And there was much rejoicing.

Matt Alexander interviewed me for his “Real Life” series. I really love how this interview turned out — we talked a lot about how gadgets and our digital life impact and relate to our physical real life.

Nice overview of the whole enchilada by Jerry Hildenbrand.

Dan Nosowitz on the Nexus 7:

The Nexus 7 is the best of its breed, but it also doesn’t give me any evidence that the breed is one that really holds all that much promise. Aside from reading books, I think it’s pretty clear that a 7-inch tablet is not preferable to a larger one like the iPad or the upcoming Microsoft Surface. It’s like comparing a moped to a car. Both get you from point A to point B, and it’s not bad for what it is, but they’re not really at the same level as far as capabilities go.

He likes it — especially the size:

For me, the key is the size. Again, I was skeptical at first, but for many situations, I’ve come to love the 7-inch frame. The iPad is brilliant when you’re sitting on a couch or camped out in a coffee shop. In my view, the 9.7-inch iPad is slowly but surely becoming a laptop replacement. I expect this to continue. But a 7-inch tablet is different. The iPad is clunky to read in bed, for example. The Nexus 7 is perfect for that. […]

Whereas laptop sizes vary mainly to please screen size preference, I suspect that 7-inch tablets will fit naturally into different use cases than 10-inch tablets. In other words, I believe they’ll end up being closer to two different categories rather than two variations of the same category.

So if the iPad is a valid laptop / PC replacement, would that make a 7.85-inch iPad Mini more like what people originally assumed the iPad would be? Who can say, since we’re speculating about an unannounced and as-of-yet non-existent product, but perhaps “a big iPod touch” may turn out to be a fair description of the iPad Mini after all (it was a completely incorrect description of the original iPad).

This Safari extension gets a Kickstarter page to serve up the HTML5 video rather than the Flash one. It takes about 4 or 5 seconds before the extension kicks in and the video loads, but it sure beats having to change Safari’s user agent or launch Chrome.

(Thanks, Dustin Davis.)

Update: Looks like you won’t need this extension come Monday.

Dan Moren reviews Ticket to Ride for the iPad. This is one of our favorite board games. I also have it on my iPad and it’s pretty fun.

Another great board game also has an iPad counterpart? Puerto Rico.

I love facts like this. The problem is, when bringing up facts like this when I’m at the movies with my friends I only reaffirm another fact: I am way nerdier than they are. But hey, the more you know. Am I right?

Seth Godin:

Too often, we’re presented with choices that don’t please us. We can pick one lousy alternative or the other. And too often, we pick one.

Put another way: good enough is the byproduct of doing the best you can based only on the resources and knowledge currently available to you.

David Sparks:

I think a 7 inch iPad in the $250 price range, along with the app store and all the other great things that Apple has built, would be devastating to competing tablet manufacturers. Apple employed a similar strategy in the iPod market and the rest of the MP3 player market never recovered. I don’t know whether Apple calls it the next generation iPod touch or the iPad Mini but the result would be the same either way, a lot of units sold to customers that would otherwise have gone to Amazon, Samsung, and others.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the iPad Mini as well.

Other than the iPhone and the iPad, all there rest of Apple’s product lineup has screen-size differentiation: different sized MacBook Airs, different sized MacBook Pros, and different sized iMacs. For portable devices especially, the size of the screen has a significant role in the usefulness of the device for the user. Some people need bigger screens and some people need smaller.

A smaller iPad would appeal to an awful lot of people. And not just because it would be cheaper; the size would have appeal as well.

If Apple does create a new iPad with a smaller form-factor its market appeal would be the same as the iPod lineup. There are some folks who own a few iPods (a shuffle or nano for the gym, and a classic or touch for the car / home stereo), and then there are most folks who own just one. It could easily be the same story with iPads: most would only need one or the other size, but some would use both.

On this week’s episode of The B&B Podcast Ben and I talked mostly about his new paywall business model for The Brooks Review. We talked about how the paywall will impact his site’s readership and growth, why Ben chose to go that route, and why it’s not a scalable business model for the Web. Relatedly, we also talked about the rising generation of high-profile independent writers and how credibility and conflict of interest relate to them and how that compares to bigger media conglomerates.

Brought to you by Studio Neat — who is offering 20% off using the coupon code “b&b” — and Bartender, an organizer for your Mac’s Menu Bar.

A friend of a friend of mine is on the Kansas City Google fiber team, and apparently Google is very adamant about keeping the details of their high-speed internet roll out on the downlow.

I’m a TWC customer because it’s the only option in my neighborhood. But once Google Fiber becomes available I plan to switch faster than you can say, “holy high-speed internet connection, Batman!”

Marco Arment:

Tweetbot for iOS has been the perfect modern client for displaced Tweetie refugees.

As a public alpha, Tweetbot for Mac is already off to a good start. I’ve been using it for about a week and have had but one bug that was fixed in the version that’s shipping today.

What I’m most looking forward to is the syncing of timeline location, and read/unread status of @replies and direct messages. This won’t happen until Tweetbot for Mac ships via the Mac App Store because of its need to use iCloud for syncing between the Mac and iOS apps.

One of the things I love about Tapbots’ software is the playfulness and clever interactions. It will be interesting to see how that personality translates from touch-based iOS apps to a trackpad-based OS X app.

Something else I’m intrigued by is Tapbots’ change in marketing strategy. Up until now all their app releases have been kept a tight secret (well, Tweetbot for iPhone got leaked simply because folks were testing it, but no other news of it was shared).

In a Q&A with Matthew Panzarino on The Next Web, Paul Haddad answers the reasoning. Paul says:

We wanted to do something different, we can’t really do any wide scale alpha/beta testing on iOS and so that’s never been an option. We’ve also gotten so many requests for Tweetbot for Mac that we felt even an incomplete product would be really appreciated and useful for lots of our users. Doing an Alpha also let’s us get lots of feedback on what’s important for people and we can make the first paid release even better.