The musings of a guy named Dan

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the internet is ruining everything. As over the top as that sounds, I find that the ways by which we have come to collect and read things takes the enjoyment out of reading them. Take, for instance, Instapaper and long-form journalism. I love the New York times, am an avid reader of the New Yorker, and a big fan of Salon. I find that long-form journalism is one of the few bastions of rationality and information for information’s sake in a world populated by such purposeless things as Jersey Shore and Epic Meal Time. But, the more of these pieces that I have access to, the less compelling reading them is. My Instapaper feed is backed up with at least twenty 5000 word articles. Every time I open up the app or go to instapaper.com, I become filled with dread at the prospect of having to one day power through all those thousands of words. I find myself rushing through articles simply to say that I’ve read them, not really enjoying them, weighing them, and letting them sink in as should be done with any good piece of writing. The ability to save these huge articles ad infinitum creates a backlog of information that needs to be read, and makes work out of what should be pleasure. This greater access to journalism diminishes the opportunity to treat each piece as special, and brings down my enjoyment of reading.

Or, take RSS. In a given day, I’ll look through maybe 500 headlines in Reeder, open 20 of them, and put one or two into Instapaper. Two or three are short enough to be read on the spot, and the rest get marked as read. That means that only ~1% of the content in the RSS feeds I read is going to be read. This is really inefficient, and the amount of time that it takes to manage so many RSS feeds is disproportionately greater than the average enjoyment that I get out of those feeds in a given day. Of course, there are always those articles that are truly great, and that make up for all that wasted time, but it does become bothersome having to slog through hundreds of boring articles that I’ll never read on a daily basis. But, I can’t just get rid of my RSS reader. If I did, I would have very little to read, and would miss out on those rare hidden gems. So, the time spent on managing my RSS subscriptions is simply a required cost of reading. 

Even Twitter makes consuming information less pleasurable. Not only does it run into the same issues as RSS in that much of it is not worth reading, but what is worth reading is diminished. 140 characters is simply not enough to get out a coherent, complete idea in a lot of cases. Either people curtail their train of thought to fit it into a small amount of space, make terrible gramatical changes to save space, resulting in a visually unappealing and hard to read tweet, or go on long rants involving strings of tweets. None of these are particularly enjoyable. If I’m going to consume an idea written by someone, I’d like that to represent their whole idea, to be grammatically correct, but also to be concise and easy to follow and understand. Twitter fails at all three. 

It’s not that I don’t like having access to more content and more information. In fact, I think that things like Twitter and RSS are some of the most useful things in the world. But, they also create more work and lessen the enjoyment of reading. Even so, having a wealth of information or somewhat diluted information is better than having none at all (such as if twitter were gone), or having to pay $17 a year for it in the form of a magazine. Ultimately, even though there are a lot of fundamental problems with the way we read things, It’s better than reading nothing at all. 

I think that the problem will get better. Startups such as Prismatic and News.me, as well as curation sites like Longreads and The Feature are making finding good things to read a whole lot easier. I can see myself leaving RSS for good and relying solely on services and sites such as these to pick out the good from the bad in the not too distant future. I’ve naturally begun to discriminate more with what I choose to add to Instapaper, and try to take my time with reading. The amount of articles that I’m adding to Instapaper now is probably 1/4 of what it was a year ago. So, although reading might be difficult now, it’s definitely going to get better.

The Verge published a nice piece in which Chris Ziegler and Dieter Bohn go back and forth on whether Instagram is good or bad for the world.

Chris Ziegler:

Instagram and its various analogues have created a legion of smartphone users who are quite literally uploading billions of damaged images into the public record. Yes, “damaged.” Because when you apply a parlor trick filter to your photo, you’re not enhancing it, you’re destroying it. You’re robbing it of its realness, its nuance, and replacing it with garbage that serves no function other than to aggrandize your own false sense of artisanship.

Dieter Bohn:

What’s more damaged? Posting a photo that looks bland and lifeless but more accurately presents all of the foibles and failures of your sub-par 8-megapixel shooter? Or posting a photo with a filter that you feel more accurately presents all the feeling and nuance of the moment you are trying to express in the limited and frail medium of imagery?

It’s an interesting article and definitely worth a read. I’m not quite sure what I think. Although Instagram filters can look nice when applied with common sense, the majority of photos end up much worse off.

I don’t mean to sound bigoted or incendiary, but, simply put, Instagram is full of bad photos. Blurry pictures of cats, discolored images of noodles, and blown out images of sunsets are a common sight on the service. It’s not that all images on Instagram are bad. There are plenty of very skilled, amazing photographers on the service. In fact, some of the best images I’ve ever seen have been on Instagram. But they’re a rare sight, and becoming even more so as more people join. 

The problem that they’re running into is that, as more and more people join, the quality of the service goes down. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that Instagram is growing to an audience that is not necessarily made up of photo enthusiasts. Growth is good. But, it also means more crap.

I think one of the biggest problems is their filters. Filters, in many cases, drastically decrease the quality of a picture. A good picture that has had a filter thoughtfully and tastefully applied can become a great one, but a bad picture that has a filter haphazardly applied to it can become a very bad one. And I’m not talking about it from an artistic perspective. I actually think that the look of Instagram’s filters are fine. In fact, I’m a fan of retro-style filters, and I think Instagram has some great ones. Rather, the problem is a technical one. A lot of filters lead to increased saturation, lowered contrast, or acute off-coloring. The existence of filters on Instagram has undoubtedly led to a decrease in quality. 

But the question does arise, does it really matter? Are quality of picture and subject matter what the users of Instagram really care about? Or is Instagram going down another path?  Instead of being a place to showcase your amazing images to your friends and followers, is it really meant to be a massive collection of images and data about what the world is doing right now? This is, after all what happened to Twitter. They started off as way to communicate to people and broadcast to the world, but now, they’re trying to act as the collective opinion and voice of the entire internet. Twitter is where all the news breaks, and where everyone goes to comment on current events. Trends have become the way that everyone learns about what is happening in the world. The quality of one person’s tweet no longer matters. Instead, what matters is 20 million people all using the same phrase in their tweet. But could Instagram really function like that?

Could you imagine an Instagram populated by blurry images taken of their TVs by people watching the VMAs, or images of people standing in line at midnight for the premiere of Catching Fire? What if, for instance, Coke encouraged everyone to take a picture of what they’re drinking right now? I don’t know about you, but this is not the kind of Instagram that I want.  

I really don’t see why everyone is getting so worked up about Girls Around Me. Their app simply took a bunch of information that was already completely freely and publicly available, and made something out of it. 

I’ll admit, it does have that creepiness factor, but all it really does is combine two trivially easy tasks that anyone can already do with social media. All I need to do to replicate the app’s functionality is check in somewhere nearby on foursquare, find someone who’s information I want to get, and search for them on Facebook. It’s not like GAM provides some kind of frightening new capability to anyone who uses it. 

And I really don’t see how one could describe Girls Around Me as a tool for stalkers, (a term that has been thrown around quite a bit this weekend) any more than they could describe Foursquare or Facebook as tools for stalkers. In fact, part of the blame actually falls on the would be stalkees. They choose to put their address and phone number on Facebook. They choose to show hundreds of pictures to the masses by posting them on their timelines. They go out of their way to broadcast to the entire world where they are at a given point in time on Foursquare.

Of course, a lot of the blame still has to fall on the companies themselves. Facebook in particular has very public defaults. Everything posted on Facebook defaults to public. That said, it is still incredibly easy to make your stuff private. The Facebook “What’s on your mind?” box has a drop down menu right next to it that allows specific selecting of how public the post is. And, their privacy settings page greets you with three massive, unmissable buttons: “Public,” “Private,” and “Custom.” On Foursquare, every single checkin page has a huge white slider that allows you to set that checkin to private. My point is, if you really wanted to be private on the web, it really isn’t that hard for you to do so. 

Girls Around Me is not the problem. It is simply a sign of the times, and a barometer showing just how public everyone’s lives have become. The real problem is that people simply share too much without thinking about it, and don’t protect their privacy. This issue is even further exacerbated by companies like Facebook and Foursquare, who seem keen on forcing everyone to live their lives in the open. But, by going after GAM, we are going after the branch, not the root. Although Girls Around Me is on the way out, it’s functionality is still completely replicable. So until we fix the actual problem, apps like GAM are still going to be easy to make.

Marco Arment on how Google and Apple have responded to competition from Apple:

That’s why Microsoft is so much more interesting today: while Google seems to think they don’t need to change anything and Apple’s customers are brainwashed by marketing, Ballmer has shut up about Apple publicly and Microsoft is making radical changes.

I’m of the belief that Microsoft is doing much better and more meaningful work with mobile.

M.G. writing about AT&T’s and Verizon’s data plans for the new iPad:

Verizon is including the hotspot functionality with their plans while AT&T isn’t. AT&T seems to be doing everything in their power to ensure you don’t buy service from them. That’s one way to fix a crap network: drive people away. 

It would appear that AT&T is extremely dedicated to “fixing their network.”

Christine Chan wrote a big comparison of Instapaper, Readability and Read It Later for AppAdvise. She talked about the strengths and weaknesses of each app, and focused on Instapaper’s search and social features. But what really struck me is how she compared Readability’s typography to Instapaper’s.

The biggest thing that Readability has going for it is the design. I have to admit – it’s freaking gorgeous…  In comparison, Instapaper looks like a joke.

Instapaper is one of the most popular apps in the app store, and is far and away the most frequently complimented company that I hear about. Given that, I must concur, Instapaper is a complete and total “joke.”

Codecademy, the startup that makes it ridiculously easy to learn JavaScript, has been garnering a ton of press lately, especially for their Code Year initiative. But unbenounced to many, Bloc has been offering a competing service. Bloc mainly offers Ruby tutorials, but offers a few in JavaScript, with plenty more in a plethora of languages coming. Bloc has far fewer users that Codecademy, but has a really clean UI and offers some extra courses. After playing with both, I figured I would compare what each has to offer, and figure out which one was the better service.

Design- Both services have very simple, straightforward homepages, with text boxes fron and center to start their respective tutorials. Codecademy’s page is a little more cluttered, and Bloc has a great fabric pattern that give it a more modern look. However, for smaller screens, part of Bloc’s initial tutorial is cut off, requiring users to scroll down. Winner: Bloc

Depth- Codecademy offers a slew of tutorials about all of the basic JavaScript aspects. Each course is thorough and simply explains what each challenge is about. Bloc offers a smaller set of larger courses that cover more. However, the large amount of reading needed to do each challenge can become annoying. Winner: Codecademy

Breadth- Codecademy is currently only offering courses in JavaScript, with Ruby and Python coming down the road. Bloc offers Ruby, JavaScript, and the Sinatra framework, with Python, Node.js, API use as well as courses in basic CS concepts coming later. The victor is clear. Winner: Bloc

The Verdict: Codecademy offers a very simple and elegant experience that is easy to grasp yet goes very in-depth. Bloc looks pretty nice, and will definitely offer things that Codecademy can’t in the future, but for now, it only offers Ruby and a little JS. I believe Codecademy is currently the better product. However, I think that Bloc can become a real competitor and even surpass Codecademy in more intensive things, like Sinatra.

The amount of Apple rumors these days is baffling. There really isn’t any reason to speculate as wildly and as out of control as the media does. Apple follows a very simple pattern of how the release products. Each product lifecycle starts off with a pretty nice entry, but really takes off with version 2. After that, they alternate larger and smaller increments. They’ve done it with the iPhone, so no one really had any reason to believe that the third incarnation of the iPad would be anything more than a solid incremental upgrade.

Not only that, we get told exactly what Apple is going to do, months before they do it. And anyone with common sense can pick out the real rumors (LTE) from the fake ones (touch feedback). In a lot of ways, Apple’s future products and strategies are a lot clearer than anyone else’s. Do you know what Samsung or HTC is working on right now? Few people do, simply because no one reports on it. Everyone writes about Apple’s every move, and as a result, we know everything Apple is going to do long before it happens.

So it’s really pretty crazy that we still have to endure this absurd speculation for weeks before any Apple announcement. Apple operates on a very clear, very obvious cycle, one which we know the every detail about weeks or months before. 

So why all these rumors? My guess is that it’s just an attempt to get more pageviews. Everyone goes bat shit crazy over the tinniest piece of information on Apple’s next iteration. People read these stories, so why shouldn’t these bloggers write them?

In fact, the next thing I write might just be a report on how Apple is cooking up a 13’ and 7’ iPad, due out this June.

Klout has a problem. The Perks sort of suck. They are very limited, and fill up virtually instantly. Getting anything out of Klout is difficult. And right now, because it’s so hard, there really isn’t a point in joining Klout at all. But, in 5 years, that perks system will be better, easier, and more targeted. 

The problem right now is that perks are a mess. There are rarely new ones, and, when there are, they fill up right away. The average person who visits Klout once in a while has no chance of ever getting a perk. This is a product of the way that perks are implemented. They simply open up to everyone who meets a certain threshold, and are given away on a first come, first serve basis. This makes it 1) really hard to know when perks open up and 2) really hard to get one. They’re simply to open.

What they need is to switch to a highly targeted system. Like on Facebook or Google, advertisers on Klout will be able to target a very specific group. Let’s say Starbucks want’s to test out a new roast. They could decide to only give a free one pound bag to college students, living less than 4 blocks from a Starbucks, who have no less than 1200 Twitter followers, have checked in to no less than 20 coffee shops on Foursquare, have at least 5 tumblr posts tagged with #coffee, and who are most active on social media between 7-10 in the morning. Now, that is a pretty contrived example, but the point is that perks are going to be really specific.

And, these perks are not going to be distributed by simply opening the floodgates. They are going to be specifically offered to certain people, and only to them. Klout will notify these people via email that they have been given this perk, and only they will be able to claim it. This ensures that these users get that perk.

This model assumes some thing, though. First, Klout will have all of your data. They already index a plethora of social networks, and will continue adding more. They will have collected everything you share of Facebook, every ounce of information you reveal about yourself on LinkedIn, every single place you’ve been from Foursquare, and every question you’ve answered on Quora. They will have it all, and use it to advertise and give perks. This is going to make them extremely effective at targeting these perks, and make them a force in advertising. This, however, require both a lot of users and for those users to give up all their data. I think that they might do what Google has been doing and literally just hand them money in return for them forking over their data. This will both encourage current users to fully connect Klout to every one of their social networks, and also entice new users to sign up because, hey, everyone loves money.

So that’s it. That’s what I think will happen with Klout and perks in the next 5 years. I think that Klout is going to be the next superpower in advertising, simply because they will have the most data. Facebook only knows what you put on Facebook, but Klout will know that and everything else. And the advertising is going to be a lot more effective. After all, giving someone a free coffee is much better that showing them a text ad talking about Starbucks.