Teradome.

Some time ago, I decided to go all in with Safari Reader, instead of using Instapaper or Pocket.

I had used these services as an inbox queue for things I needed to check during my commute — things that weren’t always “articles” — and since these are all “read later” apps, they never really fit. If what I had bookmarked was, say, a home page for a new app that had launched, chances are nothing except a header or footer would be captured.

The killer feature of Safari Reader is that it actually caches the entire web page, and not just the “reader” view of it. (Technically, it saves a local .webarchive file to open if there is no connection.) That way you could always consume it in both ways if you were offline. And I was always offline because I’d be using this underground in the NYC Subway where there is effectively zero signal of any kind.

Functionally, there have been bumps. Currently there is no API call to add pages to Safari Reader, so apps can’t directly integrate it. Another bump is the awkwardness of app switching, and that the Instapaper/Pocket approach is so established (and Safari Reader is so new) that the architecture of these apps simply don’t make it easy at all.

Lots of apps created in-app browsers because it is cumbersome to always open links in Safari and then have to switch back to the app when done. If it is written to use iOS’s default link handler, it appears that “Add to Reading List” is a default available option. This is why you can add pages to Safari Reader from Mail, and some 3rd party apps seemed to support it without any sort of update when iOS 6 launched.

But since this feature has been missing for so long, many apps have written their own link handlers, to support their own app features and existing read-later apps as options, thereby missing out on this new feature. This has left them playing a waiting game of seeing if Apple adds programmatic hooks for Safari Reader, instead of derailing themselves by rewriting (large?) portions of their in-app browsers.

In practice, always opening in Safari is no longer a problem on the iPad thanks to the multitouch gestures. Find a link, select “Open in Safari”, read it in Safari, add it to Reader, and then four-finger swipe left to get back to the original app. Really nice, actually.

(The iPhone, on the other hand, is not so lucky. App switching via the home button isn’t bad, but without gestures, it can’t be used repeatedly without feeling cumbersome.)

But here’s the thing: The Instapaper/Pocket approach has been around so long, and is so entrenched in behavior, that “Open in Safari” as an option is often buried. You’ll usually see a screen hierarchy of feed → summary → in-app browser → Open in Safari. As you’d expect, the option to “Add to Instapaper” is a link, or even a gesture, at the feed level. This is not easy.

Shockingly, in some apps, it’s not even an option. Some apps went all in with their in-app browser that the best you can do is copy the URL, which forces you to manually find Safari and paste it. These are the worst offenders, because I can’t think of a situation where an in-app browser could ever completely obviate viewing in Safari. (Case #1: bookmarks.)

Oddly enough, using Safari Reader feels great. Like, great in the way using Readability was supposed to be. For most publishers, the social contract for content on the web is, you come to the site, you give us traffic hits and ad impressions, and then you can use our content in a limited, fair-use kind of way — and that’s what you do when using Safari Reader.

Every page I’ve added to Reader has been viewable in full when offline, whether it’s a news story or home page or whatever non-article-like page you can think of. Plus, since many sites are going responsive now, most of the time I don’t need to tap the “Reader” button at all to get a mobile-friendly view, and I’m getting the full personality of the site and all the supplemental content the way the designer of the site wanted.

So I’m sticking with it for now, in the hopes that the current stalemate breaks, and Safari Reader starts appearing in more apps. Honestly, I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to… um… add it. (Sorry.)

I recently dug up this little gem for last year:

“Social RSS” wait, isn’t that just Twitter and Facebook?

— Noah Mittman (@noahmittman) August 22, 2011

At the time, I was joking about a new startup with a press release about creating such a thing, and I wasn’t all that serious about lumping Twitter into the mix.

But that’s what’s come to be: in the race to be as much of a “place” as Facebook is, Twitter has been increasingly supporting RSS-like behavior, creating email digests, adding “discover” tabs, and structuring inline previews for content outside its walls.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the majority of my followers having full-on conversations on Twitter—it’s simply gotten too crowded and busy, and there’s been less back-and-forth and much more publish-and-comment activity. And it actually seems fine, and almost natural given the massive influence it has as a real-time Internet thing.

It’s another reason why I have some faith in App.net becoming an awesome system, because it has the potential of having those two activities—sharing links, and simply talking to each other—as discrete facets of the same backend. Facets that I could easily switch between, given the right foundation, and have a dimensionality that Twitter won’t have in its rush to appeal to Publishers. I’ve seen people just pumping URLs into their ADN streams, and I’m kinda hoping that later releases gives them a better outlet for that, or, even better, they just leave that kind of activity to Twitter.

As I said before, I’m not a huge fan of decentralized system for “microblogging” (and ooh, do I dislike that term). At its best, it’s public chat around the virtual water cooler, and you want to be stumbling around within the biggest office on Earth. Now, if I can’t relay the entire scene in real-time, then I must either compromise scope or timing, and need to:

• have a localized, synchronous scene, or
• have a complete, asynchronous one.

The former are chat networks, and the latter is the Web.

Everything else in between has essentially been done, and done in more mature methods. Toss in your Laconi.cas or your IRCs for standards. Toss in your Lithiums or your Campfires for your private businesses. These are not the compelling implementations. Destinations like Twitter and Facebook are, to the general public. It’s because they provide the illusion that everyone is there.

So let Twitter become social RSS, I don’t mind. We can use a single place to freely share & discuss links. But I also still hope for a single place to just connect and talk, too.

Original

george: These pretzels are making me thirsty!

Quote

jerry: “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—@george

Re-quote

kramer: “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—@george

Re-quote if you just have to add the person you heard it from because it would hurt their feelings if you quoted it and didn’t give them some small amount of credit for having exposed you to it

kramer: “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—@george (via @jerry)

EVERYBODY GET ON THE DAMN RE-QUOTE WAGON

newman: “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—@george (via @jerry @kramer @elaine @soupnazi)

Mixel is no longer an collage-art remixing iPad tool, but a photo grid composition iPhone app. A casualty of its own excellence.

Years ago, a good buddy of mine started a drawing-related webapp that was meant to be a community-focused game and just good fun and appeal to everyone, but I had worried it wouldn’t take off.

As an undergrad art-school survivor, I’d observed two things with great confidence:

• People usually do not take criticism easily.
• People always think their art could be better.

This is what you are taught in an undergraduate art school setting: how to listen and use criticism, and how to keep creating in order to improve your skills. Ignoring the naturally (over-)confident, and the naturally gifted, these things must be learned.

So when this startup was launched, I was concerned that it would only resonate with people who “knew they could draw” and if talented artists came on board, it would only make the average user more self-conscious of their skill level and less likely to participate.

I get the sense that Mixel ran into this too, and a core set of users became the active community and it didn’t grow much from there. They’ve taken a step back and become much more like the successful art apps of the iOS world like Instagram, et al: A simple scope of creation, a lot of hand holding (that you can skip if you’d like), and features of the app itself that make looking good easy. This can be photo filters, or pen effects and smoothing like Paper for iPad provides. These apps have the ability to make anything you drop in it look better, and that’s the point.

I had high hopes that Mixel would be the thing that crossed that psychological barrier and succeed at a large scale, but I guess some things never change.

As always, it’s time for another shift in how this blog gets used. This time I’m motivated by the introduction of App.net, the new kid on the block of social networks—or at least, social platforms—and what that means for Twitter and to an extent everyone else.

Why did App.net succeed in its funding? Basically, it’s because people stopped trusting Twitter. Twitter hits a sweet spot for a lot of people when it comes to simple, asynchronous, public chat, but thanks to the combination of poorly targeted ads, hostility to client developers who have arguably introduced some of Twitter’s best features, and promise of features that no user asked for (the “apps within Tweets” vision in recent coverage), the message users and developers have gotten is “the free ride is over, we’re now going to do what we want with it.”

So it’s not that surprising that a paid ride appeared and got support. If the promise is that being paid is what will keep it afloat and not these bizarre extensions that make it a media platform and not a messaging one, it’s a good promise and worth the price they’ve set on it.

But now this means yet another network to check in on. And with this, I’ve realized that I’ve made a bit of a social mess with my current accounts that I’d like to do some housekeeping on.

Here’s what will happen, plus some thoughts:

• Tumblr: teradome.com will become all original posts only. It’s funny timing because I just caught sight of the Marco.org post on how we all can’t be Daring Fireball, and I think a lot of blogs recently wanted to follow form with @gruber and maybe reap some of his success with the format. I won’t repeat the post, but my point is, having a blogging platform in addition to all of these others is an opportunity to control one’s voice to the fullest, and not fill it with random asides. I’ve kept Teradome fairly focused, but I’d like to bring that real authority of opinion back, and add things only when there’s a complete post and thought attached. Just “sharing” has been solved by a number of other systems. Which leads us to…

• Google+: Hard to say why I still am interested in this, but I’d like to try using this as the linkblog for now. Furthermore, I’m going to use it like web comments. I think that if Google had focused more on G+ integration as a comments platform, and providing better social graph features than Facebook Comments, it would have been a better way to compete than trying to push group video chat which remains an interest of power users only. It also gives me an excuse to use their social buttons when I see them.

• Facebook: Somehow, throughout all of their updates, Facebook still remains top-of-mind as a place where I can be sure my real friends see something. To that point, I don’t deliberately share things into my Timeline unless it’s something I want them to see. I’ve stopped merely liking stories and Facebook Comments entirely, and most apps I connect to my account (for login purposes) I set viewable to “only me.” Some bots slip through, but on the whole, it works and I don’t see myself messing with it any further. Groups, messenger, and the occasional broadcast. OK.

• Twitter: Ah yes. Back to Twitter. Twitter has always been an extended conversation for me. It started as a big chatroom, like the best networking party you could have stumbled into, but less and less, people have been freely talking about what’s on their minds. It’s become another sharing node, where Pulse or Zite or something else just echoes headlines & links into the feed. Oh, and the spam! The fake followers! Random mentions that you have to see at least once because there’s no filtering! And a client that still doesn’t hide a tweet once you’ve marked it as spam.

I have to stop and acknowledge that App.net isn’t just another stab at a Laconi.ca (now Status.net). In most ways these two are not alike and it’s why App.net has different founding support than the open-source Twitter competitor did.

Laconi.ca aimed to be an open-source, decentralized microblog. The pitch was anyone could run their own Twitter, but in reality few people really wanted to because Laconi.ca decentralized conversations. By forcing people to choose a forum to start in, it immediately limited the audience, and removed all serendipity to the microblog experience. Microblogs are as much about chatting as they are eavesdropping, and to make the latter powerful, you really have to hang out under only one set of eaves. Dave Winer has again offered his opinions about a decentralized Twitter, but he continues to describe publishing, not conversation. Otherwise he’s describing a form of bulletin boards, and we already have those. That’s not the point. I suspect people who backed App.net are people who deeply loved the early days of Twitter, when you woke up, opened the Global Feed, and just started new conversations with random people.

“App.net won’t survive.” OK. Let’s try, and see if it doesn’t. No sense in giving up before we’ve started. But here’s what I see is the model of how it will survive:

• ADN makes a promise that its business is servicing paying users.
• If ADN breaks its promise, then people stop paying, and ADN as it is will fold.
• Therefore, ADN now has an interest to keep active users happy with features that make it a fundamentally better authoring platform.

And that’s the key. So if it fails in its mission, then it will have been a worthwhile experiment, but it’s certainly an experiment worth supporting.

I absolutely love these sorts of projects. There’s something utterly beautiful about being able to shift your perspective to what it was like being a small child:

Peter Opsvik designed the adjustable Tripp Trapp chair after watching his son, Thor — too big for a high chair but too small for an adult chair — struggle for a place at the family dining table; as part of the design process he produced oversize versions of the Tripp Trapp and a standard table and chair to help his team empathize with an average three-year-old child. More than seven million Tripp Trapp chairs have since been sold.

See also: Ron Mueck’s “In Bed” (sculpture)

See also: various sequences from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

via MoMA | Century of the Child, ht @monkeyprime

Maily is being touted as “your kid’s first email.”

First impressions: while this video (and app) is all kinds of adorable, I don’t think that email is usually right for the 4-year-old group. For those of you who might think “but it’s just like getting them excited about regular mail!” remember that the regular mail only comes once a day.

That slot-machine behavior of checking email to see if new email has appeared is a real thing. It’s up to you to decide if your child can handle it, and if you think it’s something that needs teaching this early.

chriskelly:

This really just boils it all down.

(via dpstyles)