Mike Elgan

Should I Block Someone? Blocking people on social networks is beautiful. Blocking on social networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter is an act of kindness and compassion. It enhances free speech. It can improve your life, and make the world a better place. You should block people without hesitation or guilt, and for a long […]

Everybody’s always lamenting the decline of newspapers. Without newspapers, the argument goes, who will do the fact checking, investigative reporting and maintain journalistic standards of fairness and integrity? Unfortunately, these virtues apply only to a small number of subjects, such as politics. There are certain topics covered by the media where you’ll find an institutional, […]

After being famously screwed over by Facebook, technologist and entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell launched a Kickstarter-like campaign to fund a rival social network called App.net, a “real-time social feed without the ads.” He has already met his fundraising goals. App.net will be a Twitter-like social site, but open and extensible by third-party developers. And it won’t […]

Apple says Samsung “slavishly copied” the iPhone for some of its smartphone and tablet designs. But is that true? A document some are calling a “smoking gun” appears to be a powerful argument in Apple’s favor. Apple and Samsung are suing each other in a Silicon Valley-based federal court. The 132-page, internal Samsung “Relative Evaluation […]

Let’s be honest: Microsoft’s new Outlook.com email service is just Hotmail totally revamped. In fact, when I signed up for the service on my iPad, the whole sign-up process was totally new, totally Outlook.com. But when I was done, I was sent to Hotmail with a welcome-to-Hotmail message in my inbox. The comedy continued: Once […]

Have you ever stopped to consider just how primitive the mobile-phone using experience was just 10 years ago? A decade isn’t a very long time. Just ten years ago, we already had Web 2.0 sites, HDTVs and blogging. But our phones were rudimentary, absolutely nothing like what we have now. I don’t know about you, […]

It’s been an “septimana horribilis” (horrible week) for social networking giant Facebook. First, Facebook got its keister handed to it by Google+in a customer satisfaction survey. Then another report showed that Facebook is bleeding users. This isn’t the end of the world for Facebook. There’s still hope for the company. But a radical shift is […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week announced that the software giant would acquire Perceptive Pixel, Inc. (PPI). Terms of the deal were not disclosed. PPI is best known as the company that makes those big interactive displays that CNN called its “Magic Wall” in the 2008 presidential race. CNN was also an investor in the […]

Email is great for conversations. But not all conversations are great for email. When you correspond with someone via email, you lose control. For example, if you’d like to delete the conversation later, you can’t. Sure, you can delete your own copy, but everyone copied on the email conversation retains control of the whole thing. […]

Companies that create content, such as TV shows, movies, books, and magazines, typically don’t sell or deliver their content to consumers. The selling is usually done by somebody else. For example, publishers make books, but bookstores and sites like Amazon sell them. Apple is one of those companies that sells content. Apple sells content the […]