Archive for April, 2010

« Older Entries

My daily readings 04/28/2010

April 28, 2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/27/2010

April 27, 2010

  • Facing Heat From Facebook’s Like Button, Glue Ramps Up Social Recommendations

    tags: recommendation, facebook

    • Currently, Glue has over 400,000 registered users and receives over 1.5 million new ratings every month, which is impressive for the bootstrapped startup. But will these new feature updates be able to save Glue from Facebook’s potential takeover of the social recommendations space? Glue’s founder Alex Iskold says that he is “flattered” by Facebook’s move to extend their Like button beyond the social network. In fact, Iskold is very familiar with Facebook’s implementation of its Like button and Open Graph API. But Iskold believes that the Like button is more publisher-focused vs. user-centric. Iskold maintains that Glue’s plug-in allows users to interact with their recommendations wherever they browse and on the sites they visit. He adds that Glue will plan to integrate Facebook’s Like button in some way, but is not sure yet how it will be added to the platform.

  • Facebook: We’ll Serve 1 Billion Likes On The Web In Just 24 Hours

    tags: facebook, Like

    • Earlier in the presentation, Platform Lead Bret Taylor rattled off another huge stat: Facebook users are sharing over 25 billion things a month currently. With the new Like button (and the other new social plugins, not to mention the Open Graph itself), and Facebook’s new partners, expect this number to surge. I mean, if Facebook is going to serve up 1 billion likes just today, they’ll be on pace for a least 30 billion shares this month, not counting any other method of sharing on the site.

  • http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/04/26/best-loading-screen-evar/

    tags: no_tag

    • 8_32384143_436688

  • http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/04/26/best-loading-screen-evar/

    tags: no_tag

    • 8-32384143
    • 8-32384124

  • mailchimp

    tags: no_tag

    • 8_32384124_436687

  • Cloudomatic(flow) | Simple Partner Software For Web Apps.

    tags: no_tag

    • 8-32383909

  • untitled

    tags: no_tag

    • 8_32383909_436683

  • Darren John

    tags: no_tag

    • 8_32383882_436679

  • http://desandro.com/resources/jquery-masonry/

    tags: no_tag

    • 8_32383470_436667

  • http://desandro.com/resources/jquery-masonry/

    tags: no_tag

    • 8-32383470
    • 8-32383882

  • On Geeks and Gays

    tags: no_tag

    • Lots of people assumed I was gay when I campaigned for an apology for the treatment of Alan Turing. I’m not, so what was it that drove me to stand up for a gay man?

  • What Twitter Annotations Mean

    tags: twitter, Annotation

  • Twitter Annotations: Fountain of Creativity or Can of Worms? by @ScepticGeek

    tags: twitter, Annotation

      • Using these, apps can come up with interesting filters that increase relevance for my Twitter experience:

        • Show me tweets from users above an influence-rank threshold
        • Show me tweets from users who have at least x followers or x list memberships
        • Show me tweets from a specific geo-location
        • Only show me tweets that contain links or pics or videos
        • There can be interesting mashups and visualizations based on such metadata.

        As apparent from some examples from the top-of-my-head, there are lots of creative possibilities.

    • I expect Twitter will wait to see what developers come up with and then absorb the best innovations in its native implementations. In the meantime, Annotations will increase “stickiness” of specific Twitter apps and may be used to lock-in users to certain apps.

  • Early look at Annotations – Twitter API Announcements | Google Groups

    tags: twitter, Annotation

    • * Ok, great. How are we going to figure out what Joe Random’s annotations

      actually mean?

      That’s something we need to figure out as a community. But here is an early

      idea: People could add some agreed upon “meta-annotation” that points to

      something which *describes* the annotation or annotations that person is

      using. Think something sort of like XML DTD, though not necessarily machine

      readable. This meta annotation could point to a URL that simply has an HTML

      document that gives a description with some examples of the various

      annotations you’re experimenting with or standardizing on.

      * Will it be in search? Streaming? Mobile? My toaster?

      We hope so! When we launch you will at minimum be able to attach annotations

      to a tweet and consume annotations from a tweet’s payload via the REST API.

      Of course it would be awesome to be able to say to search or the streaming

      API, “give me all tweets with this namespace”, or “give me all tweets with

      this namespace and key”, or etc. We’re working with the Search, Streaming

      and other teams to make all this happen. We can’t promise it’ll be ready by

      launch but we know it’s killer and a must have and are trying to get it

      ready soon.

  • Ideas for Twitter’s new Annotations — from obvious to intriguing | VentureBeat

    tags: twitter, Annotation

    • Media attachments: The basic stuff. Labeling tweets that have links to photos or videos in them. Or sticking the links to the photos and videos in the metadata itself. Or tagging the content of the photos in the tweets.

      Hashtags: Migrate them to the allotted space for metadata.

      Reviews: Add one to five-star ratings to tweets.

      Finance: Make it easier to follow stocks for spikes or sudden fluctuations with a special category of tweets. In fact, make a special type of price alert tweet for all sorts of goods and services like plane flights and oil.

      Coupons: Make a special category of coupon tweets so you know when hamburgers are half off in the neighborhood. Location data would make this especially powerful.

      Music: Mark all tweets that refer to songs. Create Twitter song charts that span different services like Blip.fm and Hype Machine. Generate playlists from Twitter. Granted, these ideas are already out there. But people might be hesitant to tweet their favorite songs for fear of spamming their followers. Tagging the tweets would allow people to opt-in to ‘music-related’ content from friends.

      Location: Yes, there is already location metadata. But there are different ways of thinking about places outside of lat-long coordinates or place names from local listings. What about all tweets about parks? Or tweets about schools? Traffic tweets? Finally tagging all the tweets that are check-ins?

      News: A news story’s dateline (when a location is written in all caps at the beginning of story) has been a key piece of metadata paired along with copy for more than a century in newspapers. Now it can be put into the metadata of a tweeted headline. This solves a big problem: media organizations often tweet the headlines of stories about topics like French politics or airplanes being grounded in Europe because of the Icelandic volcano eruption. But these tweets may not actually contain the words ‘FRANCE’ or ‘ICELAND’ or ‘EUROPE,’ so they won’t get picked up by a cursory search. One could also tag tweets that are about the same ongoing news story like ‘michael-jackson’ in the case of the pop singer’s death.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/24/2010

April 24, 2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/23/2010

April 23, 2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/22/2010

April 22, 2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/21/2010

April 21, 2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/20/2010

April 20, 2010

  • iA » Designing for iPad: Reality Check

    tags: ipad, design

  • The State and Future of Twitter 2010: Part One

    tags: Chirp

  • Tim O’Reilly Explains the Internet of Things

    tags: Internet of Things

  • • Page Flips Are Better Than Infinite Scroll – Design Dare

    tags: iPad, design

    • The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It’s like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can’t we just scroll?
    • I have to say I’ve come to dislike page flipping on the phone. I’m not certain why, but at least part of it might be the small punt of content per page. Another part might be the horse-head-on-front-of-a-car curling page animation, when a simple slide would be less intrusive.
    • The Page Flip Must Be Extremely Fast
      If you’re going to use an animation, the page flip most be almost instantaneous.  If you’re going to have to flip thousands of times, a too-slow animation is going to feel like a little papercut every time.

      But this demo shows that the animation completes extremely quickly.
    • The Page Flip Must Be Easy
      Forcing a user to drag a finger to initiate a flip every time is unacceptable. I experienced this with early versions of the Kindle iPhone app and it was maddening.  A page flip must be triggered even in the case of a single tap on the side of the screen. Again, Apple got this right.
    • Easy: page layout and never having to wonder where to continue reading. Each page can be designed as self-contained units, with precise placement of copy, columns, spacing, and media such as images and video.  The integrity of the page layout is kept intact, and when your eye reads to the bottom right of a page, you press a button and always know to look at the top left to continue reading.

      The scrolling fans argue that you should be able to know where you are.  You should never blink, or accidentally flick the screen causing your place to be sent some number of pages back. You should precisely drag the text to the exact place where you want to keep reading, carefully, each time.
    • • Something that most scrolly apps are terrible at: Getting from one part of a long document to another. With pagey apps, at least you can jump to a page number, although that (like the curling page animation) smacks of an outdated metaphor. Maybe both models could be well-served by something more like Cover Flow’s behavior.
    • As for location, I find scrolling much more indicative of location than page flip. I scroll as I read, so that the entire screen is always filled with unread content. When I come back to a scrollable screen, I know exactly where to start reading again. With pages, I have to remember where on the page I left off, which means rereading up to a full page.
    • I think a really good implementation of page flipping is the Stanza app from Lexcycle (now part of Amazon) on the iPhone. The default turn effect is redundant, but the slide effect is pretty well done–I get a sense of where I’m going (left or right), all content has a fixed location in the book, and it’s easy to go back or go forward, with a slider to help when advancing multiple pages. Ultimately, it feels natural and requires less work.
    • Another benefit of page flips is the the graphic design constraints it imposes.

      Having an endless page in every direction makes it difficult to design a self-contained layout. You have to keep part of the design in your head as you peer through a pinhole into a small fragment of the content.

      But printed magazines can use edges and the dimensions of the page to great effect.

      The iPad is a great opportunity to design around a device with a fixed size display. Everyone who uses it will be viewing the same content. No font worries or screen size variations such as are common on the desktop.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/19/2010

April 19, 2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/18/2010

April 18, 2010

  • Cultivated Play: Farmville | MediaCommons

    tags: no_tag

    • Zinn devoted his life to educating Americans in their country’s history, that they might better understand their place in its present. Such understanding is today at a premium. Ours is a time of confusion, of unprecedented changes that outpace our perceptions. As Zinn might have said, the wheel

    • At such times, and at such speeds, the task of educating ourselves becomes all the more urgent. We are citizens of a democracy, and democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master. This is why Aristotle tells us that, in an ideal state, citizens would possess ample leisure time: the education of a citizen depends upon contemplation, deliberation, and training. Citizenship requires cultivation and, as any farmer would tell us, cultivation takes time.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

My daily readings 04/16/2010

April 16, 2010

  • Droplr • Hello

    tags: mac, sharing, file

  • You’ve Heard Of Foursquare. How About This Start-Up? – Digits – WSJ

    tags: LBS, foursquare

  • Hacker News | Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet “Ginger”

    tags: design, segway

  • Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet “Ginger” – HBS Working Knowledge

    tags: design, segway

  • The Myth Of Creativity

    tags: creativity

  • Hacker News | Organic Startup Ideas

    tags: startup, ideas

    • The problem with these kinds of organic ideas: startup geeks and developers are all similar. There are so many developer tools, social tools, project management systems, freelance and small business accounting systems, and all the other things that geeks need.

      The really great business opportunities are in the areas the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid drinkers don’t even look twice. Many of them are not even fundable by VCs because they aren’t sexy. YC funds some cool ideas, but most of them are immediately useful to the 20 year olds who come up with them, which means they are immediately taking on markets being built out by the rest of the startup community.

      Ask a 60 year old manager of a sales force in a backward industry how his business works and you’ll find real “organic” startup ideas. You might even find an idea that adds value to the universe, and might therefor yield revenue and profit.

    • I think I’ll have to disagree.

      Organic Startups have one huge advantage: They’re significantly easier to build.

      Organic Startups have one huge disadvantage: They’re significantly easier to build.

      The space for people-like-me startups is severely crowded due to an over-abundance of people scratching their own itch. On the other hand, markets that are the diametric opposite of silicon-valley-tech are ripe for the picking by any halfway competent team. Look at Club Penguin, acquired for $700M, all because they focused an “unsexy” niche.

      The second type of startup is harder to build but it’s not that much harder to build. More importantly, it’s variably harder to build.

      Some people are going to be naturals at it and not see what the big fuss is all about. Others will never have the necessary social intelligence. But the vast, vast majority of people will suck at it to begin with but then get better the more they try.

      I’ve always been a big proponent of taking the road less taken. While every other uber-hacker is learning erlang & haskell, why not learn how to become better at designing for people who are not yourself?

    • The space for people-like-me startups is severely crowded due to an over-abundance of people scratching their own itch.

      Empirically that doesn’t seem to be true. E.g. there were not a lot of other startups doing Facebook at the same time as Mark. A couple, but not a lot.

      Probably the reason is the point I mentioned in the essay: most people ignore their itches because they don’t seem good enough sources of ideas.

      Ironically, if people start doing what I suggest, it could cause what you’re claiming to become true. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

  • Organic Startup Ideas

    tags: startup, ideas

    • The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the
      question: what do you wish someone would make for you?

      There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically
      out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are
      going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple
      was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a
      computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design
      one, so he did. And since lots of other people wanted the same
      thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company
      rolling. They still rely on this principle today, incidentally.
      The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants.
      [1]

      Our own startup, Viaweb, was of the second type. We made software
      for building online stores. We didn’t need this software ourselves.
      We weren’t direct marketers. We didn’t even know when we started
      that our users were called “direct marketers.” But we were
      comparatively old when we started the company (I was 30 and Robert
      Morris was 29), so we’d seen enough to know users would need this
      type of software.

    • When he was writing that first Basic interpreter
      for the Altair, Bill Gates was writing something he would use, as
      were Larry and Sergey when they wrote the first versions of Google.
    • Organic ideas are generally preferable to the made up kind, but
      particularly so when the founders are young. It takes experience
      to predict what other people will want. The worst ideas we see at
      Y Combinator are from young founders making things they think other
      people will want.
    • What’s missing or broken in your daily life? Sometimes if you just
      ask that question you’ll get immediate answers. It must have seemed
      obviously broken to Bill Gates that you could only program the
      Altair in machine language.
    • You may need to stand outside yourself a bit to see brokenness,
      because you tend to get used to it and take it for granted. You
      can be sure it’s there, though. There are always great ideas sitting
      right under our noses. In 2004 it was ridiculous that Harvard
      undergrads were still using a Facebook printed on paper. Surely
      that sort of thing should have been online.
    • We know now that Facebook was
      very successful, but put yourself back in 2004. Putting undergraduates’
      profiles online wouldn’t have seemed like much of a startup idea.
      And in fact, it wasn’t initially a startup idea. When Mark spoke
      at a YC dinner this winter he said he wasn’t trying to start a
      company when he wrote the first version of Facebook. It was just
      a project. So was the Apple I when Woz first started working on
      it. He didn’t think he was starting a company. If these guys had
      thought they were starting companies, they might have been tempted
      to do something more “serious,” and that would have been a mistake.
    • Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems
      like the problem is important enough to build a company on. If you
      keep pursuing such threads it would be hard not to end up making
      something of value to a lot of people, and when you do, surprise,
      you’ve got a company
    • Don’t be discouraged if what you produce initially is something
      other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that’s a good sign.
      That’s probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first
      microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and
      the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with
      something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls
      dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.
    • [1]
      This suggests a way to predict areas where Apple will be weak:
      things Steve Jobs doesn’t use. E.g. I doubt he is much into gaming.

      [2]
      In retrospect, we should have become direct marketers. If
      I were doing Viaweb again, I’d open our own online store. If we
      had, we’d have understood users a lot better. I’d encourage anyone
      starting a startup to become one its users, however unnatural it
      seems.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.