In a piece entitled "Curated hypocrisy: How Google camouflages its attacks on Apple" (via DF), Kontra goes to great lengths to expound on the idea of "curated computing", a term Sarah Rotman Epps used to describe Apple's oversight of it's mobile application platform. But curated computing is nothing new, it's been with us for years, reaching somewhat of a fever pitch immediately following the "user generated content" boom (remember that buzz-phrase?). In fact, a non-trivial sum of websites and applications are dedicated to this very concept, as Jason Kottke so aptly put it in his piece on FFFFOUND!:

Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. ...The pace is faster, you don't need a physical gallery or museum, and you don't need to worry about crossing arbitrary boundaries of style or media. Nor do you need to concern yourself with questions like "is this person an artist or an outsider artist?" If a particular piece is good or compelling or noteworthy, in it goes.

As the debate swells regarding Apple's platform decisions, let's not pretend it's an argument with curation on one side and complete anarchy on the other. Instead, this is about Apple forcing their continued curation upon products that they began curating, from a design perspective, well before they met the hands of consumers. It's about the other side fighting to allow the masses, aided by tools equivalent to FFFFOUND!, to curate the content themselves. And at the end of the day, it's about deciding how far you're willing to let Apple's arms extend into your life in the name of their product vision - a vision that's shifting from a "design and release" strategy to something more persistent and evolutionary. Are you sick of curation yet?