Linked List: December 28, 2013

Saturday, 28 December 2013

My thanks to Picturelife for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Picturelife backs up your photos to the cloud storage service and smartly organizes them. They have native app clients for Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android — and importers for Flickr and Instagram — and make it really easy to upload all your existing photos, along with new ones as you take them.

In short: all your photos, available from any place, on any device. They have advanced features like powerful search, de-duplication, iPhone and Aperture integration, and simple private sharing.

Plans start at just $5 a month. I’ve been looking for a replacement for Everpix, and Picturelife is it.

Chromebook Sales vs. Web Traffic Share ★

Gregg Keizer, reporting for Computerworld:

Chromebooks’ holiday success at Amazon was duplicated elsewhere during the year, according to the NPD Group, which tracked U.S. PC sales to commercial buyers such as businesses, schools, government and other organizations.

By NPD’s tallies, Chromebooks accounted for 21% of all U.S. commercial notebook sales in 2013 through November, and 10% of all computers and tablets. Both shares were up massively from 2012; last year, Chromebooks accounted for an almost-invisible two-tenths of one percent of all computer and tablet sales.

If these reports are right, we should soon see a corresponding surge in web traffic share for ChromeOS. But I’m having trouble finding a web traffic source that even counts Chrome OS as an entity. Wikimedia’s stats should be representative of the web at large, but they don’t count Chrome OS. (They also count Android as a Linux distribution, which humorously inflates the share for “Linux”.) NetMarketShare doesn’t count Chrome OS separately (perhaps they count it under “Linux”, which they peg at 1.56 percent), and neither does StatCounter. Chitika hasn’t reported on Chrome OS since March. If anyone can find a good source for Chrome OS web share, let me know.

(Daring Fireball’s stats are clearly not representative of the general public, and surely vastly under-represent Chrome OS, but for what it’s worth, Google Analytics puts Chrome OS at 0.08 percent of visits in the last 30 days. Also worth noting: iOS nipped past Mac OS X for the first time that I’ve noticed, 41.62 to 41.10 percent.)

Update: StatCounter does have data for Chrome OS.

‘A Christmas Present or Two or Ten’ ★

Fascinating bit from the Conan O’Brien show. Makes me wonder just how prevalent these canned segments are.

Om Malik on Christopher Mims’s ‘Lost Year’ ★

Om Malik:

But to label 2013 a lost year for technology is hyperbolic, to put it generously. What’s more distressing to me is that other smart folks are simply echoing the headline. I look at the world around me, and I find a technology landscape that is blooming. How can you not be excited about the idea of sensors, apps and data turning our phones into a doctor’s virtual proxy. (I live with a disease and my phone is as much a part of it, as my meds.) Helium-filled disk drives that can store more and more data? Breakthrough or boring. Depends on how you look at the world — as someone who loves technology or someone who loves the shiny interpretation of technology.

Great piece, from one of my favorite writers who cover tech.

Dave Winer’s Blogger of the Year: Nick Bilton ★

Dave Winer:

Nick Bilton decided that it was time to ask a question that the FAA didn’t want to deal with, or had no way to deal with, or couldn’t deal with for some reason. Political organizations often get stuck. The individuals inside may know it’s time to act, but they can’t pull it together.

Bilton asked a simple question that all of us who fly have asked. Would the plane crash if I kept reading a book on my iPad while the plane takes off? If not, why do I have to turn it off?