I just came across this mini-rant by Fred Wilson in my feed reader and couldn’t agree more. His key point: “Aggregation is the central element of distributing content on the web. It’s not going to get shut down by calling these services names, suing them, or even worse taking your content out of them. The continue…
Just discovered this deck (thanks for the tip iseff) – great current take on personalized intermittent reinforcement in social media. If you’re designing a social site and want to create user addiction, this is a great refresh on the levers to pull.
I’m trying to get smarter about how new iPhone apps are discovered by users, and what strategies developers are using to promote their apps on and off the App Store. If you’re a developer with at least one app in the App Store, please take a minute to complete this survey. As soon as I continue…
I just put down Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World and couldn’t leave the house without knocking out a quick endorsement. If you’re even the least bit interested in the changing role of America in the world it’s a must-read. Zakaria’s analysis of China and India as societies, economies and political actors is concise, lucid and continue…
Nice piece today from Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm that ties together a number of themes I’ve been following. Her main point is that paired advances in the browser and web-capable mobile devices have opened the to door to a (near) future in which device manufacturers and carriers lose control of the end-user experience, to be continue…
This mention of a possible revival of Google’s MyStuff idea caught my eye. I’ve been interested in the idea of a persistent personal data archive for a while now, and Google’s a natural for it. I was initially optimistic about EMC’s plans for Decho (their combined acquisitions of Mozy + PI Corp), but if so continue…
This past Sunday’s New York Times triggered a flashback for me with a story (in the Styles section, no less) titled: The iPhone Gold Rush. I was around for the first Internet boom and keep seeing parallels between the current mobile web feeding frenzy and what happened back in the late ’90’s. A couple of continue…
If you’ve been following the Askablogr saga, this is the final chapter. I’ve had a ton of fun with the project and it was a useful conversation-started in the early days of Founders Co-op, but I’ve gotten too busy to give it much love and don’t think about it except once a month when I continue…
Since switching to the G1 I’ve become even more dependent on Google Contacts as my default contact manager (because it now powers my phone contacts automagically). I’ve never loved the product – it’s always been slow, hard to navigate and even harder to edit – and I wasn’t excited about increasing my reliance on it. continue…
I just finished Ian Ayres Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. It’s very pop / light, along the lines of Freakonomics, but still worth a read for the reminder that (unlike pretty much everyone I interact with in the Web software world) surprisingly few folks are aware of the extent continue…