Month: June 2011

Why some dissatisfied users are shunning Facebook

I figured out that I wouldn’t look back as an old man and wish I had spent more time on Facebook

David Cole – Why some dissatisfied users are shunning Facebook. (via iA)

Rdio and my changing music habits

A while back I was reminded through Twitter of Rdio. I looked at it a few months ago but at the time was still stuck with my Palm Pre and didn’t want to pay for Flash only streaming. My how things have changed.

I’ve always had a massive music library. It approached some 14,000 songs before I culled it earlier this year. With all that music it’s funny that I never really listened to it all that much. For the most part I had a select group of albums that were played over and over again. The majority of my library was played once or maybe twice a year.

This is the first thing that Rdio has changed. Rdio lets me follow other users and see what they’re adding to their collections, playlists, and writing reviews of. It’s the digital equivalent of my time spent passing CDs back and forth between high school friends.

Rdio also kicks out recommendations based upon the music in my collection. Between these two sources of discovery I’ve found more new albums and artists in a week than I have in the last few months with iTunes.

The killer feature though is the ability to access all this as much as you want everywhere you are. With the web, Mac OS X, and iOS apps Rdio gives me access to all the music I want anywhere I am.

Instapaper is an app that has fundamentally changed the way I read and consume information. Having a single store of articles I want to catch up on that is available through the web, an iOS app, and my Kindle is exhilirating. Rdio does no less than that for my music habits.

If I’m hanging out with friends and someone mentions an album I can play it straight to my speakers immediately. I’m not out any money because the $9.99 a month Rdio charges gives me unlimited access to anything. The cost of browsing around for new music is essentially zero. I pay the same amount for taking a few listens to 100 albums and streaming my 10 favorites as I would for just cycling through my most-loved.

Sure, all this does mean that I’m outsourcing my music library to the cloud. But, it also means I’m not stuck trying to create a backup strategy for all those gigabytes of tracks. Also, if I want to I can purchase albums straight from Rdio for about the same price as iTunes.

Seriously, Rdio is like living in the future. It’s incredible.

Status

Rdio streaming to speakers over AirPlay via my phone makes me feel like I’m in the future.

Gopher dead, blogging lives

But try to imagine replacing Daring Fireball, Scripting News, Apple Outsider, Shawn Blanc, or any of a number of great blogs with something like Twitter. You can’t. You’d have to invent blogs so that these writers have somewhere to write.

If blogs are dead, what are we reading in Instapaper?

If blogs are turning into places for more thoughtful writing, rather than as the only place to share stuff, I think that’s awesome. We have a more diverse, interesting, textured set of web-tools than we used to. That’s good.

Brent Simmons – Gopher dead, blogging lives.

On Learning and Teaching

When I’m learning quickly everything is great. I feel good about myself and my abilities and I throw myself into learning as much as I can.

On the other hand when I’m learning slowly (hitting a “plateau”) I often get frustrated or discouraged. Nothing I try seems to speed up my ascent out of these plateaus. It seems like the only thing that works is time and practice of what I already know.

I think the reason for this is that once I learn a bunch of new concepts my brain needs some time to process them. I can learn the concepts and use them if I concentrate, but it’s not effortless. I think the reason I finally start learning quickly again after some time is that I’ve internalized the previous concepts and now I can move on to more difficult ones which build on the previous ones.

Steve Losh – On Learning and Teaching.

Fly or Drive Calculator. Neat little web app for calculating the relative cost of flying and driving somewhere. It estimates the financial, time, and environmental cost of the trip. (via Andrew Sullivan)

Product roast. Cool idea from 37signals about critiquing your product. Given the right environment it would also be interesting to let customers roast your product.

Evan Williams on blogging

But that made sense to me because it was not that the technology was new, it was that we had figured out this medium, at least one of the native forms of what the Web was good for. It was about freshness and about frequency, and it was about the democratization of media and giving power to everybody and the universal desire for personal expression and the attraction to a real, compelling personal voice.

Evan Williams – Founders at Work

The game theory of discovery and the birth of the free-gap

As we’ve made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we’ve actually amplified the gap between free and paid. It turns out that there’s a huge cohort that’s just not going to pay for anything if they can possibly avoid it.

Seth Godin – The game theory of discovery and the birth of the free-gap

Status

Chalk this up as something I never realized: moving causes you to walk a ton. Fitbit tells me I walked over 9 miles and 22,000 steps last Saturday! All while just moving boxes and furniture in and out of a U-Haul. Dang.