“ The map of the known universe shows that most galaxies are organized into clusters, but some galaxies are situated along filaments that connect the clusters. Cosmologists have theorized that dark matter undergirds those filaments, which serve as highways of sorts, guiding galaxies toward the gravitational pull of the massive clusters. Dark matter’s contribution had been predicted with computer simulations, and its shape had been roughed out based on the distribution of the galaxies. But no one had directly detected it until now.”
Unlike tacocopter, this is real.
“That means absent cocaine, the cartels could make more money on marijuana flights in one year — just using ultralight aircraft — than the government will spend on its efforts to stop them. And the cartels can always buy more planes” -Wired
“Blow a hundred million pretending you can control covert activities pioneered by other wings of your own government.” -Bruce Sterling
“ And at the end I said something about my current dilemma… that opinions are no longer a useful or appropriate organising principle, that reckoning is no longer a scarcity, that the network now so obviously and explicitly extends beyond the bounds of any individual being able to say anything useful or conclusive on or about it in isolation, that telling someone your opinion is like telling them about your dreams.”
“ For the same reason, we don’t show crappy display ads and we make all our revenue from social advertising that users love and share. We never launched one of those “frictionless sharing” apps on Facebook that automatically shares the stories you click because those apps are super annoying. We don’t post deceptive, manipulative headlines that trick people into reading a story. We don’t focus on SEO or gaming search engines or filling our pages with millions of keywords and tags that only a robot will read. We avoid anything that is bad for our readers and can only be justified by short term business interests.”
“ Everywhere I look, I see tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality. And I come back to those cliches, and I think the real problem is in how little thought goes into the language these people use. When the language you employ to communicate your ideas is small and boring, your ideas are going to be small and boring. And when all your ideas are small and boring, your future gets dimmer and dimmer and more claustrophobic until it’s finally just a pinpoint of light on a dark screen, in danger of going out at any time.”
Yesterday, I Went to the American Idol for Startups. It Made Me Want to Die.
Whiny and judgmental, but too funny not to read.
“ Instead of presenting their teams with lists of features to build in a sequence, organizations should present their teams with business problems to solve. Provide constraints for the solution and any assumptions that currently exist about that business problem and its target audience. Most importantly, each team should be handed specific success criteria. These criteria should be quantifiable and point to specific outcomes that prove the customer’s need has been met and the business problem has been solved.”
“ The rationale for not just reflecting back what your audience is talking about is this: as a brand, you generally want to be aspirational. Even an attainable product wants to align itself with an idealized vision a consumer has of him or herself. Therefore, just mimicking what your audience is saying isn’t going to deliver the positioning the brand is seeking.”
“ This, of course, means you have to think about the design ahead of time. Not just what today’s user experience will be, but what the user experience could be in the future. Future-friendly design means anticipating the types of things we’d want to put in our designs so that it feels natural when we put it there.”
- Google’s Take on “Change Aversion” Misses the Point » UIE Brain Sparks
Jared Spool arguing that people are not actually change averse.
“ The difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features. How do you turn mute on? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments—which are typically not on any feature list and often ignored—can change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved. They are the feel part of “look and feel.”
What a great move.
Window Shop the World with our Store Explorer
Today we’re launching an exciting new iOS feature: Store Explorer. Store Explorer finds the best stores in your city and lets you window shop them from your iPhone or iPad. It’s a great way to discover new shops and browse their styles before stopping by in person. And once you’ve explored the stores nearby, you can jump to cities all across the world to wander their streets and see which trends are on the rise.
To get started, download the update from the App Store. If you’re an iPad user, tap the new “Stores” tab on the left. If you’re an iPhone user, visit the “Shop” section and tap the compass arrow in the top right corner.
We’re still adding cities (it’s hard work finding great places to shop!) so if you don’t find anything in your area don’t fret. We’ll scour your streets in next week or so. In the mean time, drop by New York and take a look at the fantastic stores near our office in SoHo.
Untappd in Foursquare's "Connected Apps"
SOCIAL OBJECTS FTW!
“The first step is to connect your Untappd and Foursquare accounts together, which can be accomplished from within the Untappd app, Foursquare app, or each apps website. Once you’ve done this, check-in to a bar or restaurant from within Foursquare. You’ll notice in your post check-in details a section for “Connected Apps”. Tap on the Untappd area to see a list of popular beers from the venue you’re at over the last 30 days. “…
Oh my. The new @Tumblr iPhone app is really well designed. Not visible in the screenshot is the fantastic interaction design.
“ Responsive design and Agile have forced us to re-evaluate our methods, and we’re finding there are simply no tactical short-cuts for cross-channel and service design: the entire company itself must be”
A changing tide : Cennydd Bowles
Great thoughts on the digital design industry’s shift away from role specialization and towards in-house product/service driven teams. Im kind of biased here, but it’s still worth a read.
“ Founders tend to pride themselves on being action-oriented and optimistic—necessary traits, indeed. A founder’s passion is essential to launching a startup, but it can become deadly at almost every step. Likewise, founders’ natural biases—toward optimism over realism, toward instinct over systematic planning, toward strong attachment to their ideas, their startups, and their employees over dispassionate reasoning—often turn on them.”
Noam Wasserman: The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup (via Findings.com)
I think everyone who is thinking about even working for a startup should read this book.
(via buzz)
“ As Josh Clark eloquently put it, we need to think of our content like water, and get our content ready to go anywhere because it’s going to go everywhere. It’s bigger than the web, native, Facebook, etc. We need to put our content and functionality in front of users wherever they may be… Too often redesigns are like slapping a new coat of paint on an otherwise-condemned building. Content is the foundation with which everything else stands. That means creating context-agnostic APIs and more robust, flexible content management systems that lend themselves to adaptation.”
[For a Future-Friendly Web: Mobilism 2012 | bradfrostweb.com]
I would LOVE to see some tools for accomplishing the kind of content infrastructures Brad is describing. Less fussing over jazzed up blog templates and more tools for creating taxonomies, CVs and ontologies that can power stocks of documents easily moldable to different contexts.
