— A prediction by Mark Pilgrim in this Reddit AMA thread.
If Mark is right (and I think he will be right based on the success of iOS to date), this would be a really big deal, and transform the relationship people have with their computers. Ownership would be redefined. Calling the person who uses a computer a “consumer” or “user” would be more true than ever.
I played around with a new app this morning called Groupie on the iPhone. It’s a very nicely done implementation of message boards on a mobile device.
As mobile apps started emerging over the past decade, I thought that many mobile-native opportunities would emerge: stuff like Foursquare and Groupme.
But, what I didn’t see coming is that stuff which works perfectly well on the web alone would make the mobile transition too. Stuff like this Groupie app I just mentioned (nothing about message boards needs to be mobile, yet Groupie did a great job!)… and also Flixster and Kayak… Both of which have better iPhone apps than websites at this point.
Following my miss to its end-state, do you think all web services will move to mobile apps, even the ones that have nothing to do with location or being mobile? I was skeptical this would come true previously, but the more I find myself using my iPhone while sitting in front of a full computer, the more I doubt my initial hypothesis.
My favorite games on the iPhone all have some similarities. My “must-have” list is:
These games have the following similarities, though most of these similarities fail to explain why I love these games:
These games don’t all neatly fit into one genre. Some are puzzles, some are board game translations, others are card battling.
Based on this list, what’s the next game I should be playing but am not today?
If you’re a Carcassonne addict too, play me by inviting email address andrew.parker@gmail.com
This quote via Mr. Cutts Goes To Washington, Testifies Google Has Integrity
Wow, I’m dumbfounded that Google would even have to make this argument. For the record, I consider myself a bleeding heart lefty and see good reason for government intervention in many places. Regulating search engine results pages would be a very dangerous move, and would no doubt quickly decline into censorship. This idea is almost as bad as the Great Chinese Firewall.
How come whenever you browse local files via a web browser, the experience feels like a Netscape Navigator throwback? Try navigating to file:///c:/ in your web browser and see what happens. We must be able to design a better experience than this in 2011.
Dropbox is absolutely pioneering what local file navigation should look and feel like this decade. Perhaps more importantly, they’re challenging the assumption that local files should be “local” at all.
But, until Dropbox offers a cost effective way to store a few TBs of files in the cloud, we need a better local file browser that does awesome filebrowsing and nothing else.
I’d envision better file browsing in a web browser to have the following types of features:
Stuff like Google Docs or Zoho does all this, but they also assume that I want to edit and store everything in the cloud and have no local files. I’m not there yet, and I’m not sure when I’ll get there. Speed is a feature, and nothing beats the speed of local transferring and local editing.
It would be feature creep for the Chromium guys to build this directly into the browser. I think what I’m proposing is best implemented as a browser extension. I really like FireFTP for better FTP navigation in Firefox, and this could be the filebrowsing equivalent.
Anyone working on a utility like this?
I’ve seen the name Minecraft floating around over the past year on in various feeds, so I took the time to learn more. For some of my audience, Minecraft is old news. For others, this might be the first time you’re hearing about it. This post is targeted at the first timers. It’s an emerging phenomenon and now you can said you heard it hear first before it becomes a question (err… answer?) on Jeopardy.
Minecraft is a game that has much in common with the game dynamic behind Legos. You collect resources and then build stuff out of 1x1m cubes that represent different material. You navigate through the world you build in a first person POV. The game itself is simple enough, but the creations that emerge from people’s usage can be amazingly complex.
The game is selling in a pre-release mode (an incomplete alpha product at a discounted price of 14.95 Euros). Despite the pre-release status, the game has already sold 1,000,000 copies (which implies ~$20MM in revenue). Wild!
So, why is this game so popular. First and foremost, it’s fun. But Kotaku released an in-depth take on why this indie game has exploded, and their commentary is well worth a read.
It’s very easy to tell when a consumer service is made native to the medium through which it’s communicated. For example, Gawker.com would look silly on newsprint, just like newspapers like continue to stumble their way through transferring their content online.
In theory it should be possible to separate content from its distribution channel, and, ideally, distribute the same content through as many channels as possible to maximize audience reach. In practice, the core medium in which the content lives looks the best, and every other medium feels dull and diluted by comparison.
Think about reading Foxtrot online instead in the newspaper… doesn’t quite feel right. Likewise, what if newspapers started printing XKCD… it would just look wrong, wouldn’t it?
I just read (via tedr via sarahkunst) about an iPad-only magazine being released, called POST. It feels more like an art project than a magazine (for example, it will only be published four times per year…), and this isn’t the first iPad-only magazine (offerings from Virgin and News Corp are available or imminent). But, if nothing else it will be native to the iPad medium, and for that reason, I’m excited.
Whether you’re starting a website, opening a lemonade stand on the corner, or launching a telegraph dating service, you have to think about the medium in which your working and what are its strengths and weaknesses.
The Blair Witch Project was lauded for turning the traditional weaknesses of low budget film making (shaky cameras, bad lighting, crappy mics) into strengths that enhanced the suspense and horror of the film. It was a film that was native to its medium. The success of Blair Witch reminds me of Instagram and Hipstamatic’s similar success: they knew the lenses on iPhones were crappy, so they found ways to use that weakness to their advantage (cool filters, low resolution file transferring, and intentionally retro looks).
When you see a web service that is native to the medium, it feels authentic and fun. It’s not something you can fake and requires designers and technical visionaries the live, eat, sleep, breathe the internet to execute properly.
Much has been written lately about spam on Google. I’m very late to this criticism party, but I am genuinely baffled by Google’s inability to solve an issue so squarely in their wheelhouse… I can’t help but join in.
In short, spam blogs (splogs) are ripping off successful content from other blogs, Q&A sites, and Wikipedia, and then passing off the result as novel content littered with banner ads, affiliate product feeds, and AdSense. This issue is particularly bad in e-commerce categories, and it’s getting worse everywhere.
As someone that pretty much lives on the Internet, it’s easy to recognize a splog when you see one. Yet, I can see how a more casual internet user could mistake a splog for legitimate content because they employ a number of tactics to fake looking like a real blog. Furthermore, sometimes a splog does successfully answer the question I have via the content it illegally scrapes. I hate rewarding splogs with an additional pageview (or even a glance at a SERP snippit), but sometimes the exact content I need is right there.
Since splogs are easy enough for a (mildly experienced) human to identify, why isn’t there some combination or human compution and machine learning approach to solve this problem? Google should go to MTurk (or use their own efficient distributed labor system… I know they have one…) and create a training set of “Is Splog / Is Not Splog” data about a set of URLs. Then train a ML algorithm on that training set with supervised learning to create a classifier. Run that classifier over all sites in the index periodically. Repeat.
I know I’m not proposing rocket science here; I know barely enough machine learning to be dangerous (and that’s being generous). So why isn’t this problem getting better? I’m certain Google has already thought of an tried exactly what I proposed. Is this problem tougher to solve than my superficial treatment of the issue assumes? (sounds likely…). Or is Google improperly incentivized to solve this problem? (sounds less likely if management is thinking long term…). Or does Google genuinely believe splogs actually add value? (sounds least likely… but still possible). Other reasons?
Social security numbers are broken.
Why is my underfunded public retirement account number also my badly designed national ID number? The only security protection for SSNs is “keep it a secret,” yet average consumers are expected to disclose SSNs in nearly any transaction larger than the cost of a new TV (for financing purposes). Security by obscurity does not work. Ever. (thank you Wikileaks, QED).
I think there is a startup opportunity here around identity. It might be facebook’s opportunity. I once heard an entrepreneur say that your FB userID# is more important to a consumer than their SSN, and I see his point because it is identity verified by your friends. But, it might be a new startup opportunity and I’d love to see innovation here.
Nate Westheimer is building a web service to host office hours. I think it’s great, and I love to see Nate hacking away at code!
I’m hosting office hours at Spark next week in order to give it a spin. The date and time is Jan 12th at 2pm. Sign up for these office hours here.
One caveat: Just because I’m holding these office hours doesn’t mean you can’t contact me some other time. If you want to chat with me and this time doesn’t work, feel free to email me and we’ll find a time to chat. I hope, if nothing else, I’m accessible and respectful of other people’s time.
Asked if he had any idea why this version of “True Grit” (it was first filmed in 1969) had connected so strongly, Joel Coen, who spoke by telephone on Monday, said, “None at all.”
Joining the conversation a few minutes later, Ethan speculated that, after 15 films, the mass audience had simply stopped avoiding them. “We just outwaited everybody,” he said.
While falling down the rabbit hole that is the universe of Tumblr, I’m struck by how frequently two things occur, which work together:
These two dynamics work together to create a very anonymous and serendipitous experience. In many ways it’s even more anonymous and random that 4chan’s /b/. 4chan is generally filled with a lot of the same person, and we know what a 4chan user looks like. So, even though all the people are anonymous, it’s still fairly predictable.
By contrast, if you go 3 degrees out from your typical Tumblr friends and really start exploring the network randomly, it all feels very foreign. It’s like looking at the internet through a series of kaleidoscopes.
The utility I get from this type of random browsing is discovery and inspiration. Discovery is very different from search and requires far more serendipity than search allows. And I find inspiration very difficult to manufacture intentionally; it’s similarly tied to serendipity.
I’ve been using OpenDNS for years, by hardcoding my DNS servers in my home router’s configuration. I bought a new router last week (I got a Buffalo Nfiniti powered by DD-WRT at the recommendation of Jeff Atwood). and setup everything in a couple minutes, except I forgot to manually set my DNS servers again to OpenDNS.
I didn’t notice the difference at first, but when I navigated to a page with a URL error, I saw that Comcast is hijacking DNS errors and serving search results against them, exactly like OpenDNS.
The sponsored links on the Comcast search page are powered by Yahoo, which presumably means the search is also powered by Yahoo. Yahoo also powers OpenDNS searches. And, the search button on the Comcast page, has the distinct yellow gradient that OpenDNS uses.
Is Comcast whitelabeling OpenDNS now? If so, that would be an amazing business development deal for OpenDNS. I’ve long thought OpenDNS is one of the most interesting Internet companies in the market today, but I thought it would be too difficult to gain massive adoption if usage always required hardcoding DNS servers. If OpenDNS is now powering Comcast (or at least powering all the search pages Comcast serves on failed DNS requests), then that would negate my only issue with them. Is OpenDNS doing this type of deal with other ISPs? Very smart move…
