With our new API guidelines, we’re trying to encourage activity in the upper-left, lower-left and lower right quadrants, and limit certain use cases that occupy the upper-right quadrant.
I thought Twitter’s bullshit matrix needed a more consistent user experience, so I fixed it for them.
Daughter, 3: Daddy, the rover landed!
Me: It did! Lots of smart people made that happen by using their brains and working really hard for a long time. It’s called science.
Daughter: Yeah.
Me: When you get bigger, you can learn science and do amazing things too.
Daughter: And chew gum.
Me: Yes, and chew gum.
You’d think paying $80 for a piece of software would earn you the right not to be treated with contempt by its publisher, wouldn’t you? Well, Parallels now has “in-product notifications” that can’t be disabled. Ads, in other words.
The justification is that the notifications are used for important things, like bug fix updates, therefore they can’t be turned off. Which, of course, is complete nonsense. That story is how you sell ads to sponsors, not how you sell a product to users. What’s actually happening is that Parallels is abusing a critical information channel by stuffing paid content into it, and then pretending it’s not their fault. It’s like running ads over the Emergency Broadcast System and claiming you have no choice because it’s for emergencies.
[W]e occasionally share special offers from Parallels or other third party companies who provide special deals for our customers.… However, because customers need to receive important product information, there is not a mechanism for customers to completely disable notifications.
“Need”? Hmm, I think I read something about “needs” once, in a psych textbook or somewhere.
Yup, there it is. No problem then.
Scratch — Your Quick-Input Notepad
We’ve made loads of apps for clients at Karbon, but this is the first app we’ve made for ourselves. I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of Scratch. We hope it will become your favorite quick-input notepad. It’s crammed full of features like customizable and Markdown toolbars, Dropbox support for appending to existing files or creating new ones, built-in sharing to Twitter and more. It launches lightning-fast, too, and it always jumps right into edit mode so you can start typing right away.
The great thing is Scratch allows you to quickly clear your existing note, but stores all cleared notes in a searchable history so you never have to worry about losing anything. There’s no silly file management to deal with.
Give it a try, we think you’ll like it.
I guess this is as good a time as any to announce that I joined Karbon a few months ago. They’re a talented bunch, and Scratch is a beautiful app. Write notes in Markdown, synced to Dropbox? With a gorgeous, customizable toolbar? For three bucks? I can’t be serious!
Scratch was Shawn’s project, not mine, but I did contribute one tiny piece of code: the animation when you delete a note. By my calculations, that alone is worth at least eighteen cents. Go get it.
I know I’m always telling you to watch six-minute films about John Baldessari, but this one is narrated by Tom Waits and it’s so goddamned good.
Really, though: Vanity Fair’s eagerness for a narrative arc has led to the publication of at least two completely preposterous sentences.
An amazing essay about Romney’s high-school bullying, adolescence, guilt, and redemption.
Do not miss this extraordinary piece of writing.
(Source: sinker)
Indulge me in a fantasy.
Currently, reply scope on Twitter works like this:
What if, instead, it worked like this:
The difference is subtle but significant, because following Bob isn’t the only way I might see Bob’s original tweet. Someone else I follow could have retweeted it into my timeline. Alice herself may have done so, in fact. So one effect of this change would be to eliminate that awful “dot-reply” cheat: instead, just retweet the original before replying and all of your followers will see both.
Another effect is that it gives us a way to meaningfully interact with promoted tweets. Today, replying to a promoted tweet is all but pointless. The promoter won’t hear me — they’ll have thousands of replies to sift through, if they even bother to look — and beyond that, only those who already follow both me and the promoter will see my reply. That’s not likely to be very many people, since the whole idea of promoting a tweet is to put it in front of people who aren’t following the promoter. But under this new rule, all of my followers who saw the promoted tweet would also see my reply. Now we’re getting somewhere.
That’s step one. Step two is where this dream gets crazy:
It might look like this:
(Original tweets.) Completely nuts, right? Why would any advertiser ever go for this? It’s not fair, you may be thinking: Microsoft paid good money to have their tweet promoted, so why should any random nobody get to ride that train for free?
Here’s why: like it or not, by introducing promoted tweets, Twitter has declared that popularity and money are equivalent currencies. Your tweet can gain exposure organically, by virtue of your own following and the viral nature of retweets, or you can just pay up and they’ll stick it in everybody’s stream (or some large subset of everybody). What’s unfair is that due to the way replies currently work, the paying voice speaks alone. It’s paying to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.
Which, of course, is what advertisers want, so this will probably never change. But to me, that’s an unfortunate failure of imagination. Banksy, or possibly Sean Tejaratchi, writes:
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
What if this idea of freedom to rearrange and reuse were baked into the concept of what ads are? What if online ads became less like discarded flyers blowing down a busy street and more like living, breathing fragments of human conversation? What if users were treated like thinking beings and not like credit cards with eyestalks? Wouldn’t everybody win?
Naturally, not all replies to promoted tweets will be favorable to the promoter, and that’s OK: when you barge into a crowded room and start shouting through a megaphone, people don’t always say nice things. That’s part of the deal. And the longer ads continue to live on a weird plane of their own that barely intersects reality, the less effective they’ll continue to be, and the sooner the things we love that depend on ads will stop being able to exist.
I’d rather Twitter didn’t have ads at all, but if we must have them, let’s at least try to do something better than throwing rocks at heads.
