Linked List: February 15, 2011

Tuesday, 15 February 2011

Lendle — Kindle Book-Sharing Service ★

Lendle is a new service that lets you share books with other Kindle users:

If a fellow Lendler requests a book you own, you’ll get a notification asking if you want to lend it. When you lend a book, the borrower will have it for 14 days, and then it will be automatically returned to your Kindle.

Irina Werning’s Back to the Future Project ★

Irina Werning:

I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future.

Amazing. (Via ISO50.)

Jean-Louis Gassée on Apple’s New Subscription Rules ★

Jean-Louis Gassée tweets:

Apple’s new rules rile. But not me: I’m the paying customer and I resent the old model. The new rules are customer-centric.

Like, for example, with data sharing. Apple won’t share your personal information to publishers without your permission. Publishers want unfettered access to that information because they want to sell it, because that’s what they’ve been doing with subscriber information for decades.

Brilliant, Brazen, or Batshit Crazy? ★

MG Siegler on Apple’s new subscription rules:

He might as well be saying: “Everyone take a deep breath — here’s why this makes sense.” And there’s no question that it does make sense — for Apple. But a lot of third-party developers both large and small are going to be very, very pissed off by this move. Why? Because it totally changes the game. Companies with subscription elements of their content had been accustomed to leveraging Apple’s platform for free. Now there will be a fee. And it will be a significant fee.

You’ll seldom go wrong betting on Apple doing something that’s good for Apple and good for its users — no matter what the ramifications for everyone else.

Hands-On Report on MeeGo Netbooks and Tablets ★

Sascha Segan:

The worst product I’ve seen so far at Mobile World Congress is Intel’s MeeGo OS running on a netbook. What’s even worse than trying it is knowing that it’s going on sale in the US.

I think you can make the case that this Windows Phone deal — though a bad deal for Nokia overall — was still the best choice they could make at this point. That’s how bad a position they’re in.

Nokia Plan B: An Open Letter to Nokia Shareholders and Institutional Investors ★

The assumption underlying this vigorous dissent is that MeeGo is on track to be a viable competitor — soon. I think that’s a bad assumption. That said, these guys are right about how this deal reduces Nokia to an OEM with no control over their primary software platform:

5. Avoid at all cost becoming a poorly differentiated OEM with only low margin, commodity products that is unable to attract top software talent and cannot create shareholder value though innovation.

Nokia’s between a rock and a hard place.

Update: Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a serious shareholder revolt. The criticism of Nokia’s position is apt, though.

Apple Launches Subscriptions on the App Store ★

Apple:

“Our philosophy is simple — when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app.”