Posts

And that’s what makes this so uncomfortable: Android’s and particularly Samsung’s copying of Apple was egregious and shameless, but since that itself is not illegal (and how could you even codify that as law?), then does settling for a victory over stuff that probably shouldn’t even be patentable count as a victory at all? Making things worse, the jury had the option of invalidating patents on both sides, and declined to do so on every count. ...

Today Twitter cut off Tumblr’s access to the Twitter social graph, preventing people from using the list of people they follow on Twitter to find friends on Tumblr. This is yet another lurch toward stinginess on Twitter’s part. They obviously feel like people are hooked enough on their service that they’ll stick around despite the fact that they’re claiming your list of Twitter followers as their own property, and have decided to slowly starve third party developers who build Twitter clients. ...

Twitter Followers For Sale Austin Considine reports in the New York Times. Reminds me of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, a novel which is also mentioned in the article’s first comment.

Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. That number means that the entire economics of Ferguson’s writing career, and many other writing careers, has been permanently altered. Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor. Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them. They are merely billboards for the messengers. ...

Languages, Verbosity, and Java Dhanji Prasanna sums up the strengths of Java as capably as you’ll ever see.

Onto the next chapter Adrian Holovaty announces his departure from EveryBlock five years after founding the company. It’s a great rundown of what EveryBlock accomplished – its impact in the areas of open data and custom mapping was impressive.

The changes to the v1.1 API requiring authentication won’t affect Tweetbot, all current API calls are already made using authentication. The new rate limits that are part of the v1.1 API will likely end up being a good thing, instead of having a fixed block calls that can be made across the entire API the limits will be based on specific actions. We actually expect this to minimize the chances of being stuck in “Twitter Jail”. As an example, if you refresh your timeline over 60 times in an hour, you’ll still be able to post or DM. In general assuming the numbers listed on Twitter’s side remain consistent this should make for an overall better user experience. ...

Twitter, which can in many ways thank third party developers for the great success it has enjoyed, is imposing wide-ranging restrictions on third-party developers going forward. They’ve been moving in this direction for awhile, and the latest announcement makes these changes official. Some time ago that made it clear that third-party clients are an endangered species – not only are they discouraging development in that area, but they have also been rolling out new features regularly without corresponding API calls. Now we see that they are imposing much tighter restrictions on API usage in general, and also restricting how content from Twitter can be incorporated into other Web sites. ...

A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical By New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner. Good stuff. I am a huge admirer and fan of a well-written piece of criticism.

Happy 10th Birthday, Daring Fireball Robinson Meyer writes about Daring Fireball, John Gruber’s Apple-centric blog that you probably already read every day. I’ve been reading it from the very beginning. I own the T-shirt. Happy birthday, DF!