Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When it comes to ad-supported services, pundits everywhere are fond of the adage “If you’re not the customer you’re the product”. It’s interesting, though, how quickly that adage is forgotten when it comes to evaluating the viability of said services. Twitter is a perfect example. In response to my piece How Facebook Squashed Twitter I…
Photo Joshua Reeves, a founder of the payroll management start-up Gusto. “Even in downturns, some businesses succeed,” he said of the shifting economic environment. Credit Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Technology stocks are gyrating. Valuations for once-vaunted private companies have been slashed and some start-ups have shut down. Even Apple’s…
Peach is dead, four days after its launch. This seems as obvious as the death of Meerkat one month after its debut. One cool aspect of the modern app market is that the hype cycle can now peak in less than 24 hours. A messaging app called Peach triggered a media maelstrom on Friday afternoon, peaked at No. 85 on the…
little while ago, @dtwps published a piece on Model View Cultureentitled “Your Half-Assed Diversity Initiatives Aren’t Going to Cut It In 2016”, in which they asked “Has Twitter learned their lesson?” I thought the answer to that was yes. I thought it was getting better at Twitter. I’d just come off a private talk with some members of the Blackbirds group,…
Let’s start with the most obvious question first. This is what an “unfurl” is: Those handy little previews you see when you paste a link into a Slack message are what we refer to as unfurling internally at Slack (and also in Slack’s API documentation). While it may sound like a made up bit of tech jargon, it’s…
There has been much research that shows that page performance — how fast a page loads — can have a significant effect on the bottom line of a company. However, most of the research is focused on eCommerce sites. I have long been interested in seeing how page performance affects users on a news site, and Vox.com…
If you’re a black Airbnb user that’s had a sneaking suspicion hosts are giving you the run-around when you try to book a rental, you might be on to something. A working paper (pdf) from three Harvard Business School researchers suggests that users with black names have more trouble booking rentals. While the company doesn’t…
Share on Facebook (1,237) Tweet (348) Share (98) Pin (2) The technology industry is flush with companies forecasting the rapid growth of cloud computing over the next five to 10 years. Now Google, a relatively small player in the cloud market, has chimed in. Urs Hölze, senior vice president of technical infrastructure, predicted today at the Structure conference that Google’s cloud revenues would surpass its advertising…
Yes! Zune is still a thing. But whatever is left of Microsoft’s old music vestige will be getting shut down on November 15th. Microsoft stopped selling its Zune HD music player hardware years ago, but the brand has lived on in the form of Zune Music Pass, a subscription music service that came with 10…
The sneaky designers at Beats by Dre employ a clever trick to make you think that the company’s plastic headphones are durable products worth the premium price. Beats by Dre headphones are garbage. Besides their crappy sound, they’re basically designed to break. And yet they sell millions of pairs of headphones. It’s practically a perfect…