Dec 15, 2009
Freedom in Yahoo’s “Decade on the Internet”
As 2009 winds to a close, Yahoo! news is rolling out an interesting project reviewing the decade. In the section “A Decade on the Internet,” Freedom is cited as a tool changing the “way we talk.”
Is this the future of how we communicate with each other? Telling your spouse you want a divorce … on Facebook? Inflicting 25 Things That People Don’t Want to Know About You on unsuspecting friends? In exchange for the “six degrees of separation,” we may have just created a new level of navel-gazing.
But leave it to the Internet: There’s now an app that will help you save yourself from … yourself! Can’t stop yourself from tweeting, updating or blogging? “Freedom” will do it for you: The program, developed by grad student Fred Stutzman, will block your Internet access for up to eight hours.
Stutzman told The New York Times, “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud. I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”
Cool! In other news, I am working on a version 0.5.2 of Freedom that I hope to release in the next few weeks. It has some features that will make a number of you happy!
