Chuck Skoda, astute as usual:

[Twitter] should have a vision for what the future of communicating and sharing looks like, and be building it.

But from the looks of it, they aren’t. They’re just trying to protect what they’ve already built.

Chris Bowler (he wrote this over a year ago, but it sounds like he wrote it this morning):

Twitter spent the early years building up as many users as possible — due in large part to the third party apps that accessed the service — and decided to put off figuring out how to make money off of their service until later. Now that they have the users, they seem to have no remorse about commoditizing those users and cutting out the very people that helped Twitter become what it is.

And be sure to read the concluding paragraph in Chris’ article. He hits on the same reason that I (and probably many of you) find this transition to be so frustrating.

David Smith:

Twitter seems to have forgotten its roots. The long tail of Innovators and Early Adopters at the head of the adoption curve does not become irrelevant to your audience once you begin to welcome the Majorities. The same people who pioneered the adoption of your platform would also be the people leading an exodus.

Paul Haddad on why Twitter’s API changes won’t have a massive, world-ending impact on Tweetbot:

• Our user cap for Tweetbot for iOS is pretty huge (which is 2* our current users, not 100k)
• At the current rate our user base is growing we won’t hit that cap for a few years
• Our user cap for Tweetbot for Mac is also large and we don’t expect any problems given the smaller market
• Even if we were to run out of room all our current users will be fine

There are some great quotes and stories from Seth Godin in this interview:

I think “creativity” is better described as failing repeatedly until you get something right.

And:

I keep looking to have enough guts to do something that might not work. The phrase “this might not work” is something I try to say on a regular basis.

The video review is pretty brutal. Regarding side-by-side app mode, Patel says:

In many ways this is a dream that has turned into a terrible, unresponsive nightmare.

But hey, at least it’s a feature the iPad doesn’t have (unless you use actual pen and paper).

I had the privilege of being the guest on episode 3 of the internet’s greatest new podcast: CMD+SPACE. It was a huge honor to be on the show because the guests for the previous 2 episodes were big heroes of mine: Merlin Mann and Jason Snell.

Myke interviewed me regarding the membership to shawnblanc.net and we talked a lot about what can make or break a reader-supported endeavor.

Andre Torrez:

Rather than say: “I am too busy, I don’t have any time for X.” I realize I can be honest and say I am not interested enough in X to do it.

Being honest and saying we’re not interested: honesty to the other person or honesty to ourselves? Probably both.

Today was the 10th anniversary of John Gruber’s first post on Daring Fireball. Chances are good if you’re reading this site then you also read Daring Fireball. In fact, it’s likely that you found this site in the first place thanks to a link on DF.

I’ve been reading Daring Fireball since 2005 (shortly after I got my first Mac). I remember first reading the DF home page and how hilarious it was. Here was this guy posting links to various articles and websites and then saying something sarcastic about them.

There were no comments on the site and so I had no idea that this weblog I’d stumbled across was already so widely popular (for being so different from a site like Macworld I thought it was an obscure one-off website, and was clueless that it had tens of thousands of daily readers), nor did I know the impact John’s writing would eventually have on my own writing and even on my career.

Design-wise, Daring Fireball has hardly changed in the past decade. Moreover, the subtle humor and sometimes-not-so-subtle sarcasm of John’s writing is still as present now as it was a decade ago. The personality, voice, and tone — all still there, all still instantly recognizable as Gruber.

And but so, as Apple and their products have matured and gone mainstream so too has John’s writing. Gone are the days of Jerry Seinfeld quotes sneaking their way under the DF logo.

In a nut: John’s writing has grown up. Whereby “grown up” I mean “if you compare the writing of today to the writing of 2002, you’ll see that John takes himself a bit more seriously and that his writing is less a bit less playful”.

Speaking of John’s writing:

• Before writing Daring Fireball, there was Fedora Worldwide Media Industries’ Fedora Review where John wrote about bagels.

• My all-time favorite DF article is still Full Metal Jacket.

• I interviewed John more than 4 years ago to talk about writing, DF, how the Linked List began, how he got into Macs, what John eats for breakfast, and more.

In that interview, John stated that two of his favorite weblog writers are were Paul Graham and Dean Allen. Of them he said:

They’re the two who’ve written the most things that simultaneously delighted me (as a reader) and filled my heart with jealousy (as a writer).

Likewise, John Gruber is a writer who has simultaneously delighted me (as a reader) and made me jealous (as a writer).

My thanks to Boom for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

 

Boom is a volume booster app for your Mac.

It increases the system audio volume to produce better-quality audio from the built-in speakers. The system-wide graphic equalizer can further enhance your Mac’s audio quality.

Boom won the Macworld Best of Show award for its simplicity, elegancy and well-crafted user interface. It is priced at $6.99 and can be purchased from the Global Delight Online Store or through the Mac App Store. There’s also a free 7-day trial.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

If you had any doubts about the validity of those unibody iPhone rumors, let industrial designer Don Lehman put them to rest with this articulate take on why the photos point to the next iPhone being the most robust and well-designed iPhone yet.

This episode of The B&B Podcast turned out very well. Ben and I talked a bit about open source software, plain text, and the future of the digital landscape and how that affects the apps we use today, but for most of the show we talked about our views of the right and wrong ways to publish a link list-type blog.

Michael Mulvey:

The more time goes on and the more I really look hard at Microsoft Surface and Windows 8, the more I see a company not ready to cannibalize one area of their business in order for another part to thrive.

And for innovation to happen, you need that cannibalization.

Cannibalizing one area of your business in order for another part to thrive is easy to talk about in a staff meetings, and it’s easy to say when you’re talking about someone else, but it’s very hard to do when it comes to your own products. Because to do it, you have to be a little bit crazy and a little bit wild.

Peter Bright:

Microsoft is telling both users and hardware manufacturers alike that to get the most out of Windows 8, you’re going to need a keyboard and a pixel-perfect pointing device. Touch alone just doesn’t cut it.

Put another way, is the Surface keyboard a feature or a necessity? I think it’s the latter.