We’ve all had a little time to breathe after the disclosure last week that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson embellished his resume. Despite saying he received an undergraduate computer science degree, he in fact did not. And while rising through several positions of increasing responsibility for years, he allowed those vetting his suitability to believe otherwise.

So far Yahoo has said Thompson was guilty of an “inadvertent error” and that it was reviewing the matter. Third Point, the activist shareholder who revealed what had apparently been hiding in plain sight and is trying to grab spots on Yahoo’s board, is now demanding that Yahoo fire Thompson.

Is this what’s best for Yahoo? I doubt it. Is Scott Thompson what’s best for Yahoo? I don’t know. It’s too early to say. And that’s the point.

The company is on its third CEO in as many years, and he’s been on the job one day short of four months. You don’t get from here to there overnight, no matter who’s in charge, and you don’t get from here to there at all if you are constantly taking detours.

Yahoo can afford to have a guy at the helm who didn’t get a CS degree but said he did, but it can’t afford to aimlessly cast about, as it has now for nearly a decade. Unlike some CEOs, Thompson isn’t accused of sexual harassment or running a secret hedge fund within the company. There is something to be said for a bit of calm and a period of continuity.

Thompson was hired for whatever talents and abilities he’s displayed since college, not for ostensibly logging computer lab time in his teens. Sure, lying on your resume is not a good thing, and it shouldn’t be rewarded. But in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t rate.

The strongest argument I’ve seen for dumping Thompson is some variation of “he no longer has the credibility to lead.” Well, let’s wait and see. It’ll be clear soon enough if he’s being dissed, ignored or undermined. That’s for his direct reports to sort out, and for the board to react to. CEOs don’t tend to be let go because workers won’t play nice with them. CEOs are canned by boards impatient for results or by internal rivals.

Not every offense is a firing offense, and injured parties are actually entitled to try to reconcile. A serious rift can actually lead to stronger ties – Thompson could be just one really heart-on-his-sleeve Town Hall away from firmly establishing his cred. (On Monday he wrote to all Yahoo employees to say, “I want you to know how deeply I regret how this issue has affected the company and all of you.”)

Yahoo, despite all the drama, remains a worthwhile enterprise. It’s Comscore’s number three Web property (after Google and Microsoft).

Thomson might still fail, by whatever metric the Yahoo board thinks matters: an inability to increase shareholder value, a failure to convert hundreds of millions of Yahoo users into a community, a reluctance to establish Yahoo as a player in mobile, whatever. But not because he doesn’t have a computer science degree.

We can only guess what Yahoo has done to bring on the high-tech equivalent of the Curse of the Bambino. Yahoo blew a chance to buy Google, it did almost everything wrong competing with the search giant, and its flirtation with Hollywood-style content creation under Terry Semel was an unmitigated disaster.

But after zigging and zagging for the past few years, Yahoo can actually break the curse by forging a bit of destiny and dancing with the one they brung in.

So here it is, Yahoo board: Your own moment of truth. Hang together, or you will surely hang separately.

PHOTO: Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson/Courtesy of Yahoo.

Just how long can Apple run the table in the post-Jobs era? It was simply a matter of time before those whispers turned into a question asked out loud. George Colony, the CEO of Forrester, a research and advisory firm that has followed the company as closely as anyone, is taking a particularly dim view of Apple’s future. In a blog post that was guaranteed to spark a conversation, Colony says Apple’s days as a market leader are numbered; its “momentum will carry it for 24-48 months” and then, absent a “charismatic leader” in the Jobs mold, it will devolve from “being a great company to being a good company.”

Colony doesn’t get too specific about what this means, but we know. It’s not just about market cap, or stock price or any other shareholder metric. Colony is talking about that combination of imagination and execution pixie dust that has made Apple the most significant high-tech company of the moment, and one of the most important ever.

It’s a pretty big statement, especially since Apple is on fire: $6 billion earned on $40 billion in revenues in the most recent quarter, the iPhone selling as briskly in the rest of the world now as it did in the United States for years, 65 million iPads sold in two years, more cash than it knows what to do with, and at least one analyst speculating that it’ll be a $1,000 stock before long.

It’s also not the toughest bet to make, since high-tech companies, in particular, almost always glow hot for only so long, with rare exceptions – especially after the charismatic founder leaves or is kicked out. We’ve seen it at Sony, Polaroid, Disney and even Apple, Colony argues, when Jobs was kicked out in 1985.

But it’s a sucker’s bet. Here’s the easy counter: There is virtually no chance Apple doesn’t have tricks up its sleeve that were developed in the Jobs era. And it’s those tricks, of course, that got them this far. They have something everyone can see: a management team in CEO Tim Cook and designer Jony Ive, handpicked by Jobs more than a decade ago. Indeed, Cult of Mac editor Leander Kahney says Ive is all the proof you need to know that Colony has it wrong:

Apple’s design chief Sir Jonathan Ive – the man Steve Jobs once called his “spiritual partner” and the genius behind Apple’s iconic aesthetic and design language – is still working at Apple. More importantly, as Jobs bragged to his biographer, Jony Ive has just as much operational power at Apple as Tim Cook himself. Cook is only nominally Ive’s boss: In reality, thanks to Steve, they’re equals.

Apple’s demise will come not from a lack of inventiveness, but – if it comes as swiftly as Colony postulates at all – because someone else comes up with a game-changing something that nobody else, Apple very much included, saw coming. That’s the way giants are toppled: Personal desktop computers kill the mainframe, laptops marginalize desktops, tablets steal the PC’s thunder.

The real danger for Apple is that no company has a monopoly on the gift of thinking different. What’s more likely is that missteps for which Apple has been forgiven will be seen as failures rather than as forgivable works in progress by a mad genius. What would the tech press have made of the Apple TV hobby in the hands of anyone but Jobs? Without Jobs, how much leash would they have given Apple during the tortuous cloud timeline that began with .mac and sucked through three incarnations, until last year’s iCloud?

In fairness, this can be argued either way. This is the sort of bet that people easily take sides on, but for which there is insufficient empirical data to really know the outcome. Like two big-city mayors betting on their NFL teams in the Super Bowl, there is a rooting interest and a delightful salon game component.

And, yes, Apple will – someday – be a shadow of its former self. IBM is the classic high-tech survivor, but the number of times it has reinvented itself is head-spinning. Palm, which owned the personal assistant market until it was slow to see the futility of unconnected PIMs, is at the other end of that spectrum.

Colony’s mistake (if I may be so bold) is not in the fear factor, but in the time frame. I’d be shocked if Apple doesn’t have a five-year plan and sufficient institutional knowledge to plough that field – the absence of the serendipitous Mr. Jobs notwithstanding. The real danger begins in the following five years, as founders we haven’t heard of, working right now, come out with something different. Something Jobsian. What will Cook and Ive, who might have grown weary of Apple or each other by then, do in response?

But that’s years off. Until then, the over/under seems a pretty safe bet to me.

PHOTO: Carmen Shippy (L), the first person in line to buy the newly released Apple iPhone 4S at an Apple Store in Clarendon, Virginia, high-fives staff as she leaves the store, October 14, 2011. REUTERS/Jason Reed

A Kickstarter project for a device you wear on your wrist, but that needs a smartphone to do anything really interesting, has raised more than $5.3 million in eight days. This is this far and away the most anyone has ever raised on Kickstarter, and it’s happening – with a gadget in a category that has a pretty dismal track record – at a sales pace that would make even Apple sit up and take notice.

Mind you, Pebble, “The E-Paper Watch” looks very snazzy. At $115 (only 200 were available for $99, and it will retail for $150 when it goes on proper sale) it’s not terribly expensive. And there is a bit of the Kickstarter effect for things that get lots of favorable press: It’s great to get an insider deal and to get in on the ground floor on something cool. And to risk nothing: If the entrepreneur’s funding requirement isn’t met, you don’t get charged a penny.

Within two hours the people behind Pebble got what they asked for: a measly $100,000. By the time the funding round closes on May 19, they’re on pace to have more than $30 million in orders.

All this for a product that doesn’t exist and – see above – requires a smartphone to do anything interesting.

But therein lies the secret of Pebble’s apparent success. We don’t need something for our wrists that does anything really amazing, because we do have our phones. But we may want something that makes that smartphone we already have a little more convenient to use. The Pebble allows you to see text messages and information at the flip of a wrist, without reaching for your phone. Do not underestimate the power of incremental convenience: How many of us constantly reach for our phone, or always have it in hand, just to keep up with the data overload, most of which doesn’t require our immediate attention?

There have been a handful of attempts to put computers on our wrists. The dream began, perhaps, in comic books, when Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio transformed a mortal policeman into a sort of superhero.

Microsoft got nowhere with its SPOT watch in 2002, and Sony has something out now that seems suspiciously like the Pebble (it, too, requires a connected device to do anything interesting). And then there are monstrosities like this. And don’t get me started about the LG-GD910 video phone watch.

That’s the opportunity for Pebble. The dream of Dick Tracy’s watch resonated only because we couldn’t imagine something better and unpredictable: the smartphone. And what the world has been waiting for was the correct interpretation of the smartwatch. Remember, we yawned at all the tablets that came before (and, frankly, after) the iPad.

Pebble seems to smooth out all the edges and anticipate usability issues we can’t even really articulate in advance. As noted, all the interesting things it does actually come from an iPhone or Android phone via Bluetooth – calendar and weather alerts, Caller ID, email, Twitter and Facebook messages. With Android phones, it will show you incoming texts (this info isn’t accessible to developers on the iPhone).

It will be your bicycle computer, iPod remote, running mate – and, best of all, who-knows-what-still-to-be-thought-up-next.

Pebble has pre-sold tens of thousands of watches, which has convinced developers that this is a viable platform for apps. No chicken-and-egg problem here: The “Hacker Special” funding level, giving developers early access to the information necessary to design those little pieces of software that will even further distinguish this device, is already sold out.

The most astonishing thing about the Pebble phenomenon is that it presumably is targeted at a demographic that is not in the habit of wearing a wristwatch (yes, it does display the time). Does anyone under 30 own a watch? We all have an atomic clock on our phones.

And, yes, those who buy one might just toss it in a drawer. One of the reasons smartwatches haven’t taken off is because of the style paradox. If you want to buy something that tells time and that you can wear on your wrist, you have thousands of choices. If you want an Internet device that you can wear on your wrist, you have almost no choice. This means that anyone who dares make a smartwatch is going to exclude a sizable number of prospective customers who may like the tech, but not the look.

Pebble also seems to have either solved that problem, or overcome it.

Whatever Pebble has done, it’s working: It got $60,000 more in backing and orders since I started writing this. I only started looking into Pebble this morning … and I backed the project. Call that full disclosure (or participatory observation).

None of us will be getting our new toys until September, which is a bit of a risk, since there is plenty of time for someone to try to reverse-engineer the idea, undercut Pebble and come to market sooner (stranger things have happened).

I can wait. And at least my Pebble will arrive sooner than those wearable computers Google has promised us.

We won’t know until we know whether Apple will win, lose or settle (and now there are 16 states piling on the charges, too), but in a way it’s a sort of hapless victim. If the DOJ theory is correct, Apple did participate in a sort of conspiracy, but one driven (again, according to the allegations) by publishers that were determined to keep controlling e-book prices. In the beginning of the e-book industry it was the publishers, not Apple, that had the upper hand.

It’s important to remember the climate in which this alleged conspiracy unfolded. Amazon, against publishers’ wishes, was going rogue with $10 e-books. The mammoth online retailer – which got its start in print books but essentially created the e-book business – was widely thought to be making nothing, or next to zero, on its proprietarily encoded e-books, the better to boost demand for the Kindle.

It was classic razor-and-blades: You want to make money on the razor, so you almost give away the blades, except only your razor can hold the free blades. But in e-books it’s an even better deal. Amazon doesn’t make e-books, and they are virtual goods, requiring no inventory and little overhead in the traditional sense.

But the publishing industry was displeased with Amazon’s new $10 regime. While it was beating on Amazon to change its ways, Macmillan – whose titles at the time included the best sellers Wolf Hall and The Gathering Storm – and Apple were negotiating terms for the iPad maker’s new offering: iBooks. Apple, unlike Amazon, was willing to play by Macmillan’s – and thus the publishers’ – rules.

In Apple’s agreeing to terms from publishers that Amazon had resisted for as long as it could, a number of things occurred. It was high-stakes poker, with most of the cards still face down:

• Apple, always fearsome in prospect if not in practice (can you say iAds?), got all the deals it needed to be a credible e-book player with its new platform.
• The publishers got a new, and potentially fearsome, retailing partner that agreed to see things their way.
• That new dynamic had the immediate effect of making Amazon’s market power less fearsome.

I wouldn’t call Apple’s strategy sandbagging, because Apple almost always has a winning hand (and even when it doesn’t, still bets big – can you say Apple TV?). But I would say that, however it happened, Apple won and is winning: It got a deal that then launched iBooks, and it will benefit from varied pricing. (Relatedly, as my Wired colleague Tim Carmody makes clear, Amazon is still sitting pretty.) The genesis of Apple’s victory is the height of irony: Apple’s initial agreement weakened all retailers, as the balance of pricing power returned to publishers. Prices did go up – Amazon stopped trying to sell e-books for $10, and $13 to $15 became the norm for new e-titles everywhere. But that shift to higher prices gave the appearance of collusion, which got the attention of the Obama Justice Department.

Fast-forward to today: Apple is still in the DOJ’s sights (as far as anyone knows), but even if Justice manages to completely dismantle the price controls all five publishers had imposed (again, coincidentally, they all assert), Apple will finally get flexibility in pricing that it was denied by the agreements it had originally agreed to. At the time the negotiations were taking place, Apple, which had no place in the e-book hierarchy, was in no position to insist on a pricing prerogative in straight-up talks with the publishers (though there was some reporting at the time that it had tried). Now it will simply enjoy the terms of the settlement, because it constrains publishers – no matter if the DOJ suit goes forward, it wins or loses such a trial, or if some other settlement is hammered out.

That’s what I call drawing four cards to make a straight flush.

Permit me to not act my age.

I was all grown up already when the Internet became a big deal, scarcely two decades ago. I was like a kid in a candy store. Still, I’ve only had a couple of heart-stopping moments in those 20 years in which everything has changed.

My heart skipped a beat (along with probably only thousands of others) when I downloaded Mosaic, the first Web browser, on the first day it was released. It consistently froze up. But that small, terribly flawed piece of software was really a time portal, showing me the future, and I could barely breathe.

Two years ago I got my hands on the first iPad on the first day it went on sale. My unboxing was unceremonious because I had to rush and show it off during a couple of TV interviews. But when I got home late on that Saturday in April and finally had a chance to put it through its paces, it took my breath away. I was a kid again: full of wonder and utterly immune to negativity.

Call me childish, but I had the same primal reaction to the video, and the reporting of my Wired colleague Steven Levy, on Google’s Project Glass. As Levy writes, Project Glass is “an augmented reality system that will give users the full range of activities performed with a smartphone – without the smartphone. Instead, you wear some sort of geeky prosthetic (one of those pictured is reminiscent of the visor that Geordi La Forge wore on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but Google has also been experimenting with a version that piggybacks on regular spectacles).”

The augmented reality features in Glass aren’t new. Bionic Eye brought AR to the iPhone in 2009: You held up the phone at eye level and nearby points of interest floated through the camera’s lens. Sekai Camera, an augmented reality smartphone app, not only provides a heads-up display of information but also adds a social element. Yelp tossed in Monocle, another augmented reality feature, as an Easter egg in its app. Heck, in December 2009 Wired highlighted the seven best augmented reality apps for iPhone and Android.

Some people who actually pay close attention to these things say we are maybe a generation away from commercial, indispensable AR glasses. Project Glass isn’t even in beta, and there is no word when that might occur.

But here is what I saw when I peered into Project Glass: a glimpse into a post-smartphone future. I have no idea if the project, from Google’s pure research Google (x) division, will make it out of the lab. Or if someone else will beat them to it in a big commercial way. Or if people will take to wearing these glasses with any more fervor than they have those home 3D specs. Or if pesky legislators will ban them after someone gets hit by a bus while looking at a pop-up display instead of oncoming traffic.

But the key to innovation is the identification of friction – the stupid things that slow you down, like extra clicks, deep menus and rotary dialers – and the acceleration of convenience: dissolving real pain barriers, even as those barriers recede into barely perceptible speed bumps. This is not only why smartphones and tablets took off but also why Apple’s devices in particular do so well. Ease of use, intuitive transitions, “obvious” functionality: Victory goes to he who paves the smoothest path to the task at hand.

None of this will happen tomorrow. But something tells me we are witnessing a new paradigm. I went out on a limb a couple of years ago and argued that tablets could be the smartphone killer. So far this bold prediction hasn’t come true. But I can see how easy it would be to slip on some transitions glasses – clear glass or prescription – and have that be our connection with the outside world instead of a mini-computer in our pockets.

PHOTO: Wearing a Google Glass visor. Google/handout.

“You can look, but you can’t touch” – great advice in most museums, and every strip club. But it makes no sense when it comes to our computers. We are getting very touchy-feely with our smartphones and tablets, and this is how it should be. Even BlackBerry and Amazon’s Kindle, which launched with hardware keyboards to differentiate it from the competition, have abandoned them.

It’s no accident. We touch instinctively. We are born touching everything, and only learn where the boundaries are later in life. Our handheld devices are reconnecting us with the primary technique we used to learn about the world we had just entered. The metaphor extends. Now it’s the mobile computers that we use to learn about the world around us, and we control them with our fingers, by touching a screen. How do you place a price on that?

Many are trying, thanks to software patents. Patents have become a bane to the very essence of innovation. They are arsenals, ostensibly meant to defend but more often used to offend. Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook over 10 patents further proves that weaponizing software patents is the last gasp of a dying business.

Which brings me to the news that Twitter is trying to patent one of the most instinctive gestures on the iPhone, what they call User Interface Mechanics. Anyone who has used a Twitter client on their phone knows to refresh the page: You “pull” it down and release. Others use this as well, like Google’s Gmail mobile site.

But as Techcrunch noticed, this functionality isn’t built into every core app on the iPhone (like the Mail app), and the reason is probably because it’s potential lawsuit bait.

It’s not a sure thing that Twitter’s application will be approved, or that Twitter would enforce it. The most important computer interface device – the mouse – was patented by visionary Douglas Engelbart in 1970, and everything worked out all right.

But the point is that once you have the right to control the use of something, you have the power.

The goal of IP protection is to encourage innovation by creating incentives for an inventor to come up with something new and useful. But when used to circle the wagons around the obvious, it has the exact opposite effect. Where is the dividing line? I’d say ’round about something that would have been invented anyway. The wheel, as opposed to a Segway.

Pretty soon, we’ll be using eye-movement detection and Siri-like voice commands as much or even more than touch. Specific approaches to a method are certainly proprietary, but surely not the method itself. Google’s search algorithms are properly that company’s property, but search isn’t.

This stuff is a big deal, even though it doesn’t (forgive me) touch us every day. But ideas that are simple, easily repeated, and in retrospect no-brainers cause a revolution, unless they are not permitted to do so.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the graphical user interface, the granddaddy idea of personal computing. He got a peek at a prototype at Xerox PARC. But that didn’t prevent the audacious Jobs from accusing Bill Gates of ripping him off, with Windows. In an encounter allegedly witness by Andy Hertzfeld, Gates cooly replied:

“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Or, as Ratso Rizzo said at that party when caught stuffing his pockets with buffet fare: “Well, if it’s free, then I ain’t stealin’.”

It would be insane if windows (small “w”), icons, drag-and-drop and the like were private property. The line is somewhere between stealing and free. Wherever it is, it isn’t where we are now.

Twitter hasn’t made it a habit to throw its weight around – though some developers might say that buying Tweetie was a blow to the innovation it had encouraged. Now, Twitter has a chance to make a grand gesture, by setting this gesture free.

PHOTO: An Apple employee is reflected in the screen of an iPad tablet computer at an Apple store in central London while demonstrating the device during its UK launch, May 28, 2010. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

The new iPad has a bunch of hardware and design upgrades that do make sense, even though the impetus for incorporating them may or may not have been to play catch-up with some Android tablets that nobody is buying.

It’s nice to see 4G make its first appearance on an Apple device — one wonders why this wasn’t possible on the iPhone 4S that came out not that terribly long ago. This exponentially better network standard isn’t widely available yet, but where it exists. it spoils you quickly.

Better camera, new iSight on the back, HD video, retina display, quad-core graphics acceleration, check, check and double-check.

But it all seems so … predictable. The immensely insightful Sharah Rottman Epps says of the new iPad: “A Gut Renovation Masquerades As Incremental Innovation,” and she’s not someone you disagree with lightly. Yet there’s no magic in this newness. Apple really is only shoring up a sure thing with features first introduced by considerably less successful competitors and Apple itself on other devices.

I was hoping, especially in the first big product rollout of the post-Jobs era, for One Last Thing from the Jobs era. Instead of surprising us with an unpredictable Bobby Fischer-like sequence of moves to win, this update feels like Apple is playing for a draw.

Why not, one might argue. Apple really doesn’t have anything to prove right now. The iPad already has the kind of market share in tablets that Google, which is virtually synonymous with search, has in search.

I was hoping for something entirely different from Tim Cook, whose black shirt was in keeping with the Jobs tradition, but whose preference for a collar — albeit not buttoned up — was perhaps a modest declaration of independence.

My chief lament: No Siri, the imperfect but powerful voice-controlled personal assistant introduced in the iPhone 4S. Porting Siri to the iPad and granting app developers access to it would have been insanely great.

But I’m biased, having been seduced by her charms. Even more than the iPhone, the iPad is becoming basic kit in every industry — the military, aviation, medicine, restaurants, retail. Reliable voice control is such a powerful force multiplier that Apple wouldn’t even have to hype it much to make the case that it’s the most important development in computing since the mouse — and infinitely more versatile.

Apple usually either produces something insanely great, or makes us believe — through that famous Jobsian reality distortion field — that it has. But the new iPad is handsome and respectable and admirable. It’s not a rebel.

That doesn’t mean Apple has got fat and lazy as it rolls around in piles of cash and watches its stock price reliably test historical levels day after day. But the iPad event was sobering instead of intoxicating. “Sanely great” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple event as an image of the old iPad is projected on the screen behind him, in San Francisco, California March 7, 2012.  REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Yahoo is taking on Facebook — but it’s not vying for the hearts and minds of the Internet cool kids. It’s for licensing fees over some patents. This is not how it was supposed to be.

No, I’m not naive. But I am a bit of a romantic. Thing is, I remember when Yahoo was an upstart with two crazy awkward college kids who came up with something that the search giants of the time — Lycos and Alta Vista — could not withstand. Yahoo’s scrappiness was part of a long tradition of Silicon Valley startups that came before (and would come after). Like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the elder statesmen of Silicon Valley who began their iconic company in a now iconic garage, Jerry Yang and David Filo started with nothing but an idea in a dorm room and changed everything. Yahoo’s blazing success in search and (the now-quaint notion of) cataloging the Web begs comparison to two other crazy awkward college kids who started a search engine. That search engine, of course, killed Yahoo. It had an equally kooky name — Google.

Now Yahoo, as part of its effort remake itself after a decade of decline, is said to be wielding a new weapon: a patent trove. The stellar DealBook blog of the New York Times, which first reported this story, couldn’t get anyone to disclose the particulars, but it quotes “people briefed on the matter” as saying Yahoo is threatening lawsuits and is in the midst of negotiations with a pretty big fish. “Yahoo is seeking to force Facebook into licensing 10 to 20 patents over technologies that include advertising, the personalization of Web sites, social networking and messaging,” DealBook reports.

Oh, how the mighty have… matured, to be charitable. Yahoo was crazy disruptive before “disruptive” was even digerati shorthand for “cool.” It was so popular that Reuters — yes, this Reuters — took a sizable stake in the young company. The American executive who made this happen, Andy Nibley, delighted in telling the story of how the very British Reuters board received the news he was investing millions in a company named “Yahoo!”

For years the two companies closely partnered to create wicked revolutionary news services. I know this because I was the lead guy on the Reuters editorial side in those heady days, collaborating with some daring executives and talented engineers at Yahoo’s Mountain View mecca.

Hey, we all grow up. We get married, get car loans, take on a mortgage. We become, as my closest comrade from those days (still a dear friend) never tires of reminding me, “not the demographic they care about.”

But that doesn’t mean we still can’t be cool — disruptive.

Yahoo’s been through the wringer. It’s sad enough that the worst decision it has made in the past few years has been not to sell out to Microsoft, and that one of those crazy awkward kids, Jerry Yang, has completely severed his ties to the company he founded.

Who knows — Facebook may be getting away with murder.

But patent enforcement is becoming the subtext of Web 3.0, threatening to make the Internet the province and playground not of awkward dreamers but of lawyers and accountants. Look at what’s happening: Google buys Motorola Mobility, sure, to extend its brand and reach into the mobile payments arena but also as a defensive move to acquire a basket of patents. Same with Nortel, divvied up by Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony. Kodak, a brand that people of a certain generation identify with the perfect slideshow, goes Chapter 11 long after it ceased to be relevant because it could not generate enough income from its patent portfolio to stay afloat.

And then there is Paul Allen: the co-founder of Microsoft, one of the world’s wealthiest self-made people, legendary risk-taking investor, a person who could easy wear “cool.” What’s he been up to? Patent trolling. As as Wired‘s Ryan Singel reported it, Allen is suing the “entire web — except Microsoft.”

Again, I am not naive. I know the Lords of Usenet fruitlessly (and laughably) tried to quash the commercialization of that pre-Web, text-only communications network. I know today’s awkward dreamers only make it to the cover of Wired when moneyed risk-takers back them, and they succeed.

So Yahoo is in good, or bad company, as the case may be. The company is not on life support like Kodak, but it has lost its way. It traded a founder in over his head for a hothead it fired and now have a back-to-basics guy, Scott Thompson, occupying the CEO’s office.

Every penny counts, of course. But I, for one, am yearning for great things again from Yahoo. Collecting taxes probably isn’t what Vint Cerf had in mind.

It certainly doesn’t want to make you scream: “Yahoo!”

Photo: Yahoo’s Times Square neon sign, by freddie_benjamin/flickr. Used with gratitude via a Creative Commons license.

Google got its hand caught in the cookie jar last week — and this time it really does have some explaining to do.

The search giant, which derives some 97 percent of its revenues from advertising, thought it would be all right to circumvent some protections incorporated into Apple’s Safari browser so that it could better target its ads. By intentionally bypassing the default privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser — and, as Microsoft has now asserted, Internet Explorer — Google has decided for all of us that our Web activity will be more closely tracked. They opted us in, without asking. And without a way for us to opt out. (We didn’t even know about it until the Wall Street Journal blew the lid off this last Thursday.)

On the merits, this is a pretty big deal. A class action has already been filed, and an FTC probe is almost certain. That the no-tracking settings were circumvented (and secretly) makes it easier to infer that even Google worried it might be touching a third rail. It says it wasn’t, that its intent was only to discern whether Google users were logged into Google services and that the enabling of advertising cookies was inadvertent.

But the atmospherics are horrible:

• Google is the company whose unofficial motto is “Don’t be Evil.”
• Google and Apple already have a pretty tortured relationship. Secretly deploying an exploit for an Apple product isn’t exactly a good-faith gesture.
• Google only a month ago got some props for putting the best face possible on a big change in its privacy rules under which it now aggregates information gathered about you from one Google service with that collected from all the others you might use.

That last point in particular frames the bigger problem: We, the general Internet-using public, have an innately uneasy relationship with the “free” services we use. We vaguely understand that we are being spied upon — how else could Amazon and Netflix make such darn good suggestions? — and more or less see it as a reasonable trade-off. Then we try not to think about all the consequences of this new world order.

But this relationship is based on trust and on the ability of the big companies, that for immense profit bathe themselves in ever-deepening pools of our not-so-personal details, to keep convincing us that it’s all good. Some of them — like Google – take in sums approaching $40 billion a year, while others fancy themselves $100 billion companies — like Facebook — based on this uniquely digital-age business model: We are not only the customers, but the product.

Honestly now, nobody should be expected to understand how cookies and referrers and Adsense work. We shouldn’t have to worry about the clues and signals and anonymized information that the quants at Internet behemoths scrape so they can raise money from marketers to reach us and use that money to invent incredible, world-altering things.

But when a company like Google does something like covertly breaking though a data firewall — however righteous Google suggests the action might have been — the delicate trust imperative is jarred.

By definition, trust fills a vacuum created by the absence of verifiable facts — that is, not actually knowing for certain what the person is doing. You tell your spouse you’re working late, and if you’ve earned the right, she believes you. She doesn’t check up, doesn’t call your office line, doesn’t activate the “Find Your Friends” function secretly enabled on your iPhone.

You screw that up, and everything you do is suddenly questionable.

The line that Google crossed may not be an absolutely terrible one, and the whole affair might have been avoided — say, by being transparent. As Wired‘s Ryan Singel explains in mercifully understandable detail, it might even be argued that Safari is thwarting what we want — or at least not presenting us with a real-time opportunity to decide if Google’s going after that information was all right with us.

But Google will have a tough time making itself seem like a white knight and defender of best practices, primarily because it strayed down Evil Road.

And that leaves one wondering now: What is Google really up to when it says it’s working late?

The drama: A lawsuit by a patent troll who said he owned the rights to the “interactive web.” The troll says he’s owed some back rent for owning the Web we all use every day.

Dramatis persona: Tim Berners-Lee. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He invented the World Wide Web.

Oh, to have been in Tyler. It was the stage for a showdown in one of the most bizarre patent troll cases ever, pitting (metaphorically if not in fact) expert witness Berners-Lee against some punk who wanted to make his name by taking out a very, very big gun in a shootout. The plaintiff, Eolas, claimed it owned patents that entitled it to royalties from anyone whose website used “interactive” features, like pictures that the visitor can manipulate, or streaming video. The claim, by Eolas’s owner, Chicago biologist Michael Doyle, was that his was the first computer program enabling an “interactive web.”

If Texas was still the Wild West this might have been settled at High Noon at some dusty, just O.K. Corral, with single-action Colt .45 revolvers. There was no gunplay, but for geekdom the calm morning testimony in an air-conditioned courtroom was just as exciting.

On Wednesday, Jennifer Doan, a Texarkana lawyer representing defendants Yahoo and Amazon, examined Berners-Lee for the plaintiffs, which include Google, Amazon and Yahoo. An excerpt from Wired‘s report:

When Berners-Lee invented the web, did he apply for a patent on it, Doan asked.

“No,” said Berners-Lee.

“Why not?” asked Doan.

“The internet was already around. I was taking hypertext, and it was around a long time too. I was taking stuff we knew how to do…. All I was doing was putting together bits that had been around for years in a particular combination to meet the needs that I have.”

Doan: “And who owns the web?”

Berners-Lee: “We do.”

Doan: “The web we all own, is it ‘interactive’?”

“It is pretty interactive, yeah,” said Berners-Lee, smiling.

The jury of eight deliberated for only a few hours before declaring the suit without merit, derailing what would have been an avalanche of suits that, at best, would have cost big Internet companies tens of millions to fight and hundreds of millions in damages if they lost.

We can only imagine that the jury retired, looked at each other, silently agreed this was prima facie madness, played a few hands of hearts for appearances’ sake and to prolong their service to score one of those fabulous free courthouse lunches, and then returned with a verdict.

If they had seen it the other way, the impact on our daily lives would have been pervasive. It could have made the Web economy unstable, in turn threatening innovation. It might have required you to pay a fee for uploading a video of your toddler for grandma to see. The mind boggles. It would be like being told that Central Park isn’t public property, but real estate owned by Donald Trump, who’d be happy to let you keep lying on the grass — for a price.

The decision really could not have gone any other way, given the truth-is-stranger-fiction narrative. This trial didn’t need a Perry Mason moment. It had an Alvy Singer moment. Here was, if not Marshall McLuhan, as close to McLuhan as we can get. The man who invented the Web was asked to defend his legacy to some jerk who was sullying it. This time the jerk lost.

But patent trolls are playing a lottery which, if it does pay off, can pay off hugely. The incentive to buy up patents by the bucket and then see if any apply to something as necessary as breathing – Turning that doorknob? Pay me!! — is too much for slime with money.

Patents are a vital part of the creative and free-enterprise process. If you can’t protect an idea that can be easily copied, then there is no incentive to invent. There is always going to be someone out there who can steal, develop and market your idea in the blink of an eye. Heck, even with decent enough patent, copyright and IP protections in the United States and European Union, this sort of thing happens anyway.

But patent law has been perverted by trolls. A company whose charter is to invest in patents and then assert they cover everything creates nothing of value. In the meantime, they cause untold trouble. Amazon had to fight a troll over One-Click, its innovation that reduced purchase friction so much it helped catapult the retailer into one of the most powerful forces on the Web. Sometimes there is justice, as when Righthaven — a company some newspapers hired to sue publications for copyright infringement — got its own comeuppance.

So, as the sun sets on another gunfight — er, patent law case — we can only hope that the black hats are in retreat.

PHOTO: World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee delivers a speech at the Bilbao Web Summit in the Palacio Euskalduna, May 17, 2011. REUTERS/Vincent West