ChrisPosterous

Was reading an article on FastCompany this morning before work entitled "Some Job Advice for Twitter CEO Ev Williams" and embedded within the article was the following tidbit on Ev's ability to hire great talent:

Another thing Williams is doing right, according to recruiters: Surrounding himself with smart senior players. He's added major talent during the past year, laying the groundwork to scale and make the company profitable. Notable hires include:
* Scott Forstall, former vice president of iOS software at Apple
* CFO Ali Rowghani, formerly CFO of Pixar/Disney
* COO Dick Costolo, formerly Group Product Manager for social ads at Google
* General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray, formerly Senior Product and Intellectual Property Counsel at Google
* Director Engineering and Operations, Mike Abbott, formerly Senior Vice President of Software and Services at Palm
* Human Resources Janet Van Huysse, formerly a business partner in the human resources department at Sony Pictures

Did I read that first one right? I did a Google search and found no corroborating articles to support Forstall's leaving Apple, in fact, found articles to the contrary. Was this a misprint? Or a scoop? Or have I been asleep the last few days?

When does a company know too much about you on the internet. Is it when they can track your every internet search and site visit? Is it when they have access to every bit of personal information you entrusted to them when signing up for some of their services. If you have been worried about Facebook privacy recently, you may have started to move some or all of your online presence to someone like Google. But how much more secure is that?

The answer is not very. You see, recently, during my experimentation with Android, I made the mistake of downloading an app from their very "open" app store that provided Gmail New Mail notifications on my Android device (it changes the Gmail icon to show the number of unread messages). In order to get the app to work, I logged in to Gmail via this app and provided my email address and password.

About 3 days later I received a notice when logging into my account that someone had accessed my Gmail account from a Chinese IP Address. I immediately changed my password and hoped that nothing bad had happened that I could not yet see. But then I started looking at all the other stuff attached to my Gmail account login credentials - Google Profile, Google Buzz, Orkut, GTalk, Blogger - a lot of my online life now was potentially exposed and violated. 

There is definitely a risk in trusting a for-profit corporation with your personal information, especially when they provide their services for free. The contract you have with some of these companies can be devoid of an expectation of trust on their part. And your ability to recover from a serious breech may be hampered by the fact that you are not paying for the service (the "what did you expect for free" response).

This weekend, I spent a little time reviewing exactly how much time I spend on each of the services I use and exactly what I share. And I decided to make some changes. After a long relationship with Google, I have decided I simply have too many internet "eggs" in their basket. I have decided to kill off my Google Profile and Buzz account and to split out my mail to another service. Recently I have been disturbed by Google's unchecked growth and their lust to takeover my browser, my search experience and my social networking identity. At this point in time, I trust Twitter and Facebook more than I trust Google, and I am sure a lot of other folks feel that way too but are just too immersed (or maybe even afraid) to make their escape. So as of today, at least on my personal devices, I am not longer running Chrome, or Google Search, or GMail, or gChat or Buzz. I will continue to use Blogger as the backup to my Posterous, but that's is about it. At work, I will continue to use Chrome for the time being, but probably will probably switch back to Firefox when version 4 goes GM. I will report back soon on how this all goes, but right now, I feel like in a small way, I have taken back my corner of the net and locked the door behind me secure in the knowledge that someone else does not have a key.

Coincident to my posting my Goodbye Android piece, I received a response from a post on the Motorola Owner's Forum regarding my complaint a few days ago about laggy apps and memory issues. The answer I received is paraphrased as follows:

"The Motorola Backflip is a no different than a personal computer in that it needs to be periodically restarted to keep it running efficiently. We recommend turning the phone off each day for several minutes before restarting it (this will also re-connect the phone to AT&T's towers for improved cell reception).  Also, like a computer, the phone should be hard reset at least once per week. You can perform this operation by powering off your phone, removing the battery and waiting 5-10 minutes before putting the battery back in and starting up the phone..."

Really? Do any of you do this with your PC's? I never even turn my Netbook or work laptop off - at best, they sleep. Also, I'm pretty sure that if I took the back cover of the phone off every couple of days and removed and replaced the battery, eventually the cover would no longer stay on and the battery would fall out, as the back cover is not on very tightly to begin with on the Backflip. 

Within the next day or two, I plan on dumping the Motorola Backflip and going back to my iPhone 3G (albeit a few days earlier than planned). The great Android experiment of 2010 is ending unceremoniously as the phone and software abomination I have been toting around for just two weeks has finally gotten on my last nerve. Not sure if its the 3 hour battery (my Netbook does better), the flaky phone functionality, or the Task Killer that I hate the most. But it did have a killer 5MP camera that worked wonderfully (the only thing I liked unfortunately).

Now don't get me wrong, Android 2.2 is a promising operating system. I can see why people can get excited about it - I certainly did. But yours truly will never know the sweet goodness of Froyo as the Android phone I picked will never be able to run it. And the version it does run (1.5) is old and half baked at best. Sure there were some good apps - Seesmic for example is one, Twit.tv (for free), a nice Pandora implementation, and all those tasty widgets. But the offerings on the iPhone are simply more polished and less "amateurish" in feel. And a few that I really wanted to try were Android 2.1 only (like the official Twitter app). Widgets are fun, for the first couple of days. Then you realize they are sitting there eating your battery while you sleep (or walk, or drive or work, or do anything for that matter). And removing them makes the phone a poor knockoff of every other smart phone that isn't an Android or iOS device.

Many of the problems and issues I experienced the last two weeks were the result of Motorola making a lousy phone and AT&T doing their best to further cripple it with an old OS and no clear upgrade path (and "Planned for Q3" is not my idea of clear). But this is a perfect example why the Android ecosystem is so strange. Sure there are lots of manufacturers making lots of phones (which makes the number of units sold look awesome compared to one manufacturer making one phone) but this is the problem - they all roll their own solution in one way or another, and if you choose unwisely, you are stuck with an albatross.

In general. everything I could run on the handset had a horrible early-DOS quality, which would not be bad 3 years ago, but is horrible in today's App Store dominated world. Moving from home page to home page is slow and laggy. And apps routinely just quit mid-work. Not good for an SMS app for example when it crashes mid message. And lord help you if your phone rings while you struggle with the apps. I was unable to answer 1 out of every 3 calls due to some unknown system process in the background, widgets hogging memory and the slow response of the "answer slider" control. Oh, and I certainly won't miss the Task Killer - you know there is something wrong when the first app people recommend you install is an app killer to prevent memory problems. Good grief.

As a phone, the Backflip is a terrible phone. Signal quality is terrible no matter how you hold the phone. Where my wife routinely had 5 bars on her iPhone, I had 1 or 2. And 3G hardly ever worked. Maybe a bad/defective phone? Probably not as the majority of Backflip owners reported the same issues on the various owner forums.

So, tomorrow or Friday, I'll be visiting Gazelle and selling this brick and going back to a phone whose quirks I can understand and live with, even if it is a 2 year old iPhone 3G. Guess I am just not cut out for the Android/Open Source/Tinker-to-death phone crowd. Frankly, I just want to make calls, check twitter go about my business. I already spend too much time "managing" my PC's, I don't need to do the same to keep my phone up and running.

Whether you need to call in an air strike Forrest Gump style or place that insider trading order to Goldman Sachs, you can be assured that you will NEVER touch the antenna wrong or have problems with crashing apps or lost email. Sending back my Android and selling my iPhone Monday morning. Goodbye reception issues, hello chick magnet. Where did I put that Gordon Gecko phone number...

Not sure if the folks on 2.1 or 2.2 have a better browser or not (again, a major failing of Android - too many flavors of the experience, no consistency), but the default browser in my Android v1.5 device is craptacular. It displays every page wrong, is slow and hard to control. I heard some good things about Opera Mini, but never bothered using it on the iPhone just because it really wasn't needed. Safari on iPhone is just that good.