minima-list // mnl.st

Picplz Shutting Down Permanently

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 15:35:55 +0300

From an e-mail I received yesterday:

On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently and all photos and data will be deleted. Until then, you can log in and download your photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in your photo feed. Thank you for your support of picplz and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

What can I say? Not all Instagram clones are as good as Instagram. It would be nice to see a Picplz-fail inspired article on Instagram clones and their life cycle. I wonder how many similar apps have failed, by now, trying to replicate Instagram’s succes.

Original article and comments, here
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Mike Daisey and the "badge of honor"

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 10:37:54 +0300

Mike Daisey and the "badge of honor":

I found this at Stephen Hacket, who’s saying Mike Daisey blasted Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher on the D10 interview with Tim Cook. Now, I’m not an English native and I really hope “blasted” is some irony, because Daisey should shut the hell up and swallow his lies. Mossberg’s aggressiveness is isn’t aggressive enough for what Daisey has done, but he’s right: “being attacked by an admitted liar is sort of a badge of honor.”

You see, Mike Daisey is a liar. He took a vacation in China and wrote some science fiction, playing with journalists’ credibility. I can get misunderstandings, I can get being lied or not getting the information properly, it happens and mistakes get published. But I don’t get premeditated lies. It’s like first degree murder. For premeditated stories, Daisey’s punishment is to be forever silent. He lost his right to comment on journalism.

Original article and comments, here
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Therefore

Thu, 31 May 2012 19:29:57 +0300

René Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks “Would you like a beer?”. Descartes says “I think not” and promptly vanishes.

Helvetica in Motion

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:19:05 +0300

Cool. Watch it.

Original article and comments, here
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Hammer.js - easy multitouch gestures for sites

Thu, 31 May 2012 10:35:22 +0300

Hammer.js - easy multitouch gestures for sites:

Hammer.js is a small library for handling touch events. You can add tap (touch/click), double tap, hold, drag (touchmove/mousemove), swipe, and transform (pinch) events to any website. Comes as a jQuery plugin as well. Go check the demo. [via]

Original article and comments, here
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Kafka

Wed, 30 May 2012 23:58:03 +0300

Kafka:

I loved this:

Facebook is Kafka with a thumbs-up button.

Brent Simmons is damn right. But then again, some people need to graduate MIT and work in its research labs to understand ~~the importance of social media~~ how Facebook changed people.

Original article and comments, here
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Tim Cook: "I'm not Steve Jobs' replacement"

Wed, 30 May 2012 16:58:08 +0300

Tim Cook: "I'm not Steve Jobs' replacement":

Tim Cook about Steve Jobs:

Steve was a genius and a visionary. And you know, I’ve never viewed my role as to replace him. I think he’s an irreplaceable person. Steve was an original. I don’t think there’s another one of those being made. I’ve never really felt the weight of trying to be Steve. It’s just not who I am. It’s not my goal in life. I am who I am, and I’m focused on that and being a great CEO of Apple.

A great summary of the D10 interview in MacWorld. I thing this quote is one of the most interesting in the whole interview. I know, I’m going to write once again about “haters gonna hate”, but the fact is lots of Apple products users don’t trust Tim Cook. That’s because they really think a new Steve Jobs should have taken Steve Jobs’ place. Well, there’s no other Steve. And Tim Cook does a hell of a job as Apple’s CEO, cherishing Apple and Steve Jobs’ legacy while doing business on his own terms, following Steve’s steps but on his own terms and strategies. Which is absolutely cool.

Basically, Tim Cook says this: “Stop comparing me with Steve, we’re different, damn it!” Again. But, of course, in his own very elegant way of saying it.

Original article and comments, here
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Tim Cook: "We didn't invent the tablet"

Wed, 30 May 2012 09:34:43 +0300

Tim Cook: "We didn't invent the tablet":

We didn’t invent the tablet market. It was there. We invented the modern tablet.

Tim Cook said that at D10. Now, for starters, it takes a lot of courage to say it, especially in a context in which all haters say “Apple didn’t innovate anything, it’s just marketing, they’re copycats.” That’s one. The second, here’s what Cook says about “transformers”; on the long run, it’s about Windows 8:

I love convergence and I think convergence is great in many areas, but I think products are about trade-offs. And you have to make tough decisions, you have to chose. And the fact is the more you look at the tablet as a PC, the more the baggage from the past affects the product. […] You end up not building the best product, in this particular case, when you try to converge this.

And here’s a bit more on how tablets will kill computers. I’m kidding, he’s not saying that, “analysts” say it. Cook says they’re different:

People want tablets to be incredibly thin.But if you look at it as a notebook, you’re not gonna come out of the design of the product and be a kick-ass product, something people say “Wow!, This is what I wanted!” […] Many people will select a tablet over a PC. It will clearly cannibalize the PC, so from that point of view, at a macro point of view, they’re connected. But I think if you force them together, I think the PC is not as good as it could be, and I think the tablet is not as good as it could be.

The HDD is not enough. For Adobe, of course

Tue, 29 May 2012 10:53:49 +0300

That’s the standard Adobe Reader, occupying my Air’s hard drive. It takes 416 MB to read text. Speechless. Well done, Adobe.

Original article and comments, here
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Different TV stations, same content. Sharing the news

Tue, 29 May 2012 10:29:04 +0300

Different TV stations, same content. Sharing the news:

The stations here compete for viewers, but they cooperate in gathering the news — maintaining technically separate ownership, but sharing office space, news video and even the scripts written for their nightly news anchors. That is why viewers see the same segments on car accidents, the same interviews with local politicians, the same high school sports highlights. The same kind of sharing takes place in dozens of other cities, from Burlington, Vt., where the Fox and ABC stations sometimes share anchors, to Honolulu, where the NBC and CBS stations broadcast the same morning show.

It’s what happens in the US with at some local TV stations. Which reminds me of a local business in my country, started in 2007 or 2008, I think. A TV star started a series of shows which her production company sold to local TV stations. With some differences, viewers from different counties were seeing the same thing. But they were receiving good content that local networks wouldn’t otherwise have been able to deliver. I think something similar can be done in the news business in the US. Deliver the same news, but record it with different anchors and sell it to local networks. Might be an idea, right?

Original article and comments, here
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Apple is clearly going oh!-so-down

Tue, 29 May 2012 09:06:29 +0300

Apple is clearly going oh!-so-down:

Cook wants key players in Washington to know they now have an open line to the chief executive in Cupertino. That was the message aides briefed on the meetings said Cook conveyed in sit-downs with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Yeah, Apple is clearly going down. I mean, it’s not like Tim Cook is trying to bring new corporate and, especially, some new government clients, right? And, we all know Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs and he’s going to take the company so down!

Yes, I’m being ironic.

[via]

Original article and comments, here
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All your houses are belong to Facebook

Mon, 28 May 2012 19:07:56 +0300

All your houses are belong to Facebook:

Two robbers have paid a visit to a house in south-eastern Australia, hours after a teenager posted a photo on Facebook of a large sum of cash. The masked men, armed with a knife and a club, struck the home of the 17-year-old girl’s mother in the country town of Bundanoon on Thursday, police say.

Because Facebook is for meeting nice new people.

Original article and comments, here
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Yup, rating agencies underperform. And use blackmail

Mon, 28 May 2012 18:49:39 +0300

Yup, rating agencies underperform. And use blackmail:

Just read an article and remembered about this:

McGraw-Hill Cos., owner of Standard & Poor’s, has “underperformed its potential” and should break into four parts, shareholders Jana Partners LLC and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan proposed. […] The company “has consistently underperformed its potential and traded at a sizable discount,” Jana said in the filing.

Well, what do you know?

Now, what exactly does “underperform” mean? Not enough money, maybe? Oh, so if S&P underperformed, it’s legit to say Moody’s and Fitch underperformed, right? Oh, so rating agencies downgrading countries is, basically, the equivalent of some strange form of blackmailing, right?, and a way to keep the old and attract the new clients, huh? Well, now. Doesn’t that sound a bit like a conspiracy? Well, not really. It’s just business. A dirty business, for what it’s worth.

Original article and comments, here
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A Facebook phone? But, why?

Mon, 28 May 2012 16:06:48 +0300

A Facebook phone? But, why?:

OK, so there are rumors of a Facebook phone coming soon. Like, really? Are you serious? But, why? For instance, the Facebook app is responsable for draining 3 percent of your Android phone for each charging cycle. Compare that to the 13% used by the touchscreen and the 4% used by the system to keep the phone logged in to the network. Imagine a Facebook phone. If the Facebook Android app uses almost as much power as the cell idle system… Really? I mean, really?

Anyway, what I’d like to know is this: is Facebook going to be a manufacturer using its own OS or is it going to be just another HTC-like manufacturer, using Android as the core OS for its phone? Because, just look around, Nokia dies, RIM crashes and burns, why another OS? Remember the rule of the three?

Original article and comments, here
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Soundcloud Downloader. I'm a pirate, baby!

Sun, 27 May 2012 14:22:16 +0300

Soundcloud Downloader. I'm a pirate, baby!:

When I saw ‘Drive,’ I fell for the soundtrack. ‘College’, I mean. I’m not a fan of d’n’b and its bastard dubstep, but I like electronic music. Old-school electro, whose parents descend from psychedelic and synthesizers. The ‘Drive’ sountrack is just that, and the French dude David Grellier is doing a hell of a job with his project College. What happens when you like the music but you can’t buy it? Well, you become a pirate. And if you find the music on SoundCloud.com… It’s how I found SoundCloud Downloader. I don’t have to explain what it does, do I? Anyway, If you liked College, here’s the link to the tunes. Enjoy.

Original article and comments, here
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From retrofuturism to the future of television

Sun, 27 May 2012 13:08:22 +0300

About a week ago, I attended RoNewMedia, a regional conference on new media and technology. In the third and last day of the event, the main topic was media and content. And some of the speakers were talking about the everlasting subjects of streaming, video on demand and payments. Now, it happens that a local Apple premium reseller gave me an Apple TV 1080p to play with for a couple of weeks. And it happens that The Verge published this article about the history of television. Marvelous.

Now, for me, the future of the media looks like this: print newspapers will probably die, but magazines will survive; radio will still be there, because we need stuff to listen in our cars; TV will probably be the same, but more and more people will use services like Hulu and Netflix. You see, traditional television is organized entertainment. Netflix and Hulu are an alternative if you have the patience and the inspiration to search for something to watch. But they’re chaotic. TV channels are curating programs and spare you the lack of inspiration. For people saying they don’t need a TV, they should wait until they get a family.

Old v. new models

TV was, for decades, in the center of the house and in the middle of the family. It will still be there. That’s because it’s an alternative to computers and it still brings everyone in the same place. TV is a cult. And the only way Apple TV or Google TV, or whatever, could take its place is to rethink the whole cable system, because it basically gets to the point where you just can’t stand having a bunch of remotes and a bunch of useless channels.

Let’s say Apple will launch the iTV. It will probably have apps like Netflix and Hulu, but the main feature should be a “TV app” which should incorporate a “chose-the-TV-channels-you’d-like-to-watch-and-pay-for” feature. My main problem, at home, is that I have a TV and two set-boxes. That’s three remotes. I use the TV remote for the volume and selecting the input, the set-box remote for zapping and the Apple remote for the Apple TV. I could just as well use my iPhone to control everything.

When is too much?

But I have another problem: way too many channels. I pay $21 per month for my triple-pay subscription: a 100 Mbps internet connection, some lousy phone line I never use (which is actually less than $2 per month) and for the set-box (which I received for the digital TV subscription I had to buy only because I couldn’t watch HBO on analog cable). The last one gives me access to about 100 channels.

You know how many channels I actually watch? Here’s the list: two national TV channels, AXN and HBO. Once in a while, when I can’t find decent info online, I switch to news channels. So, I don’t really need more than 20 channels. But I do get one hundred. Why pay 100 channels to only watch no more than 20? Can I pay a few cents for each of the channels I want to watch? If so, that’s what I want. Do I want more? I’ll pay for each.

How I see the future of media content distribution

If iTV is coming, it should let me choose which channels I want to pay for, it should have Netflix and Hulu and some other entertainment apps. That’s all I need. Well, maybe a game center to replace hardware such as the XBox and the PlayStation for when I’ll have kids. That’s it. I know, this means killing the cable networks. Or, maybe, revamping them, transforming them into streaming services. Hell knows. But cable as we know it should die. It’s becoming obsolete.

Original article and comments, here
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Silicon Valley, destroying the world?

Sun, 27 May 2012 11:21:12 +0300

Silicon Valley, destroying the world?:

Nope, but it’s fun to use PandoDaily-like titles when quoting PandoDaily. Anyway, here’s something about WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg:

Mullenweg said he’s concerned that Silicon Valley is creating products that are so engaging that they’re also incredibly distracting, to the detriment of creativity and productivity. He fretted that some of these socially disruptive technologies might be “morally destitute.”

Too much tech is indeed really distracting. I used to be a creative person. Then I got to work online, I got an iPhone and now, a few years later, I’m lacking focus. Matt is quite right, those products are distracting, but then again, the internet is incredibly distracting. That’s because of the shift I wrote about a few days ago. We’re moving from the traditional “tech innovation” to “social innovation.” I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it sure changes the world one way or the other.

Remember the days when the tech you used was pure sci-fi for your folks and they were getting really tired shortly after using it? That’s what’s going to happen to us too while kids will be as savvy as we were. The main difference is that the “social innovation” is getting us, those in our 30s, very tired much faster than it drove tired our parents. Speed is nice, but sometimes it’s just a pain in the, well, brain.

Original article and comments, here

Sources familiar with the matter

Sun, 27 May 2012 10:35:59 +0300

Sources familiar with the matter:

Stop quoting “Sources familiar with the matter”, Asian websites lazily thrown into Google translate, Apple Supplier Press Releases or the way Tim Cook holds his coffee cup in the morning; it’s lazy shitty reporting and only serves to make you look like an asshole when you’re inevitably proven wrong or called out on your bullshit.

I love this piece. Read it all. It’s about how Apple rumors are made (up).

Original article and comments, here

Absinthe 2.0 is out, jailbreaks iOS 5.1.1 devices

Fri, 25 May 2012 15:37:32 +0300

Absinthe 2.0 is out, jailbreaks iOS 5.1.1 devices:

Absinthe 2.0 is finally here to jailbreak your device. This release has been a large collaborative effort between Chronic-Dev Team and iPhone Dev Teams (Jailbreak Dream Team.) This jailbreak supports firmware 5.1.1 ONLY and is again one of the most easiest jailbreaks to use.

The long awaited jailbreak software is here. Yet another chance to jailbreak my device and I don’t want to do it. What can I say?, I don’t need it. For what it’s worth, have fun.

Original article and comments, here

The hyperlocal myth

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:14:00 +0300

Stowe Boyd asks what happened to the hyperlocal hype. Well, nothing happened to the hyperlocal, that’s what happened with the hype. You see, I used to work for a local newspaper. A county newspaper with only a few reporters. In our town - an almost 80.000 people community - we were three reporters and one editor. We were publishing about 10 articles a day. I was responsible with sports, some local economics and health - well, the hospitals. I was supposed to deliver four or five articles a day. Which didn’t really happen, because, well, nothing really happens in a small community. That’s one problem.

The second problem is money. You have to find some companies to buy advertising in order to pay salaries. Well, in our town, there were really few businesses that were buying advertising on a monthly basis. I guess, the paper was merely sustaining from a traditional advertising model. We’re talking about a print newspaper back in 2003 - 2005, when things were way better than today. Now, the paper was selling somewhere around 10.000 copies a day in the whole county and about 4.000 in our town. At the time, that was the equivalent of a readership of 15.000- 20.000 people per day, considering there were two other dailies in our county and people would rather share a newspaper instead of buying one. It was a profitable newspaper, but not from selling traditional ads.

Now, let’s extrapolate. You have a “Beacon Hill” community of 5.000 and you launch a hyperlocal news website. That’d most probably get you, in the happiest situation, a 2.000 unique visitors per day. Which you’d have to sell to advertisers. In my country, in a small town, that’d be enough for two people to live a decent life, because we have shops and stores at each and every corner. But in a suburbs-based society, where you have to drive to a hypermarket located a dozen miles away, who’s going to buy ads on your website? OK, if your site is dedicated to a neighborhood in Detroit, you might sell some ads. But it will be really hard to convince those companies they’ll get clients if they’ll pay you for displaying their ads. They don’t care about your potential 25.000 people in the hood, they care about the clients that’d come from their two or three blocks area.

So, the thing about hyperlocal is that it would require big advertisers. Well, big advertisers, like Pepsi or Chevrolet would go for websites with huge audiences. The problem with hyperlocal news websites is that there’s no sustainable business model. And if there’s no huge hyperlocal.com delivering ads on every “hyperlocal.com/city/smallcommunity/”, splitting revenues with reporters, there’s no money.

That’s pretty much why hyperlocal is just a myth. Yeah, there might be some successful hyperlocal sites - Cory Bergman had a few examples -, but they’re few and they were lucky enough to launch before the hype, lucky to get a user base and enough awareness to survive the crisis.

Original article and comments, here