I decided to write him back with some advice. I’m publishing my response on the hope that it will help salespeople produce better pitches (which will thereby reduce the number since they will have to be more thoughtful), and saving that, maybe my post will provide some cathartic commiseration to all of the other people who I know face a similar barrage of unqualified pitches every day (and I won’t even get into the cold phone calls).

I can not even begin to put a number on how many unsolicited pitches I’ve gotten via email over the years. Hundreds if not thousands. Most of them are pretty terrible. One or two per year are for products I genuinely need or will need in the future. But the process itself, whether or not the product being solicited is good or not, is old and busted and really needs to be done away with.

Chad’s advice is right on the money, of course, in that these inside sales people really should do a little research before they decide to email an executive out of the blue. Otherwise it is lazy and the email becomes borderline spam.

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Now they need to take a queue from Instagram (and many other modern mobile apps) and start uploading the photo immediately, rather than waiting for the user to click “done”, so that it seemingly uploads instantly.

Flickr blog, yesterday:

Uploads from the Flickr app are much faster. We did some magic to optimize uploads, but also start uploading in the background while you think about the photo’s title or where you want to share it to.

It is less magic and more smoke and mirrors but a welcome change nonetheless.

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Barley has been a smash hit and it isn’t even publicly available yet. We’ve been overwhelmed by the response. We’ve had interest shown by people and companies in every Internet-connected country on the globe. Literally. Designers and developers are building templates, importers, SDKs and more for Barley already.

We just put out a teaser video, check it out.

My blog will be back in full swing when we convert it to Barley.

In its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is experimenting with wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass, according to people familiar with the company’s explorations, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to publicly discuss unreleased products. Such a watch would operate on Apple’s iOS platform, two people said, and stand apart from competitors based on the company’s understanding of how such glass can curve around the human body.

Apple. You have over $100 billion in cash on hand. You’re making around $20 billion in profit per quarter. You have some if not the most talented design and engineering staff the world has ever known, a supply chain that money can’t even buy, and a beloved brand that people wait in the freezing cold to pay money for. Do not make a watch.

Even if the watch is cool… and I believe it will be. Even if the glass of the watch can literally mold to my skin and be utterly transparent in ways I could never imagine… and I believe you could do that. Even if the watch can use Siri and Maps and allow me to check-in on Foursquare… and I believe it could. That still isn’t enough to justify your time and attention.

With the resources you have you could build a small village on Mars. You could tackle the TV industry and turn it on its head the way you did music just a short decade or so ago. You could disrupt the way modern-day computing happens yet again by offering relatively inexpensive laptops with retina displays that are always connected to the web, for free, anywhere I go. Or, create an even better iPad that begins to rival the computational power of a desktop computer.

Any one of these efforts would be considered an amazing feat but truly worthy of being tackled by a company with your resources. Choose to do something amazing with your resources. Even if you make the best watch the world has ever seen… and I believe you could… you shouldn’t.

The broad, public perception of Foursquare still seems to be that it’s all about being the mayor of some bar, or something useless like that, which actually hasn’t been the company’s focus for a long time.

But it is a little hard for someone who only knows the old Foursquare to grasp how useful the new Foursquare has become. The company has actually made great progress in product, design, and utility over the past year. But like many companies, it hasn’t communicated this sufficiently. That’s a big part of the reason, I’d guess, that it isn’t growing as fast as it could be.

I completely agree. Foursquare is an incredibly valuable tool. Even if you don’t use it you see it in use within Instagram, Path, and many other applications. Foursquare has been collecting very useful data for years and has recently really begun to understand how to use that data in a way that is valuable on the go.

I still see people using Foursquare daily that focus mainly on the badges and not on the discovery engine, the ability to plan trips using its list features, etc. Foursquare needs to start telling people the best way to use it.

I certainly can’t answer your specific “how much” question in a single 1,000 word blog post.  But I will suggest there are only three main buckets in which to place your answer generally.  Once you’ve placed your trust in one of these buckets, then you can get to work on your specific amount:

1. “raise no money now, keep bootstrapping” (~20% of deals should do this)
2. “raise only what you need to get the current job done” (~70% of deals should do this)
3. “go big or go home” (~10% of deals should do this)

I’m planning on discussing how I decided how much money to raise for Plain once our company has our site and blog up and running (tomorrow, hopefully). But I can say that I am generally taking Wayne’s #2 approach; raising enough to get the current job done and go from there. Although I did have the opportunity for #3 I think it is still early on and we have a lot of unknowns so I see no reason to move too quickly and get over our heads.

Great post by someone who has seen a lot of deals. Read the whole thing.

The unfortunate consequence of this most recent refactoring, though, is that if you have a private account I may no longer be able to follow you on Twitter. Twitter does not currently allow me to add your account to a list if we don’t follow each other.

Update: Why am I refactoring? This is why.

But the larger point here is that he turned a rant into a positive action. He challenged me to do something about it, to blog what I’d figured out, to provide a clear constructive encouragement instead of just a criticism.

And..

If you believe something passionately, you should blog that.

I agree. I’ve been thankful to myself for nearly every post I’ve ever written. Even if only a handful of people read them also I’d always have the posts for myself.

I need to blog a lot more than I do. About solutions, practices, and processes. And I’m going to. Just wait.

Tantek also has Part 2 up.

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This latest batch of one million amazing developers joined GitHub in just the last five months.

GitHub isn’t for your mom (though I’m sure the team at GitHub would appreciate you teaching her how to use git). But it seems like GitHub is being found by exactly who it is for. And that’s awesome.

Congratulations to the entire team (especially my friends there).

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I can’t talk about the details of how things fell into place but the choice became obvious. I’ll be designing for Microsoft as of summer. I promise that I’ll make the my greatest work ever while I’m there.

Web creative types take note… sharing your work, ideas, and thoughts will lead to good things. Share more.

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Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there.

And then there are the countless billions of galaxies besides our own. I wonder if we’ll ever make it to even just one of them?

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I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged by his attorneys last year to help prepare a defense for his April trial.

It is an interesting read.

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If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result, the only women you see in tech are those who are willing to put up with all the abuse.

There aren’t enough women in tech for a variety of reasons and the male-dominated environment is definitely one of the bigger reasons. I’ve heard stories that I wish I could forget from older, disgusting men who thought they were bragging to me. In every case I’ve almost immediately removed myself from those discussions and, as quickly as possible, stopped doing business with those men. If you were one of those men and are now reading this, now you know one of the reasons why I no longer work with you.

I pulled this quote out because as you read the interview you begin to realize your reading the words of someone who had so many interests and was very well educated on many of them. And, he cared.

Aaron was wise beyond his years. And many will laud his technical achievements like being a co-author of such specs as RSS, RDF, Creative Commons, and co-founding Reddit. I will remember how he thought. Aaron tried to keep firmly in mind the long term. He tried to set things up that would last and even put together a way to make sure they kept going. Too often we see decisions being made that purposefully have a short half-life for the benefit of the few rather than the long-term benefit of the many. In Aaron’s memory lets try to reverse that trend. Stop and think.

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If you’re not committed to your life’s work in a company and with people you could endure for decades, are you making progress on it?

Yes. I am.

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“If my idea isn’t worth copying then it’s not a very good idea. If my product or business can’t handle a new competitor, then it’s not a very good product.”

If someone copies your idea for a product it should make you feel validated for having the idea in the first place. Build the best product you possibly can and stop worrying about being copied.

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Sadly, Gruber might be right. And The Verge’s video shows this. Ubuntu for phones may be a non-starter.

However, Gruber says that a gesture-based UI can never work. I don’t know if that is true. I’d hate to say that anything is impossible. Gruber and I are old men. Maybe a gesture-based UI wouldn’t work for us (though keyboard shortcuts come as second-nature to anyone my age and under) but will work for a future generation? What if every mobile OS became a gesture-based touch OS? Then humans would be forced to deal with it and get used to it.

So, I don’t know if it is a non-starter because it is a gesture-based UI or if someday that will catch on as the norm, but I do know that if it isn’t responsive or reliable than it won’t take off regardless.

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You might want to consider subscribing to this YouTube channel.

One of the most important lessons we took from delicious was the value of single user utility in social systems. It might seem odd that systems designed to leverage interactions between people can have (should have?) single person utility. But I strongly believe they should.

In short; single user utility is the fact that an application or service can be valuable to a single user with or without the social components like the network, sharing, etc.

Delicious is a good example of this, as Wilson describes, but there are many others. Path, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, the now discontinued Nilai, and many more have their own single user utility.

Bad examples? Google+, Instagram. Both of these would be fairly meaningless without the social components.

Social components should multiply the value of a service not be the only value of a service.

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5. No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking in any way the person of an opponent shall be allowed; the first infringement of this rule by any player shall count as a foul, the second shall disqualify him until the next goal is made, or, if there was evident intent to injure the person, for the whole of the game, no substitute allowed.

Could you imagine if this rule were still in effect today? It would be like hockey where a team could have a power play. Until the next goal was scored a team would be playing 4 on 5.

/via Jason Kottke.

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How do you determine if your organization is complex before it needs to be?

“When you talk to employees of a large company, it seems as if their entire world is made up of byzantine internal politics with no relation to customers in the external world… a large percentage of every day is spent attempting to navigate ever-shifting politics surrounding the org chart. It would seem that the larger a company gets, the more the company tends to allocate resources towards inwardly focused (as opposed to outwardly focused) issues.”

A company doesn’t even need to be that large before this starts to become an issue. If you’re at a company that talks more about what they will do than what they actually do, that worries about their titles more than their product, or has a bunch of people that don’t know what their job is… you’re already there.

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I feel as if most people currently paying for Flickr Pro don’t take advantage of all the features offered. I might even go in the other direction and have the current Flickr Pro offering become the mid-size account, and offer a more expensive Business account that doesn’t have file size or video limitations.

My main argument for why I think Flickr should make a scaled-down account is more about price than about features. I was a paying Flickr Pro user for many years, as was my wife, and we never utilized the account to the full. Though I’m sure more serious photographers do. However, in today’s market of mobile apps and the services that power them, most people will not pay $24 a year to share photos with their friends. And I don’t think the Instagram generation needs Flickr Pro. But I do think they’d pay enough to make it worth Flickr’s while to create a more affordable account with less features.

Creating a Premium account is an interesting idea and is always on the table for SaaS platforms. But I don’t think that is the right strategy for Flickr. I doubt there are many members that are pining for more features or space or video capabilities. They can go elsewhere for video. I believe there is a goldmine of brand new users that are dabbling with Instagram – to the tune of tens of millions perhaps – that would love a few extra features that Instagram simply does not provide (stats, groups, sets, etc.) and all Flickr has to do is price the account just right, and market it properly, in order to suck them all in.

Again, Danny:

Whatever their strategy for success may be, Flickr must evade further stagnation in order to be competitive. They can’t ignore and leave new markets wide open like they did with mobile. They have the opportunity to become a powerful weapon in the hands of Yahoo.

It is amazing to me that so many people see Instagram as Flickr’s failing. But it is obvious. The people that were the innovators in photo sharing missed the boat. I think the problem is that Flickr became a business very quickly after joining Yahoo! It went from being an innovative product that was really trying to solve problems to a business that needed to make money and innovation sort of was pushed to the side. And the fact that we didn’t hear anything from Flickr for years was mind-boggling. I have no idea what they’ve been doing for the last few years.

Danny nailed it when he mentioned cannibalization. Some of the things Flickr should have done over the last several years were no doubt thought of and even sketched out but perhaps decided against for that very reason. They didn’t want to lose current customers. But they may have to do just that in order to grow again.

Yahoo! needs to invest in Flickr. They need to let the team know they can take chances again. They can try and fail and try again. They need resources, talent, and a someone with a clear vision to run the entire thing.

If Marisa runs Flickr like she ran search at Google Flickr will succeed. If she runs it the way Google+, Buzz, and Wave was run she won’t. And there is a subtle difference between the two approaches. Google+, Buzz, and Wave were innovations, no doubt, but without any real value or use case that was obvious. I remember trying Wave for the first time and having no idea what it was for. The products were perhaps a little too innovative. Instagram isn’t so much an innovation as it a well-designed simple solution that brings delight to people every day. Google search is a well-designed (seemingly) simple solution that brings an amazing amount of value to people every day. Flickr should aim for one of those; delight or value. I’d pick delight.

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I remember reading a review that Pauline Kael wrote about some director’s big epic, and she said: Now, look, it might seem unfair to judge a talented man more harshly when he tries to do something big than a less talented person who’s doing something easier. But when you try big things, you take big risks, and if you’re trying to do something that is maybe above you and you can’t quite pull off, then whereas before we only saw your gifts, now we see your failings.

I’ve always been pushing that envelope. I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you’re not that good. You just reached the level here. I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.

I like to think that I feel the same way. If you go big you will sometimes fail but go big or go home.

/via Michael Heilemann on Twitter.

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Now they need to take a queue from Instagram (and many other modern mobile apps) and start uploading the photo immediately, rather than waiting for the user to click “done”, so that it seemingly uploads instantly.

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Well, Flickr has done something that I think could be the first big step towards doing just that. They’re giving away 3-months free of Flickr Pro to existing members. This should help bolster the usage of Flickr over the next three months in a big way. This could also help them to determine how people will use the new iPhone app on-the-go (something they have very little experience in since, until recently, their iOS app was no where near as great as it is now) and, perhaps, come up with a new model as I suggested.

Regardless of their reasoning for doing the giveaway – Flickr will be used a whole lot more over the next three months and I’m sure a portion of the people that take advantage of this deal will fall in love with Flickr all over again.

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Now, despite the country’s ongoing economic struggles, a slew of emerging growth start-ups are flocking to the city of pints and pubs. This year alone, tech darlings including Indeed.com, Hubspot, Zendesk, and, most recently, Dropbox, have opened or announced plans to open offices in Dublin.

I really enjoyed visiting Dublin last year. Geeks want for but a few things; posh surroundings, bikeable neighborhoods, fast internet connections, and lots of amazing beer. Dublin has all of these and much more.

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So, to whoever suggested the name “Safari,” thank you.

Though I’m a Chrome guy now (Safari is just far too slow) I too thank the person that came up with Safari rather than Freedom as the browser’s name.

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A feature roll out is when a new feature is added to a service for a certain number of users at a time and, after some duration of time, every user on that service ends up with the new feature. This process could take hours, days, weeks.

There are a lot of reasons a company may need or want to do a feature roll out. There are also reasons a company may want to avoid doing them. Lets first look at why a company may need to roll a feature out.

Some features on these large-scale platforms are incredibly taxing on the technology infrastructure of a service. Say, for instance, that YouTube released a feature that allowed its users to re-encode all of their videos into a higher quality than they previously allowed. YouTube has billions of minutes of video. If every one of their users were allowed to do this all at once they’d bring YouTube’s infrastructure (world-class though it may be) to its knees.

Twitter’s recent roll out of a feature that allows its members to download all of their tweets in an archive is another example. While certainly not as intense as video encoding, gathering up tens-of-thousands of tweets and creating a neat and tidy archive of them does take some horsepower. They’ve decided to roll this feature out.

Another, slightly more technical, reason that a company may need to roll out a feature over time would be that they split their traffic onto many different web nodes. Or, actual web servers or clusters of servers. Each of those web nodes being updated at exactly the same time would bring the service down for a short period of time. High-capacity, “always up”, networks like Twitter can not afford to have downtime across all nodes at once. So they may roll out a feature so that their service remains up and running and they only have to pull down one node at a time, moving the traffic that would normally go to those nodes to other nodes temporarily, to update it with the new feature.

But why would a company want to roll out a new feature even if they didn’t need to? There are many advantages and I think one of the best ones that is often overlooked is hype. Remember when Instagram rolled out web profiles? It took the better part of a week for everyone to get their web profiles.

If you don’t see your profile yet, be assured that you’ll see it in the next few days. We’re rolling out profiles to everyone on Instagram over the course of this week.

A week. Even with 100,000,000 users a week in internet-speak is just about one year and three months. But with a certain number of users getting their web profiles each and every day they got an amazing amount of word-of-mouth for free. “Yay! I got my web profile!!” followed by a link on Twitter from a huge percentage of users. If for no other reason then to have Instagram on everyone’s mind for an entire week it was worth rolling this feature out over time rather than giving it out relatively immediately to everyone.

Another advantage worth noting is that by rolling out a feature the company is able to monitor the progress, effectiveness, and use of the feature and has more of a chance to correct things as the feature rolls out. If a feature has a direct impact on the stability or cost of running the service then rolling it out over time gives you a better idea of how well the feature is doing at attacking that goal. If a feature is brand-new and the company wants to see if users will A) use it and B) figure out how to use it correctly – by rolling it out you can get some sense as to how users interact with the feature. This is very advantageous.

Why would a company want to avoid feature roll outs? Announcing features that users do not have yet is always risky business. It is almost never a good idea. Some of the risk falls on user awareness. If a user learns about a feature and gets excited to use it and can not use it for a week they’re likely to forget about it a week later. You’re also likely to create higher expectations for a feature than you’re able to deliver on. I’m sure the Instagram users that got their web profile a week after they were announced had a slightly less excited response at getting them than the ones that did in the first day or two.

Feature roll outs are sometimes a necessity, sometimes a tool, and sometimes a bad idea. Choose carefully.

Any other advantages or disadvantages? Chime in on Hacker News.

The real world: Quit, verb, to leave (a place), usually permanently.

The internet: Quit, verb, to threaten to leave as loudly as possible, usually over something stupid, then do nothing.

I’ll admit it. When I first saw the Instagram news I too wanted to look at my options for leaving the service. But I wasn’t about to delete my account 30 days before the policy would have even been put into place.

I’ve seen people quit Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram only to come back a few days later and need to rebuild their entire accounts under new usernames because they thought better of it. To each their own but at least allow news like this to sink in for a day or two before you make a decision.

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3. Apply a single filter to multiple photos at once. Did you fall in love with a particular filter? We’ve made it easy for you to apply it to multiple photos at once. You simply select the photos from your camera roll that you’d like to edit then go to the filter screen and tap and hold the filter that you want for your photos. And just like that, all of your photos are Panda-ized.

I also didn’t realize that you could manage your Flickr Groups from within this application as well. This is a very feature-rich application.

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Good. I hope everyone didn’t go and delete their Instagram accounts without waiting until everything really shook out.

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People want to secure material in something more reliable than a single website.

I think she has a future in writing.

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With a nicely redesigned client and support for filters, Flickr is finally catching up to battle Instagram on the photo sharing front. And its dormant community of lapsed Pro users (who are required to pay a nominal fee each year) could be awakened after Instagram users realize they’re the product of advertisers. It could be a temporary backlash, the same type we witness whenever Facebook adjusts its news feed, but competitors are ready this time and Twitter and Flickr are waiting in the wings for a share of Instagram’s unhappy user base.

He calls what Flickr charges for its Pro account a “nominal fee” and for what you get I suppose it is. Warren states that Flickr Pro users, like myself, will come out of hiding and reup their accounts. That may be true but I don’t think we’ll see new users jettisoning from Instagram and signing up to Flickr as Pro users. I would, however, see them moving over in droves if there were a cheaper account level that stated, simply, that Flickr/Yahoo wouldn’t use their information for advertising purposes.

Your move Yahoo!.

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Flickr has long since been very good at a few things; sharing, licensing, and interoperability. It is one of the reasons Flickr was included in Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost; Flickr’s API is world-class and the entire Internet can benefit from its rich offerings.

Instagram being bought by Facebook was the first step in the wrong direction in the eyes of many web veterans. And there are more and more web veterans every single day as the web gets older. Web veterans are people that know better. Web veterans know that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram aren’t the Internet. In fact, they are the antithesis of the Internet. These companies do whatever they possibily can to pigeon hole people onto their websites for as many hours throughout the day as possible. The rest of the web, the real web, tries to solve a problem for people while playing nicely with every other service out there.

Flickr made the first big step in capitalizing on Instagram’s move to Facebook last week when they debuted a brand-new iOS application that has gotten rave reviews from web newb and veteran alike.

However, Flickr is too expensive for people casually sharing a filtered photo from their mobile cameras now and then. Yes, you can use Flickr for free for up to 200 photos but I think just about anyone with a Flickr account would much prefer to have all of their photos available all of the time.

If Flickr were to change their model just slightly – one from a pro backup and catalog solution to one of sharing – they could easily win a ton of accounts that are falling off of the Facebook/Instagram table on a daily basis. Perhaps creating a cheaper account-type that costs, say $5 or $7 per year, would be enough for the web veterans (again, there are a lot of us) to completely jump ship from Instagram and pony up. This way, we would never have to worry about advertisements, creepy data collection, or wondering if our data will ever be trapped on someone else’s servers. And believe me, this isn’t something that is terrible difficult for Flickr to give a shot. They have everything they could possibly need already in place to do this.

Flickr, you’ve already made one step. Take the next step and bring us all back home again.

[discuss on Hacker News]

You can look at this any number of ways. On the one hand, if Instagram is free and we have to see advertisements in order to use it – wouldn’t it be great to see ads that you’d actually like to see rather than ads you really wouldn’t be interested in? On the other hand, it sort of stinks that the photos you share, the places you visit, and the people you know all become currency for Facebook.

This change goes into affect on January 16, 2013. The only way to opt-out of these changes is to literally delete your account.

Just when Instagram really started to become great, they go and make us think they are creepy.

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With over 26,000 tweets under my two-sizes-too-big belt I can say that I’m very happy about this. Twitter has now given me a way to relive the last 6 years of my life whenever I choose.

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For me, I’m most productive early in the morning and mid-afternoon when I get back from lunch. I’m worthless just before lunch and anytime at night.

That is, unless I get into Flow. Flow is something that I definitely subscribe to. One of the responders to Todd’s question also brought it up and, like me, feels it is random and unpredictable. I’ve found, though, that you can sort of force Flow by giving yourself deadlines.

Here is a good way to get into Flow every day… write down a task that you know can be handled in a short period of time, tell yourself you have to have it done by a certain time and start working on it. If you finish early then you gave yourself too much time. But if you get the timing right you’ll be working really hard to get that task accomplished. Once you do, you’ll be on a roll. You’ll achieve Flow. Don’t stop. Don’t get up. Just start something else on your list.

I’ve found this has worked for me when I’ve needed to force myself into Flow.

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Now we just need a way to make the Gmail for iOS app our default email application on iOS.

/via Shawn Blanc.

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My relationship with the Viddler team actually began before my first day as a team member. My friend and ex-coworker Mike Stickel and I ran a small company called ChanceCube that did some consulting for Viddler long before I ever thought I’d end up working there full-time. In 2006 the small team at Viddler was focused on creating a Flash-based video player that included comments that popped up along the timeline as you viewed a video. Mike and I helped Viddler conceptualize the UI for that player.

In 2007 when I visited Rob Sandie and Donna DeMarco in what was then a closet-sized office in Jordan Hall at Ben Franklin Tech Ventures near Lehigh University I saw that they had built what Mike and I had helped them design and it was way beyond our own expectations for how good it really could be.

It was during that initial visit that I knew I wanted to be part of the Viddler team.

Since that cold, cold day in January 2007 everyone at Viddler has worked very hard to first build a cool product, then build a viable business, an incredibly good team, a very reliable platform, and ultimately a sustainable company.

At every step in the evolution of Viddler and from every member of the team past and present I’ve been able to learn so much. It was a privilege to serve on the Board of Directors, to help recruit great talent, and to work with Viddler’s largest customers to accomplish their online video goals. Each of the various roles that I tried, and both succeeded and failed at, were challenging, fun, and worth the effort.

I feel it is time to do something different. I’m ready to do something new. I have many interests and the world of web video was only one of them. It will take a few months before my new team and I are ready to share what we’re working on but I’m very excited about what’s next.

There’s no getting around that, no matter how good a programmer you are, no matter how experienced, it’s just hard. Programming doesn’t require a lot of attention, it requires all of attention.

I agreed. As much as the founder wants to be the developer they shouldn’t be. I don’t think it means that they can’t do any development. But the responsibility of this task should not rest solely on their shoulders. They can dabble. They can mess around with ideas. Maybe even help put together new prototypes. But leave the production stuff to professionals.

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He also puts forth this worthy nugget:

In order to advance the state of the art, we have to be willing not only to try new ideas, but to retreat when those ideas prove untenable or when something better comes along.

Boy do I believe this! Trying new ideas should be something that we, as builders, and even entire companies, should make a priority. Try. Try. Try. The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll learn.

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But we’re going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.

Facebook is definitely the modern-day America Online. Twitter the modern-day SMS. But our blogs are still here. And Google does a decent job of indexing them. And maybe, just maybe we’ll see a resurgence of people “getting onto the web” as opposed to “getting on Facebook”. But the only way that will happen is if these tools of yesterday get as much attention and focus as the social web. And I think I see that coming.

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While the day job got in the way of me being able to make Nilai as truly great as I wanted it to be I ended up finding Nilai incredibly useful. I used it every day. But then, some really great new services began popping up such as Pocket and Kippt.

Fast-forward to today. I have little or no time to make the updates that I’d like to make to Nilai so I’ve decide to shut it down. If you go back to why I built Nilai in the first place, it was because I wanted a bookmarking service that would be around forever. So I’m going to keep the service running for a long time (because I still tend to use it every day and I know quite a few other users do too) but the service will no longer accept new sign ups and existing users will no longer be required to pay for their account.

Since Nilai’s users pay per-month I’ve already begun canceling the next scheduled payment from all users. If any users would like a refund I’ll gladly provide a full refund for every month you’ve already paid for whether you’ve used the service or not. If you want to continue using Nilai every day you may do so for as long as I keep it running. If you want a refund or an export of your data simply send me an email. Thanks so much for trying out this hobby with me. I had a lot of fun doing it.

If you’re looking to fill the void that Nilai did, I suggest using Kippt. Recently I’ve begun using this service and the team there really seems to care a lot about making the product truly valuable.

Decide who can access your dashboard, setup their own Viddler username and password, and choose what they will have access to in your account. Select who can view and/or manage certain videos or playlists, who can edit account or billing settings, and for those customers with sub-accounts, you can set permissions for accessing these accounts as well, which makes managing your content easier and more productive.

This is huge for publishing organizations that need to allow multiple people within one organization to upload, edit, or manage their video library. Even better, if a single organization has more than one Viddler account (say, for different publications or departments) – they can set up access to each of those sub-accounts as well. The importance of this feature can not be overstated.

Any company doing video publishing should take a serious look at using Viddler if they haven’t already.

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As photos and other media become a bigger part of Twitter’s strategy in the future, it can’t have this kind of thing completely at the mercy of a service owned by a competitor.

Instagram’s being able to simply yank Twitter’s ability to embed images inline on their site and apps is far too much control for Twitter to be comfortable with. Makes sense to me. And, as Marco said, I hope it is this reason and not to try to hurt Instagram. Because that wouldn’t work.

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We aren’t focused on pageviews, but rather posting things that interest us. Of course, the hope is that they’ll interest you as well.

This is an interesting topic. And “pageview journalism” is an interesting phrase. The post that Jim links to on ZDNet describes pageview journalism as the act of writing about topics that a writer or editor believes will get the most pageviews rather than writing about what the writer themselves may think interesting. In other words, writing about Apple rumors will more likely generate more traffic than writing about amps. So a publication will focus on writing about Apple rumors. Traffic dictates content.

The Loop, however, has managed to stay true to the author’s interests and still find an audience that appreciates a balanced approach to its content publishing. One that definitely bends towards keeping up-to-date with Cupertino but still finding several off-topic posts as interesting.

Pageview journalism has other nasty side-effects besides just dictating the topics a publication focuses on writing. As we all know it can also have adverse effects on the reading experience of a publication.

For instance, The Loop’s RSS feed is an excerpt-only feed. This forces people like me who subscribe to the feed to visit The Loop in order to read the entire post. I think I understand why The Loop does this; to generate more members (who get a full-text RSS feed) or to generate more ad revenue to off-set those (like me) who are not paying members. It makes total sense to me why  The Loop has done this but it certainly is a direct result of how they choose to earn revenue for their publication.

Of course, this isn’t nearly as egregious as, say, a site that purposefully splits up articles into multi-page layouts to generate more pageviews. Most of the publications that continue to do that crap we’ve all simply chosen to ignore. But it is definitely something that fits under the umbrella term of pageview journalism.

Update; December 17: Jim has tweeted me to say that only the long articles are truncated. After looking, of course he is right. So only the full articles need to be read on their site. Which makes perfect sense to me.

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Something I’d like to see is for an app that is as well-designed as this to handle what is arguably the much more difficult part of poker – the betting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had split-pots and difficult-to-count bets that a machine could do in seconds.

/via John Gruber.

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 Google AdSense’s internal CRM is a Rails app called Toothpaste that I cobbled together one (late) night that now serves the global team.

What is your hobby project?

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