I love Instapaper. It was one of the first apps I downloaded when I got the iPhone 3G last year, and I’ve used it as much or more than any other app since. Hundreds, or possibly even thousands, of articles have passed through there, including every edition of BusinessWeek and the Economist.

I’m a power user, and being that as it is, I’d be more than willing to upgrade to pro, or at least look at some advertising, if it meant that the product would continue to improve. And there was a very simple way to get me and others like me to do that: stop developing the free version, and add awesome features to the pro version. Eventually, that would be too enticing to pass up.

But instead, Instapaper chose a really strange path, releasing an update to the free version that is a downgrade in a number of ways: only your last ten articles are visible, it doesn’t save your place when you leave an article, and it’s now ad-supported (I don’t really have a problem with this, but taken with the former two, it’s a little ridiculous). There are some added features, including background updating, but not nearly enough to make it a net positive.

The idea, of course, is to make Instapaper Free just objectionable enough to encourage people to upgrade. But now I just feel annoyed, and upgrading almost feels like rewarding bad behavior. As I said before, the right approach would have been to stop developing for the free version, and make the pro features so great that the free version would just feel stale.

As it stands, I’ll probably try out a couple of other tools, including ReadItLater. Honestly, I really want to upgrade to Instapaper Pro, but I’m still put off by that “upgrade,” and the last thing I want is to encourage other companies to do the same later.

How valuable is google docs? Valuable enough apparently for Twitter to trust it (and their biggest competitor) with a copy of their confidential notes, financials, and plans. In all the hooplah last week about Twitter getting hacked, I was surprised no one seemed to notice this.

In fact, some of the compromised notes directly commented on the status of negotiations with (and potential threat from) Google itself:

In a May 7 management meeting… the attitude towards Google is cautious: “Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product.”

But by June 9, things seem to have progressed with Google. After an earlier two hour meeting with Google executives, the Twitter leadership had decided that an “agreement for some period of time makes sense - with our parameters.” But at the same time, they resolved to that Twitter’s own “search results page needs to be great - better than the landing pages on Google.”

While it’s unlikely Google management would sanction eavesdropping policies against competitors, it’s not hard to believe that a lone employee might occasionally do a key word search and stumble upon proprietary and potentially useful information.

I’m a big tech geek. I have enormous amounts of trust in both technology and many tech companies to do the right thing. Still, even I hesitate to put strategy docs on google, when a project may be competitive or otherwise relevant to google’s business. Whether or not Twitter management themselves trust gmail / google docs with this proprietary info, it’s certainly worth noting that it’s becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to prevent ALL employees from storing or transmitting info via Google.

It’s an issue that more and more companies (particularly web companies) are going to have to consider, and it’s something that Google would be wise to address (hello - encryption!) at some point (especially for companies that don’t trust ANYONE with their data).

Nonetheless, this says a lot about not only the utility of google docs, but also the inherent trust our generation of web startups has in each other to do the right thing. Trust is the future, “Do No Evil” is a requisite.

It’s official - the most libertarian, freedom promoting, anti-authoritarian society in history is now reorganizing itself around strong central government. And if my intuition is correct, that says something interesting about the future of real world societies as well.

From its design as a tool to help communication survive nuclear attacks, to its evolution as an distributed web of information, the internet is all about decentralization. And that decentralized nature  has unleashed an explosion of creativity and innovation across the world.

But something is changing, and it’s happening very quickly: we are starting to empower specific organizations and companies with central control.

We used to all host our own web servers. Now it’s generally far more efficient to let Amazon do it for us. Five years ago we used to communicate through our own email servers. Today an increasing chunk of that communication is now happening on managed communities like Facebook and Twitter (and soon Google Wave). These communities have very specific and pronounced structures (laws) that govern everything from how the system acts, to who can participate in it.

And to a large extent these laws are widely beneficial. Unlike email, users on Facebook have a (somewhat) validated identity. There is also a centralization of spam-prevention, abuse procedures, content formatting, and even structure to profiles that maximizes the efficiency of finding and retrieving information.

And it’s not just Facebook, the same thing is happening with Twitter, which is using centralized management and control to improve the experience of un-managed platforms like blogging and SMS. In fact, the biggest critism of Twitter today is that its not exerting enough control.

And while my libertarian blood cells coagulate at the thought of centralization and its inevitable abuse and inefficiency, that doesn’t seem to be happening online. What does seem to be happening, unlike with real world governments, is that these strong central players are organically rising and falling (ahem, MySpace) based on the effectiveness and responsiveness to the people they are governing.

I’m far from a political scientist, but it’s a common belief that as societies advance they form governments to maximize the quality of life for their citizens. The same seems to be true for the online world. The question is what happens as the two worlds increasingly become one.