Reid Dossinger

Like any TechCrunch-reading web nerd, my first reaction to the "Open Graph" Facebook changes was whiny and furious. How dare they slap my name on every site that's desperate to tap into their user base? If I wanted my name on those sites, I would have signed up for them! And if I wanted to share my info from those sites with my Facebook friends, I would have individually signed in to each and every one of them, giving that site explicit permission to share with the same people I was sharing with on places like Facebook and then dealt with dozens of different settings arrangements! Maybe you can see my thought path on this issue changing there. If not, it's come to this: not only is the change not a big deal, but it's what we've been looking for from the web for years . Yes, I was surprised when I went to the Washington Post front page and was greeted with a list of the articles my Facebook friends had shared. Yeah, it was a little discomforting to go to Yelp a...

With the launch and demo of Google's Chrome OS, where the OS is the browser and all your information lives online, my head was in the cloud (HA! No? Oh, alright). As much as I love the move towards an online life--where information stays in one place and the only thing that changes is the devices we use to access it--it's hard not to take in the arguments that we're throwing our privacy away. Playing the part of the skeptic (not too much of a stretch for me), it's not hard to see the concerns. Sure, at the moment there's nothing in my Google Docs or on my blogs that will put me in jail or get me blackmailed, but it's pretty easy to see a 9/11-type event or massive change in government that means more scrutiny on what we say and do. Our world can change in a big way, and what formerly seemed innocuous is now a crime, with all the evidence needed to convict available in the formerly-friendly-sounding cloud. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are sweeping the ashe...