Linked List: August 2, 2011

Tuesday, 2 August 2011

Push Pop Press Acquired by Facebook; Abandons Planned Publishing Platform ★

This has nothing to do with Push Pop’s products, and everything to do with Facebook building a roster of design talent to rival Apple’s. Mike Matas is responsible for and/or had a major hand in much of Apple’s best and most exuberant design work in recent memory.

This is big. Shows that Facebook — and Mark Zuckerberg in particular — is committing to design as a top priority. And it’s more than a little disappointing to those of us who were highly anticipating Push Pop Press’s publishing tools and platform.

The big question: who else is on Zuckerberg’s list? I know who I’d want.

Define ‘Winning’ ★

Timothy B. Lee at Forbes, “Why Google Is Winning the Smartphone Wars”:

This explains why iOS has been losing ground to Android even though most people agree that the iPhone is the best single smartphone on the market. There are tens of millions of people who care most about the narrow end of the funnel. They want the best user interface, and are willing to make compromises on other fronts to get it. Most of these customers will opt for an iPhone. But there are hundreds of millions of customers who care more about some other factor. They want a phone from their favorite carrier, a phone with a physical keyboard or a removable battery, a phone with their choice of app store, a phone they can get for free with a contract, a phone they can get with a pre-paid plan, etc. No single phone (wireless carrier, hardware manufacturer, etc) can satisfy all of these diverse customers. Only a platform designed to support many different phones from many different manufacturers on many different networks can cope with this kind of diversity.

Horace Dediu, last week: “Apple Captured Two Thirds of Available Mobile Phone Profits in Q2”.

Nosh: 404 ★

Now that’s a 404 page.

Android Development From the Perspective of an iPhone Developer ★

Interesting post on Android development by Nick Farina, one of the developers of Meridian.

Amazon Free App of the Day ★

Somebody isn’t happy:

That’s right, Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of our app! At this point, we had a few seconds of excitement as well, had we mis-read the email and really earned $54,800 in one day? We would have done if our public agreement was in place, but we can now confirm that thanks to Amazon’s secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day. That’s right, over 100,000 apps given away, $0 made.