March 2010
52 posts
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“‘We discovered a nifty thing very early on,’ Singhal says....”
– From Wired’s How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web
The more that computers “think” about information in the ways and manners that humans do, the more powerful a tool they can be.
February 2010
14 posts
Notes on customer acquisition and viral marketing →
from Andrew Chen’s presentation to the First Round Capital CEO Summit.
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The difficulty in removing software artifacts
As software advances, programmers become more aware (and less apt to include) artifacts of past programs. My favorite example of this evolution is the “save” button. There’s no intrinsic need for it anymore—developers have been building software for years that saves every keystroke—but there’s no denying that I’ve developed a behavioral reliance on the...
Photoshop turned 20 today →
I’ve probably spent too much time with this program.
“If you design something without any regard for or understanding of the end...”
– Form over Function: A review of the Cube Jigger (via cubicle17)
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Long-term thoughts about Twitter
Whenever a website goes down or something universal happens that I want to investigate, I go to the Twitter home page. But 99% of my time is spent in TweetDeck, paying attention only to the handful of people I actively follow. It’s listening vs. engaging, I guess, and Twitter is vertically integrated on one, and pipes only for the other.
Opening the API really fractured the product in the...
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bijan:
Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands - Phoenix
...
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Why not a 'secure' tag?
It occurs to me that I can store a lot of non-public things in gmail because I believe in the security of my password. But anyone with access to my cellphone has access to my email, without a password. So does that mean I believe a password secures my email digitally at least as much as possession secures my phone physically? Given that I’m not a ninja, but also that I use secure...
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Twitter vs. Facebook
Ben says: “Facebook is all about sharing with friends…Twitter is all about shared interests.” I’d go one step further: facebook is meant to connect you with the people you already know; Twitter is meant to connect you with the people you don’t know, but want to. In that sense, facebook is backward-looking and twitter is forward-looking. One is about where...
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The NY Times Innovation Portfolio →
A showcase of everything the NY Times visualization crew is up to. Beautiful, interesting things going on over there.
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Kwedit Launches: The First Completely Unreliable... →
As a business, TBD. As a social experiment, gold.
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Try Boxee. Now.
I want to encourage all (one) of you to check out Boxee. I’ve been a fan of digital home theater software since XBMC (which is what Boxee’s coded off of), and the Boxee Beta is hands-down the best software solution for home theater I’ve found. The organization of online media (and the interweaving of online with local storage) is as good as it gets. I know there are rights...
The Present Value Of Future Cash Flows →
Fred Wilson’s starting a new series called “MBA Mondays,” in which he gives dead-simple explanations of b-school concepts for non-b-schoolers.
The “basic” MBA is a wonderful idea, especially for people who are thinking of diving in deeper. I’ve long thought that the best way to go about learning new concepts is to start high and set the context before diving...