March 2011
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Denmark's New Digital Stamps →
Launching this Friday, users of the new service will text the word “PORTO” to 1900, receiving a confirmation text in reply along with a string of numbers and letters. These numbers and letters can then be written on the envelope as way of payment, rather than using a stamp, according to a report on Deutsche Welle. The service is currently only available for domestic mail inside Denmark and for...
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“Surely this march of progress is all to the good. Who would want to go back to...”
– - Witold Rybczynski, Have computers made architects less disciplined?
This is an endless refrain, going back to Diderot and the ancient Greeks, that our tools will make us less though our reliance on them. Socrates blamed written language for the decline in memory and deep thought, although he is...
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The 6 Verbs For The Next 20 Years Of The Connected... →
Screening — Kelly notes that whereas there used to be just the television screen and then the computer screen, now screens are everywhere. And increasingly, everything will be a screen — all surface. There will be a “one screen for all,” Kelly says.
Interacting — Right now, interaction is limited mainly to our fingertips, Kelly says. But the iPad is changing that — it’s about using more of...
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BRYCE DOT VC: AOL: Hand Over Crunchbase and Nobody... →
brycedotvc:
Dear AOL,
Congrats on your recent acquisition of Techcrunch- there’s no better team reporting on tech these days. They’ve really come into their own over the last couple of years and are producing high quality articles and videos at scale and driving conversations forward that are important to all of us. I think you’re going to make a fortune selling ads against their content....
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Evan Williams | evhead: An Obvious Next Step →
Ev Williams stepping down from his full-time role at Twitter, where he was ramrodding product after stepping down from CEO role. What’s on the horizon?
now that Twitter is in capable hands that aren’t mine, it’s time to pick up a whiteboard marker and think fresh. There are other problems/opportunities in the world that need attention, and there are other individuals I’d love to get...
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Witness Tags? No, A General Microsyntax For...
Jeff Jarvis wants a microsyntax to easily learn that a Twitter message was posted by a witness at a major event, such as the earthjquake in Japan:
Jeff Jarvis, Tweeters: I want a witness tag
A proposal:
It would be terribly useful if there were a separate convention for tweets from witnesses to major events so their reports can be separated from the discussion that follows. How...
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“You know it’s not good when one of the most prestigious pediatric journals,...”
– Pediatrics Gets it Wrong about ‘Facebook Depression’ | World of Psychology (via gracemcdunnough)
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Why I Use Scenarios In Design
Narrative imagining — story — is the fundamental instrument of thought.
- Mark Turner
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More Like A City Than An Army
In recent appearances, I have used a certain example to make a case about the openness in businesses of the future, contrasting today’s organizations with cities. ‘You don’t have to ask if you want to move to NYC’ I say. ‘You just show up, and start doing your thing, interacting with people, renting a storefront, buying things.’
‘Imagine a business...
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“Former Social networking darling, Myspace, has seen its monthly unique visitor...”
– Desire Athow, 10 Million Users Leave Myspace Within A Month
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The Five Things Bloggers Rub Into The Face Of...
Jay Rosen, The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists: My Talk at South By Southwest
Journalists today are under stress. The stress has five sources. Bloggers put all five right into the face of professional journalism.
One: A collapsing economic model, as print and broadcast dollars are exchanged for digital dimes.
Two: New competition (the loss of monopoly) as a disruptive...
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“I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all...”
– Lincoln Steffens, cited by Jay Rosen in The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists: My Talk at South By Southwest
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“Grumbling about bloggers these days is tantamount to yelling at the neighborhood...”
– Julie DiCaro, Dear John Kass, Where’s The Love?
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“Maybe a digital news product isn’t a collection of stories, but a system for...”
– - Jonathan Stray, The editorial search engine
Says a great deal about the future hybridization of algorithms-meet-curation.
“My fear is that too many entrepreneurs will work on ideas that really...”
– Charlie O’Donnell, You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger
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Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo! Research →
Who Says What to Whom on Twitter
Authors:
Wu, S.; Hofman, J.M.; Mason, W.A.; Watts, D.J.
Source:
(2011)
Abstract:
We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter—-known as Twitter...
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“If you are building a marketplace or a social platform, make sure to build...”
– Fred Wilson, Curation
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Five ways to fix SXSW Interactive (not that it's... →
Recommendations to improve SxSW seem to boil down to limiting the number of attendees, and various techniques to consolidate the conference in a small number of venues.
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Firefly Shutting Down Today
I got an email from Gary Culliss, one of the founders of Firefly, the Twitter appliance that let you check-in at various places and post that info in your Twitter stream.
Apparently attention is being pulled away by the enormous noise in that space, like Foursquare and Facebook, new entrants like Ditto, and photosharing geolocational tools like Instagram.
Gary says he will be pursuing other...
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Free Access To 'Streams In Business Report' This...
To celebrate the launch of Podio tonight (at the Podio Store, 224 6th in San Francisco) I am going to provide free access to my report, Streams In Business, this week only. The report provides in-depth scenario-based evaluations of the following products: Podio, Bantam Live, Cohuman, Flowr, IBM Connections, Mangoapps, Socialcast, and Yammer.
Here’s one comment about Podio, from the...
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“For certain skills, there’s infinite desire.”
– David Sze, cited by Pui-Wing Tam, WSJ.com
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Looking Ahead Into The Past
I am pulling my thoughts together for tonight’s panel at The Podio Store, on the topic of Tools For Work. I will be on the panel with Eugene Kim, David Skult, and Jon Froda, and we’ll be talking about works tools of the past.
We can learn a lot about email and its impacts on work. Most today don’t recall the time prior to widespread email adoption in business, or the transitions...
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“Money and the way it works is going to be a constant, not a variable.”
– Neal Stephenson
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Podio, The pioneers of work tools, San Francisco →
I will be speaking on Wed evening with an illustrious group of social tools researchers and entrepreneurs, including Eugene Kim (Principal, Blue Ox Associates), David Scult (GM, Office 365, Microsoft), Jon Froda (Co-founder, Podio), and moderated by Thomas Madsen-Mygdal (Chairman, Podio). The session is called Tools For Work, and we’ll be looking back at technologies that revolutionized...
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Wristwatches? Dead.
You can’t make wristwatches relevant again, guys. But keep on trying, please, it’s amusing.
Randall Stross, Wristwatches, Reimagined - Will Young Shoppers Care?
Last month at an H.P. event in Shanghai, Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer of the company’s personal systems group, displayed the MetaWatch, a prototype developed by Fossil that he described as the first...
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Not Even Kevin Rose Really Uses Digg Anymore -... →
Kevin Rose is 26x more active on Twitter than on Digg. Not a good sign.
By the way, the decline of Digg is a good case study about how people can quickly move away from a social tool is it begins to be played out. In the case of Digg, it seemed to miss the shift from macro to micro posting. Basically, Twitter and Facebook became the place to share links, and talk about what’s hot. Digg...
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How Bad Can Customer Support Be?
My relationship with Verizon goes back a decade or more, since I installed Verizon’s FIOS in my house in Reston VA. FIOS is a good service and I really had next to no problems with it until 2010, when everything got interesting.
To make a long story short: Verizon wants us to pay a $200 ‘early termination fee’ to close my dead father’s landline account.
My mother and...
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Dabble DB Joins The Deadpool
Smallthought was acquired by Twitter in June 2010, and is pulling the plug on Dabble DB.
(via email)
March 17, 2011 Smallthought Systems Inc. 300-422 Richards Street Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z4 Canada Dear Customer: You are receiving this letter because you have been a user of Dabble DB. We are writing to notify you that we will be shutting down the Dabble DB service on May 18, 2011....
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Why I was Wrong About SxSW
I wrote a post a few weeks ago — it seems so long ago — entitled Why I Am Not Going To SxSW. I was all wrong. Let me explain.
SxSW ia a petri dish for the social, mobile future.
My piece was primarily oriented to the event — the SxSW Interactive conference — and my past experiences as a participant. You know, ‘the rooms are too crowded’, ‘uneven...
“[According to Pew Research]: 46% of (US adults) now say they get their news...”
– Milestone: The Web (Finally) Surpasses Newspapers As Source for Americans’ News (via interestingsnippets)
“It’s become cliché, at this point, to say mobile is big. And I loved the CEO of...”
– Harmonic Aftershock: 5 Takeaways from #SXSW. Via colleague @rozzy. (via 2105)
“It’s an age-old problem, exacerbated by technology. To be always filled with...”
– Caterina Fake (via bijan)
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“Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning....”
– - Ubiquitous Computing
I love the term ‘calm computing’. Who came up with that?
But we will wind up using ‘mobile’ as the term of art for this, I bet, even though sometimes that alludes to us, the users, being mobile and interacting with ‘calm’ objects, like...
“The thousands of startups today that are pitching themselves at app competitions...”
–
Stacey Higginbotham, Have Startups Become a Fetish?
bryce says:
I wonder. With Startup weekends, Startup bootcamps, Startup schools, Startup incubators, Startup America, and on and on I wonder if the term “Startup” has officially become meaningless.
There was a time when “Startup” meant...
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Gripeline by Nandimobile
A few weeks ago, I attended Jason Calacanis’ Launch event in San Francisco. It was an impressive debut. I don’t think I have ever attended a launchpad-style event with so many knock-your-eye out companies, ever.
My usual style is not to write up a short post based on a cursory look at some technology. I generally like to use a tool for hours, or days. to get a real deep feel for its...
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“Connectivity has become like oxygen. If you don’t have it, you notice its...”
– Paul Saffo, via NYTimes.com
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“At some point, every company gets taken over by conniving business assholes,...”
– Joe Hewitt
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Twitter Throws A Bomb In The Ecosystem: No New...
Twitter has dropped a bomb in the middle of its ecosystem, basically telling the developer community to not build any other Twitter clients:
Ryan Sarver, consistency and ecosystem opportunities
*The Opportunity for Developers*
Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should...
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Keller, Huffington, And The Remassification Of...
I read two argumentative posts this morning, one by Bill Keller, the NY Times Executive Editor and the second by Arianna Huffington. Keller started the hair-pulling by writing a column, in which — after a long build-up about his throw-weight as a Lion of Media — he complains in an aggrieved tone that Huffington lifted some of his observations about the future of media:
Bill Keller, All The...
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“It seems like technology from the near future.”
– John Gruber, The iPad 2
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The connected company - Dave Gray →
A great post about the necessity for management to give up on industrial, top-down metaphorical thinking about business, and to give in to biological and networked conceptualizing.
(pointer by @petervan)
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Where's The 'Daily Google'?
In a review of the new Zite iPad social journal — competitor to Flipboard — Mathew Ingram asks a killer question:
Matt Ingram, The Race to Build the “Daily Me” Continues
There’s one nagging question that keeps jumping out at me as I look at all of these apps and services, however, and that is: Where is Google? The combination of smart aggregation and algorithm-driven ...
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Why Doesn't Twitter Steal Job's App Store Model?
Om Malik recounts recent flaps surrounding the Twitter ecosystem, and drives home a key point: Twitter still doesn’t have much of a business model. He recounts a number of companies that prospered based on business model innovation — including Apple’s App Store — but doesn’t thread the needle:
Om Malik, What Is Twitter’s Problem? No, It’s Not the Product
In the...
