Linked List: January 9, 2015

Friday, 9 January 2015

The Software and Services Apple Needs to Fix ★

Glenn Fleishman has done the yeoman service of delineating just what problems made Marco Arment’s “Functional High Ground” argument resonate this week:

Part of what makes these sorts of statements reasonable, though, is to enumerate the problems, whether they’re long-running or unique to Yosemite or iOS 8 (or to the last two releases of each system). Here’s a list of regularly recurring issues or fundamental problems I’ve seen supplemented by those provided by others. Post your quirks in the comments.

Traffic Sources to the Priceonomics Blog in 2014 ★

Priceonomics, looking back at their web traffic from 2014:

Hitting the front page of Reddit is the single highest traffic source we’ve ever seen. The second highest, in our experience, is when lots of people are sharing an article on Facebook. The third highest is being linked to by Daring Fireball.

Not a bad third place.

Regarding the quality of Facebook traffic:

On thing we gradually noticed, however, was that maintaining a Facebook page was pretty much a waste of time by the end of 2014. While Facebook sends lots of traffic to us if one of our articles goes viral, posting said article to the Priceonomics Facebook Page does pretty much nothing any more. Posting on Twitter or emailing things to our readers is much more effective for us than posting on Facebook. We can only imagine how swindled companies that spent millions promoting their Facebook pages must feel. What a monumental waste of money.