June 2012
41 posts
The Evolution of the Web →
evolutionoftheweb.com
Really beautiful design
“‘the mythology continues to be propagated by an uncritical technology media who tell us continually that the next paradigm shattering technology is just around the corner. Madrigal’s criticism seems self-interested – without constant high-profile success stories, people will stop listening to the technology press hype machine.’”
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‘is it reasonable to expect a constant and frequent supply of disruptive innovation, and attribute the absence to a failure of entrepreneur imagination?’
R/GA Tech Blog » Creative Destruction is Harder Than it Looks
Cowboys Must be De-ranged →
lettersofnote.com
if lawyers become disbarred, and priests unfrocked, how might people in other paths of life be read out of their profession or calling?
It occurred to me then that electricians get delighted, and musicians possibly denoted. If these assumptions are correct, surely it follows that cowboys must be deranged, that models are deposed, and judges are obviously…
“@Trackgirl was set up to infiltrate a group of runners. She would scour Twitter for messages with running-themed keywords and post them as if they were her own. Three times a day, she’d pick five people to follow, and she’d always follow back anybody who followed her. Because she seemed connected to the right people, @Trackgirl started to gain followers, who thought her cut-and-paste messages about the agony and the ecstasy of long-distance running were coming from a real person. One day, however, the Twitter bot posted a message saying that she’d hurt her ankle. Soon after, her followers wanted to know if @trackgirl was on the mend. “People were sympathizing with a Python script,” says Marra, a Google product manager who spoke about his work at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston last week.”
—Man Builds Twitter Bot That Humans Actually Like | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com (via s-m-i)
“There is power in lurking. To say you have to be connected, you have to be plugged in, contributing, sharing, I’m not so sure…we can’t devalue the power in lurking and taking. So, maybe instead of encouraging (pushing) others to contribute blogs and tweets and ideas, maybe we begin by having a conversation about the value of lurking. Show there is value in what we have here and in other social networks by encouraging others to get connected and take from the network. That just might lead to the growth of our networks.”
—Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: The Power Of The Lurker (via s-m-i)
“Dear humans: You do not have a duty to be happy. Your parents might say ‘I just want you to be happy’ and a large portion of the media is geared to make you think that happiness is attainable and what should be sought. Happiness might even seem like the only sensible goal in a godless universe. But, I feel the duty of happiness is a burden and should be cast off.”
—Phaçade (via maxistentialist)
Gene Wilder: How I enter and what I wear →
lettersofnote.com
Gotta love this amount of considerate and detailed feedback.
“A man is a good retainer to the extent that he earnestly places importance in his master. This is the highest sort of retainer.”
—— Hagakure: Book of the Samurai
Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others, don't owe us anything.
Articles have been cropping up that lambast Craiglist (1, 2), Netflix (1) , and LinkedIn (1) for policing their APIs and criticize them for stifling innovation.
API access is not a charitable offering to the start-up community for these obviously for-profit companies. The goal of any company who offers an API to their data is to build a eco-system that promotes lock-in and added benefits for their service, not to help other companies profit and take advantage of their hard work.
I agree with some of the criticisms that point out the inconsistency of these companies enforcement of their terms of service. Regardless, we should not be shocked that they will exercise tight control and act quick to stamp out anything that threatens their business.
In the case of the recent controversy surrounding Pealk, a start-up that was using LinkedIn’s API to provide premium features to users at a discount, should we really be shocked or up in arms that LinkedIn shut them down?
Start-ups should stop feeling entitled to other companies’ data in the name of innovation, and either:
- Man up and build a start-up where you collect all the necessary data you need yourself.
- Build services around APIs that help make the API offering company so much money and benefit that they don’t mind if you take a little coin for yourself in the process.
Really, please just stop acting like spoiled brats. Nobody owes you anything.
“If you asked people in 1989 what they needed to make their life better, it was unlikely that they would have said that a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext.”
—http://farmerandfarmer.org/mastery/builder.html (via cdixon)
You know you should defriend someone when...
You get a notification that someone posted on your timeline and your first thought is: “I bet this is spam” and it turns out it is.
