One day Facebook will be gone. But your blog can live on…
Recently I’ve been writing stuff on Facebook, because the engagement level there is so high. But I’ve found that if I want people who don’t use Facebook, and there are still important people who don’t, you have to put it somewhere else, and for me that’s here on my blog.
We’ve been taught to think that the only economic virtue is competitiveness. This is a faith: I’ll get into it for all I’m worth, seeking the maximum advantage for myself.
I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing has a bit too much power at Apple today: the marketing priority of having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.
Niels Ole Finnemann, a professor and director of Netlab, DigHumLab in Denmark, said: “The citizens will divide between those who prefer convenience and those who prefer privacy.”
via The Future of Privacy | Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
I’ve long said that as the web continues to evolve, particularly as a social medium, we’ll see privacy and the idea of a federated web help shape a new digital divide.
On one side, there will be people who choose convenience and ease by utilizing networks akin to our current ones (ie Facebook). They’ll trade their privacy and data for connections for social connections in a walled garden with pretty flowers.
On the other side will be the federated web by those who are able (either technologically or financially or both) to have and sustain their own web presence that they own and control.
This isn’t a geek vs non-geek distinction as it has been since the web started or something like we have in 2014-2015 where people who care about things like federation or privacy are outsiders.
Now we just need to kill apps.
Today we’re unwrapping the best holiday gift we could’ve imagined: the first real build of our self-driving vehicle prototype.
It’s hard enough already not to become the prisoner of your own expertise, but it will only get harder, because change is accelerating. That’s not a recent trend; change has been accelerating since the paleolithic era. Ideas beget ideas. I don’t expect that to change. But I could be wrong.
Woohoo… Android 5.0 Lollipop on my 2014 Moto X. It’s like Christmas in…November.
Completely agree with the main idea of this article… Chromebooks (and tablets to some extent) are mature platforms and great devices for both creating and consuming content for personal and business use:
In short, I’m done with PCs—at least as they are conventionally defined. And I think the majority of long-suffering PC users would be too if they weren’t so accustomed to thinking of computers in the same way they have for decades. Building new technology is easy compared with changing the habits of those who use it.
Yep…
Blogs are — or at least were — different. They are an individual’s place for speaking out loud, but the relationships that form around them were based on links among posts, not social networks that link among people. I’m all for social networks, but we also need networks of ideas.
Fun Sesame Street video from the 80’s, but I wonder how kids today would answer that last question… “can a computer think?”
Having access to a 3D printer at Hammond has definitely changed the way I think about design, production, and consumption (in a school environment at least).
I greatly look forward to the concept of printing to continue to extend from hand written manuscripts to the printing press to 3D printing to this type of molecular crystal printing…
But the most interesting application has to be the potential for 3D-printed pills and medications. The technique could be adapted into a consumer-friendly machine allowing patients to simply print their own medicines in the exact dosages they need.
via Scientists Produce Rounded Crystals That Could Lead To 3D-Printed Pills.
I’ll admit, there are times when I think it would be much easier to share links, ideas, and posts via something like Google+ or Facebook or Twitter rather than my blog.
Then I take a deep breath and step back. I realize the instant amount of traffic that is offered by those services doesn’t equate to the feeling of having my own space on my own blog.
Just a late night feeling after a long day.
Hadn’t seen this before but lots of good information for those educational institutions pondering Chromebooks and accessories…
CDW Chromebook Solutions Guide.
I tried.
I bought an iPhone 5s in August and did everything I could to try and live in an Apple ecosystem full time (for science).
However, given the choice at the Verizon Store yesterday between an iPhone 6+ and a new Moto X, I took the Android path.
I don’t regret or second guess my decision one bit. I’m typing this now on my Moto X and I’m loving this phone so far. Its quite possibly the best mobile I’ve ever owned (given, it’s only been a day).
Why?
I’m in the Google cloud, I like to tinker, and I don’t like having the same phone as 90% of the people I see around me. Plus, I can run my life and business on this phone in ways that aren’t possible with iOS.
iPhone is great. It’s just not for me.
I like to post these every so often (this one from 2010 is historic) for my own archive uses…
By the way, someone asked me yesterday why I had Lastpass on the front page and what it did as an app. I don’t know any of my passwords as they are all generated by Lastpass. Between that and using 2 factor authentication for everything I can (the Google Authenticator app beside Lastpass on the top row), I feel pretty confident about my security online. Those are two of myost used apps as a result.
Additionally, I’m glad to see services like Mint (my personal accounting app) and Evernote integrate their apps with TouchID on the iPhone so that I have to supply my thumbprint to open them up (Bank of America is releasing their updated app with that integration as well).
Security is my app theme for the end of 2014, evidently.
I’ve had quite a few people ask me which iPhone 6 (the 6 or 6+) they should buy (money aside). Here’s a nice review I’ll be pointing to:
Big vs. bigger: Which iPhone 6 deserves a place in your pocket? | Cult of Mac.
This makes me sad…
The video games studio behind Minecraft is in talks to be taken over by Microsoft, according to reports.It has been suggested that Mojang might sell for more than $2bn (£1.2bn).
via BBC News – Microsoft is ‘set to buy Minecraft developer’.
Very valuable read if you’re interested in the future of the web… time to rethink “Big Internet”
“Big Twitter was great — for a while,” says Jacobs. “But now it’s over, and it’s time to move on.”
These trends, if they are actually trends, seem related. I sense that they both stem from a sense of exhaustion with what I’m calling Big Internet. By Big Internet, I mean the platform- and plantation-based internet, the one centered around giants like Google and Facebook and Twitter and Amazon and Apple.”
Nicholas Carr at http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5010
