Linked List: June 5, 2012

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

Would be interesting to see how this compares to the same search, say, five years ago.

Airtime 

Ben Popper, writing for The Verge:

Airtime is a browser based video chat service, like Chatroulette, that lets you seamlessly talk with friends and people who share your interests, but unlike Chatroulette, uses Facebook Connect to ensure people’s real identities and hopefully keep their pants on.

I love how the screenshot of Airtime in actual use shows two guys whose Facebook Connect real identities are “Anonymous” and “Anonymous”.

Over at BuzzFeed, Matt Buchanan writes the best sentence of the day:

Airtime periodically snaps screenshots of users to make sure the thing talking isn’t a penis.

WSJ: ‘Apple and Google Expand Battle to Mobile Map Apps’ 

Jessica Vascellaro and Amir Efrati, reporting for the WSJ:

Apple has fought back, invading Google’s advertising turf by selling mobile ads. And last year it unveiled its new weapon against Google’s search business, the voice-activated “virtual assistant” named Siri that gives people a new way to search for information from the iPhone.

Some Google executives privately say they think Apple is trying to wean iPhone users away from using traditional Web search on its phones.

“Privately”? There’s nothing private or secretive about it. Just watch one of Apple’s Siri TV ads. And it wouldn’t be a story about Google without something like this:

On Halloween in 2006 — just months before the iPhone was announced — Apple’s product-marketing head, Phil Schiller, and other executives met with Google engineers to determine how the iPhone could use Google’s mapping data to let people see their locations and get directions. At the meeting, one Google employee attended wearing a nun costume.

Pre to Postmortem: The Inside Story of the Death of Palm and WebOS 

Epic must-read reporting by Chris Ziegler for The Verge:

Thirty-one.

That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract. […]

The following is an account of Palm’s ascent prior to the launch of the Pre, the subsequent decline, and eventual end, assembled through interviews with a number of current and former employees.

Steve Jobs on the File System 

Nice catch by Ole Begemann — Steve Jobs pretty much describing the basic idea for iOS in 2005.

The Mechanics and Meaning of the Dial-Up Modem Sound 

Alexis Madrigal:

What you’re hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you’re hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.

If you’re of a certain age, the sound of a dial-up modem initiating a connection will forever trigger a Pavlovian response.

Ping: What Went Wrong 

Chris Breen, writing for Macworld:

While I could let Ping go quietly into the night, Apple provides us with so few failures that it’s impossible to pass up the opportunity to give Ping’s corpse a poke or two to determine what led to its demise. And, fortunately, it doesn’t take a forensic genius to sleuth that out.

Idlewild 

New from H&FJ:

For the longest time, we’ve been reaching for a typeface that wasn’t there. We knew it was something spare and tranquil, its letterforms reaching ambitiously outward, and we could hear it speaking in hushed but captivating tones. We imagined it as industrious, combining space-age optimism with the confidence and composure of a master craftsman. We could see the typeface among the realm of satisfying things, objects designed not merely to be used but to be enjoyed: a well-balanced knife, a performance engine; the tool that fits the hand just so.

And… now I have another font crush.

Blind Tennis 

Speaking of blind people doing cool things.