The Brooks Review

Year: 2011

  • Why Bing “Likes” Facebook

    Paul Boutin on why Bing may be a better search engine for most things (particularly if you use Facebook):

    Beyond beating link spam, your friends’ preferences and recommendations may also provide a better guide to what you, as an individual, really want to find. If, for example, you’re shopping for a new pair of shoes, the most valuable search results may not be the most linked-to pages on the Internet but, rather, what your best friends want to be seen wearing.

    It is an interesting dilemma that Google will need to deal with: unless you tie into Facebook/Twitter how do you provide results that are more relevant that page ranking? My guess is that Google would rather use tracking cookies and other methods of tracking user behavior — than they would tying you into a social graph that they don’t own.

  • RSS Is Dying [Being Ignored], and You Should Be Very Worried

    Kroc Camen:

    Google Chrome has no RSS reader. It doesn’t even try to render RSS, or even help the user with it in any way. It gives less of a crap than a French man smoking a cigarette in public.

  • Automatically add Tasks delegated by Email to Things with Applescript

    I previously posted about an applescript that will send an email to OmniFocus as a task — for those emails that you want a little tickler on. Now with the help of Sven Fechner you can set this up for Things too. It’s no OTA sync, but hey it is free.

  • Real Power Users

    Chris Clark trying to defend Facebook messages over email:

    It’s been a recurring theme this week, but the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors. These are the people who complain that an iPad can’t have third party software installed from anywhere but the App Store, ignoring the massive convenience and security gains the policy affords average users.

    I think this statement is massively off base:

    1. Plenty of “Pro” users that I know (myself included) are more than happy with the App system Apple has in place.
    2. There is a relatively small user base that Jailbreaks when they are not happy.
    3. Others will just move to a “open” ((Yeah, right.)) system like Android.
    4. Lastly I would argue that Steve Jobs is a “Pro” user so by Clark’s account — Jobs should not be allowed to design future systems.

    That means that clearly millions of people are wrong for buying products that Jobs makes? I think the problem here is that Clark is using the word “Pro” and “Power User” when he should be using the definition: “Niche Users”. He and his friends clearly are a niche where they are best served by something other than email. I am no fan of email, but I certainly don’t agree with what Clark is arguing.

    People keep sending me emails about this article and I can’t say that I agree with anything that he is saying in it.

    People are not flocking to Facebook because they want better email — they flock because they want to see what their ex looks like now. Facebook is not popular because it is a communication tool — nor is it an underutilized communication tool — Facebook is popular because people like to spy on each other.

  • The Problem With Ping

    Nik Fletcher on Apple’s Ping network:

    A purchase of a song isn’t the strongest indicator of a user’s liking of a song: the playing of a song is. Ping with Scrobbling would offer me far more of an incentive to visit – I care much more about what my friends are listening to as opposed to what they’re buying (and even when buying, there’s no guarantee the purchase will be via iTunes and thus tracked).

    What a great point.

  • Twitter for iPhone FAIL

    San Francisco we have a problem: Twitter for iPhone has become the most crashtastic app on my iPhone over the past month or so. I can’t pinpoint when this first started to happen but Ian Hines lamented on Twitter the other day:

    @twitter for iPhone crashes roughly 30% of the time. Unacceptable..

    For an app so good and as high profile as Twitter — this is hardly a good thing. On my iPhone it seems to happen most frequently when I am trying to reply to a Tweet, followed closely by the times that I am simply trying to tap out a Tweet. Normally I use a mix of Tweetie and my iOS devices, but while traveling this weekend Twitter for iPhone was my primary interface and it was frustrating to say the least.

    I am hardly in the mood to switch apps at this point, but I may be forced to if this continues much longer. Then the questions is what app do I switch too? I am not much of a Twitterific fan — Icebird seems nice, but is hardly great. Suggestions?

  • Lending Kindle Books

    Amazon:

    Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days.

    I don’t know about you, but I rarely finish a book in just 14 days — I am a slow reader and have way too many other things going on. One would think that Amazon (by the very nature of their business) would have a damned good idea of just how fast people are reading books — 14 days seems a little bit faster than I imagine most read.

  • Matt Gemmell Reviews the MacBook Air 11″

    Gemmell does an excellent job reviewing the 11″ Air. Most importantly he decided the best way to talk about the limited screen space was to put together a Flickr gallery of screenshots with popular programs running. This is the type of reviewer that I love.

  • Tablets and Input

    Tim Bray:

    Tablets and handsets can displace computers as play and reading devices, but they really can’t become dominant as work tools until we have a better solution for high-speed low-friction text input. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see dramatic progress in this area; it’s so obviously the number-one usability barrier for everything that isn’t badged as a “computer”.

    Agreed — though I don’t agree with much else in his post. Reviewers take note: you need to dedicate at least 250 words to talking about how the text input experience is on each device you review — this stuff matters.

  • The Daily Post

    So you want to try and blog everyday in 2011? WordPress.com is there to help.

    WordPress.com:

    This is an experiment in blogging motivation from the folks at WordPress.com. We will post every day here with ideas, suggestions and inspiration, hoping it will help you get the most out of your blog.