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Anil collects more thoughts on the coming storm of apps vs. open web. "This, for me, is a social issue, a cultural issue, and a political issue, not just a technological issue. Perhaps we need to speak of it that way more often, to make the stakes clear."
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"...it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late." Tim O'Reilly on the coming platform storm. [via anil]
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This is the best photo-editing software I've found for the iPhone. And it's free.
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A nice interview with Josh, including some thoughts on being a MeFi moderator. "...the enthusiasm from other folks on the site to collaborate and make it all work was just stunning and cemented for me somewhat the reality that this was a community and not just a bunch of nerds yelling at each other on a website."
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A serious warning about using Google Groups for public discussion. [via ginatrapani]
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Getting the Google IDs of liking users is interesting, but I didn't know about "Reader's view of a feed", also interesting. [via kottke]
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"To help you understand how Web Caches will treat a Web page, the Cacheability Engine will look at a URL (and optionally any images or objects associated with it), giving both specific cache-related data about it, and a general commentary on how cacheable the object is."
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"The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work." Derek on SEO. In summary, hire a good designer not a self-proclaimed Search Engine Optimizer and design for humans not algorithms. Couldn't agree more.
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The horrors of stop words.
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Search for icons or browse icon sets they've indexed.
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Cell phone nostalgia! I had the Ericsson S710a right before the iPhone, and it's true that the camera was better and Internet tethering just worked. I'm tempted by a Google phone now too just to show my unhappiness with the iPhone App Store. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.
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J.D. gets close to the TV media machine and finds everything a bit too scripted. It's a good reminder of one of the reasons many folks started writing weblogs.
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I honestly hope Merlin turns his blog into a treatise on creativity through Steely Dan anecdotes.
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Anil offers a high-level view of Apple's current developer-relation woes. He blames their culture of secrecy.
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Steven Frank is letting go of his iPhone until the Apple fixes serious problems with the app store.
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This is great. I'd love to see more people aggregating tweets and offering them outside of the Twittersphere.
These are links I added recently to my shared items at Google Reader. Just catching up.
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ahh, dreams. [via joshua]
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Privacy, Security, Lock-In, and Downtime. Gina runs down some problems with outsourcing your data management.
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"The cloud, however, comes with real dangers...If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you." A good summary of some problems yet to be solved with cloud computing.
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"Enclosure is a process whereby a resource held in common is taken into private control....The acts of enclosure of the information age are about social assets, they are subtle and invisible, and they are being implemented, to a large degree, by peer pressure." [via anil]
Remove Google Reader 'Likes'
Google Reader is adding some new social features, and one of them is Likes. You can mark that you like a particular post that flows through Google Reader and see other users who have done the same. The Like notification appears in a prominent position directly under the headline:
There's no way to opt out of the feature and I found it distracting. To disable it, I used Stylish for Firefox. I chose "Write new style", then "for www.google.com", and I added the following lines (after some CSS investigation):
There's no way to opt out of the feature and I found it distracting. To disable it, I used Stylish for Firefox. I chose "Write new style", then "for www.google.com", and I added the following lines (after some CSS investigation):
.entry-likers-n {display:none;}
.like-inactive {display:none;}
That removes both the Likes count and the button for marking something as liked. It's a lot like the MetaFilter favorites feature but it feels odd because there's little to no community interaction at Google Reader. I guess it might be neat to spot someone you happen to know in a liked-list, but what are the chances? (Showing just my contacts who liked something would be great.) Aggregate data might be fun to see, but I don't need the feature active unless I want to start Liking-posts-up to give them more attention on a list of popular posts somewhere. So until Google Reader liked-lists are more than just a list of random users who liked something, I'm going to mute it.-
"This Friday, June 12, TV stations nationwide will cease broadcasting analog signals and switch to digital-only broadcasts...Starting Friday, I can no longer get TV on the radio." Didn't think of this, what a bummer. I've used this trick occasionally too, especially when the power goes out. [via MeFi]
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"...new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace." That's Chris Messina paraphrasing Tim O'Reilly on Web 2.0 in general, applied to Facebook's new vanity URL feature specifically.
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"I tried to alternate the charming children's covers with the creepy modernist covers, but I soon lost the ability to tell one type from the other." Excellent collection of early 20th century graphic design in Japan. Be sure to check out the previous post with book covers too.
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Nice summary of Fuelly with a list of things to do once you sign up. I bet interest increases directly with gas prices.
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Google's take on YSlow--Yahoo's excellent website performance analyzer. Not as polished as YSlow, but looks promising and includes some analysis that YSlow doesn't cover such as CSS efficiency and image compression.
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A little web app for creating a shadow image for custom Google Maps icons.
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Handy little wizard for generating custom Google Maps icons.
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Nice royalty-free icons, including the new free Payments set.
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Handy bit of JavaScript to get the longitude and latitude of the center point on a Google Map. This works great as a bookmarklet.