The title of this post is a premise of the work I've been doing to develop a social news system without a company in the middle.

News without a corporate business model to control it. News without a silo. A very First Amendment sort of thing.

Right now most writers, people who create the kind of stuff that Twitter and Facebook readers want to read, at most feel uneasy about the companies who own the networks they are writing on. Very few people so far feel compelled to find another way to reach people who care about what they think, learn, invent, create or discover.

And maybe Twitter and Facebook forever will be model corporate citizens, always putting the freedom of their users ahead of their own bottom lines.

And if you believe that, keep on tweeting. Don't worry, be happy.

But if it should happen that your freedom is abridged by these corporations, and they aren't the government so they don't have to respect your rights (you are free to speak elsewhere), you will be very glad I and the people I am working with are doing what we're doing.

Here's the deal. I think the Internet itself is a social network.

That's the guiding principle. Using standards we already have, like HTTP, HTML, RSS, DNS, OPML, JSON -- you can make a news net that is as open and distributed as the Internet itself. There's no company in the middle, anymore than there's a company in the middle of the Internet. And if it goes down, it's a lot bigger problem for the world than one service going down. In a sense it means that civilization crashed. Can't do anything to work around that, I'm afraid. But short of cataclysm, the Internet makes for a very robust way to communicate, by design.

If you're a techie and want to know more, here's a list of stories I wrote last fall that spell out how all the pieces work.

 4/23/2011; 10:11:31 AM.   .

It didn't take long to zero in on the Nexus S.

I had a Nexus One and liked it. Gave it to a friend and she really likes it.

Got it at Best Buy on Broadway near Houston.

It seemed a bit pricey, just under $600 with tax, but I went for it anyway. Unlocked GSM phone that runs Android. It's my European phone. As soon as I get to Amsterdam I'll buy a prepaid SIM for it at the airport. And when I get back, if all goes well, I'll probably replace my Droid with it? We'll see. Too soon to tell.

Now, do I like it?

Wellllll... it's not even close to as nice as the iPhone 4. The software (Android) is catching up, but the iPhone 4 has this stunning display. It makes the Nexus's screen look pretty bad.

And the Nexus has a light, cheap plastic feel to it. For a $600 piece of hardware that has to compete with the iPhone, it should have some heft, some gravitas. It has none. Seriously. It feels a bit like a McDonald's happy meal toy, compared to the iPhone 4 which has a unique feel to it, not like anything else, and seriously interesting. You just like to hold it. It sounds so flakey, but it's true.

The main reason I will have this with me is for the camera, but I'm not sure I'll use it. It's not as good as the iPhone and that was barely good enough. I'm bringing my Canon SureShot with me. Not bringing the Canon SLR my dad left me. Too much iron to carry to Europe and back. I'm not a big iron camera guy I guess, after all.

The map app is great. Really amazing thing is the 3D view you get because it has a hardware compass built in. Hard to describe in words, but it solves the problem as you're walking in a city of which way am I pointing now. You get a very tight readout.

I installed the Amazon App Store on it. Installed Kindle, loaded a few books onto it.

There is no Netflix app for Android. Huge missing piece.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to load music and podcasts on here.

How do you play videos on Android??

 4/23/2011; 8:09:48 AM.   .