If the virus authors hadn’t put in the search redirection they could’ve probably lived on for another month sending their merry spam.

I’m certain a clever virus could infect a very large percentage of the world’s computers without anyone noticing. Probably already has.