Recent Articles

Christopher Poole, 4chan’s founder:
>I don’t believe in large websites supporting themselves through ongoing donations (a la Wikipedia), both ideologically and practically. I *hate* the thought of asking users to donate money and receive nothing of value other than “the site doesn’t die.”

Poole has shifted to the ad-supported + membership model now for 4chan. I urge you to read the entire post if you are interested in how to support websites at all — because it offers a good look at just how hard it is no matter how popular your site is. I know a lot of people get tired of hearing me harp on why ads are bad on websites, but I think most people are missing the larger point.

Which is that ads are not, by themselves, bad — but in aggregate they are not helping the web as much as people think they may be. The future of the web isn’t with ads plastered everywhere just as the future of cell phones wasn’t a service with ads interjecting into conversations. Likewise the future of the web isn’t with every site requiring you to pay them to read it.

There’s got to be a balance somewhere between free and paid — I’m not sure where it is — but I know that I don’t want to be on the free side of things. Somewhere, somehow, someone has to pay for the content on every webpage — be it the creator, reader, or other party — and I only know two things about that:

1. I don’t want to be the one paying to give away my content;
2. and I don’t like advertising.

That’s all I really know, everything else is a big experiment waiting to see what happens.

Scott Rafer:
>What’s missing from this conversation is that map usage is critical. Regardless of Google’s PR success in the Atlantic’s unintentionally misleading Google Ground Truth infomercial, more than half of Google’s mobile map usage is going away in the next month or two. I love the Atlantic, but they got punkd. Usage makes maps better a lot faster than software does.

Rafer says it way better than [I did](https://brooksreview.net/2012/09/maps-apple/), and the more I think about it, the more I think it was Apple’s play to kick Google Maps out and go “all-in” on mapping. Maps are far too important a part of iOS for Apple to not own and control them.

It sucks that right now Apple Maps aren’t as good as they are from Google, but I think Rafer is off on his 18 month prediction — I’m thinking more like “by Christmas” Apple will have played catch up. Of course, that all depends on how much man power Apple assigns to it.

Matt Drance:
>It’s no coincidence that the “Tech Specs” link atop apple.com/iphone is dead last. Apple’s best marketing has always been about what a product does, not what it has. Forget MHz and GB and mAh — how much faster does it launch apps? Play games? Snap pictures? Load web pages? How many hours of video and talk time? These are things that anyone can not only understand, but appreciate.

The entire post by Drance is a fantastic explanation of why people are upset there is no NFC in the iPhone, but the above quoted section is a spot on analysis of why Apple products are seen as more compelling. Apple doesn’t tell you it has a 3200mAh battery, it tells you that you can talk all day long — and which is more useful information? Certainly there are qualifications to all day long, but the same is true with pure specs. A fast CPU and massive amounts of RAM are great, unless the OS is piss-poor.

People often say that the specs are the actual “facts” of the device, but that’s simply not true. Benchmarks certainly are, same with real world testing, and so it is along that line that I think Apple’s advertising *feels* more true to me.

Harry Marks:
> I also see Street View as a much more practical feature than Flyover because if I’m going somewhere I haven’t been before, I’d like to know what the building looks like before I get there.

Actually, as someone who has been using the iOS 6 betas, I disagree. Flyover isn’t the same as street view, but it is better in some ways than street view. Most importantly it is more fluid. It is true, that you don’t get the standing on the street perspective, but I think the perspective is also very useable for finding where a shop/store is on the map.

The difference is that Street View gives you a very direct and limited perspective, whereas flyover gives your a very indirect and wide view of the area. You don’t see what the store front looks like, but you certainly know which building it is in and where a bouts in the block that building is. It’s hard to state, but once you play with it you will see what I mean.

An additional bonus of Flyover is that you can see all sides of a building, regardless of there being a street — that is, Street View only shows you what can be seen from a car (mostly) and Flyover shows you what can be seen period.

As for 3.2 billion people not getting Flyover or Street View: that’s pretty shitty.

Ryan Block is thinking along [the same lines I am](https://brooksreview.net/2012/09/iphone-changes/):
>These product don’t always look revolutionary on day one. In fact, they can even be pretty hard to spot at first blush. But they’re always easy to identify in hindsight — once they’ve fundamentally changed how we do something, once they’ve caused us to question how we ever went without them.

I like his over arching point of asking the question: “Is it a great product?”. I used to be a spec sheet guy when I bought computers way back in the day, but I’ve been able to change my thinking to look at the overall product, not just the spec sheet. I think all too often many of us still want to compare based on spec sheets, because it’s the easiest way to make that comparison. Any review that offers a checklist of side-by-side features of any device, has already missed the point in my book.

[Shawn Blanc is thinking along the same lines too](http://shawnblanc.net/2012/09/function-form-future/):

>The easier and more enjoyable it is to use, the more you’ll want to use it and thus the more utility you’ll get out of it.

You either get “it”, or you buy an Android — at least that’s what I have noticed.

Horace Dediu does a fantastic analysis of how Apple is determining whether they have reached the point of “good enough” with the iPhone, eventually concluding:
>By ranging products which are older and at lower price points it can measure whether the improvements are valued.

His point is that by keeping older iPhones selling at a lower price along side the new iPhones, Apple can compare the sales of the different models. So if the iPhone 4S outsells the iPhone 5, then Apple can conclude that the *new* features in the iPhone 5 are not valued by consumers. It’s a very clever way of doing business — not only does it open up lower-priced markets for Apple, but it provides them with robust data.