The Surface RT was a supremely bad idea in that it offered nothing new in terms of capability as compared to what's already on the market; and, oh by the way, let's offer that nothing new in Windows form! Ugh. But the Surface Pro ... it's a game changer. I'm seeing a lot of them in college classrooms where students are replacing their paper notebooks with the Surface Pro/OneNote. Laptops have been in classrooms for a while, but taking notes in math class on a laptop is difficult and a pen-enabled device is far easier to work with. MS should've come up with more distinctive names for these vastly different devices.

I disagree. I think that monetization is what has created the current mess and the pressure on Facebook to be a profitable corporation will piss off users into fleeing at an increasingly faster clip. I also think that the future model of social networking will look more like the Diaspora model where people pay for their own hosting, write their own code or use software which expedites the process, and where people have a greater involvement in their online persona. There won't be a need for monetization in this scenario. There was a time where paying for television seemed absurd; tv should be free! (Free after you buy the rabbit-ear antenna.) Today, people regularly pay triple digits on their cable and satellite bill. So it isn't a stretch to think that people will pay for hosting, or form groups with friends to share hosting costs, to continue social networking.

I'm increasingly seeing Facebook crack down on pages for reasons which seem silly and arbitrary. I've had a friend whose criticism about a movie was removed by Facebook admin. Yesterday, a business which sells e-cigarette products had their page shut down by Facebook. The explanation: Facebook's policy prohibits marketing tobacco and they include e-cigarettes in that category.

There's nothing wrong with the concept of social networking itself, but it's survival will depend on decentralization.

And as far as Diaspora's use requiring skills and know-how that, currently, most people don't possess...give them time. I remember an era when people complained that setting the clock on their VCRs was too difficult. Nowadays, most high school students know how to work Excel and many high schools even teach college-level Java programming.

I'm an old fart who has gone back to school and, during class recently, I had a brand new TI-84 which did not have a Quadratic Formula program on it. I mentioned it to a classmate young enough to be my daughter. She asked for the calculator and handed it back to me two or three minutes later. She had programmed a Quadratic Formula app it in for me.

People can learn stuff when they feel like there's an incentive to learn it. Don't underestimate the incentive that is people's ability to post cat photos.