Unfair Platform Advantage

I devoted my last post to discussing Ina Fried’s prediction of a September 10th iPhone launch date, forgoing my thoughts on the article itself and its rise to popularity over the last twenty-four hours. From my opening paragraph:

“Earlier this morning, as I scrolled through my RSS reader, I came across a number of articles mentioning an unassuming and altogether unremarkable AllThingsD piece by Ina Fried. Despite its lukewarm tone, the prediction of a September iPhone launch event ran the gamut of popular tech sites and garnered a great deal of attention even though it said nothing surprising or even particularly interesting at this point.”

Now, I intend to expand upon that overarching sentiment of disappointment.

As near as I can tell, it appears the hullabaloo that rose up around Ina’s article stemmed from her information purportedly coming from a source within the company, or so her article seemed to imply. That, and the fact that the notable(?) site AllThingsD published the rumor.

And I consider that fundamentally wrong. As I said in The September iPhone Launch’s opening paragraph cited above, Ina neither made any surprising nor interesting observations — let alone predictions — as to the future with the minor exception of a concrete launch date. But as I demonstrated later on in my article, even deducing that date proved of little difficulty; no harder than tacking on “...sources told AllThingsD” anyways. But yet GigaOM, TechCrunch, Macstories, and other well-known internet publications picked it up, branded it with their stamp of approval, and passed it along. It’s disappointing, really: both the article itself and the fact that so many deemed it worthy to pass along in such high regard.