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Linked List: March 15, 2007

Thursday, 15 March 2007

From Late Night With Conan O’Brien. (Thanks to Aristotle Pagaltzis.)

Andy Baio measures Twitter’s growth in terms of messages posted — cleverly deriving them from the post numbers of Evan Williams’s own history:

I decided to find out by using Twitter’s founder Evan Williams himself, albeit indirectly. Since Ev’s Twitter history goes from message #28 in March 2006 to #8,281,991 about three hours ago, it’s a convenient snapshot of Twitter’s growth since it began.

My only quibble with Andy’s charts is that they make it look like Twitter didn’t take off at all until November. March–October 2006 are nearly flat in these graphs, but that’s only in comparison to the huge numbers that have come since November. Here’s a graph I whipped up showing only the growth from March through October 2006.

The lesson here is that even with a good idea and an experienced team, overnight success doesn’t happen overnight.

Mat Balez Foolishly Predicts the Demise of Twitter ★

Mat Balez:

I make no bones about my disdain for Twitter. I’ve commented far and wide about the inanity and potential danger of the tool, and even discussed some of the associated social repercussions on this blog. But I’d like to now go one step further, and predict its imminent supernova-like implosion.

I’ll take that bet. I say Twitter traffic (measured in posts) will be notably higher one year from now. Perhaps staggeringly so.

Regarding The New French Law on Recording Violence ★

Apparently it is not an outright ban on citizen journalists recording violent acts:

The law aims at fighting “happy slapping” only (filming orchestrated violence and sharing the images on the web, the intention being to harm the victim) […]

(Thanks to Paul Mison for the link.)

Wired.com Redesign ★

Too plain, too disorganized.

‘Yahoo Betrayed My Husband’ ★

Wired profile of Yu Ling:

Yu’s husband is now in Beijing Prison No. 2, serving a 10-year sentence for inciting subversion with his pro-democracy internet writings. According to the written court verdict, the Chinese government convicted Wang, in part, on evidence provided by Yahoo.

(Couldn’t they have taken a better picture of her, though?)

The Right to Criticize Programming Languages ★

Tomasz Węgrzanowski:

There are words that I’ve heard many years ago, which really affected my thinking about discussions and criticism. I cannot recall them exactly, but they went something along the lines of:

You have no right to criticize a programming language, unless you are able to point three things in which it excels compared to your favourite language.

Great little essay overall, but my favorite part was watching him struggle to say something nice about C++.

(Via Wolf Rentzsch.)

The Amazing Hivelogic T-Shirt ★

Swell design and good timing — I need some more t-shirts. (Do not mention this to my wife.)

Regarding HP’s Mac Drivers ★

Dave Nanian:

So, imagine my surprise when — after a recent Mac purchase at the Apple Store — I decided to get a “free” HP C6180 all-in-one printer and… hey! It’s been de-suckified!

The thing is well designed, has good drivers, built-in networking, even scans and faxes over the network — pushing or pulling to multiple “associated” Macs, it’s not perfect but what the hell? It’s like someone is writing these drivers who actually uses a Mac!

UIScape ★

New weblog about interactive design and research.

Mac OS X 10.4.9 Includes an Updated Version of ‘sudo’ ★

They’ve updated the warning before the password prompt. Here’s the previous warning for comparison. (Thanks to DF reader Joachim Bengtsson.)

Web Typography Sucks ★

Slides and notes from Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton’s presentation at SXSW 2007.

Using TextWrangler to Browse and Modify Aperture Libraries ★

Same tips apply to BBEdit, of course.