Category Archives: Linklog

Google Wallet: Fixing What's Sort of Broken

Posted on by David Pierce | 2 Comments

Google Wallet is supposed to be the Earth-shattering thing that completely changes forever how we deal with money. And to be fair, it might, but as Matt Buchanan reports, it’s not. Not because the product doesn’t work well, but because the thing that sucks about money isn’t the swiping of your credit card:

But then I still had to tell the dumb credit console whether I was paying debit or credit. And then I had to wait for my receipt to print out, all ten miles of it. Which made my attempt at being a mysterious stranger with mysterious magical technology quickly disappearing into the night fail miserably since it wouldve been mad awkward to stare directly into each others eyes for 45 seconds without saying a word.

Google Wallet is clearly a close-up glimpse at what the seamless, slippery future of money looks like—MasterCard is an appropriate enough vector for a technological Mark of the Beast, I suppose—but its still very much in 2011. Friction abounds.

Texting with UPS

Posted on by David Pierce | NO COMMENTS

Starting in October, gone are your days of missing packages:

If you miss package deliveries enough to want to punch something, this will make you happy. The day your package is scheduled to be delivered, UPS will text or email or call you with a four-hour delivery window. This service, called UPS My Choice, is free and launches October 3rd. For a $5 fee you can reschedule delivery or ask them to deliver to another address. $5 is a little steep for that if you ask me, but there have definitely been occasions where getting the package that day would have been worth it to me.

Yay. Just, yay. Also, why did no one think of this before?

If This Then That

Posted on by David Pierce | 4 Comments

Shawn Blanc, on how he uses super-nifty tool If This Then That:

An example action ifttt calls them recipes would be: “If it’s going to rain tomorrow then text message me.”

I set up a recipe so that I get an email with the link to any item I star in Google Reader. It used to be that when I was reading feeds on my iPad and I came across an item I wanted to link to here on the site, I would email myself that article. Now I simply star it and it’ll still show up in my email inbox.

I just set up the same thing, except for Evernote. Whenever I star something in Google Reader now, it shows up in Evernote like ten seconds later. Ditto for Twitter favorites, too. It’s really easy to set up recipes, and I love that you see what other people have done.

In my endless quest to consolidate things into as few inboxes and places to check as possible, this is a huge secret weapon.

The Amazon Tablet is Real

Posted on by David Pierce | 1 Comment

And MG Siegler (speaking of MG) has seen it:

The interface is all Amazon and Kindle. It’s black, dark blue, and a bunch of orange. The main screen is a carousel that looks like Cover Flow in iTunes which displays all the content you have on the device. This includes books, apps, movies, etc. Below the main carousel is a dock to pin your favorite items in one easy-to-access place. When you turn the device horizontally, the dock disappears below the fold.

—

But the key for Amazon is just how deeply integrated all of their services are. Amazon’s content store is always just one click away. The book reader is a Kindle app (which looks similar to how it does on Android and iOS now). The music player is Amazon’s Cloud Player. The movie player is Amazon’s Instant Video player. The app store is Amazon’s Android Appstore.

I can’t wait. I don’t see why this tablet can’t be the second-biggest tablet on the market, essentially from day one. I think, by marketing the Nook Color as an ebook reader at the beginning, missed its chance to grab a huge chunk of the tablet market, and Amazon won’t make the same mistake. Android, apps, $250, and easy access to content is a magic combination, and coupled with the brand power of Amazon? This is going to be big, folks.

Who is the iPad For?

Posted on by David Pierce | 1 Comment

The iPad’s biggest downside may be that the people who cover it for a living are the one and only group of people for whom its biggest flaw really matters. So says MG Siegler:

Here’s the thing: at first, I wasn’t completely sold on the iPad as a PC replacement. And for my current line of work, I’m still not. It’s simply too hard to type more than a hundred words on the thing. You hear this refrain over and over again in the press. But it’s paradoxical. The press has to write about and review the iPad because that’s what they do. But they’re also the worst possible candidates for iPad usage.

I’ve slowly come to realize this over time. When I went on vacation a few months ago, I brought both my laptop and my iPad. I promised myself I wouldn’t do any work during the trip — as a result, the laptop never came out. Not once. The iPad? I used it every single day, for hours.

That’s important. The key is that I love computing and the web. Even during my off time, I love it. Yes, disconnect — blah, blah, blah. I’ll do what I want. But I’ve been trained over time to think that the traditional PC is the way to do these things whether it’s for work or play. That’s simply not true. The tablet form factor is so. much. better. when you don’t have to do an excessive amount of typing. And during downtime, when I use a computer like a more regular human being, I’ve found that’s often.

I completely agree. When I’m working, my iPad never comes out of my bag, and I’m working most of the time. But when typing lots and lots of words isn’t my first goal, the iPad does the things I need better than any other gadget I’ve used.

MG’s dead on, as usual.

The Kitchen Table of the Future

Posted on by David Pierce | 1 Comment

Not so many years from now, the New York Times is betting, your morning ritual might look similar to the way it does now: sit at the table, drink a cup of coffee and read the newspaper. The “read” the newspaper part, though, might work a little differently, as the Nieman Lab found out:

And news itself, in the same way, collapses into the broader universe of information. We’re used to thinking of “the news” as its own category, as something to be consumed primarily during commutes or during post-work relaxation in the evening. But news is becoming more pervasive (there’s evidencethat many people, at the moment, consume the bulk of their news during the day, integrated into their work), and the R&D platforms reflect its ubiquity. The prototypes on display at the R&D Lab consider how news can be used, in particular, in the home, woven into the intimate contexts of the morning coffee, the family dinner, the daily getting-ready routine. They explore what it means to brush your teeth with the Times.

After watching the video, I can’t wait for this to be part of my mornings. And it doesn’t seem that far off, really.

Can Tim Cook be Steve Jobs?

Posted on by David Pierce | NO COMMENTS

Osama bin Laden’s death, the East Coast Earthquake, and Steve Jobs’ resignation. What do those three things have in common? They’re the only three things in recent memory that have taken over every aspect of my online life, from my Facebook to my favorite blogs to my Twitter feed. People who don’t give a crap about tech, or politics, or whatever else, give a crap about this.

It’s been covered from every angle, but I like Nick Thompson’s best. He wonders, can Tim Cook do what Steve Jobs did? He says no, not because he’s not great, but because his name isn’t Steve Jobs:

The big question now is whether Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor, can succeed. I’m sure he’s good, and the people around him are good too. But he won’t do as well, for at least one reason. Steve Jobs built a cult of personality that gave him power. Many of Apple’s future fights will be about content. Which tech companies will get the rights to show what things, in what ways, on their devices? Jobs had a power that Cook could not possibly have here, just because he was Jobs. He could summon anyone he wanted to meet with him; he could get journalists to write whatever he wanted them to write; and, if he and Apple threatened to screw you over, you had to believe them.

via News Desk: Steve Jobs’s Power : The New Yorker.

Nick Kroll's Social Media Manners

Posted on by David Pierce | 2 Comments

Nick Kroll, from Best TV Show Ever “The League,” gives Details readers advice on how to not be terrible at social media. Lots of good stuff, but two things he’s dead on about:

If you write LOL in a tweet or status update unironically, I will immediately assume that I am smarter than you are.

And:

Don’t bother going on first dates anymore. Skip right to the second or third date. Why? Because if I have your full name, I will Google you, Facebook you, check you out on Tumblr, read your tweets, and see what your favorite YouTube videos are. The only thing you can learn about people on a first date is how good they are at pretending like they don’t already know everything about you.

 

Sometimes You Need the Print Version

Posted on by David Pierce | 2 Comments

Jack Shafer writes about why he cancelled his New York Times subscription, and then forked over too much money to get it back. Mostly, he said, it’s because it’s not the news without the paper paper:

The researchers found that the print folks “remember significantly more news stories than online news readers”; that print readers “remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders”; and that print readers remembered “more main points of news stories.” When it came to recalling headlines, print and online readers finished in a draw.

Although the number of readers tested in the study is small—just 45—the paper confirms my print-superiority bias, at least when it comes to reading the Times. The paper explores several theories for why print rules. Online newspapers tend to give few cues about a storys importance, and the “agenda-setting function” of newspapers gets lost in the process. “Online readers are apt to acquire less information about national, international and political events than print newsreaders because of the lack of salience cues; they generally are not being told what to read via story placement and prominence—an enduring feature of the print product,” the researchers write. The paper finds no evidence that the “dynamic online story forms” you know, multimedia stuff have made stories more memorable.

The key thing here, I think, is the importance of context clues. Big headlines mean “please read this, this is important!” There’s not a good way to do that online, especially not at any kind of scale; every story is the same online, and that’s just not right. We need the Times to tell us what’s important, and how important it is.