I love flow, so there's a temptation to put a Facebook "Like" button on every Scripting News story, but I'm resisting the temptation for the same reason I never used Feedburner to host my RSS feeds. They were offering a benefit, but I didn't want to cede all that power to them or trust them not to sell out to a big company that I don't trust. Or (as with Facebook and Google) be a company that I don't trust.

So perhaps there's a compromise? Let me implement my own Like feature and have it connect up to Facebook through a feed. And let it connect up to Facebook's competitors just as easily. I'm sure the smart guys at Facebook could figure out how to do this, perhaps they already have? I'm willing to do a little extra work to keep the web independent of any one company.

Update: Facebook is trying to be more than the identity system for the web. They are trying to be the identity system for everything. There's no limit because they've (correctly) understood that the web can and in many ways does model our reality. Yelp has pages that represent restaurants. IMDB pages rep movies. None of these things had identity until now. Which leads to the second update.

Update: You gotta wonder if this is enough to shake both Google and Twitter from their megalomania. In retrospect, what a mistake it was for Twitter to get so aggressive with developers last week. Had they realized how cornered they were, they would have gone the other way, surrendered to the developers, completely and unconditionally, even begged for terms. "How can we all work together to keep what we need to be open, open?" I haven't heard anything from Google in the last few years that wasn't utterly menacing. Let's see if they can quickly learn how to get along with creative people who don't work at big tech companies.

 4/22/2010; 4:50:46 AM.   .

Pretty sure there's no way to really turn off the Mac screen.

I now live in a small one-bedroom apartment. My desk, and main computer, are in the bedroom. So the fact that the computer turns the screen back on at apparently random times is not only a waste of energy, it's a wake-up call.

I have the Energy Saver preference set to turn the screen off after 15 minutes of no use. That does happen, but the screen just comes back on. I've tried quitting all the apps, thinking it might be one of them that is asking for the screen to be re-lit, but it makes no difference.

Okay, so I thought -- let's just put the computer to sleep using the Sleep command in the Apple menu. It doesn't help. It just wakes up, on its own. When it wakes up, the monitor turns on, full brightness.

I've tried running the Brightness Control app. The computer ignores the fact that the monitor is turned down. When it wakes up it turns the monitor up to full brightness.

I did a search and read various threads with comments from Mac users with the same problem.

In the old days the monitor had an on-off switch. When you turned it off, it stayed off until you turned it back on.

So when people say Macs "just work" -- you gotta wonder.

 4/22/2010; 4:44:25 AM.   .