ING just sent us our new debit cards and they’re pretty cool looking. I guess it’s slightly comforting that an imprint can’t easily be made, but I’m not sure how important that really is.

Within the last 6 months, I’ve run into two cab drivers in San Francisco and one gas station on Prince Edward Island that could only take credit card payment via imprint. Granted, cash would have been safer both times, but you have to do what you have to do.

What would be more interesting is if they finally adopted the EMV chip and made traveling in Canada and Europe a bunch easier. It’s such a pain to be the hold up in a checkout lane that has to convince the person at the register that your card won’t work that way and needs to be swiped.

In ‘The Web We Lost‘, Anil Dash does a fantastic job of describing the cycle that the web is going through. Though you should ignore this post for the most part and go directly to the source, I’ll highlight my favorite of the points:

Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site, or to show a list of links which were driving inbound traffic to your site. Because Google hadn’t yet broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links weren’t about generating revenue, they were just a tool for expression or editorializing. The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.

And he’s correct in saying that the web is a cycle. It is up to us to make use of it for good as it comes back around.

The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web.

The Web We Lost – Anil Dash

That’s a long blog post title.

I just remembered some of Dave Winer‘s writing on the subject of user generated content vs running your own server and it’s worth a read when thinking about owning your data online.

Here’s a few:

• Maybe it’s time for personal servers
• People hosting their own servers
• HowTo: EC2 for Poets

This didn’t work out as perfectly as I wanted, but it’s still pretty cool. I took this picture from my phone and saved it to my Dropbox folder. Ifttt then grabbed it and created a post in WordPress for me. The biggest problem is that it creates a post using the Dropbox URL for the photo, not by uploading the photo to my WordPress install and creating something (with thumnail options) from that. I think a plugin may be in order rather than Ifttt, but still pretty cool!

If you all of a sudden have trouble starting Apache on your Windows system, either through XAMPP or otherwise, and you also have Skype installed, this screenshot is for you.

I’m not entirely sure why Skype would choose to tie up port 80 by default, as that configuration has to be so unlikely for the average user, but they do. So if you’re having trouble starting Apache, uncheck that little box first.

I wouldn’t normally create a post for this, but if you don’t get the search terms right, you run into a bunch of ‘tutorials’ that take forever to just say the words ‘Skype uses port 80′. Sometimes all you need is a little screenshot. So now this exists, and it can now provide more juice to other similarly helpful posts such as Apache and Skype from Otto, which I ran into after being amazed at the other several hundred word tutorials.

It’s 9:19pm on the west coast and Twitter appears to be down hard.

This turns out to be the perfect time to test any apps that you have integrated with Twitter and to see how hard they fail when the option to Sign In With Twitter just doesn’t work.

When you realize that the only way for them not to fail during a Twitter outage is to have a backup authentication system, you….

Oh. Right.

This blog post happily published to the world using Twitter.

There have been many words written recently about the liberty that Facebook and the applications installed on the Facebook platform may be taking in our online lives. ^[1]

It’s all mostly true and well intended. Some of it a little over the top, like this piece, but that’s good. Sharing information amongst people is an important thing and while we’re trying to figure out the best ways to do it, many words should be written.

For that reason I’m tossing another 2 cents onto the field:

Facebook applications are vampires. And that’s (mostly) all right.

You see, vampires are pretty cool. I’ve never met one, but in accordance with shows like True Blood, one could posit that lots of really awesome stuff happens when you’re friends with a vampire.

Of course, one of the things you may choose when becoming a friend with a vampire is to invite them into your home. This is dangerous and where the direct analogy to Facebook applications begins.

Normally your home is a safe haven. By default a vampire can do nothing to enter your home without your permission.^[2] The second you invite a vampire into your home, you are implying a ridiculous amount of trust and if your vampire friend turns on you, at least some of the blame should be placed on yourself. Of course it sucks that your new vampire friend turned on you, but you were aware.

So that’s the predicament we’re in.

I want all this really cool stuff to happen with information and I want it to happen automatically. Right now in order for that to happen, I have to assign a ridiculous amount of trust in some really cool applications. Unfortunately, it’s only after assigning that trust that I find out whether or not it was ill advised.

That’s the end problem here. The model works at the moment, but it’s wrong. There absolutely needs to be a way in which I can assign tentative trust. A setting that says:

Yes, I really want to trust you and I can tell this is going to be the start of a beautiful relationship. But. Chill out a second and be explicit about your every move until we can establish that trust.

Earn your trust.

^{[1] I’ve specifically seen a bunch of traffic around Dave Winer’s piece, Facebook is scaring me, including, but not limited to Nik Cubrilovic’s Logging out of Facebook is not enough and an intensecomment storm on Hacker News. I also wrote up a Facebook application experience yesterday in Good Citizenry.}

^{[2] For the observer of minor details, please note that I’m referring only to vampires that follow standard rules and guidelines around home entry. If there are other vampire story lines that do not have this rule, they obviously don’t fit this analogy. Still, all vampires should earn your trust.}