I fought with this issue of syncing and did a write up here, similar to yours, that is more of a walk through; showing how to sync with Outlook, google, ipad, and sync calDAV subscriptions all replicating across. My walk through is here if you're interested: http://ipad-candy.com/synching-outlook-to-googl...

Again, thanks for the great write up and I hope to see more about the iPad!

-John

It's almost like he's taken the whole privacy battle and reduced it to simple terms: people care about privacy, because they care about what other people think of them, and their certain behaviors. But inevitably there are people we don't mind sharing this information with. Why? At a simple level, because they trust it won't change the perceptions those closer friends have.

Coupled with the inevitable concept of interconnectedness, it seems like he sees the main issue of privacy as the lack of acceptance of what is defined as taboo within certain different segments of society. So, on this path toward objective morality/ethics, away from subjective judgement, privacy is a construct of the past to keep us feeling safe doing things we do , but feel we shouldn't be judged for doing, especially in the digital age.

(aside: Frankly, I think a lot of this sentiment has been fueled by the actions of capitalist entities going after culture warriors. Those who grew up with computers, sans a corporate capitalist underpinning mentality, have a different view of information, culture, what is intellectual property, etc. Additionally, similar to how the world around us has changed exponentially as a result of technology, so too has the subsequent infiltration, adoption, aging of culture increased exponentially. There is a famous quote which I think sums this up: “People see Rock N' Roll as youth culture, and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do? Do you have any idea?”)

And a lot of it comes from fear of our information being used against us, even if the underlying reason for using that information is to make our lives better and easier by knowing what we want, need, etc. There are intrinsic values to some of our information: where we live, what stores we shop at, what we buy regularly, etc. All of this information can be used for our benefit. But what we don't like is someone taking that information, selling it to someone else who may not have our best interest at stake. The trouble is so many of these perks we've had ingrained in our lives for so long that most people don't realize the complex ways in which our information fuels many of our markets. Our personal information is valuable, because we make it so.

(another aside: There was a big stink about a county in California recently proposing to force fast food restaurants to no longer offer toys with meals. No toy with your happy meal. This was solely for non-incorporated areas in just this one county, but you've got people talking about how this is an infringement on their private lives by government. I understand that slippery slope argument, but in reality, the corporation started the game by using your own child's desires against you, the parent! And all just to get you to eat crappy fast food.)

So this 'benefit' I guess would really be the realization of this 'goal' — a more connected, diverse, accepting, free-flowing society. That being said — it'd be optimistic, at best, to assume that Zuck's doing all this purely for the sake of the greater good of society: there is clearly monetary incentive. It will be the choice he has to make between selling out and staying true to his original concept — and maybe he already has, and this is the middle-ground he came to. Either way,, even in the interest of the 'greater good', it will get sticky. Too long for this post, but I commented on another blog about the possibility of users now being willing to pay a monthly fee in order to maintain a certain level of privacy.

On the other hand, the value of the network might be undermined by too many privacy lock downs. We can dream of things we might like to do, but haven't, but you can never really like something until you've been exposed to it, and privacy locks keep stuff from being discovered. From an abstract POV, if the things we don't know are our dreams, then helping to unlock on a massive scale, what we collectively don't know (through not sharing), then perhaps we can unlock more of our dreams.

It's interesting how all this talk seems to fall back on singularity theory, but that's probably due to the glasses i'm peering through

The advantage to Exchange sync is that it is all inclusive; contacts/calendar/email. I’m not aware of any other way to do this for contacts, and it seems equivalent to the caldav method. On email it isn’t ideal, on the iPhone I find myself using both the native email client (for composing and for being notified of new mail) and the web app (for searching, archiving and spam tagging).

I haven’t seen anything about to-do items and I’m not seeing it in the iPad guide? Maybe a Remember the Milk calendar in the sync list?

So here’s another question I pose to you: Do you see any advantage between using Exchange to sync email and using IMAP?

Also: Any idea why I don’t see the ability to add to-do items in my calendar after I’ve set it up like this? I know it has that functionality because I’ve seen it in screen shots. Maybe if you only use Exchange calendars it’s not an option?