Brian Stelter:
>By creating in-house content, social Web sites can increase the amount of time that users spend on their sites, thereby increasing their value to advertisers.
Sounds an awful lot like blogging about blogging. Which sounds boring as crap.
Nice little app that gives you more fine grain control when recording video on your iPhone. The icon is hideous though.
Best feature: exposure and focus locks that are independent of each other.
*(Thanks to all on Twitter that recommended this app.)*
I shot a quick video ((Sorry for the bad audio and heavy breathing I am a bit sick/congested from traveling.)) using my father’s [Ten One Design Magnus](http://www.tenonedesign.com/magnus.php) stand for the iPad 2. The point of which is to see if the [iPad tips over while being used](http://hypertext.net/2012/01/magnus) in the stand.
Spoiler: it doesn’t.
However the angle is so steep that the stand isn’t great on your desk.
Jason Whitely:
>The theft has shaken Mojra’s trust in the TSA.
“You can grope me, but you touch my iPad and it’s on.”
Andy Weissman commenting on the ‘information wants to be free’ mantra:
>Information (content) does not want to be free. Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free. That’s a big difference, and also the massive opportunity that should be at the center right now.
Worth a full read.
I feel like we should take this entire article about the TSA and use it as the definition for ‘incompetence’.
Frank X. Shaw has posted on the Microsoft blog a list of Microsoft alternatives to Google — in case you are concerned about Google’s motives. Two things:
1. It should strike you as awesome that Microsoft did this, because think back 10 years and try to imagine them being this snarky. I love this post. Not because it is helpful, just because Microsoft seems to be everything that Google didn’t want to be, but now somehow Microsoft is looking better than Google.
2. Holy crap Hotmail has “hundreds of millions” of users.
You may not want to switch from Google to Microsoft, but you have to hand it to Microsoft that this is a pretty great post. The people reading the Microsoft blog are likely the people willing to switch to Microsoft.
Andrew Winston:
>But would anybody in their right mind be disappointed with $16.5 billion in quarterly cash flow instead of $17.5 billion?
Yes, Wall Street. But then again you did qualify that with “right mind”.
This is an incredibly over simplified view of the problem — paying more for manufacturing doesn’t solve the core issue. The core issue is that such poor labor standards are acceptable in China.
Giving Foxconn more money just means that Foxconn makes more money.
Apple could demand that it be passed along to the employees, but let’s be honest because that is going to require a lot of double checks.
Back to the above quote — while $16.5 billion and $17.5 billion are still huge numbers, Wall Street tends to *not* reward declining numbers. So yeah, there would be disappointment — especially so if Wall Street were to find out that Cook just decided he would like to make *less* money.
Not much tech news invaded Macworld, but Launch Center did manage to get talked about quite a bit. I had a chance to download and toy with it while I was down at Macworld and I think it is one of those apps like Keyboard Maestro: it can be really good if you put in the time.
Right now I only have three actions in it: Call wife, Flashlight, and New Tweet. Those three actions though eliminated the need for one app (flashlight) and makes two other “common” actions very easy. Right now it is a page 2 app for me, but it may just usurp Instapaper for page 1. ((No offense Instapaper, I just don’t use you that much on my iPhone.))
Paul Robert Lloyd on Facebook:
>Over time, I found it became less valuable; a utility for procrastination. As the company sought rapid growth, the design moved away from encouraging users to create close personal networks, towards openly sharing every aspect of their lives, with everybody and often unknowingly.
True, but this bit is pretty scathing:
>Much like producing advertising campaigns for cigarette companies, **working for Facebook has become an ethically questionable career move**.
Ouch. Even given how much I hate Facebook — I can’t agree with that last quote. I do however think that Lloyd is right in saying that Facebook has become rather arrogant — so too has Google, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM.
Nelson Minar on Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra:
>But I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.
Minar doesn’t think Google is disregarding their mantra, but I do. I think his above statement is actually pretty accurate because Google does seem to have ‘moved on’ and I think that while it may not be fair to say the company has been “evil” — it is fair to say they are trending towards that line.
Great update. It addresses my biggest complaint: the open front pouch that used to let all my stuff spill out. Very nice.
This was a great talk by Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, and John Gruber.
Tim Worstall:
>Boycotting Apple for better Foxconn wages and conditions is like having sex for virginity. Entirely counter-productive and exactly the wrong thing to be doing.
Sounds about right to me.
Chuck Skoda:
>How do we reference locations in electronic books? Historically, it’s been easy to throw out a page number, and many people were likely to have the same edition as you or at least one with the same page layout.
Georgia for iMore:
>Inside the iFixit Thirsty Bag you’ll find two “molecular sieve packets”. Each of these contains powerful liquid absorption material that, according to iFixit, can reduce the atmospheric humidity to 1% RH and suck up pretty much all liquid inside your device over night.
Sounds like a fantastic piece of emergency kit to keep in your house and for $6.95 it seems like you can’t go wrong. ((I ordered 2.))
Nick Bradbury on Facebook’s frictionless sharing and why it adds more friction:
>Because in the past the user only had to decide whether to share something they just read, but now they have to think about every single article before they even read it. *If I read this article, then everyone will know I read it, and do I really want people to know I read it?*
Good point and I think it applies to far more than just Facebook. It’s the same as all the auto-tweet and auto-Facebook-update junk that iOS apps love baking in. Too often these apps default to sharing with all services possible, far too often.
Look no further than someone you follow on Instagram that also automatically posts every picture to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Flickr — that’s not just tiring, it’s annoying.
While at Macworld my buddy Pat Dryburgh told me that he updated the DuckDuckGo search field on the bottom of this site. We just pushed the changes today and it looks fantastic.
Actually, the search field just looks like it always did.
Pat just posted about how you add the very same to your site, so be sure to hit the link if you don’t want the iFrame option that I was using. You can also see some of the [params](https://duckduckgo.com/params.html) he set to match link colors to the theme of this site.
Matthew Yglesias:
>And so once the basic business proposition is “this company will make the most amazing Web services available and give them away for free in order to sell you to advertisers,” plummeting levels of privacy become inevitable.
Very true, he also asks the million dollar question:
>The business question is that if we assume some other firm or set of firms could come up with comparable quality products to Gmail, Youtube, Google Search, etc., how many people would be willing to pay a premium for privacy-respecting ad-free versions of them and how much would they be willing to pay?
[I would](https://brooksreview.net/2011/03/fragility-free/), but I am not the majority.