The whole flap over Google Reader is a little weird to me. I remember some hand-wringing in the portal era of the web that we would see rampant over-consolidation, killing the independent nature of web publishing. There was that “keyword” period that was sort of the last reincarnation of even-then-bygone AOL and CompuServe’s walled gardens. You went to yourchosenportal.com and typed a keyword versus doing an open-ended web search or going directly to a URL, a thin but somewhat effective lock-in tactic for the less adept or brave.
One of the worst implementations of all this, which amazingly enough has survived in zombied form to this day, is go.com. Despite the look and feel and noisy autoplay advertisement, this is copyrighted by Buena Vista and has a Disney-themed logo. You really only know go.com from URLs like espn.go.com, which is essentially a vestigial auto-forward but survives to this day on ABC’s namesake properties as well (but not Disney’s!).
The federated nature of the service provision marks this as a failed Big Media venture, not a Tech one: weather by AccuWeather (not ABC?), maps by MapQuest, search by Yahoo (although AccuWeather.com uses Google). This was a website venture by a pure media company without the wherewithal to launch something like Bing to back it up from a technical end.
Now we’re in a weird, similar, but also totally different era, where we kind of live on these sprawling futuristic plantations and argue about the processors in the cellphones licensed by our webmail providers. The “fan boy” concept arises from the elective dependence that arises from all this; a lot of the economics of these thinly-justified “free” services relies on the network effect, value proportional to the square of the user count. In other words, your personal position is enriched by an increased overall user base.
This leads to a lot of thin skins, and people feeling like they have what skin they possess firmly in the game on behalf of their service don. We wait with cupped hands to learn what note-taking service Google will kick down the hill to us (it’s Keep), and then worry that its $0 price will undercut Evernote. It’s a weird oligopolistic thing, and hearing people gripe about Reader, perhaps the highest-profile failure case in this era, shows the weakness in the system.
Reader for me wasn’t a compelling product. Any RSS reader written by e-mail people has always seemed to me as only effective for low-volume feeds, as pointing to rss.news.cnn.com or whatever will leave you with some thousand “unread items” that very quickly fade in relevance. There are obviously ways to get around this, but I never saw the low-volume and high-volume cases merging into a unified experience.
I heard about IFTTT’s use case from an article by a Reader refugee, and for me this kind of nails the low-volume case while also merging with my normal reading “work”-flow, making it a transparent thing. This is also why I question how IFTTT stays in business without sending me a bill - which I would pay if reasonable and proportional to my trifling throughput in the system, by the way, or roll my own on my server, which would probably be a 30-line Python script. They’re too transparent.
For high-volume sources I’m toying with Twitter but leaning toward just continuing to visit the websites directly, exit through the gift shop, and provide my support in the “conventional” ways, with my eyeballs drifting across advertisements. Was this so bad in the first place?
But that’s me.
People want to get all lathered up and talk about how Google ruined their lives because they released a useful free service that made inferior costly services or applications seem stupid, then pulled the service and thus made those inferior services more attractive and ripe for improvement.
As opposed to notetaking, which is pretty much an unperfected holy grail in the true personal assistant smartphone era, RSS feeds have always been a bit of a sop to the technically adept, kind of like how DVD ripping and DVRs are despised by the entertainment industry but tolerated because nobody has figured out how to make them disruptively easy or useful enough to gum up the works. RSS feeds can drive you to the website, but with clever tools like Pocket you can pretty much use them as a way to bypass site ads and referral content altogether.
Pulling Reader was a message to us freeloaders that services not aligned with the big goals of the organization need to become boutique products, and boutique products are (1) generally not free, and (2) generally not provided by Google. We freeloaders need to accept this and look beyond the plantation when we don’t like the offerings.
Immortal Technique said something that just resonated with me thinking about fanboyism and the like: “You see me and [fellows] like this have never been equal / I don’t project my insecurities on other people.”
The next time you watch a cable news nihilistic debate-joust or read an iPad hate article, ponder how much of the trouble with modern communication and interpersonal relations is tied up in projecting one’s own insecurities on other people.
I just signed up for IFTTT (pronounced like “gift” without the “g”), which stands for If This Then That. It’s a difficult-to-monetize hot startup that connects different web resources together for free.
I just made my first recipe:
This polls an RSS feed and adds its content to my Pocket (formerly Read It Later) queue.
Pocket is what I use on my tablet to read articles I find on either my cell or my work computer, generally, and don’t have time to read on the spot. It strips out the advertisements and formats the article for eBook-style consumption on a tablet, cell, or computer.
I’m excited to try it out. I find that a 7” tablet is very app-driven, where a 10” is probably more web-driven. Apps like Pocket really make it a pleasant device, kind of a Kindle for the web.
If I could sum up the two most useful things I learned in business school that have developed further since I’ve been out, it’s that (1) almost all good decision-making is done on the margin, and (2) almost any form of risk reduction really just boils down to some form of insurance. Business school augmented by Trading Places adds a third: (3) any sufficiently interesting form of investment finance has a direct analogue in gambling.
Good dietary management, I’ve found, also occurs on the margin. What has worked for me so far is what I might consider a “naive thermodynamic philosophy,” in which you essentially atomize your efforts into daily, standalone units and view your progress as an energy balance equation as follows:
Base Load + Exertion + Surplus/Deficit = Meal Intake + Extra Intake
Surplus/Deficit is the measure of imbalance between intake and output. My basic budget is that you gain a pound for every 2,500 kcal (food calories) of accumulated surplus, and you lose a pound for every 3,000 kcal of accumulated deficit. The precise truth is about in the middle of those two, but building in a spread makes sure you’re never surprised by the results of your actions.
Most fad diets and diet pills spend a lot of time convincing you that your Base Load energy (also referred to as Resting Energy Expenditure or various terms to that effect) is a controllable quantity, a tidy function of manipulable variables. Certainly, there is data that eating a hearty breakfast “jump starts” your metabolism for the day, or that doing your exercise (Exertion energy) earlier in the day can also raise your Base Load if you don’t try to go to sleep right after, etc.
I feel like a lot of this stuff is pretty hokey for practical purposes, though, and is at least a distraction from the truly manageable parts of the energy balance: principally intake, followed by exercise.
I read through a published study of anorexic women who went from essentially near-starvation to tube feeding. In the course of the first eight days of hospitalized tube feeding, their base caloric need went up by about 12% after controlling for increased body weight over that time. For them, that was around 125 kcal per day, which for somebody my size would translate into something around 300 kcal per day. Over that same eight day time period, the average body temperature of the test subjects increased by about 1 F, a clear indicator of metabolism almost literally firing up in these previously near-death girls. After more than two months of forced nutrition, they essentially had just over another 125 kcal per day increase in base load, again controlling for their significant weight gain over that time.
If you look at this extreme case where you went from a body in near-shutdown to a rapid weight gain scenario, that theoretical equivalent 300 kcal/d adjustment for somebody my size would only be worth a pound of fat over an 8-10 day period. Nothing to sneeze at, but a focused effort at dieting should probably result in a daily deficit of as much as 1,000 kcal, netting you two pounds lost per week with a weekly cheat day where you take in your Base Load with no deficit.
What I’m saying is not that optimizing your Base Load is a bad idea, but that intake is infinitely more predictable and generally easier to control, with a bigger potential impact to boot. Putting the focus on Base Load ends up pushing you into pseudoscience hand-waving (“Caffeine helps because it raises heart rate! No it doesn’t! But it suppresses appetite! But it’s a diuretic! That doesn’t matter! Yes it does!”) or apathy (“I could exercise, but it’s late in the day so why bother.”) or balloon squeezing (“I’ll force myself to eat breakfast even though I’m not hungry since that’s healthier.“).
The anti-gluten people, who must be tied in with the breastfeeding mafia, have entered the dietary arena, claiming some business with insulin can wreck your resting metabolic rate or what-have-you. I’m just wondering from a thermodynamic perspective where all that phantom energy need is going (or not going) if your preferences in wheat products are so impacting your body’s most essential activities? The starving girls had noticeably lower body temperature and probably failing organs in some cases, and their corrected-for-weight caloric need only jumped by 25% from near-death to recovery.
To jump back to the alleged theme of this post, I feel that Base Load manipulation is a gaming the average, where dieting and exercise are managing the margin. But the margin is really where you gain or lose weight: that surplus or deficit, however achieved, is changing your body every day. Before you worry too much about the efficiency of the conversion, it’s best to think about the controllable inputs and outputs.
I just finished A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in the Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. As much as it pains me to leave it where it sits, I’m not going to read the fifth book unless any subsequent books get far better reviews.
It’s hard to put a concise finger on it, but I would say that the shift in narrative focus and character strength from North to South, which really took hold in the fourth book but was really already gearing up in the second book, killed it for me.
I respects the author’s irreverent spirit in somewhat capriciously murdering lead characters and promoting others from margins to chapter headings is part of the fun of the books, but - while trying to avoid obvious spoilers - I just feel he went too far with the North. In fact, I thought he went too far in the first book, but I was ready to stomach it and move on.
It’s hard to read 800 page installments for fun when things don’t seem to be heading anywhere. Back to $0.99 crime thrillers!
James Taranto’s excellent Best of the Web Today column details the following letter exchange between a young girl and Hasbro:
My name is ______. I am six years old. I think it’s not fair to only have 5 girls in Guess Who and 19 boys. It is not only boys who are important, girls are important too. If grown ups get into thinking that girls are not important they won’t give little girls much care. Also if girls want to be a girl in Guess Who they’ll always lose against a boy, and it will be harder for them to win. I am cross about that and if you don’t fix it soon, my mum could throw Guess Who out. My mum typed this message but I told her what to say.
Le réponse:
Guess Who? is a guessing game based on a numerical equation. If you take a look at the characters in the game, you will notice that there are five of any given characteristics. The idea of the game is, that by process of elimination, you narrow down who it isn’t, thus determining who it is. The game is not weighted in favour of any particular character, male or female.
Finally, from the mum:
Unfortunately, she is now no clearer as to why there are only five female characters for her to choose from in her favourite board game, compared to the 19 male characters her brother can pick. (Obviously, she could choose to be a male character, but as you know, that’s not usually how children work)… . But I must confess that, despite being 37 years of age and educated to Masters level, I am equally at a loss. Why is female gender regarded as a “characteristic,” while male gender is not?
While the mum and daughter sound like world champion eyebatters with the tone of those notes, the company’s response is an interesting illustration of the blinding effect of mental models. The company rep did in fact see female-ness as a “characteristic,” might we say a “peculiarity,” but actually saw the game as remaining balanced despite an obvious imbalance in place. Belief in the structure of the game overshadowed an obvious imbalance.
I have interest in advertisements, kind of in a backwards psychological way. Like, I don’t care much about the intended effect on the viewer, but I am very interested in what the advertisement (especially the background music) says about the attitude of the company itself.
I feel this Windows 8 ad is especially meaty in this area:
First off, it’s a retread of an old song. I find Microsoft’s official quote about the ad to be informative:
“We selected music from up and coming bands. We didn’t want to use overly popular songs because we wanted to bring the viewer on a journey of discovery, both through the storytelling and the music that accompanies these stories. Sometimes, as in “Express Yourself,” by Labrinth we found a new take on a classic old song, much like the reinvention of Windows.”
Certainly, the lyrics hit their key-frames with “smile” and “express yourself.” Of course, he also says “awkward” when they’re moving about the Metro interface, and the song (even the excerpt!) is actually saying that he’s not that great, but that authenticity is what counts, or something like that.
Then you get to the goods for sale. The thing that hits me most here is the “brush sold separately” fine print. If you’re selling a product like this (I believe this thing intros at $1,200) for playroom usage, you have to be ready for the device to perform advertised functions out of the box. Where’s the energy, the passion, in this kind of marketing? You’re seeing the seams in the Windows 8 canvas: this app is not made by Microsoft, the paintbrush is not made by Microsoft, nor are these made by Sony, who makes the computer. I know “Mini Piano” isn’t an Apple product, but you also don’t see non-bundled accessories in that demo. In fact, their fine print says “available in iTunes Store.”
Plus the senselessness of what’s going on here. You’re using a high-dollar device to produce bad paintings with all the tortured skeuomorphism of paintbrushes on Gorilla Glass. Then, you don’t share them with Dad via some new messaging, or Facebook, or Twitter. You print the darn things and hang them on the wall, then take them off the wall and hold them upside down in front of the dadgum screen just to illustrate how awkward it all is. Dad doesn’t even seem impressed until she flips the paper over.
Is this a dig on Apple for having shaky printer support on the iPad? Where’s the hook? Do I go, “oh, good, I can avoid the fun and experience of finger paint but still have all the papers to hang?” I don’t get it.
