It's me, Pete... from the podcast.

Skype Acquires Qik

Skype Acquires Qik for $100 Million [CONFIRMED] – Mashable

Qik’s userbase catapulted to 5 million users in 2010, up from 600,000 at the beginning of the year, thanks in part to partnerships with major telecom providers like T-Mobile.

Wow. That’s a big leap – the Qik service has been spotty for me, but I haven’t given it much of a test recently. Skype, however, with the addition of video calling on the iPhone, has become my goto app overnight when mobile. I don’t use it more than Angry Birds, but that’s about the only other horse in the top–2 race.

As an aside, I love how Tony Bates has taken to video. With the Skypeocalypse last week and all the good news from CES, I’m seeing so much of Tony I’m developing a bit of a CEO crush on him.

Chris Breen on transferring Angry Birds saved game data from iOS device to Mac

Transferring Angry Birds saved game data to Mac app

It’ll cost you $20 for PhoneView if your iOS device isn’t jailbroken, but if you’ve put in the sweat to 3-star every level, it might just be worth it.

Brett Kelly takes on blog ads gently

We Need to Talk about the Ads on Your Blog

Look, here’s the thing. Your blog is like a restaurant: people are willing to ignore the semi-offensive paintings on the wall if the Penne All’Arrabiata makes their knees weak. With every ad you shove onto your blog, you’re asking them to ignore another awful painting.

Android 3.0 Preview video is live

Android 3.0 tablets are going to be fascinating. I played with the Galaxy Tab for about a half hour this week and while the thing feels MUCH better than the OS feels on a phone, I still can’t get over the fact that with every swipe it just seems like developers vomited UI elements on screen and put it in the box to ship. Android 3.0 seems a step to rectifying that.


The bigger challenge for the next wave of tablets will be the hardware manufacturers, who seem hell bent on destroying the user experience with cheap skins on top of what amounts to otherwise interesting devices. This is the dark side of open-ness in the Android landscape.

Horace Dediu is right again re: the demise of the voice phone

The parable of the the PDA: predicting the smartphone’s future | asymco

The problem is that the vendors that lost this game failed because they listened to their customers. Like with PDAs or with the original mobile phones or first generation of PCs, early adopters are not the audience that should be consulted on how to improve the product.

Absolutely spot on.

Facebook messaging: the kids are all right

What 20 Minutes On Facebook Looks Like: 1M Shared Links, 2.7M Photos Uploaded, 10.2M Comments

While these numbers are impressive, Facebook’s stats on “what 20 minutes on Facebook looks like,” are even more staggering. According to Facebook, 1 million links are shared every 20 minutes on the network. Here are a few other stats listed:

[…]

Comments: 10.2 million

Messages: 4.6 million

Related to the change in the dynamic of email, seems like people are … I dunno … taking to the Facebook messaging platform OK to me.

Michael Piller’s unpublished book on Star Trek Insurrection is floating around the net

“He might have read the document when he was tired, at the end of a long day of being tied to a whale.” | MetaFilter

Patrick Stewart on one draft treatment of the script:

In the story I have been reading this weekend we are enmeshed in a context of Federation politics, fine interpretations of The Prime Directive and ancient history – as ancient as Star Trek – of conflict between two members of The Federation. In the middle of all this there is a vaguely defined, characterless, uninteresting civilization who seem to have attended too many performances of Siegfried and Roy. [..] what I have read would have hardly composed a moderately interesting episode somewhere in the middle of season five of TNG.

I’ve only skimmed the first bit of it, but if you’re interested in screenwriting, this looks like a terrific insider-read. Plus, it’s funky to be reading this book posthumously. It’s like a love-letter to fans from Piller, frustrating to see the result that ended up on screen. Find the PDF of the text here: Fade In.

He seems like a pretty honest guy. From the introduction, page 6:

I was the writer from start to finish. … Had it been any other circumstance, there’s no question in my mind that, before the final draft was completed, I most certainly would have been fired.

Chris Clark riffs on Power Users, Facebook, Email, and Old Habits

Crotchety Old Power Users

Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors. These are the people who complain that an iPad can’t have third party software installed from anywhere but the App Store, ignoring the massive convenience and security gains the policy affords average users. These are the people who are still using slotted screwdrivers and Edison light fixtures and manual transmission cars.

As a power user, I have yet to hear a super-compelling argument as to why I need third party apps on the iPad. But I love my Edison light fixtures. Chris’s main point is on Facebook messaging and email, and the same thing stands. Since Gmail, I haven’t used email like I did in days gone by. I don’t filter or file, I thread and search. What this process costs me in microseconds per transaction is made up in spades by freeing me from the silly frustration of keeping my email folders organized. (Taking the time to learn how search really works is the single biggest process gain one can make in streamlining the day-to-day buckle-shuffle of email.) Once I made that liberating cognitive leap, de-evolution of messaging as is on display in Facebook is a lot easier to understand.

NPR and science are totally on my side about video games

Video Games Boost Brain Power, Multitasking Skills: NPR

“Video game players are able to pick up very subtle, statistical irregularities in environments and use them to their advantage,” Pratt says. “And these same irregularities in environments are the things that help us guide our behaviors on a daily basis.”

Take that, luddites. Video games make me awesome-er.

Best Kenny Loggins themed Christmas post ever

Hyperbole and a Half: The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas

It was finally time for Jesus to be born. Due to my incomplete understanding of childbirth, the scene involved Jesus being tossed across the room, as if in flight, and me running over to where he landed and acting really surprised to find him there.

So, there is this bit where a child beats a baby Jesus with a stick, but you should realize before you read it that, in context, it’s funny. Really funny.

PhatPad for iPad takes hand-written notes, scrawls and converts to type, shapes

PhatPad for iPad on the iTunes App Store

PhatPad offers everything you need to express your ideas, enabling you to draw pictures, jot notes, or put a mixture of drawings, images, handwritten and typed text on a virtual scratch pad. The included handwriting recognition engine automatically converts your handwritten notes into digital text, and PhatPad even takes objects you scribble and translates them to perfectly formed shapes.

I loved my Newton for these very features. Can’t believe Apple didn’t include them in the iPad. Jury is still out on how well it works.

More delicious – Not so fast on the shut-down stuff

delicious blog » What’s Next for Delicious?

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?
– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

Yes, the Internet was in a hurry. Yes, panic caused steaming scoop disorder. Sounds like those who care are working to find a good solution.

RWW on delicious.com closure

R.I.P. Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me

It was beautiful. And now it’s gone.

GBs are units of measure, too

32 GB versus 32GB: Almost everyone is writing it wrong

The International System of Units, otherwise known as the metric system, sets the standards for not only what a given quantity is, but how to express it. On page 133 of the SI brochure, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures says, “The numerical value always precedes the unit, and a space is always used to separate the unit from the number […] The only exceptions to this rule are for the unit symbols for degree, minute, and second for plane angle.” (emphasis added)

Pedantry aside, I do this wrong all the time.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is live – Word nerds everywhere rejoice

Official Google Blog: Find out what’s in a word, or five, with the Google Books Ngram Viewer

Since 2004, Google has digitized more than 15 million books worldwide. The datasets we’re making available today to further humanities research are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year.

The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years. One of the advantages of having data online is that it lowers the barrier to serendipity: you can stumble across something in these 500 billion words and be the first person ever to make that discovery.

As much as I get to armchair rib Google for Chrome OS and the App Store, it’s stuff like this: that a company the size of Google can afford to let brilliance go to work in every little corner of the organization, that makes it an exceptionally interesting time in our history. They’re a great model for humanities research right now.