Matt Buchanan
Shoving The Web In Your Pocket To Read Later Is Kind Of A Big Deal
Time-shifting web content — the way we do TV shows — to read or watch later is how we're consuming more and more stuff from the internet. What makes Pocket, formerly ReadItLater, interesting is that it was first "read later" app go beyond reading by adding video. And now, editorial director Mark Armstrong tells me Pocket is the biggest "save for later service" out there — "larger than all competitors combined when it comes to the number of downloads, users and saves per day," which totals nearly a million downloads a day.
Matt Buchanan
Can Marissa Mayer Save Flickr?
The only Yahoo product I care about is Flickr — if Marissa Mayer can save nothing else at Yahoo, I want her to salvage Flickr. Mat Honan, perhaps the definitive chronicler of how Yahoo has slowly strangled it, assesses how tough that task would be. Short answer: very.
Matt Buchanan
The Original iPad Was Gigantic
Revealed in court filings (which were first noticed by NetworkWorld) is a prototype/mock up ("035") for an Apple tablet created between 2002 and 2004 — years before the iPad came out. It still looks like an iPad, but crossed with an old iBook. And man oh man it is HUGE. Here it is in full color for the first time.
Matt Buchanan
A Little YouTube Feature That Could Save Lives
Visual anonymity is no token feature, particularly in some parts of the world, which is what makes this new checkbox from YouTube — Blur All Faces — perhaps the most important checkbox ever launched on the site.
Matt Buchanan
The XXX Video You Can Play In Your Office
Looking at 400 million searches, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam determined that 13 percent of them were for porn. Then they took the top 100 "sexual internet searches" from that study and turned them into a series of QR codes — rendering even the nastiest link SFW — compiling them into the dirtiest video ever that's also SFW. (via)
Matt Buchanan
How To Design A Touch Keyboard That Doesn't Suck
Guess what? It's really hard and requires a lot of data. For instance, while researching and prototyping designs for the Windows 8 touch keyboard, Microsoft discovered that the perfect size for keys is 19mm across. No more, no less.
Matt Buchanan
Potential Data Class Warfare On AT&T
If it's true that AT&T plans to charge separately to use FaceTime over cellular networks, it'd be a lot like when they charged an extra fee simply for the ability to tether your laptop to your phone — it wasn't for extra data, it was simply to use part of your existing 2GB allotment for tethering. It doesn't pass any sort of logical test. If you're paying $25 a month for 2GB of data, why does it matter how you spend it? (FWIW, FaceTime over 3G works just fine on an iPhone running iOS6 I've tested.)
Matt Buchanan
The Beginning Of The Laptop As We Know It
The basic way laptops are constructed seems like the most obvious thing in the entire world: Of course they're clamshells that fold open to reveal a screen and keyboard. But that design didn't exist until 1982, when Grid Systems launched the Grid Compass 1101, which cost $19,000 in today's money. An excellent excavation of computer history by Harry McCracken.
Matt Buchanan
What If Every Ad Looked Like An Apple Ad?
There's a formula for a certain kind of Apple product ad, art director Bryan Evans noticed: product + product name + optional hands. What if other companies advertised their products the exact same way? Well, this.
Matt Buchanan
Apple's Free Love Phase Is Over
Apple software used to be easier to spread amongst your friends than, um, love. Not anymore.
Matt Buchanan
In Which Dish Cuts Off Its Nose To Spite Its Face
Part of the reason Dish is holding out on getting AMC back in its channel lineup, it says, is that the narrower window between broadcast and digital availability makes shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men less valuable to its customers. So what does AMC do in response? Send more customers to digital outlets. A lesson in how not to preserve the current model of television.
Matt Buchanan
Android Is Less And Less And Like Voltron
Android, overall, has 51 percent of the US smartphone market, compared to 34 percent for the iPhone. But if you look at the split by manufacturers, as others have pointed out, Apple has nearly double the share of its nearest competitor, Samsung. Which might seem like picking nits, but as Chris Ziegler wrote here, "in the long term, we'll be talking about the Google experience, the Samsung experience, and the HTC experience." Not so much Android as a whole. The best-selling Android tablet? The Kindle Fire. Yeah.
Matt Buchanan
Facebook Transparency For You And Me, Yessirree
Facebook's been slowly creeping toward a new kind of transparency: Showing people whether you've read their messages, revealing to groups if you've read posts, and now, showing what comments you've edited. Social networking is better if the people you're networking with are looking back at you, right?
Matt Buchanan
A Tiny History Of The @reply
A funny thing about Twitter: A lot of the features we use everyday, like hashtags and RTs and @replies were not invented by Twitter, but by Twitter users. The first ever @reply? Sent to Buzz Andersen on Nov. 2, 2006. Three weeks later, the convention exploded.
Matt Buchanan
I See You
There's an odd trend happening in social networking: Showing people whether or not you've seen what they've posted, breaking the tacit agreement that nobody ever knew what you looked at Facebook. Now it's like they're looking back at you. This is how Path works; it's how messaging services like iMessage and Facebook Messenger work; and now it's how Facebook Groups works. You have to wonder where else Facebook will be rendering your gaze visible.
Matt Buchanan
Why Broadcast Streaming Service Aereo Is Still Alive
This is the decision that is allowing Aereo — an internet service that captures broadcast TV (using antennas!) and streams it to subscribers — to continue to exist for the time being. Unofficial official FWD legal correspondent Michael Phillips says that the judge leans on the fact that according to Second Circuit case from 2008, Aereo isn't the one "transmitting" anything.
Matt Buchanan
Breaking Phones To Fix Patent Problems
Apple holds a patent for a “universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system,†which it successfully deployed to get an injunction against Samsung's Galaxy Nexus phone. In order to get around said injunction, Samsung is now "updating" phones like the Galaxy S III and crippling their local search features. I'm sure those consumers are thrilled that innovation is being totally protected, though.
Matt Buchanan
Pretend You Are Being Recruited By Apple
This is the video that you'd watch. Apparently, the iPad Smart Cover was really hard to make.
Matt Buchanan
Unburying The First Year Of Twitter
Here's an issue with Twitter: It has a way of erasing history because it makes it very hard to look back very far — the API limits clients from going back more than 3500 tweets, for instance. But cool guy kellan has thrown together a search engine for the first year of Twitter, called oldtweets. A small work, but a critical one in reclaiming the history we've all built together on Twitter.
Matt Buchanan
In Case You Never Want To Miss Somebody's Tweets
The latest Twitter for iPhone and Android brings Cards and other small stuff to the mobile apps, but the killer feature is this: push notifications for individual Twitter accounts. So you can get a notification every time Horse_ebooks tweets anything. You can see how, from there, Twitter eventually introduces other custom ways to deal with other people's Twitter accounts. Like selective muting. And a whole lot more.
Matt Buchanan
