Last night on a whim I asked folks on Twitter if they had a home phone – you know, a “hard line” – the k ind of communications device that used to be ubiquitous, but seem increasingly an anachronism these days. The response was overwhelming – only three or four of about 35 responses, about ten percent, said they did, and most of those had them due to bad cel reception or because it makes people feel safe in case of an emergency (the “911 effect”).

The reason I conducted my unscientific poll on the home phone came down to my own experience – my home phone (yes, I have one) rings quite rarely, and when it does, it’s almost always a telemarketer, despite the fact that we’re on the “do not call list.” All of our friends and family know if they want to get in touch, they need to call our cels. Of course, our cels don’t work very well in the hills of Marin County, California, which creates a rather asynchronous sense of community, but more on that in a bit.

I set about writing this post not to bury the home phone, but to celebrate it. The home phone is relatively cheap, incredibly reliable, and – if you buy the right phone – will work for years without replacement. Oh, and far as I can tell, a home phone won’t give you brain cancer.

In a perfect world, the hard line should have become a platform for building out an entire app ecosystem for the home. And yet….it didn’t. Thanks to its monopoly nature and the resultant lack of competition, basic home phone service hasn’t changed much in 20 or so years – we got voice mail, call waiting, and a few other “innovations,” and that’s about it. It’s a dumb technology that is only getting dumber.

Now, I understand why the hard line is dying – mobile telephony is much more convenient for the consumer, and far more profitable for the telephone companies. Mobile phones are not a regulated monopoly (at least, not quite yet), so there’s a lot more innovation going on, at least at the platform level.

But I’m not sure we’ve really thought about what we’re losing as we bid adieu to the home phone (and I’m not talking about 911, which is a mostly solved problem). That one phone number – I can still remember mine from my earliest days growing up – was a shared identity for our family. When it rang, it forced a number of social cohesions to occur between us – we’d either race to answer it first (if we thought it might be for us) or we’d argue over who should get it (if we didn’t). An elaborate system of etiquette and social standards flowered around the home phone: how long a child might be allowed to stay on the phone, how late one could call without being impolite, and of course the dread implications of a late night call which violated that norm.

In short, the home phone was a social, shared, immediate technology, one that existed in rhythm with the physical expression of our lives in our most formative space: Our home. But it’s quickly being replaced by a technology that is private, mobile, asynchronous and virtual. Today, my kids don’t even look up if our home phone rings. But they’ll spend hours up in their room, texting their friends and chatting over the Internet. In other words, the loss of the home phone has sped up the phenomenon Sherry Turkle calls “being alone together.” We may be in the same physical space, but we are not sharing the same kind of social space we used to. And something is lost in that transition.

We may yet might decide there’s value in what the home phone once represented. I believe smart entrepreneurs will see opportunity in the “hard line,” and might help us rediscover the benefits of sharing some of our communications bounded once again in real space and time.

Remember, Searchbloggers, I’ve got a new RSS feed that you can consume so as to miss these non-work related posts.

A few pics from a 25-mile mountain bike ride I just completed with my son…

On way up, White Hill Trail as it goes under Sir Francis Drake Blvd.

And up on Pine Mtn. Trail, after a good climb…Ian’s the blue dot way down the trail…and that’s Mt. Tamalpais in the distance.

Remember, Searchbloggers, I’ve got a new RSS feed that you can consume so as to miss these non-work related posts.

Meanwhile, it was a busy week, with the CM Summit in New York. Here are a few of the wines I enjoyed:

The closing dinner for the CM Summit speakers was great, I didn’t pick the wine, but I sure liked drinking it. It included:

…the I Perazzi La Mozza 09. I don’t know anything about Italian wine, except how to drink them.

Next up was the Dolcetto d’Alba Brandini. I recall this being rather so so.

The Bastianich Adriatico, which I could not seem to get a good shot of. By this time, not sure my palate was quite wine-worthy.

When I finally got home, after five days on the road, I opened this 2007 Macauley Cab from good old Napa. Wow. It really delivered.

And then on Saturday, my pal Mark at our local family pizzeria turned me onto this nicely priced and very deep Benovia 2010 Sonoma pinot. He had three extra bottles, I bought them all.

Last December I posted on “The Internet Big Five,” noting their relative strengths and the market cap of each. Since that time, the Five have only gotten stronger, adding a cumulative $272 billion in market cap (much of that is Apple, but Amazon and Facebook – assuming the offering does as expected on Friday – have also increased quite a bit). All in all, nearly 30% increase in value for these five companies – sort of makes me wish I was an investor, rather than a writer and entrepreneur.

I’ll also check the number of engaged users for each platform, to see if there are any significant shifts, though I don’t recall seeing any in the news recently (save Facebook crossing 900 million users). It is interesting to note that Facebook, should it hold its supposed valuation, will be more highly valued than Amazon.

A reminder as to why I’ve made a point of watching the Big Five, from my original and secondary posts:

..there’s more to the selection of this Big Five than just market cap. In fact, there are four main criteria for making it into the Big Five.

First, as I began to describe above, the companies must have financial heft, both in terms of large equity capitalizations, significant cash on hand, and a defensible core profit making machine. This gives them the ability to throw their weight around: they can make strategic acquisitions (like Google’s acquisition of Motorola), and they can leverage their profit centers and cash positions in any number of ways that offer them flexibility to play the corporate game at the very highest levels.

Second, the companies must have scale in terms of direct reach to consumers. By this I mean their brands are used as meaningful platforms by hundreds of millions of people on a frequent basis.

Third, the companies must have deep engagement with those consumers, the kind of engagement that builds brand and creates massive stores of useful data. The relationship between the brand and its customer has to be meaningful and consistent (therefore creating permission to extract a premium and offer new products and services). It takes an ongoing service relationship for such engagement to occur….

More on the product strength of the Big Five here.

Pardon the site-specific interruption, but as part of my ongoing quest to keep my content here on my own site, I’ve begun posting pictures of stuff here that I’d otherwise put on Instagram, Twitter or other services. Given that many of you read Searchblog for my trenchant commentary as opposed to my preferences in pinots, I promised you that I’d create new RSS feeds. Well, here they are!

You’ve got a lot of choices – Everything (all photos and posts), Everything But Photos, Headlines Only, and Photos Only.

Many thanks to the team at Blend for helping me make this happen.

Enjoy!

The remarkable news today that, among other important board moves, Ross Levinsohn will take over as interim CEO at Yahoo may well mark the end of an era – should his tenure stick, perhaps we can stop talking about the web pioneer in past or conditional tenses. If you’d like to get to know him a bit better, here’s an interview I did with him at Web 2 last Fall.

Last Friday Businessweek ran a story on Diaspora, a social platform built from what might be called Facebook anti-matter. It’s a great read that chronicles the project’s extraordinary highs and lows, from Pebble-like Kickstarter success to the loss of a founder to suicide. Given the overwhelming hype around Facebook’s IPO this week, it’s worth remembering such a thing exists – and even though it’s in private beta, Diaspora is one of the largest open source projects going right now, and boasts around 600,000 beta testers.

I’ve watched Diaspora from the sidelines, but anyone who reads this site regularly will know that I’m rooting for it. I was surprised – and pleased – to find out that Diaspora is executing something of a “pivot” – retaining its core philosophy of being a federated platform where “you own your own data” while at the same time adding new Tumblr and Pinterest-like content management features, as well as integration with – gasp! – Facebook.  And this summer, the core team behind the service is joining Y Combinator in the Valley – a move that is sure to accelerate its service from private beta to public platform.

I like Diaspora because it’s audacious, it’s driven by passion, and it’s very, very hard to do. After all, who in their right mind would set as a goal taking on Facebook? That’s sort of like deciding to build a better search engine – very expensive, with a high likelihood of failure. But what’s really audacious is the vision that drives Diaspora – that everyone owns their own data, and everyone has the right to do with it what they want. The vision is supported by a federated technology platform – and once you federate, you lose central control as a business. Then, business models get very, very hard. So you’re not only competing against Facebook, you’re also competing against the reality of the marketplace – centralized domains are winning right now (as I pointed out here).

It seems what Diaspora is attempting to do is take the functionality and delight of the dependent web, and mix it with the freedom and choice offered by the independent web. Of course, that sounds pretty darm good to me.

Given the timing of Facebook’s public debut, the move to Y Combinator, and perhaps just my own gut feel, I think Diaspora is one to watch in coming months. As of two days ago, the site is taking registrations for its public debut. Sign up here.

A very happy Friday night with my wife, mother in law, and kids (and tomatoes, kale, wild rice, et al), made round by this MacRostie Pinot, 2007. Yippee, it’s the weekend!