House, what has become of you? 

I faithfully watched and loved the first three seasons of House.  But in the fourth season, the script writers appear to have gone on strike early…  

House’s team from the first three seasons (Foreman, Cameron, and Chase) are, confusingly, halfway in and halfway out of  the show.

The "reality show" subplot to select their replacements was briefly amusing but is now a silly diversion.  None of the potential replacements are as strong as the originals.

The cases this season lack a satisfying dramatic or emotional arc, and are more than usually implausible. Insight, diagnosis, and treatment come out of the blue in the final 30 seconds.

The ultimate cause for my fear that House has jumped the shark?  In a recent episode, it actually was lupus.

Update: The votes for House on JumpTheShark.com still say overwhelmingly that House has never jumped the shark. Is this denial, slow reaction time, or am I just being too pessimistic?

As Alan mentions, we’ve got a "super-super-raw preview/demo" of the Mergelab product and are looking for feedback and suggestions from close friends. 

Please drop us a line if you’d like to take a look and offer your thoughts.

Facebook apps have attracted tremendous interest and activity. They are also, it seems to me, killing the Facebook user experience and diminishing the social value that Facebook provides to users. 

It now takes forever to load the profiles of my friends on Facebook because they’ve got so many apps on them. Page response time is critical to a good user experience and Facebook has lost the ability to control it.

Instead of useful news, my Facebook news feed is littered with spam from self-interested applications trying to promote themselves. The usefulness of Facebook for social interactions is going down.

Facebook has created an ecosystem but the ecosystem is being taken over by robots instead of people– armies of annoying applications each trying to make more noise than the next.

I know I’m not the only one complaining about this, consider for example this complain from Trent Adams:

I know that Facebook has a great API that allows anyone to create a new application for Facebook. This has some tremendous possibilities to extend Facebook to do some really amazing things! I am all for this!

What I do have a problem with is that there is not an option to stop all the bombardment of requests for you to add these applications because someone on your friend list did. No one is going to uncheck the users they don’t want the request to go to, so they just send it to everyone. It is really starting to get on my last nerve.

I use a handful of applications myself and make sure that I don’t invade my friends and family with requests to add the same application. It is the same as email spam. Unwanted and unsolicited. I have ignored more requests for applications in the month of August than the previous months combined. I can only imagine that September will be horrible.

Can the genie be put back in the bottle in a way that retains the value of an open application platform while avoiding the pitfalls?   Probably, but as Microsoft has learned it gets harder by the day to correct past platform mistakes.

Increasingly, a few large companies control the flow and storage of most private data.  This data is so valuable for detecting potential national security threats that governments face an overwhelming temptation to tap into it. The US Congress seems to be of two minds about whether this is a good idea.

On the one hand, a bipartisan assemblage in Congress recently called Yahoo a moral pygmy for revealing the identity of specific users in response to a government subpoena from China:

The two top Yahoo Inc. officials on Tuesday defended their company’s role in the jailing of a Chinese journalist but ran into withering criticism from lawmakers who accused them of complicity with an oppressive communist regime. ‘’While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,'’ said House Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.).

[Yahoo’s] Callahan said, ‘’I cannot ask our local employees to resist lawful demands and put their own freedom at risk, even if, in my personal view, the local laws are overbroad."

Because Yahoo gave up personal data to the Chinese government, several dissidents were jailed without trial as threat to national security. (Google has a better track record of existing such requests but even Google gave in to the Chinese government’s laws demanding censorship in exchange for access to a lucrative new market.)

On the the other hand, Congress is preparing to grant immunity to US telecoms for giving the NSA access to all of their internet traffic without the court orders required by law. (Telecoms already have immunity from prosecution if the request for data is accompanied by a court order, but without such an order the law says they should protect users privacy.)

You can hear an interview on NPR with an AT&T employee who blew the whistle on the program.  The total flow of data monitored at just one location was 2.5 gigabits a second.  The employee reports that the NSA was monitoring not only the endpoints but also the contents of the communication using semantic analysis technology.