Linked List: May 9, 2009

Saturday, 9 May 2009

‘Tumbularity’ 

Adam Lisagor on Tumblr’s new “Tumblarity” metric (which, Lisagor points out, would sound a lot better and have a more natural adjectival form if they’d called it “tumbularity”; i.e. tumbular rather than the god-awful tumblarious). Anyway, I like this bit of analysis:

I haven’t a clue what my Tumblariety score means. Thus, it’s not much of a score, which makes it not much of a game. I stay away from games that I don’t understand. Granted, I’m dense, so this rules out Monopoly, the stock market, World of Warcraft, and dating, but I can’t see myself getting much into a game I feel a near-complete lack of control over.

I too prefer games with very clearly defined simple scoring rules.

Jumsoft 

My thanks to Jumsoft for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Jumsoft offers a wide array of products including Mac OS X apps (for accounting, CRM, project management and more) and templates and themes for Apple apps such as Keynote, Pages, iWeb, and Apple Mail — everything designed with style and attention to detail.

Daring Fireball readers can save 20 percent on all Jumsoft products with the coupon code “DARINGFIREBALL”.

Exploded 128 

Neat new t-shirt by Garry Booth: a detailed rendering of the internals of the original Macintosh.

Jim Goldman Calls on Eric Schmidt to Leave Apple’s Board 

Jim Goldman:

But Apple shareholders deserve engaged board members singularly focused on the company’s business at hand. Schmidt himself now admits he recuses himself from iPhone discussions. Soon, he’ll have to do the same with Mac discussions when Android gets loaded into netbooks. The same might happen with Levinson. Brilliant guys both, but Apple investors deserve — and should expect — board members to serve their board full time, not part time.

None of Apple’s board members, other than Steve Jobs, work full-time for Apple. Goldman knows that. Board members don’t work on products or even product ideas. Goldman knows that, too.

So I just don’t get it. Seems to me that this board has represented shareholder interests well, and that Apple’s alliances with Google are in its interest.

The DOJ Looks Into Whether Google Is a Monopoly  

CNN Money:

As James Stewart wrote in The Wall Street Journal this week: “Google’s continued gains in market share bear out my contention that Google is that rare breed: the natural monopoly. By natural, I also mean lawful, since the monopoly derives from Google’s skill and qualities inherent in the business, not from anticompetitive behavior.”

Adds Stewart: “I sometimes get the sense that antitrust regulators, in their single-minded zeal to promote competition, ignore the fact that monopolies, in and of themselves, aren’t illegal, or even necessarily bad.”

I don’t think there’s any question that Google has a monopoly on search. But I don’t see how they’ve abused their success in anti-competitive ways. And they certainly don’t have a monopoly on advertising, which is what they’re actually selling.