Nice post Comparing iPhone Twitter app timeline views, should you be concerned with such things. Interesting to see the differences and similarities though.
The Next Web points out that The new Myspace is now open to the public. Now the big question is “will anyone care?”
Just saw that the very cool Apple news (and other stuff) site The Brooks Review has set up A New TBR Business Model via Shawn Blanc:
My pal @BenjaminBrooks removed the ads on his site and set up a membership and a paywall. Gutsy. brooksreview.net/2012/07/new-tb…
— Shawn Blanc (@shawnblanc) July 11, 2012
“Gutsy” is one word for it. I’d go with “ballsy” and “I can’t wait to see how it goes”. The blog post goes into the details of it, but in short he took out all the ads and set up a $4/month membership. You pay, he writes. About as simple as you can get.
This will be (I think) a touchstone of what online published could become. It could be a complete failure, or it could work fantastically. A great episode of Build and Analyze a few weeks ago, and then reiterated on last week’s show basically put it out there that your (the viewer’s) eyeballs are more valuable to advertisers than they are to readers.
IE: If you are willing to pay $x for a “product” (website, online service, etc), an advertising agency will pay the website or online service owner more than $x because as an eyeball to put ads in front of, you have more potential value than that. I’ve phrased it poorly but hopefully you get the picture.
I have no idea what a “real” advertiser will pay for a moderately popular site to run an ad or RSS feed ad, but I’m fascinated to see what happens, and I really hope that @BenjaminBrooks follows up in a couple of weeks to let us know how it goes.
Twitter Promoted Products are now more mobile, meaning (yay :( ) you get ads in your twitter feed on mobile as well as on the website.
It has been nearly two years since we introduced Promoted Tweets, the first in our suite of Promoted Products. In that time, people around the world have increasingly accessed Twitter from a mobile device. Today, we are taking an important next step in making our Promoted Products available to those users.
Oh joy. They aren’t even trying to pretend this is a good thing, or spin it to even seem like users are going to want this.
Have the "new new" Facebook timeline but don't have the photo chops to put up a super-awesome cover image? DB is giving away a few Free Facebook Cover Images to get you started with an epic cover image for your facebook timeline.
Benwerd has thoughts on the new Facebook Timeline feature: The Facebook Timeline is the nearest thing I've seen to a digital identity (and it's creepy as hell).
I have to agree with Jeff Jarvis on the last This Week in Google (link) as to the "what is 'creepy'?" question, but that's another thing. If you're interested you can turn on the facebook timeline right now. Note that if you do turn it on it looks like it replaces (or at least augments) your profile page with the timeline (or something like that).
Ironic that a site with an article 20 Reasons Why Your Website Design Sucks is the same site that pops up one of the "web 2.0 popups" (overlay asking if you want to sign up for a newsletter or some crap). Factor that in when you read the article. Via Forgetfoo.
Similar to Seesmic before them, the Tweetdeck guys have introduced Introduced TweetDeck Web Beta, a webapp version of tweetdeck that doesn't depend on Adobe AIR for it's install. You can sign up with your tweetdeck account for the Beta, but you have to wait until you're chosen to actually participate.
Personally I found the Seesmic webapp the least compelling of their product offerings for some reason, however these days things are going more and more towards webapps so I have high hopes for tweetdeck.
If you're an EMACS user and are sad that only Textmate and Vim people seem to have the fun and cool Rails development stuff, be sad no longer! Emacs 24 Rails Development Environment - From *scratch* to Productive in 5 Minutes goes through setting up the latest EMACS (with a bunch of copy and pasting) to customizing for full Ruby on Rails lovin'!
Flock is firing back against the new guy RockMelt with the release of Flock 3.5. It updates the base software to Chromium 7 and offers various other tweaks.
Here are another couple of links with talk about the new 3.5 upgrade.
The twitter blog announces that now #100% of users have access to the so called "newtwitter", the (IMHO) excellent new web interface for Twitter.com.
If you've ever done any Ruby on Rails programming you have no doubt encountered @mhartl's great railstutorial.org. You'll be happy to know that there is now a set of 15 hours of screencasts to go along with it. Super awesome, and nice and affordable as well.
Cool news for the stalker and voyeur in you Canadian brethren... Facebook Places Now Live in Canada.
The source code for Facebook Competitor Diaspora is out, pre-alpha state, but out and available. Thing is I'm not sure how much this is still needed. Facebook solved (well, in theory) a lot of the security issues that had this project starting in the first place, and while I 100% agree that an alternative is needed, FB no longer being (as) evil means that it's going to be that much harder for Diaspora (which needs a better name) to gain traction.
Here's the developer blog post on the Diaspora site.
My buddy @milesforrest pointed me over to Hipmunk, which just launched, and has a very cool and slick web-2.0 take on flight search sites. Note in particular the sort by "Agony" on the results page.
Via: This tweet originally.
Cool writeup on Designing the new Campaign Monitor iOS icons. Good info for people wanting to deal with i[Phone|Pad] apps and icons.
iPhone CSS3 is a very cool example of a) how a talented person can use CSS to "draw" b) how specific CSS can be (ie: this only works on a webkit based browser, so Safari, Chrome, etc, even iPhone's browser looks great, but IE (duh) and strangely, firefox show a fairly crappy rendition. Make sure you hit the blog entry to read more about it.
Woopra (the new hotness in web analytics) has introduced Woopra Web Analytics. You get (and this is a shock) the analytics on a webpage, instead of their desktop app. Congrats to Woopra!
Kevin Rose has the Digg v4 Preview up on his site. I think the video's been floating around a bit already, so it's nice to see it. I'm not sure I like it though, even ignoring the Digg is Deadd article a couple of days ago. The focus on friends makes it feel like YAPTHASGAF (Yet Another Place To Have A Social Graph And Friends) along with twitter, facebook 4square, gowalla, etc etc etc. Still, looking forward to new and shiny things.
The slideshow viewing site Scribd will be switching to HTML5 away from flash. Sounds good to me, the less flash the better, not cause I don't like flash, but I do like seeing new innovations and standards adoption.
Twitter has released an official Android client. The screenshots look pretty nice, but since Google hasn't gotten around to sending me that evaluation unit, I can't give you a hands-on review :)
Well, on the heels of the Github downtime last night, and perhaps related (* twirls mustache*), Rails 3.0 beta has been committed.
There's also a new app on edge rails post up for people who want to give it a shot.
Great article I found via twitter about Software on the Cheap and just why you should be paying your programmers more, and not less, and why that six figure salary will (probably, assuming they are good of course) be completely worth it compared to getting uncle bob's nephew who took some classes sometime.
Via Lifehacker comes a Beta for the Silverlight Client for Facebook, which is a desktop facebook client with a look similar to Seesmic Look, but darker and moodier. Looks awesome.
Note that you need to install the SilverLight 4.0 beta to have the client work.
Today Seesmic released Seesmic Look into their arsenal. This is a new style of app to immerse yourself in the twitterverse. Hit their features page for more details. Basically it gives you a more "floaty" view of your subscriptions, lists, things like trends, and other categories of items.
Looks very nice, though a bit slow, on Windows XP. Not unsurprising as it's optimized for the Aero experience in Windows 7, but doesn't allow some standard things like right click to copy a link. Ah well, a neat new view of twitter for sure. Wonder if this will make it's way into an iPhone (or other mobile) app. There was one for the iPhone that used a 3D paradigm, which was ok, but didn't catch on that well.
Announcement blog post as well.
If you're looking for the "next gen" video experience (read: not using flash) and use Youtube, you can hit the YouTube HTML5 page to add your account to the trial. Note that not many browsers are modern and awesome enough to support HTML5 properly, so you are currently limited to what you can use:
Right now we support browsers that support both the
Sadly a few restrictions are in place, mostly that if the video has ads in it (more and more these days :( ) it'll play in the flash player, and no fullscreen. However, I expect the option to get better and better as time goes on. It's also not perfect. For example the volume control seems a bit touch in terms of allowing you to adjust it while the video is playing.
If you're a Google Chrome user you can also check out the Youtube HTML5-ifier extension to do something similar.
How's this for inventiveness? Instead of letting the lack of flash on the iPhone stop them, an Open Source implementation of Flash in Javascript has been created. Details over at 9 to 5 Mac:
Even if Apple never lets a Flash plugin within 50 yards of an iPhone, you may yet be able to enjoy the richness of those blinking banner ads. Gordon (Get it? Like Flash Gordon?) is an open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript.
Nifty little HTML/JS/CSS magic hack to create an Online HTML5 Editor where what you type in is rendered in real time.
The Web Census Research Project sounds interesting, a "map" of all possible IP addresses and if they have a webserver sitting on port 80.
Follow Christmas Tweets of the year to see what people are saying about #christmas. Cool site for sure.
Laughing Squid has a link to The Evolution of the Hipster 2000-2009. Wow, I never thought that "hipster" was anything other than a fake style and word. Apparently it's not just used to describe one of those mac-lovers!
Interesting post from Leo (of the world famous TWiT network) posts that he is changing how he is paid. An excerpt:
Up to now I've been taking my pay from TWiT's general fund (along with all the other employees). Not any more. From now on you'll pay me directly with your contributions. I won't take a penny out of the operating funds.Think of your contributions as a tip jar.
Definitely an interesting move which ups my respect for Leo as well. Many thanks to West Coast Geek for the pointer.
Pretty amazing HTML only particle system called Parcycle. A bit slow on my dual core system, still amazing to see though.
As usual, IE users need not apply until their browser supports HTML5 and standards....
With the new twitter features coming out lately, a new retweet and geolocation setup, twitter clients are starting to update. Tweetdeck is no exception, with a slick new 0.32 update that brings both of those, plus LinkedIn support and various other nice bits.
At PDC this year Microsoft revealed an early look at IE9, what it's targeting, and what the plans are to come. The theory is that IE9 will ship sometime next year, possibly corresponding with Windows 7 SP1.
Here are a couple of links about it first.
Basically Microsoft is going to concentrate on web standards, javascript engine speed, and most interesting, rendering using the computers GPU instead of CPU to speed up rendering.
I'm glad they're finally going to concentrate on web standards as well. Please don't give me the "but HTML5 and CSS3 aren't finished standards and Microsoft will support them when they're ratified" argument. The other major browsers out there support these, get 100% on the ACID 3 test (well, Firefox actually only gets 93/100, still a far sight above the 33/100 that IE8 gets), and when people are writing web apps and cool tech with these standards in mind, IE users get left out in the cold, which isn't good for anyone.
Here's my main complaint with IE. Other than the security issue's it's had in the past, the UI is too slow. Not the rendering speed mind you, the UI. IE's rendering speed is, within reason, completely irrelevant. A 10th of a second difference in rendering msn.com (ugh, what a horrible page by the way), or apple.com or whatever, hell, a 5 second difference really doesn't matter all that much. But when it takes me the count of five to open a new tab in the last updated version of IE on my dual core Windows 7 system, compared to almost instantly in Chrome or Firefox, that's where the failure is. I wish I knew what it was, it's not that silly "automatically detect proxy settings" setting, but it's consistant across the different computers I use.
I think that if Microsoft has the resources to do magic stuff like rendering webpages in the Graphics Processing Unit of my computer, they sure as hell should be able to make the "new tab" function happen in a second or less.
I think that even the IE apologists will acknowledge that some of the UI in IE is sub-optimal compared to other browsers out there. Even if the rendering engines and security were apples-to-apples the same, the responsiveness of Google Chrome and Firefox win out.
Scoble does a great interview with the guys from Seesmic on the perfect Facebook and Twitter client. Very interesting, cool to see @loic and the team.
Cool article on how to Successfully Launch a Web Design Startup with Social Media and No Budget. Including what's needed, social media, etc. Via @johnkoetsier.
Mockingbird is a cool new online tool for mocking up websites. Even better, it's written in pure HTML/JS, no flash to be found. Very sexy tool!
In a thrilling video, @sockington celebrates his one millionth follower. A cat. Who posts things like "A MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR WHAT OF YOURS I JUST BROKE ACCIDENTALLY what oh nothing". Has (as of 4pm thursday the 27th of August in the year of our lord 2009) 1,082,191 people and spam bots watching his posts. Holy crap.
That said, I'm intruiged by this cat and his tweets and videos, and pissed off (still) that I didn't think of it first.