Linked List: February 20, 2014

Thursday, 20 February 2014

Cuteness Where You Least Expect It 

John Teti, writing for The AV Club, on the design of Threes’s tutorial:

It takes confidence to soft-pedal the actual tutorial content. Too many mainstream game studios build their opening tutorials to leave no possibility of misunderstanding — they browbeat you out of fear that you won’t get it. Vollmer and Wohlwend instead designed the beginning of Threes in a way that encourages organic understanding. The game assumes that there’s a reasonably intelligent and playful person on the other end of the line.

Matt Taibbi Bids Adieu to Rolling Stone 

Sign of the times: Matt Taibbi is leaving Rolling Stone to start a new publication for First Look Media. Big loss for Rolling Stone.

Chitika Reports on Chrome OS Web Traffic Share (Spoiler: It’s Minuscule) 

New Chitika report pegs Chrome OS’s share of North American web traffic at 0.2 percent.

See previously: here and here.

J2ME and WhatsApp 

TextIt, “Your Path to a $16B Exit? Build a J2ME App”:

That was the genius of WhatsApp really, they recognized that messaging apps are all about network effects and instead of focusing on the comparatively small market of the ‘developed world’, instead targeted the other 3 billion people who don’t have smartphones. And at that they have been supremely successful.

If you are anywhere apart from the States, WhatsApp is the de facto standard for messaging. Here in Rwanda, it has far more penetration than Facebook, it is used by literally everybody who has a capable device. That came about not by having some edgy new user interface, or by a gimmick around disappearing messages, but by providing real value, value that can be measured in the pocketbook of a market that is massively under served.

So the next time you are thinking about “putting a dent in the universe”, maybe you should look a bit farther, and maybe, just maybe you should start with a J2ME app.

I think they’re right that building apps for all phones is what got WhatsApp to 450 million users and the attention of Zuckerberg. I don’t think the lesson holds for any other sort of app. It was an opportunity unique to messaging.

(And WhatsApp didn’t start with a J2ME app — they started with an iPhone app.)

Vintage iPhone Claim Chowder 

Bill Ray, writing for The Register in late December 2006:

Apple will launch a mobile phone in January, and it will become available during 2007. It will be a lovely bit of kit, a pleasure to behold, and its limited functionality will be easy to access and use.

The Apple phone will be exclusive to one of the major networks in each territory and some customers will switch networks just to get it, but not as many as had been hoped.

As customers start to realise that the competition offers better functionality at a lower price, by negotiating a better subsidy, sales will stagnate. After a year a new version will be launched, but it will lack the innovation of the first and quickly vanish.

Oftentimes pundits can accurately predict almost exactly what Apple will do, but are incredibly wrong about how customers will react to it. By December 2006, there were very strong signs that an Apple mobile phone was imminent, and Ray got it almost exactly right: exquisite design, exclusive to one carrier.

The rest, not so much.

Mapping Ukraine’s Crisis 

Max Fisher, writing for The Washington Post:

Ukraine’s ethno-linguistic political division is sort of like the United States’ “red America” and “blue America” divide, but in many ways much deeper — imagine if red and blue America literally spoke different languages. The current political conflict, which at its most basic level is over whether the country will lean toward Europe or toward Russia, is part of a long-running and unresolved national identity crisis. Yes, it’s also about Yanukovych’s failures to fix the economy and his draconian restrictions against basic freedoms. But there’s so much more to it than that, which helps make the crisis so intractable.

Benedict Evans on WhatsApp 

Benedict Evans:

Second, the winner-takes-all dynamics of social on the desktop web do not appear to apply on mobile, and if there are winner-takes-all dynamics for mobile social it’s not yet clear what they are. There are four main aspects to this:

  • Smartphone apps can access your address book, bypassing the need to rebuild your social graph on a new service
  • They can access your photo library, where uploading photos to different websites is a pain
  • They can use push notifications instead of relying on emails and on people bothering to check multiple websites
  • Crucially, they all get an icon on the home screen.

Any smartphone app is just two taps away - a desktop site can crush a new competitor by adding it as a feature with a new menubar icon but on mobile there isn’t room to do that. Mobile tends to favor single-purpose, specialized apps.

On the second point, it’s not just that mobile apps have access to your photo library, it’s also that the device is the user’s camera. That enables mobile apps not just access to photos you have already taken, but also to photos you are taking right now, in the moment. In the pre-mobile world, you did stuff with photos hours or even days after you took them. Today, you do stuff with them moments after taking them.

Facebook as a Conglomerate 

Kara Swisher:

It’s a little like deciding to be Disney, said one source, owning all the good content brands. If Facebook is Disney (by the way, its COO, Sheryl Sandberg, is on the entertainment giant’s board), then Instagram is the Disney Channel (the kids love it!) and WhatsApp is ESPN (everyone loves it!).

This Facebook effort has stopped and started at the company, but insiders have been saying a lot recently that the goal is now to break out all the various functions of the whole service into big mobile apps. Hence, Messenger. And news-reader Paper. And, of course, the purchase of photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion, which now seems like a bargain.

Om Malik Steps Away From Day-to-Day Journalism 

Om Malik:

Living a 24-hour news life has come at a personal cost. I still wake in middle of the night to check the stream to see if something is breaking, worrying whether I missed some news.

It is a unique type of addiction that only a few can understand, and it is time for me to opt out of this non-stop news life. After five years as a “venture partner,” I am joining True Ventures as a partner, and thus bringing an end to my life as a professional journalist.

As a friend, I’m happy for him. As a reader, I’m going to miss seeing his byline.

The Verge Reviews the Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 

Watching the video, I find all of Samsung’s interface customizations impenetrable. I don’t particularly care for the standard Android UI, but it’s easy to grasp. Samsung’s implementation of multiple apps on screen at once looks like a mess. It seems more complex, by far, than Mac OS X or Windows. It seems like a worst-of-both-worlds product. The “5.9” bottom-line score is dreadfully low by Verge standards.

My guess is that the thinking behind this product went no further than “We’ve had success making high-end big-ass phones, so let’s make a high-end big-ass tablet.”

‘Ukraine Burning’ 

Riveting, informative documentary from Vice News. 30 minutes well-spent if, like me, you found yourself woefully under-informed about the protests in Kiev and across Ukraine.

See also: This interview with Vice reporter Henry Langston, on the street in Kiev, on the escalating violence and death toll. Protestors are being shot to death by the police.