I saw the launch of Readlists from the Readability guys yesterday. It’s an important step forward for the web and I think a signal of what is to come.
Easy Kindle Publishing
The killer feature here is easy kindle publishing. You plug in a bunch of URLs and with one click you can send a whole bunch of content to your kindle.
It’s all about curation right now but I’m excited to see where this goes. Right now the perception is that the Kindle is just for e-books. But in reality it’s so much more than that, the media is changing and services like this help to completely turn the perception of the Kindle on it’s head.
Everyone is a publisher.
See It In Action
Here is a demo Readlist I created that you can download to your kindle. It’s a random smattering of some articles I’ve loved in recent times. If the iframe isn’t working for you on mobile or rss then click here to check it out.
In 1930, Gandhi spent 8 months in the Yerawada Jail in western India. During that time, he invented a new spinning wheel that came to be known as the Yerawada charkha. The Yerawada charkha is one of the more beautiful pieces of technology I’ve seen; it’s elegant, easy-to-build, and efficient.
Gandhi made the spinning wheel a linchpin of his independence campaign. And it worked. By spinning their own cloth, poverty-stricken villagers gave themselves a source of income and spiritual sustenance. They freed themselves from their dependence on the British textile industry. And they spawned an ecosystem of trades and tools, from weaving to dying to washing to carpentry, that restored vibrancy to the villages.
This is a wonderful read about technology and psychology and the interdependence of the two. If you don’t like the format try the printable version instead
Wouldn’t it be cool if we built the Instagram for desktop?
On first glance that might sound ridiculous. But I believe there’s a market for it and no one’s done it well yet.
As a user I desperately want a simple way to grab a portion of a page as an image and share it with friends. Something that doesn’t require “saving” or “uploading”.
This functionality is massively popular on mobile. We’ve had cameras in our phones for close to 10 years now.
On the desktop, grabbing an image of a page is non-standard and most of my friends still don’t really know how to put an image in an email. You need some kind of chrome add-on, firefox extension or desktop app combined usually with a file hosting service.
Unless you write blog posts regularly you likely don’t know about imgur and don’t know how to grab screenshots quickly and easily. But people love sharing images and the web is visual. So let’s get sharing.
Google Should Nail Screenshot Image Sharing With Chrome & Google+
Google is perfectly placed to nail this functionality with some combination of Chrome, Google+ and Google Drive. I imagine it would look a little something like this:
As Browsers Converge This Is The Future
In this day and age all the modern browsers are largely the same. Will your average user notice a big difference between the latest Firefox, Chrome or IE? Probably not.
So where does the next round of innovation come from in the browser wars? In my opinion it comes from features like this (and features like persisting session across devices)
It started with a simple idea—an online version of the classic arcade game Asteroids, but on a massively multiplayer scale.
It would support hundreds of players at once, thanks to a scalable network backend. It would be real-time, meaning that every player would see every shot and every movement simultaneously without delay.
Unfortunately for the Hacker News community—where an MMO Asteroids “prototype” would eventually make the front page—it all turned out to be fake. April Fools.
[…] Vikrum Nijjar, however, took that as a challenge. He believed it could be done. And as luck would have it, he had been developing just the software needed to make it a reality
[…] His MMO Asteroids prototype made the Hacker News front page too. And this time, it was actually real
I’ve been dreaming of large scale real-time interactive games for a long time. This piece breaks down the events that led to the MMO Asteroids project and also looks at the underlying technology and where we might be headed in terms of true, large scale real-time interactions on the web.
I’ve joined the Svbtle network. I’ve long been an admirer of the work that Dustin Curtis has done and I’m excited and honored to join the network:
The Svbtle Network is an experiment that brings some of the best things from newspapers (editing, vetting, etc) to a network of independent bloggers. It is focused on the writing, the news, and the ideas. Everything else is secondary. - Codename: Svbtle
Why am I joining? Because I’m fanatical about content. And typography. And the force of ideas.
Who Am I?
I’m a tech geek, marketer and fiercely curious individual. I live in Brooklyn, NY and work for Distilled.
The State of Svbtle
Those are the colors currently present on the network. And now there’s me too:
Stats
Since I’m a maths geek I thought I’d break down what’s going on with Svbtle right now. As of writing there are:
28 writers on Svbtle (not including me)
595 posts written on Svbtle (not including this one)
422 posts written on Svbtle excluding Dustin Curtis
I look forward to contributing my thoughts and writing to the future of Svbtle. In the meantime, I’ve shifted my essays to essays.tomcritchlow.com where you can still find The Art of Being Switched On.
