Linked List: July 14, 2011

Thursday, 14 July 2011

Remember back in January, when Eudora-creator Steve Dorner announced he’d been diagnosed with cancer? Good news:

I had another PET CT on Monday, and received the results today. The remaining lump is no longer hypermetabolically active and is probably just scar tissue.

There will be another PET CT in three months to reconfirm, but it looks like I’m in remission.

Josh Topolsky Interviews HP’s Stephen DeWitt and Jon Rubinstein on WebOS, the Death of Palm, and Partnering With Amazon ★

I tried reading this and couldn’t get past the bureaucratic-ese. Seems like wheel-spinning.

Update: Scroll about halfway through and it does get a little juicier. To be clear, I think Topolsky asked good questions throughout; it’s the long non-answers from DeWitt and Rubinstein that got to me. The back-and-forth between Topolsky and Rubinstein on the upcoming TouchPad 4G, and why in the world it would have a faster processor than the just-released regular TouchPad, is worth it.

‘Over-Aggregation’ ★

Unrest at the Huffington Post.

The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer ★

Craig Hockenberry:

The scary part is that these infringements can happen with any part of our products or websites: things that you’d never imagine being a violation of someone else’s intellectual property. It feels like coding in a mine field.

From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees. After years of pouring your heart and soul into that product, it’s devastating. It makes you question why the hell you’re in the business: when you can’t pay salaries from product sales, there’s no point in building it in the first place.

In a nut, the App Store is so popular that it’s attracting sharks, and the sharks are making it too expensive for indies.

Paraphrasing/Rewriting vs. Aggregation ★

Simon Dumenco wrote this column for AdAge last month about the Twitter trending popularity of Apple’s WWDC announcements vs. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s weenie-pic scandal. It got picked up by Techmeme, and then by the Huffington Post:

HuffPo’s aggregation, titled “Anthony Weiner vs. Steve Jobs: Who Won On Twitter?”, consisted of basically a short but thorough paraphrasing/rewriting of the Ad Age post — using the same set-up (i.e., pointing out that Apple had the misfortune of presenting its latest round of big announcements on the same day Weiner resigned from Congress) and the bulk of the data presented in the original Ad Age piece. HuffPo closed out its post with “See more stats from Ad Age here” — a disingenuous link, because HuffPo had already cherrypicked all the essential content. HuffPo clearly wanted readers to stay on its site instead of clicking through to AdAge.com.

So what does Google Analytics for AdAge.com tell us? Techmeme drove 746 page views to our original item. HuffPo — which of course is vastly bigger than Techmeme — drove 57 page views.

As Gabe Rivera (the guy behind Techmeme) argues here, Dumenco has an interesting comparison here, and his main point is absolutely spot on: there is no ancillary benefit to having a massive site like Huffington Post rewrite your story, even if they include a link, because almost none of their readers click such links. They’re stealing attention.

But Dumenco shouldn’t be calling what The Huffington Post did (and does, all day, every day) “aggregation”. Paraphrasing/rewriting is not aggregation.

MG Siegler on the Competitive Implications of Amazon’s Purported Upcoming Tablet ★

He sees it as much more of a threat to Google than to Apple:

That’s why Google should be scared shitless of this Amazon tablet. Thanks to the “openness” of Android, Google has handed Amazon the keys to the Android kingdom. Amazon is going to launch a tablet that runs Android, but it will be fully Amazon’d. It will use Amazon’s Appstore, it will use Amazon movies, it will use Amazon books, it will use Amazon music, etc. Google will have no control over this, even though it will be the seminal Android tablet. That would be terrifying for any brand.

I’ve heard talk about Amazon’s Android skunkworks project for over a year. The gist of the whispers I’ve heard is that they’re not planning to use a stock version of Android, but instead they’ve more or less forked the OS, using Google’s Android as a foundation for Amazon’s tablet OS. Presumably, the Amazon Appstore is a sign that Amazon’s Android OS will be app-compatible with Android as we know it, but I don’t expect much if any Google branding or apps.

Barnes and Noble has already done the same thing with the Nook, but I suspect Amazon has something more ambitious in the works.