Garrick van Buren – Page 42 – About time. And product. And being more deliberate.

Eating the Free Lunch

“GMail is slow because Google can’t afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I’d have no problem paying $50 a month. Considering how much time I spend in email, it’s kind of scary to think how much I’d be justified in paying. At least $1000 a month. If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would be a cheap way to make my life better.” – Paul Graham

Coffee Lock-in

“The problem is that you bought yourself a shiny espresso machine that only takes pods distributed by the manufacturer. So even if you buy the hippie’s beans, you can’t make yourself any coffee with them because the machine won’t take them unless they’ve been shipped to the manufacturer and packaged into little special pellets.” – Reginal Braithwaite

Departing

“I recently deleted Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and Flipboard from my phone, and have been very happy with the result. Today, I am deactivating my Facebook and Twitter accounts. This is not a decision motivated by Lent, and I have no idea at this moment when or if I will reactivate them.” – J Ben Deaton

Being Honest with Yourself

“There’s one difference. Mine doesn’t save the page, it just pretends to. And that’s good enough.” – Dan W. on his Instapaper Placebo

Reminds me of a fantastic Twitter-esque service I thought of a few years back. It would have a ‘compose tweet’ box just like Twitter and when you clicked ‘Tweet’ the box would empty just like Twitter.

Except your message wouldn’t go anywhere.

Though, for an extra charge – the messages could be reviewed by a licensed therapist.

#titanic { float: none; }

The story of the Titanic’s demise as written in jQuery.

In terms of geek humor, this achieves ‘sudo make me a sandwich’ status.

The Return of Fee

“For example: I’d like to see a start up set out to become the world’s best email service. For $40-$100 a year, customers would have unlimited storage, a powerful (ad free) interface, and rock solid reliability. ” – Drew Breunig

Olds

“One thing that I find missing is discovery of non-new content. The web is completely oriented around new-thing-on-top. Our brains are also wired to get a rush from novelty. But most “news” we read really doesn’t matter. ” – Evan Williams

Friends != Content Generators

“I believe we all live vicariously through the people we love and admire, we bask in their stories and their grace. To somehow conclude that it’s beneficial for us to ‘consume the information shared’ by those we love via the heavily branded and advertising-conscious proxy that is Facebook is, in fact, an insult. It’s a third–rate experience.” – Youssef Sarhan

Dogged

“I sometimes think that Silicon Valley is this weird abstract hunting ground where Neo-Victorian aristocrats hunt and kill good ideas for sport, the same way their ancestors would have killed foxes.” – Giles Bowkett

A Much Tastier Sandwich

Remember back when John Gruber called iPhone Web Apps a shit sandwich. And then Apple fanboys dragged Apple into native applications while balkanizing the nacent mobile software world?

Have you heard that today, WebKit is so popular other browser vendors are contemplating support -webkit CSS prefixes.

Now today, Apple announces:

Mac is obsolete. All their devices are different form factors of iOS (I called this last April)
OS X apps distributed via the App Store will need to comply with additional restrictions

So wait: build native apps and be ever restricted by Apple or build web apps and work across devices, across platforms, and even have non-Webkit browsers compatibility?

Leads me to believe that, as much as Apple doesn’t have the internet in it’s DNA, they’d still prefer – after all these years – that developers build web apps.