I was walking across King yesterday, and I saw something amazing in Berczy Park.

It’s the WWF Ice Bear!  Basically a giant sculpture of a polar bear.  As the ice melts, it uncovers the bronze skeleton underneath.  I think it’s an incredibly fitting and poignant symbol of one of the WWF’s causes, and I urge everyone in the city to check it out before it’s gone.

Apple has been going at it with Adobe ever since they decided they wouldn’t include Flash in their iPhone and iPad devices.  If you missed the whole thing, you can probably catch up by reading a post that Steve Jobs wrote explaining their decision.

Eat it, Adobe.

The post set off an Adobe hate-fest on Twitter, one which in turn set off a guy named Joe Hewitt, who actually has a lot of insightful thoughts on the state of the web today (TechCrunch has a nice synopsis for anyone who hates trying to figure out twitter streams).  One of his tweets linked to an incredible post, from which I stole my title.  Here’s the punchline:

“The modern web had over 10 years to reach parity with desktop applications, and it couldn’t even hit that. Now it faces extinction as innovation in native applications accelerates.”

That hits home, doesn’t it?  Most of the web apps we use aren’t REALLY being innovative, they’re just trying to emulate the desktop, and FAILING.  Now that developers have the option to write applications on a way better platform, why wouldn’t they?  Apple knows it, developers are figuring it out, and what’s more, if you take a few minutes to think about it, you know it too.

Separated at birth?  (by about 10 years)

At the moment, your internal monologue might sound something like this:  “but what about HTML5, Al?  Everyone will just use that when it comes out and then the web will be awesome again!”

If that’s what you’re thinking, you should ask yourself this: “Does HTML5 have native support for multi-touch?  Or gestures?  Or accelerometers?”  (the answer in all cases is no).  Apple’s development platform supports all of those features now.  Flash will undoubtably add support for these features rather soon.  HTML5 will add support for these features…when a committee decides that they belong (read: don’t hold your breath).

The fact of the matter is, HTML5 is just another platform (just like Flash, just like Apple’s development platform), and as a platform, it has its own pros and cons.  It’s great as a baseline, but new features are added way too slowly for us to use it as the upper bound for functionality when we’re thinking of new apps to make.

So what do we do?  How do we deal with all this platform war rubbish?!?

1. Use the right tools for the job.  If your main goal is wide adoptance, use something like HTML.  If your main goal is snazzy new features, use Apple’s dev platform.  If you’re looking for something in the middle, go ahead and use Flash.  The technology you use will depend on YOUR goals, and not the goals of Apple or Adobe.  I actually believe that more choice is a good thing; there’s a better chance that there will be a technology which matches your needs.

2. Stop trying to support everyone.  Find out who your target market is, and do your best to support them.  If you’re building some sort of highly-interactive website for socially-connected users, I think it’s safe to drop support for users who don’t use javascript. On the other hand, if your website caters to the 60+ crowd, maybe you should think about not having javascript at all.

3. Vote with your support and dollars.  At the end of the day, Apple and Adobe are both slaves to their customers.  That includes the application developers.  If you’re a developer that truly believes that Apple made a mistake in dropping Flash, then build your Flash apps and stop worrying about iPhone users.  If you’re a user who MUST have Flash, then don’t bother buying an iPhone.

Conclusion: whether you’re a developer or a user, choice is GOOD.  A platform that isn’t ubiquitous is not useless.  At the end of the day, WE decide the future, not Adobe and not Apple.

Drew’s “Get Up and Go” post rekindled my thinking on the current state of sharing on the internet.

Every website you go to nowadays (except this one ) has those handy sharing links on every piece of content it produces…that is, every piece of content that THEY want you to share.  But what if you want to share something that they forgot to put a share link on, like their contact section, or their bio section?  And what if they don’t provide share links at all?

Mashable.com – convenient sharing links on their content stream…but not their jobs section

Unacceptable!  As a content-hungry, share-savvy internet user, I demand to be able to share arbitrary pieces of content!  Of course, internet companies can read ours minds, and so some people have attempted to satisfy my demands.  Sites like delicious allow you to use bookmarklets to share any page on the web, and a little-known feature on Google Reader’s bookmarklet actually allows you to share ANY piece of content you highlight/select on a page (to do this simply get the bookmarklet, refresh the page with the item you want to share, DON’T click anything and click on the bookmarklet for instructions).

Google reader sharing – we’re getting closer to my share-topia!

Okay, so now you have your arbitrary content, but what’s the point of sharing if you can’t have a discussion?  Well with Google Reader, you COULD hook it to your buzz stream and blah blah blah LAME!  Too many steps!  Comments aren’t threaded!  And what’s worse, you have to wait for the content to pop up in your buzz before you know what your friends have been saying about it.

Unacceptable!  I want to know what my friends think about web content IMMEDIATELY, right when I’m looking at it.  Well the mind readers on the internet have started going in this direction.  Check out Stickr.  It’s an interesting take on how to get instant feedback for content on the web.

In case you’re wondering, yes that is my stickr.

The basic idea is that you post stickrs on any website, and you can read stickrs from your friends, from random people, and comment on the sitckrs as well.  It’s a really interesting idea, and the execution is not totally terrible.  The real problem?  None of my friends are on it (it’s mostly a bunch of Russian people).  I barely even care what my friends think, so obviously I don’t care what random people have to say about most content pieces.  So there’s still something missing here.  Good idea, but there is a long way to go.

I think the ideal solution will integrate current social sharing sites so that my friends will already be signed up.  That’s what Google did with Buzz, and I think they were incredibly successful considering how entrenched people are within their own social media spheres. All they have to do is make another bookmarklet that will allow me to see what people have already said about content while I’m surfing, and they’ll be two steps ahead of everyone else.

Until that happens, I’ll be constantly refreshing my buzz stream.

Apparently Ben gets around.

If you’ve ever met our tech director Ben Feist, you’d know that he has a bit of a mischievous streak in him.  That’s why I wasn’t surprised when he told me that he was the foursquare mayor for all of the digital agencies in the Toronto area.

I think it’s hilarious, but I should mention that not everyone is laughing.  Apparently some people aren’t impressed that Ben is the Mayor of the TAXI Bodyshop (our office gym) since he’s never there.  Of course, he doesn’t actually have to be in the building to check in, he could just be in the vicinity.

One might ask how he did it, but I think the clear answer is that he just has way too much time on his hands.

In conclusion: remember to check into your workplaces foursquar-ers, or one day you might wake up to find this man as your mayor:

Hello, Clarice.

Unless you’ve been stuck under a rock for the past few months, you’ve likely heard about location check-in services such as Foursquare and Gowalla.  If you aren’t hardcore into these services like Drew and Christian are, then you might have found yourself asking “What’s the point?”

Obviously businesses and advertisers can appreciate what these services are trying to accomplish, but what about users?  Sure it’s useful to see where your friends go for sushi, or where they are right now, but beyond getting to be the “Mayor” of a location, there is little incentive to check-in.

MyTown differs in this respect by offering a game mechanic to the user.  You gain points from each check-in you make, and these points can be used to “buy” locations.  After you’ve bought a location, you start getting rent every time anyone else checks in at that location.  Then you can use this rent to improve your property (which increases the rent you receive from every check-in) or buy new properties.

The stats speak for themselves:

• Gowalla: 100,000+ users in one year (source1+source2)
• Foursquare: 600,00 users in 15 months (source1+source2)
• MyTown: 1.2 million users in 2 months (source)

It just goes to show how a seemingly small differentiator can make a big difference.