Some friends help you meet your obligations; some friends help you avoid or break your obligations. You need both kinds, but you need to know which is which.

“The first mistake is assuming you control your brand.”

Not anymore, anyway. A good friend of mine in the advertising industry pointed this out to me recently.

Today, your brand is the aggregation of a thousand points of view. With regard to consumer goods and services this has long been the case, but until recently it wasn’t possible to really sense these points of view, so we confuse brand with artifacts: full-page advertisements, Super Bowl commercials, and billboards. After all, in its original use, a brand was a symbol literally burned into an object.

So, a while back I started an experiment. On all of the forms and profiles that I complete online, I’m supplying a Google query as my home page. Rather than attempt to tell you who I am by pointing you at a carefully crafted web-site, I’m using Google’s page rank, and the links you’ve created to my artifacts, to tell you who these thousand points of view think I am.

I realize, I open myself up to “miserable failure” style manipulation of the system, but then, isn’t that in its own way reflective of the brand?

Todd AKA http://www.google.com/search?q=todd+sundsted

Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them…

[ Tim O'Reilly, Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies, What Is Web 2.0 ]

Tim made a fortune publishing books–many of them about Free or Open Source Software.

He also articulated a set of characteristics (core competencies) common to some of the most successful technology companies since the dot com bust–the so-called Web 2.0 companies.  Think of Facebook.  Think of Google, for that matter.

In early 2008, Wired Magazine published an article by Chris Anderson titled Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.  Chris used “free” in the sense of “free beer” (no monetary cost).  Free products and services are often paid for by third parties–parties who are willing to pay to participate in an exchange taking place between two other partners.  Advertising is a specific case of this three-way marketplace.

Of course, these third parties are only willing to pay if there’s no other way to play.  This is why control is important.  Control creates scarcity.  Scarcity creates a perception of value.  Commerce ensues.

In the last few years, we entrusted a tremendous amount of personal data to Web 2.0 companies.  True, in many cases it cost us nothing to post/store/share this data.  However, thanks to Tim, at the heart of every Web 2.0 business plan and every Web 2.0 private equity investment is the idea that control of a hard-to-recreate data source is valuable.

In 1985, Richard Stallman published the GNU Manifesto.  Like Chris, Richard believed that free was important; however Richard was concerned about “free” in the sense of “free speech” (unfettered or unrestrained).  The GNU Manifesto put forth the radical idea that software should be free.  Users should be free to read, modify, and share software source code.

This kind of freedom is powerful–I’m writing this post on a laptop that runs entirely on Free Software–but it’s incompatible with the kind of control embodied and embraced by the Web 2.0 world.  This is ironic, because a great amount of Web 2.0 software is powered by Free Software.  It is also disappointing, because Tim has to know that sharing, not control, is at the core of Free Software movement.

It’s time to learn a lesson from history, to look back on the incredible value that was created by and with Free Software over the last fifteen years, and to free our data so that we can see an explosion of innovation down the road.

I would be willing to pay to use my favorite Web 2.0 applications, but give me an API and easy access to my data.  I’m unwilling to trade one kind of free (freedom) for another kind of free (monetary).

The price is too great.

The airport has free WIFI. Nice. Very nice.

I have an hour until I board; the rest of my team isn’t here yet. I pull up an e-mail and go to work.

Security is important. I want private communications to remain private. On the road, I used to manually tunnel in to my office over SSH to connect to my IMAP and SMTP servers. Over the last few weeks I’ve been migrating to a more mature configuration — IMAP over TLS and SMTP with TLS and SASL. As a result, I’ve been keeping half an eye open for problems with the configuration. So far, no problems.

I type a reply and hit send. I get an error — something about the server not offering STARTTLS in the EHLO response. Damn!

I put the reply on hold and run through a few quick diagnostics.

• Can I SSH into the box - check
• Does the server configuration look correct - check
• Is my mailer set-up to use my server - check
• Does the DNS name resolve to the correct IP address - check
• Can I telnet into the SMTP server - check

Running the last test on the box itself, I clearly see 250-STARTTLS in the response to EHLO foobar. I tail the maillog and hit send again. I get the same error but see no indication of activity what-so-ever in the log. “Damn!” turns into “What the fuck?”

Okay… The DNS record resolves to my IP address. The IP address points to my box. Port 25, however, appears to point somewhere else — to someone else’s SMTP server, in fact. I verify this using telnet on my laptop. A proxy perhaps? But why? To prevent terrorists from sending spam from within the airport? As a kindness to travelers who find themselves away from home or office and in need of a SMTP server? Or something more sinister? Or incompetent?

The gate agent repeats her last call for boarding. I really want to send an e-mail through the system so I can take a look at the header; and to put an obvious username and password in the e-mail to see if the lure attracts any game. But I am out of time. I snag the conversation between client and server in ethereal for future reference.

The conversation between mailer and server:

220 ESMTP
EHLO [AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD]
250 OK
QUIT
221 Bye

The conversation between telnet and server:

220 ESMTP
HELO foobar
250 OK
EHLO foobar
503 Not Implement
QUIT
221 Bye

503 Not Implement?

What is that?

This is the kind of bad grammar I see in Trojan-bait “Friend sent you an e-card” e-mails.