While the revolt against Spore’s DRM continues, Amazon, site of most of the negative reviews, is proving the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Do a Google search for spore drm, and you’ll get the page shown above. The sponsored link on the right? It’s an Amazon ad with the title “Spore DRM Revolt?” Click through and you’ll go to the order page, negative reviews and all. From the looks of things, Amazon may be right in its assumption that the “revolt” won’t hurt sales. Spore is currently the top-selling game on the site, despite close to a thousand negative reviews and a day’s worth of press on the contretemps.

I’ve been reading the developer docs for Google Chrome with great interest; clearly Google has put a lot of thought into this application, and has major plans for it. And one paragraph in the docs has really stood out for me. In Google’s documentation on the user experience for the browser, the company states:

In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.

That paragraph makes Google’s goals pretty clear: though the company has brushed off countless claims made over the years that it eventually plans to release its own operating system, it has now essentially done so. Chrome is intended as nothing less than a cross-platform OS for web-based applications and content. Though this is a big move for Google, it’s not exactly radical for a browser to do far more than serve as a window onto the web; Firefox essentially functions as a web OS for millions of users today. Whether you’re using Firefox on a Mac, Windows or Linux box, your experience is largely the same, and if you live in the cloud and beef up your functionality using plugins and extensions, your underlying OS is almost negligible.

But Google’s plans to enter this space could, potentially, have much higher stakes. Google has the resources to build its market share far above the 20% level Firefox currently enjoys, and could easily do everything from striking bundling deals with netbook manufacturers to paying users to download the app a la Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback promotion. Should Google truly decide to make good on its plans to turn Chrome into a universal “shell for the web,” the potential losers could include not just Microsoft and Mozilla, but every OS maker from Steve Jobs to Mark Shuttleworth. In the long run, operating systems could fade into the background, serving as little more than a collection of drivers and utilities, as they did in the days of DOS and CP/M. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for consumers; they could get a consistent and familiar experience on any computer, and ignore all of the banter about snow leopards, herons and seinfelds.

That long run may be a very long way off, but Google is nothing if not patient (this is a company, after all, that has kept its email client in beta for over four years). And even if Google eventually loses interest in Chrome and it becomes the next Orkut or Google Answers, OS makers should remain concerned. The browser-as-OS era is already upon us, and the only question remaining is which browser you’ll be booting in the next few years.

Blogging about my day job again. Sort of. Just wanted to mention this article in Folio: about the redesign of Consumer Reports magazine that went live with the October issue. Even though, for the most part, I’m not directly involved with the dead-tree version of CR, I still think this is a great redesign, and really does a great job of presenting our outstanding information in a new and stunning visual language. Since the Web and the mag are two different platforms, the redesign isn’t directly reflected on ConsumerReports.org, though we have incorporated the new, streamlined CR logo. Oh, and for the record, it’s a complete coincidence that Luke Hayman of Pentagram was involved with the redesigns of both CR and Radar, two magazines that just happen to have Pertons in their mastheads (though I do think he did a great job with both!).

I was recently “deactivated” by Facebook. The details of what I did to get myself taken down aren’t worth going into right here (though if you’re interested in all of the lurid details, you can find them here). What really concerns me is what occurred after I was cut off. Because what actually happened is that I completely disappeared from Facebook. Not in the simple sense that my friends would get a message saying that my account had been deactivated; that would have been fine. What happened was much worse, and says a lot about what can occur when we entrust our social networks to commercial enterprises: I disappeared completely from Facebook. My profile vanished, along with anything I had ever done elsewhere on the service. Posts to friends’ walls: gone. Comments on boards: gone. History of participation in games: gone. In short, it wasn’t just a simple service cut-off. For all intents and purposes, I had been erased. It was as if I had never existed on Facebook.

I eventually opened a new account, and painstakingly rebuilt my network and profile. But I’m still troubled by the way in which my account was disabled. Facebook has become extremely powerful, and countless numbers of people almost literally live their lives within the service’s walled garden. However, Facebook’s power isn’t based on its technology or brand; it’s based solely on its network of users. If those users begin to defect in large numbers, Facebook will rapidly find itself in the same predicament as other former powerhouses that took their users for granted, like AOL, which virtually invented for-profit large-scale social networking without quite realizing it.

Fortunately, Facebook seems to recognize this risk, which is one reason the service has opened itself to so many third-party tools. It’s now extremely easy to maintain an active profile on Facebook without ever actually using the service. This post, for example, was written for my blog, but if you’re reading it on Facebook, you may never know that. Ditto for my updates, which are sucked in straight from Twitter. Of course, this openness is a two-edged sword. The value of Facebook’s network is based on user interaction. If I post on Facebook via third-party tools, and then interact with my friends directly on other platforms (such as comments in my blog, or Twitter replies), rather than Facebook, ultimately Facebook has a lot less value for me, and I may eventually stop checking in at all; my profile will still look active, but it will essentially be an automated shell, with all the real action taking place offsite.

For now, Facebook has the critical mass, and more of my friends communicate there than through Twitter, FriendFeed or any of the other services that allow easy online interaction. Which is why I went through the trouble to reconstruct my profile and nag my contacts to friend me again. But there’s no guarantee that this will remain the case, and if Facebook wants to retain its dominance, it will need to do more than just provide a convenient place for users to share their thoughts, pictures and experiences. It will need to provide better customer service, and be able to assure users that their digital life won’t be snuffed out without notice because of one careless mistake.