Linked List: May 22, 2008

Thursday, 22 May 2008

doesfollow.com 

New site from Damon Clinkscales, lets you check whether someone on Twitter is following someone else.

Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh on the Record Label Mentality 

From the A.V. Club’s interview with Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh:

I remember going to visit [Warner Bros. head] Mo Ostin about six to nine months after audio cassettes became a big deal. Before that, people were just buying vinyl, but then, audio cassettes were becoming the most sought-after item. People were not buying records anymore; they were buying these little audio cassettes. [The record label was] paying [us] less money for an audio cassette, but there were articles in all the papers about how much cheaper it was to make an audio cassette than it was to press vinyl. So I went in and had a meeting with Mo Ostin, who was the president of Warner Bros. Records, and said, “You know, Mo, I need to ask you something really important. Why is it that in our deal, you have it so you’re paying us substantially less money for every audio cassette that you sell than for every piece of vinyl, yet you make a bigger profit off every audio cassette?” He just smiled and looked at me like I was his dense, naive son. And he goes, “Because that’s the way it is.” That was his answer.

(Thanks to Henry Lincoln, who sent this in regarding this week’s bit about the record labels wanting to charge more for songs downloaded over 3G wireless networks than for songs downloaded over Wi-Fi.)

Twittering About Architecture 

Nice post from Twitter engineer Alex Payne:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that’s introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability.

Zero Punctuation: Mailbag Showdown 

If you’ve never watched Yahtzee Croshaw’s excellent Zero Punctuation video game review show before, this is a good time to start. Hilarious.