Thomas Brand on some of the hardware, features, and names that OS X will be leaving in the dust later this month.

Garrett Murray:

Recently, user @rabble put together a blog post titled Origin of the @reply – Digging Through Twitter’s History, in which he did some research to show when it was first used. Only his research isn’t entirely correct and it doesn’t give fair credit to everyone involved.

Remember when @replies were seen by everyone who followed you and then Twitter started hiding people’s @replies if it was to someone you didn’t follow and we were all upset about it because how were we going to discover cool new people to follow? Good times.

One of the best things about Twitter is that my experience using it has hardly changed at all since I first signed up in March of 2007. Since I follow who I chose, it doesn’t matter to me how big Twitter gets or how many silly people join it. Because I don’t have to follow those people.

With all the kerfluffle about Twitter’s aim to unify the user experience, I just hope they don’t kill what I consider to be the next best thing about Twitter: it’s 3rd-party clients.

(Via Kottke.)

Jeff Atwood:

Windows 8 is, in my humble opinion, the most innovative version of Windows Microsoft has released since Windows 95. Maybe ever. And it’s good. Really good! I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a Windows release, except when I was kind of obsessively running betas of Windows 95 and waiting for Windows 95 to be released.

Cute. And very Apple-like. (Via Cameron Moll.)

Speaking of the iPad, Dave Caolo just kicked off a series of posts where he’ll be exploring the brief and incredible history of Apple’s runaway tablet. Today he starts off looking at “the greater history of tablets and the pen-driven devices that preceded [the iPad].”

So great. I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the series.

Daring Fireball at its best: smart, witty, fun.

This 72-minute interview that Robert Cringely conducted with Steve Jobs back in 1995 is just great. It’s a $4 rental on iTunes and is well worth your time.

Stephen Hackett wrote down some great notes and miscellaneous thoughts about the interview, and Garrett Murray transcribed one of the best lines from Jobs.

One of my favorite segments was towards the end. Jobs was talking about people who are able to nudge the direction of the computer industry so that in the future it will develop into something great. When asked how he knew what the right direction was, Jobs answered that “it comes down to taste”.

Part of what made the Macintosh great is that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been for computer science the people would have all been doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them a very liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best that we saw in each these other fields into this field.

Tell me that doesn’t describe so many of the people who use, write about, and develop for Apple’s platforms. We may be nerdy (in part by association), but we’re artists at heart.

Fred Wilson on how web growth is somewhat plateauing and mobile is growing like a weed:

All of this is good news for entrepreneurs since they are in the best position to take advantage of all of these changing dynamics. It is not as good news for those who find themselves operating a big Internet business started more than five years ago. You are going to need to make a hard right turn super fast without flipping over the car.

In the past fifteen years, we have seen Microsoft go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, we have seen Google go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, and I suspect we are going to see Facebook struggle with the same thing. RIM is dying quickly now. Yahoo! is a question mark.

I also loved this observation:

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

I remember seeing a lot of tweets during John Gruber’s surprise talk at Úll, and how he said something along the lines of iOS being like a game where users build their own levels via the apps they install.

The new TextExpander 4 from Smile dramatically increases the options for automating your work with advanced “fill-in” snippet types. They are great for creating form letter templates that can be personalized on the fly. Check out the

(http://syndicateads.net/s/u) and see the new multi-line text fields, multiple choice popups, and optional text blocks in action.

Registered TextExpander users can upgrade for $15. (There’s no charge for the upgrade if you purchased after January 15, 2012.)

Still haven’t tried TextExpander? Download the free demo! There’s even a new Snippet Creation Snippet to get you started.

My thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote TextExpander. This is one of those apps that I’m handicapped on my Mac without. I use TextExpander not just for expanding text but also for fixing common typos, making sure I spell certain people’s names right, powering through emails more efficiently, properly capitalizing certain product names, pasting code, and a whole, whole lot more. They shipped a big update few weeks ago and it’s definitely worth checking out.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

On Friday I wrote this sentence:

Metrics like pageviews and subscriber counts are a cheap and dying metric.

Re-reading it, it sounds to me like a sensational exaggeration. And that was not my intention. I apologize for that.

My intention was to try and convey that the ratio of pageviews to engaged readers is not as high as it once was.

Perhaps a better analogy would have been to relate pageviews to economic inflation. As pageviews become more common, their overall value decreases. Just as a dollar today doesn’t buy what it used to, so too a pageview isn’t necessarily worth what it used to be.

Federico Viticci and the MacStories team found out that Apple is contacting the hosting providers of these iOS beta activation sites with DMCA requests.

It’s a custom-built app that has all the playbook info, scheduling, push notifications, and video. The app can be updated server-side, and if a player loses their iPad (or it gets stolen) then the data can be wiped remotely. So much better than a giant 3-ring binder. (Also: there’s got to be a BlackBerry joke in here somewhere.)

Mathew Ingram:

One reason people often give for the failure to link (or the “hiding” of links at the bottom of an article, for which some have criticized outlets like The Verge) is that the financial model for digital media — that is, advertising — relies on pageviews, and one of the ways to juice those numbers is to pretend that you broke a story. But whether this inflates reader numbers in the short term, it ultimately depreciates the value of the blog that does it, and that leads to a loss of trust — and trust is far more important than pretending you have a scoop, the half-life of which is now measured in minutes.

Metrics like pageviews and subscriber counts are a cheap and dying metric. As the global user base of the Internet grows, and as more and more millions of people use internet-connected phones we’re finding that 100,000 pageviews today is not the same as 100,000 pageviews was yesterday. The truest metric of a website’s value is found in the amount of trust, attention, and influence it has. But you cannot easily quantify trust, and so most business models are still predominantly based on pageviews.

Marco Arment recently gave a way to help spot a website that is aiming for a business model based on trust versus one based on pageviews:

If you’re truly providing value, you should have the confidence to send your audience away, knowing that they’ll come back to you.

Update: I want to clarify what I mean by pageviews being a cheap and dying metric. Re-reading that statement, it sounds to me like an exaggeration, and that is not what I meant. My apologies for that.

My intention is to try and communicate that the ratio of pageviews to engaged readers is not as high as it once was, and it will continue declining as social networks and active Web users continue to grow.

Perhaps a better analogy is to relate the value of pageviews to economic inflation. As pageviews become more common, their overall value decreases. Just as a dollar today doesn’t buy what it used to, so too a pageview isn’t necessarily worth what it used to be.