Linked List: July 12, 2012

Thursday, 12 July 2012

The Real History of the @reply on Twitter ★

Nice bit of Twitter history from Garrett Murray. It’s quite interesting how many Twitter conventions sprang from users, not Twitter itself.

Digg Still Exists? ★

Joseph Walker and Spencer E. Ante, reporting for the WSJ:

Digg Inc., a social-media pioneer once valued at more than $160 million, is selling for the deeply discounted price of about $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said. […]

Digg confirmed Thursday it sold its brand, website and technology to Betaworks. The price is a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including Facebook investor Greylock Partners, LinkedIn Inc. founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

The good news is, that’s like $1000 per active user.

Microsoft: ‘In Our View, Apple Has It Wrong!’ ★

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge:

Microsoft’s chief operating officer, Kevin Turner, took to the stage at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference earlier today to stir up the crowd and discuss Apple’s idea of a post-PC era. “Apple makes great hardware,” admitted Turner, “the reality is in the OS we see things differently.” Turner went on to discuss the company’s upcoming Mountain Lion operating system and some mixed press reaction to the future of OS X. “We believe that Apple has it wrong,” says turner. “They’ve talked about it being the post-PC era, they talk about the tablet and PC being different, the reality in our world is that we think that’s completely incorrect.”

Turner then went on to describe this new era as a “PC+” period, one that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates predicted back in 1999. “We actually believe Windows 8 is the new era for the PC plus,” says Turner. “We believe with a single push of a button you can move seamlessly in and out of both worlds. We believe you can have touch, a pen, a mouse, and a keyboard.”

Apple’s post-PC vision isn’t about input devices — mice, keyboards, pens, whatever. It’s about exposed complexity. Tim Carmody argues in a follow-up at The Verge that Apple’s “post-PC” and Microsoft’s “PC-plus” aren’t that far apart. I think that remains to be seen. With the iPad, Apple has eliminated large amounts of complexity. With Windows 8, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft has eliminated complexity, or merely hidden it behind a Metro veneer.

I think the Steve Jobs quote Microsoft should be focused upon far predates this post-PC stuff. Go back to 1997:

“We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose,” Jobs said. “We have to embrace the notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. If others are going to help us, that’s great. Because we need all the help we can get. […] The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over.”

Swap “Apple” and “Microsoft” and that’s the advice Microsoft needs today.

Amazon Same-Day Delivery ★

Great piece by Farhad Manjoo for Slate:

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly this move will shake up the retail industry. Same-day delivery has long been the holy grail of Internet retailers, something that dozens of startups have tried and failed to accomplish. (Remember Kozmo.com?) But Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed.

Yahoo Confirms, Apologizes for Massive Email Account and Password Leak ★

Ingrid Lunden, writing for AOL/TechCrunch:

There are still a lot of questions about this alleged Yahoo Voices data breach — including whether there was a reason behind the breach in the first place — but Yahoo has now officially confirmed that the data did in fact come from its servers, and that “approximately” 400,000 email addresses and passwords have been leaked in plain text online.

Here is some interesting analysis of the leaked passwords. 117 people had passwords that were only one character long. How is that even possible?

All PC Makers Sales Drop Dramatically in the U.S., Except Apple ★

Jim Dalrymple on the latest PC market share numbers from Gartner:

Note that the numbers include “desk-based PCs and mobile PCs, including mini-notebooks but not media tablets such as the iPad.” So they included everything that would make the PC companies look as good as possible. Imagine if they included the iPad in Apple’s numbers.

Classic disruption: the old guard doesn’t even acknowledge the upstart.