What is this, Windows 95?

On countless surfaces in Facebook's open, bullpen-style offices, the word 'Hack' is scrawled, spraypainted and stenciled. The message is simple: This is a company focused on the particular flavor of experimentation native to Mark Zuckerberg-style geeks. And not much else.

Since the beginning, this has been apparent in the visual style of Facebook. Even after the recent redesign, it retains the inoffensive color palette of its earliest days.

At first, this was a welcome departure from the chaos of MySpace. But now it feels corporate. It feels like something that came out of late-90's Redmond.

The general feeling of blah extends to Facebook's unnecessarily tortured UX.

Compare Facebook's "resharing" functionality to the "repin" feature on Pinterest, a site whose stripped-down interface is in no small part responsible for its success.

On Pinterest, there's no decisions to be made: Everything gets a caption, there are no choices about thumbnails, I don't have the choice to remove the source of the link, etc. Pinterest asks me to navigate one dropdown and a single (not optional) caption field.

Facebook, meanwhile, throws me two dropdowns, one of which has critical consequences for privacy, an optional caption field that kind of breaks the site's UI if I leave it blank, a superfluous (grayed-out) URL, a description field whose auto-filled text is always inadequate, a choice of thumbnail (and, inexplicably, grayed-out thumbnail choice buttons when I have no options -- why not just leave these out?) as well as a separate checkbox for leaving out a thumbnail all together. Whew.

Where have we seen this kind of feature creep before? Oh, right, Office:

via Coding Horror

So why does Facebook continue to expand at such a rapid clip? Simple: network effects. Like Windows before it, it's good enough, and since everyone else is using it, you kind of don't have a choice.

The irony here is that after many years of stagnation, Windows 8 indicates that Redmond may finally be figuring all this out, or at least the design side of the equation. That doesn't mean that both companies aren't ultimately vulnerable to disruption. In the case of Facebook's weirdly corporate, hospital-waiting-room user experience, that day can't come soon enough.

OnLive's revolutionary technology makes iPads 50% less effective

You can't own a tablet for more than a month without thinking that it's secretly a fully-functioning computer that was crippled at the factory just so you wouldn't replace your laptop with it. Now OnLive has more or less proved that point, by rolling out an app that allows you to "run" windows on your iPad.

But you're not actually running Windows on the iPad, just streaming a continuous video feed of Windows directly to your iPad. So you have to be on a reasonably fast connection (wifi, not 3G) for it to work. Windows and its apps run in "the cloud," or in this case OnLive's remote servers.

OnLive is better known for applying this same technology to streaming gaming, which it unveiled just 18 months ago.

All kidding about the advisability of running Windows on an iPad aside, this is an interesting application of a much larger trend: offloading some, or in this case nearly all, of the processing for an application into the cloud. For example, processor-intensive tasks like face recognition are better accomplished by remote servers, and everything from location services like Skyhook to your cell phone's email client represent a series of trade-offs between server and client side processing. AJAX, Web 2.0, etc. are also part of this trend of re-balancing which parts of the application are best chewed through locally or somewhere else.

Some folks have even turned this paradigm on its head, running "the cloud" on cell phones instead of servers.

At any rate, OnLive's Windows-on-any-device cloud strategy could point the way to a future of (very) "thin clients" that can access any amount of computing power anywhere at any time, and contain just enough processor power to run a display and accept inputs. Or at least that's the future this would point to in a world of unlimited bandwidth. As long as cell data service remains capped and people want to take their devices on airplanes, however, I imagine most of us will want to keep our apps client-side.

Mining, textiles, retail—these are the industries that are most likely to violate worker's rights, right? Nope— turns out the electronics industry is worse, according to a recent report from Oekom, a sustainable investment research firm. (For more on that report, check out the breakdown of its findings at GreenBiz.)

The appearance of monologist / investigative reporter / anti-Apple agitator Mike Daisey on the most recent episode of This American Life is leading to a whole new wave of awareness of a stark fact of electronics manufacturing: There is no "Fair Trade" standard for our electronics, even though industry watchers have been calling for one ever since the well-publicized suicides at FoxConn, China's largest manufacturer of electronics.

If you think about it, it's mind boggling that we can buy Fair Trade coffee, tea and chocolate, "conflict-free" diamonds and clothing manufactured by companies happy to trumpet their labor practices, but no electronics manufacturer seems to have taken the slightest (public) notice of the conditions under which their goods are manufactured.

Yet exploitative labor practices and unaccountable manufacturers are exactly what we should expect, argues Richard Locke at Boston Review, because the kind of turnover consumers demand in their electronics— better, faster, newer—mandates those practices.

In response [to the average 8-month life of a cell phone] brands and even suppliers have developed practices that protect themselves, including pull-based ordering systems that signal that products should be assembled only after they are purchased at some retail outlet, just-in-time delivery of components needed to assemble the products rapidly, and "flexible" labor practices that enable factories quickly to hire and fire assembly workers in response to fluctuations in consumer demand and production orders.

But these practices place a greater burden on the workers assembling the products. In other words, our desire for the latest model creates enormous volatility in consumer markets that can only be managed through a set of business practices that inevitably leads to excess working hours, low wages, and unhealthy working conditions for millions, who are often women migrant workers.

Locke's argument is interesting, but it's not the whole story. There are other industries that are all about disposability and price—think of fashion—that have come up with ways to treat at least a subset of their workers more humanely.

It's hard not to look at the situation and wonder why companies like Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorolla (now owned by Google) and Microsoft can't figure out a way to direct just a small portion of their margins toward making working conditions more humane. The fact that there is nothing like a Fair Trade certification standard for this industry has got to be part of the problem—if it existed, it could probably shame them into acting, just as Greenpeace's bad report card for Apple apparently inspired change at the company.