90WPM

Kentucky Fried Colonel

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 15:10:50 -0500

Kentucky Fried Colonel

Agile Billing

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 14:29:25 -0500

My first piece for Smashing Magazine is about different ways of billing for design and development work. Definitely worth a read if you’re a freelancer or run your own shop.

Deep Inside The Social Media Operations Of A Gay Escort Service

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 18:40:45 -0500

Deep Inside The Social Media Operations Of A Gay Escort Service:

Dave’s employer is not, strictly speaking, a pimp. Instead of dealing directly with the trade, the company runs what is, on the surface, an online social network for gay men, shielding itself behind a legal loophole that allows it to profit from the sex trade while maintaining plausible deniability.

His parents don’t know the exact details of his work, either. When people ask, “I’m a consultant for some companies in New York” is his standard cover. He and his coworkers use fake names at work, and he treads lightly when discussing the details of his job. “I try to have a first conversation to see what kind of people I’m dealing with so I can tell them what I do.”

Most people “don’t believe that it exists,” Dave said. Some immediately assume that he works as an escort himself; others find it fascinating, and pepper him with questions. No one seems to know the first thing about how these online escort services operate within the law.

Welcome to the world of rent boys.

In which I take a deep dive into the world of online male escort services. The post is SFW, but some of the links within most definitely are not. Proceed with caution.

The Dream of the 1890’s is Alive in Brooklyn

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:01:07 -0500

The Dream of the 1890’s is Alive in Brooklyn

The NRA Claims the AR-15 Is Useful for Hunting and Home Defense. Not Exactly.

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 11:21:00 -0500

The NRA Claims the AR-15 Is Useful for Hunting and Home Defense. Not Exactly.:

“A hunter does not need a semi-automatic rifle to hunt, if he does he sucks, and should go play video games.”

The AR-15 is, however, much more of a profit machine than traditional hunting rifles and shotguns.

The Shame Eraser: How To Delete Your Most Embarrassing Old Tweets In 3 Steps

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 15:17:23 -0500

The Shame Eraser: How To Delete Your Most Embarrassing Old Tweets In 3 Steps:

Now that Twitter has made it easy to download our entire tweet archives, the Internet is now faced with the scary reality that the dumbest things we’ve ever said are only a few clicks away. Our early tweets were sent from a time of innocence, joy, and freedom from the realization that one day other people (and we ourselves) might pass judgement on them.

But the time of reckoning has come. And if you’re unable to bear the weight of your shame, this is your way out. Perhaps you had a particularly dark period after a break-up. Maybe your first six months on Twitter were just bad haikus. If you’re the type of person who rips up your old shitty poems, this script is for you.

Merry Christmas.

Why the Instagram debacle just taught every tech company to be shadier than ever

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:25:09 -0500

Why the Instagram debacle just taught every tech company to be shadier than ever:

If you’re a lawyer today, you just learned that bad things happen when a hint of clear language invites non-lawyers to read your work. And you’ll react in one of two ways: you’ll either make your contracts so confusing and impenetrable that no one will read them, or you’ll make them so “friendly” and “fun” that no one will read them correctly. Come give me a hug, your contracts with the public will say. Do not mind that I am ruthlessly picking your pockets to sell targeting data to advertisers.

Nilay nails it.

Worst QR code ever

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:42:14 -0500

Worst QR code ever

“Hints of angel food cake”

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:30:17 -0500

“Hints of angel food cake”

Why Are We Debating "Tablet-Native Journalism"?

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:42:00 -0500

My last post got Felix’s attention and he updated his article with a link to my thoughts, as well as Gruber’s take:

The second part I agree with. The Daily’s failure had nothing to do with it being iPad-only and everything to do with the fact that it just plain stunk.

But what’s foolish about publishing on a single platform? I publish only on the web, and Daring Fireball seems to be doing OK. Marco Arment’s The Magazine publishes only for iOS and is doing well enough that he’s already expanded to hire an editor. In fact, I’d go so far as to say The Daily’s success proves the opposite of Salmon’s conclusion: that an iPad-only daily news app could be a success.

First things first: The Daily proves nothing, because it is a single data point, not a representative sample. That said, Gruber and I are likely splitting hairs. But since we just watched News Corp. flush $30M in development costs plus $500,000 a week in operating expenses down the drain, I believe these are hairs worth splitting.

What is a Platform?

Is the web a platform? Yes. Is Facebook a platform? RSS? Mobile? Android? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. There are platforms built upon platforms, platforms fragmented into sub-platforms, and platforms that aggregate data from a bunch of other platforms.

Platforms all the way down.

Audiences rarely use one platform exclusively; a casual gamer might split time between Words With Friends on a smartphone during a morning commute, Farmville on a laptop computer during the day, and Angry Birds on a tablet at home.

Gruber says he publishes only on the web; yet his blog has an RSS feed and a Twitter account. One could easily read Daring Fireball without ever contributing a single pageview just by sending links from the feed or Twitter to a read-later service.

We have a choice.

You Can’t Reach All of the People All of the Time

But you can reach most of them, most of the time.

You’ll reach most of your potential readers, some of the time, by designing exclusively for a single platform. But to reach them most of the time, you have to offer your users a choice, even if it’s a simple one like “Web site or RSS”.

Going mobile-first is a valid design approach. But even Instagram allowed users to share a useful atom of content with their friends who did not use the app before the company rolled out web profiles. The Daily offered a static image of an article — practically useless for written content.

Still, there’s one example which seems to turn this logic on its head.

What About The Magazine?

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about tablets and publishing these days without bring up Marco Arment’s nascent iOS-only publication, The Magazine. The app is about as bare-bones as it gets, and runs on a subscription-only model. Users can read, and they can share small snippets of articles, and occasionally the entire text, though it’s unclear when the limitation is lifted.

Marco was very clear during the launch that The Magazine was not meant to be a blanket solution for digital publishing, and the audience is intentionally limited to “geeks like us”:

There’s room for another category between individuals and major publishers, and that’s where The Magazine sits. It’s a multi-author, truly modern digital magazine that can appeal to an audience bigger than a niche but smaller than the readership of The New York Times. This is what a modern magazine can be, not a 300 MB stack of static page images laid out manually by 100 people.

The Magazine appears to be doing well enough; as he noted in his own post-mortem of The Daily, it quickly reached profitability, and Marco has hired a full-time editor and raised the writer payment rate. But let’s not kid ourselves; the publication’s overhead during the initial issues was likely limited to the app’s design and a token fee paid to the authors, most (if not all) of whom are friends with Marco. While readership may be off the charts, we don’t know either way, as the “profitability” goal is relative, and relative sales numbers are essentially worthless.

The Magazine does not pretend to be a general-interest news publication. But while the content is niche, thus far very few of the writers appear to be doing any actual reporting. This has caused some to write off the entire format, when really they just aren’t interested in the content that The Magazine publishes, which is closer to long-form blog posts than “traditional”, research-based journalism.

Marco appears to be working on this, having stated his intention to eventually fund “more in-depth articles and even investigative pieces”.

What the Hell is Tablet-Native Journalism?

There seems to be a bit of confusion about What Journalism Should Do Next as the post-PC era begins to take shape. Now that we have all of these amazing tools at our disposal, how can we adapt our writing to take advantage of them?

This question, however, is misleading, since it frames the problem in terms of the technology rather than the story being told. The question is not How can we take advantage of these new tools?, but rather How can we tell stories in ways that take advantage of these new tools?

Contrary to popular belief, journalism did not begin with Gutenberg and the printing press; mass-media journalism did. What was the original marathon if not an extremely dangerous, physically demanding breaking news alert?

Socrates lambasted the written word, lamenting the negative effects it would have on learning and memory (and thus the oral storytelling tradition). But did the ancient Greeks engage in spirited debates over the nature of “writing-native journalism”? Probably not. If history is to be believed, they accepted that the written word was here to stay, and kept on telling stories. This decision seems to have worked out fairly well for the human race, and we discovered that some forms of expression, like poetry, can be given new layers of meaning through the act of writing.

So then, let us ask ourselves: what kinds of stories are we telling today? Do they work well on the tablet? If not, let’s fix that first — tablets aren’t going away, after all. If they do, it’s time to start thinking about what we can build to make them even better.

The impossibility of tablet-native journalism

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:02:00 -0500

The impossibility of tablet-native journalism:

Felix Salmon, Reuters:

I think that The Daily has taught us all an important lesson — which is that tablets in general, and the iPad in particular, are actually much less powerful and revolutionary than many of us had hoped. Specifically, far from being able to offer richer content than can be found on the web, they actually find themselves crippled in unexpected ways.

Felix asked me for counter-examples to prove that iPad news apps aren’t all “glorified PDF readers”, but I couldn’t fit my thoughts in a tweet, so here they are:

Every issue of a new publication has to be downloaded in full before it can be opened; this takes a surprisingly long time, even over a pretty fast wifi connection. That’s one reason why web apps can be superior to native apps: no one would dream of forcing people to download a whole website before they could view a single page.

Take a look at NYTimes for iPad, which downloads news on a per-section basis, caching additional multimedia over wifi afterwards.

Even Adobe Publishing Suite, which I abhor and which powers many of the “glorified PDF reader” apps Salmon refers to, was updated almost two years ago to allow for concurrent issue downloads, and now includes progressive page loads rather than forcing an entire issue download before one can read.

Look at any publication you’re reading in an iPad app, and search for a story. Oh, wait — you can’t: search is basically impossible within iPad apps, which at heart are little more than heavy PDF files, weighed down with multimedia bells and whistles. Navigation is always difficult and unintuitive, and pages are never remotely as dynamic as what we’ve become used to on the web.

Take a look at Bloomberg Businessweek+, which allows full-text search across all downloaded issues, as well as a more intuitive navigation than plenty of web sites I’ve used.

Read to the end of a story, and then see how many headlines you can click on: which stories are you being given the choice to read next? The answer is probably none, and again the reason for that is built deep into the architecture of the iPad, and of other tablets too.

Both of the above apps include this functionality. And with all due respect, claiming that a feature as specific and CMS-dependent as linking to related stories at the end of a news article is somehow hindered by limitations “built deep into the architecture” of the iPad and other tablets is laughable to anyone with a cursory knowledge of how software is built, regardless of what platform it’s on. (Felix: I could go into the technical details of why this is ridiculous, but I’d rather not bore you or my readers. Let’s get lunch sometime if you’re curious.)

The web, for instance, doesn’t need to traffic in discrete “issues” — if you subscribe to the New York Times, you can read any story you like, going back decades. Whereas if you subscribe to a publication on a tablet, you can read only one issue at a time.

Amazingly enough, the New York Times has a native iPad app, mentioned above, which does exactly this. Magazines, on the other hand, work as issues. While one can make an argument for or against the virtues of an issue-based publication cycle in a post-PC world, that’s a different essay.

I’m reminded, here, a bit of Apple’s iOS Maps debacle.

Yes, Maps. They suck now, but they were better before, when they used the same Google server infrastructure as their web-based counterparts. This has nothing to do with the client implementation being native or web-based.

No iPad publication is remotely as innovative or as fun to read as, say, BuzzFeed, because BuzzFeed has coders who can do very clever things with their chosen platform, and iPad publications don’t.

I love BuzzFeed, and I write for it fairly often, but I fail to see how the company’s web team has made the reading experience on the web appreciably more “fun”. The content does that, for me, but I can get that in Pocket.

I would suggest The Atavist, or the iPad version of Our Choice as examples of tablet publications that are finding new — if still imperfect — ways to engage readers through touch.

Perspective, which lets authors create stories with data tailored for the iPad, and Tapestry, a platform for reading “tap essays” like Robin Sloan’s Fish are also interesting new upstarts in the space.

If you’re publishing on the iPad, you’re basically a designer rather than a coder, and you’re far more limited in what you can do.

No, you’re not, unless you can’t find a coder willing to work with you. Use Adobe Publishing Suite, and yes, you will have no control over the code. But that’s a far cry from some mythical limitation on publishing apps which prevents them from deviating from the horrible implementations we’ve seen thus far.

This kind of thing, for instance, works OK in Safari for iPad, but you won’t find it in a downloaded publication.

Nope, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done with a bit of work (quite possibly less work than it took to make the cross-platform HTML version).

As far as news and journalism are concerned, the verdict is in: tablets aren’t a new medium which will support a whole new class of publications — there’s almost nothing you can do well on a tablet that you can’t just put on a website and ask people to read in a browser. Publications of the future will put their content online, and will go to great lengths to ensure that it looks fantastic when viewed on a tablet. But the tablet is basically just one of many ways to see material which exists on the internet; it’s not a place to put stuff which can’t be found anywhere else.

Salmon appears to be taking out his rage at the current crop of iPad publications from companies like Condé Nast and News Corp. on the entire tablet publishing ecosystem. But there’s much, much more to publishing on the iPad than just blindly reproducing antiquated print metaphors, and there are plenty of developers out there doing amazing things with the medium.

Publishing for a single platform, whether print, web, or the iPad, is a foolish move, and I think we knew that before The Daily was excised from News Corp.’s balance sheet. But to write tablet publishing off entirely due to one poorly-planned app from a massive traditional publisher would be terribly short-sighted.

The Founders Lie About Comfort Zones

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:00:27 -0500

The Founders Lie About Comfort Zones:

In general whenever a X-guy enforces solving a problem with X everyone should step back and try to analyse it objectively.

Founders, read this immediately.

Old couple buying iPad Mini at Apple retail store, 11:39 AM.

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:39:14 -0500

Old couple buying iPad Mini at Apple retail store, 11:39 AM.

Friendly neighborhood poll inspector

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:23:14 -0500

Friendly neighborhood poll inspector

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Android Director John Lagerling's Nexus Interview with Brian X. Chen

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:41:38 -0500

Source: One on One: Google Android Director on Nexus Strategy

My personal favorites are the 360-degree panoramic photo, Photo Sphere, and the fact that you can do inductive charging so you don’t need to fiddle with a plug — you can just put it on a surface to charge. On a Nexus 10 it’s the fact that it’s so thin and light, and the resolution is 2.5 K, so it has very crisp text and pictures.

And the price. I negotiated the prices and I’m very pleased with being able to deliver these things at these prices; $299 for an unlocked Nexus 4 — I think that’s pretty revolutionary.

Please, please, for the love of god, do not ask me about LTE.

Basically we felt that we wanted to prove you don’t have to charge $600 to deliver a phone that has the latest-generation technologies. Simply that level of margin is sometimes even unreasonable, and we believed that we could do this.

We do not sell enough Nexus devices for the products’ abysmal margins to make any noticeable dent in our quarterly earnings reports.

For Nexus 7, we were able to ramp those new memory SKUs at the same price. These move so fast that we knew after a few months, from an economical perspective, it was doable. Between us and our partners we have a very good understanding of supply chains. We’ve all done the best we can to really reach these prices — $399, $299 is pretty amazing, if I may say so.

Even though we chose not to make an affordable 64GB unlocked phone in order to keep prices under $400, we discontinued the 16GB model, because the price consumers will pay for it leaves us with practically no margin.

It’s not so much fairness as it is to sort of work with partners who happen to be in good “phase match” with us in what we’re trying to do. So Samsung just happens to be in a good phase match on a high-end display, which is exactly what we wanted to do at a low cost. LG had a good phase match with the hardware they were working on. Asus as well. It’s just more about the timing being right.

None of our hardware partners has the ability to produce three size variations on a touchscreen device which meet our hardware standards at this time.

[Motorola stands] where Sharp would stand, or Sony would stand or Huawei would stand. From my perspective as a partnership director, they are another partner. We are really walled between the Motorola team and the Android team. They would bid on doing a Nexus device just like any other company.

Please don’t ask me about Motorola again.

The way I understand it is, it’s mostly about the patents, the way you can sort of disarm this huge attack against Android. We talked about prices. There are players in the industry who were unhappy about more competitive pricing for the consumers. They want to keep the prices high, they want to force the price to be so high that operators have to subsidize the devices very highly. That’s not only the Cupertino guys but also for the guys up in Seattle. They want higher margins, they want to charge more for software.

I feel uncomfortable referring to our competitors by name, but they are misers who are literally forcing consumers to buy their products at an unreasonable premium.

We simply believe there’s a better way of doing it without extracting that much payment from end users, because there are other ways to drive revenues.

We like ads.

Patents were used as a weapon to try to stop that evolution and scare people away from lower-cost alternatives. And I think with the Motorola acquisition we’ve shown we’re able to put skin in the game and push back.

Patents are evil, except when they’re not.

We haven’t announced numbers. We typically don’t allow our partners to announce numbers. All I can say is it has sold way above expectations. That could mean one of two things: Either we have very low expectations or we’ve done amazing [sic] well. But we’re very pleased with how we’ve done with the Nexus 7.

We have very low expectations.

I don’t have a number for how many apps are properly adding those APIs that you need to put fully to use the extra screen real estate. What I can say is that the Nexus 7 has been a superstrong catalyst to kick off developers’ attention to making those expansions, so we’ve seen tremendous growth in apps for the larger screen size. The trending is very positive because of the Nexus 7.

We really, really hope we can convince developers to build a lot more tablet-optimized apps.

But before, I’ll be honest and say, yes, there was a lack of tablet apps that supported bigger screen real estate. But I’ll add that, I know we talked about the Cupertino guys, but obviously people who have smartphones are a huge target for us.

While our main competitor in the mobile space — which I do not feel comfortable referring to by name — has had unprecedented growth with its competing line of tablets, we believe mobile phones are the future.

If you look globally that’s something we worry more about, not so much about competing with other smartphones, but more about, how can we get more people onto the Internet on mobile phones? And that’s a big deal. That’s why low cost is so important.

We will never compete with Apple on quality.

We had such a long laundry list of things we wanted to do, and the fact we had to roll it out so it would work on a multitude of devices, it simply took a bit more time for us to get here.

We did not prioritize the quality of the overall user experience above other concerns, like breadth of available devices and carriers, or “openness”. Fragmentation bit us in the ass.

But the structure we’ve had for an operating system from day one including widgets, actual multitasking, notifications, it’s finally coming to its true form right as the software has come into final polish. Project Butter for Jelly Bean, to get every pixel to move really beautifully, it’s finally showing off those capabilities we’ve always planned to have.

Now, you can finally purchase a Nexus device that’s worth buying (unless you need LTE).

We have the right teams and maturity to deliver what we’ve always wanted to do. I’ll admit we’re finally much more closer to our actual vision in the past year than we have ever been.

Thank you for not asking me about LTE.

The office is packed today.

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:17:43 -0400

The office is packed today.

New, used, wet, broken

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:35:26 -0400

New, used, wet, broken

Disruption Theory 101

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:16:00 -0400

Disruption Theory 101:

Vincent Messina, Cult of Android (emphasis mine):

For Apple consumers, there’s simply no reason other than form factor to choose the Mini over any of the other iPads Apple has to offer.

Gruber:

The only thing the iPod Mini had going for it was its smaller thinner form factor. It went on to become the best-selling iPod.

I refer thee to this post on Asymco, as well as this one, and this episode of The Critical Path.

The iPad Mini does a different job than the iPad 2, the iPod Touch, and the iPhone. What that job is has yet to be seen. I’d put my chips on casual reading as a major selling point, but then most reviewers thought the original iPad would be mainly used for content consumption, like watching video.

One thing is for sure: if they’re releasing it this month, you can be damn sure that Apple has at least some idea of what that job will be. And rather than watch Amazon and Samsung disrupt the iPad, Apple is willing to disrupt itself. The similarity with the iPad 2’s pricing is no mistake: the Mini will lure in customers who might buy an iPad 2 or 3 when they get a chance to play with it.

And if it takes sales away from the more expensive tablets, great! Apple is better off if anyone who would rather spend less for a smaller tablet ends up buying an iPad Mini instead of being wooed by a Galaxy Tab or a Microsoft Surface. Welcome to Disruption Theory 101.

I can’t wait to get one.

Why Remix Culture Needs New Copyright Laws

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:05:13 -0400

Why Remix Culture Needs New Copyright Laws:

If they choose to test the waters, artists with little to no knowledge of copyright law are faced with countless legal questions: How much of a song can I sample? What if I record my own version of it and sample that? If I give it away for free, does that make it OK? (Answers: it doesn’t matter; still illegal; and it might help your case.)

Even without overt sampling, a work can still come under attack. The growing popularity of “soundalikes” — songs written in the style of popular artists used in commercials to avoid licensing the originals — is a recent example among dozens of dilemmas faced by modern composers, songwriters, and performers. What about the Koren Ensemble, who perform orchestral, intricately-arranged medleys of popular TV theme songs?

My latest piece for BuzzFeed is a how-to on how to remix without getting sued, and what is necessary in order to encourage remix culture from a legislative standpoint.

It was co-authored with Gabe Levine, my lawyer and the co-star of one of my favorite Creative Mornings talks of all time.

Fuck. Yeah. Legal. Advice. With help from the wonderful,...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:54:20 -0400

Fuck. Yeah. Legal. Advice.

With help from the wonderful, patient Chris Ritter finalizing my half-baked Omnigraffle chart, and co-authored with the legendary Gabe Levine.