December 11th, 2012
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.
June 27th, 2012
The Nexux 7 is a 7″ tablet from Google.
Naturally it runs Android but it runs a version of Android that no one else has yet and, if Android’s track-record stays intact, not many older Android-powered devices will ever run.
I’m skeptical only because I’ve never seen an Android device that I’ve liked. But who knows?
Of course, Marco bought one.
May 8th, 2012
Like many Marco Arment thinks it is time to streamline U.S. currency:
- 1 cent: I don’t care whether we keep these. I’ll still keep them in a bowl and eventually bring them to a Coinstar machine for Amazon credit.
- 5 cents (5x previous denomination)
- 25 cents (5x)
- $1 (4x): I don’t care whether it’s a coin or a bill. Just pick one.
- $5 (5x)
- $20 (4x)
- $100 (5x)
My swing at this would involve the same number of currencies but would look slightly different. After spending a few weeks in Ireland last year I grew to love coin money over paper money. So I’d do it this way…
This would mean that prices would have to change. Gone would be the days of prices that end in .99. I say good riddance to the penny and bring on the dollar and two dollar coins.
March 16th, 2012
Instapaper 4.1 just hit the shelves. Here’s Marco Arment with what’s new:
The biggest two changes are the six awesome new reading fonts and the distraction-free, full-screen reading interface.
I just updated Instapaper for my iPad and iPhone. For free. Marco puts a lot of thought and care into this application and it only costs a few dollars. If you’d like to mark things to read later I suggest grabbing Instapaper.
Side note: I’m hoping to integrate the brand-new-not-even-finished-yet Nilai with Instapaper in a future update. I do not foresee Nilai supporting any other read later services.
December 20th, 2011
Well, not really.
December 13th, 2011
Jim Dalrymple’s definition of an Apple fanboy hits home for me. Especially this particular part of the definition:
“someone that loves to get the job done instead of working on their machine”
When I began my switch to the Macintosh nearly a decade ago my single biggest reason that I trumpeted to friends was that I could focus on my work rather than wasting countless hours maintaining my computer. I remember spending far too much time reinstalling my operating system, defragmenting my hard drive, installing virus and malware protection software, and other such tasks. Since switching to the Macintosh I have not had to spend a single minute on any of those things. The Mac lets me do work and get back to life. And I’m a huge fan of life.
December 9th, 2011
Remember when I said this yesterday?
“What would happen if, say, tomorrow Twitter decided that all Twitter clients (third-party and official) had to show some fairly obtrusive ads or you’d need to pay a few dollars per month to use the service?”
It turns out Twitter did change the next day. (I knew nothing of #letsfly at the time, I promise.) Marco Arment, today, whilst linking to John Gruber’s thoughts on the matter.
“I’d wager that all third-party clients will be forced to display the trends and ads within a year, and what we know as Twitter today — or at least what we knew until yesterday morning — will be a distant, quaint memory: Remember when it was just people you followed?”
So, it is happening. Twitter has changed. In the blink of an eye its most loyal users are second-guessing its future. It pulled a Facebook. And I’m guessing that Marco isn’t too far off in his estimate. Twitter will never be the 140-character simple messaging system that we all fell in love with in 2006.
August 10th, 2011
Thank goodness for people that are geeks about different things than I am and are willing to share their findings with the world.
That is exactly what Marco Arment is (a geek about different things than I am, willing to share findings) when he reviews Coffee Joulies (which started as a Kickstarter project). When he and others linked to this Kickstarter project I was moments away from backing the project before I thought these little guys were a bit superfluous for me. Yet, I had hopes that when they did come out they’d be either good or great and I’d eventually cave and buy a set. Turns out that Marco’s findings, regrettably, are that they really aren’t worth buying.
Thanks for saving me money Marco.
January 5th, 2011
How quickly things change! I’ve been praising Tumblr over the last several months because it has been an excellent tool to build The Watercolor Gallery with. And it still is, except since I began building The Watercolor Gallery Tumblr has been, well, tumbling down in the minds and hearts of some of their core users.
I even called Zach Inglis out for his tirade against the Tumblr team. Now I’m thinking, perhaps, he was completely justified. Or, maybe, I spoke too soon. However, I also believe that the Tumblr team (or perhaps just the investors) and its core users want two very different things for Tumblr.
One of Tumblr’s main investors and mentors has been Union Square Ventures. USV is an incredibly adept team of venture capitalists who, for the most part, have made some excellent bets over the years and whose opinions I respect. Put simply, guys like Fred Wilson “get it” without even breaking a sweat. Well, at least he makes it look easy. That being said USV obviously cares very much about the success of Tumblr – I just believe it is a different type of success then what the core users want. Investors, by and large, want to see growth and eventually profitability while core users want stability and for things to work better and better over time for them.
In early 2010 USV reupped their bet on Tumblr by “doubling down” on them. They’ve put a cool $10m into Tumblr alone. Wilson, in his post in April 2010 about how Tumblr had gotten to 1bn pageviews per month, wrote a very short reason why they’ve made that bet.
“There are some lessons here. First, make your software super easy to use. Second, you don’t need hundreds of employees to build a big time web service. You can keep it lean and scale if you have the right team. That’s how Tumblr got to a billion page views and we just made a bet that they will be able to take that number a lot higher.“
Emphasis mine. USV thinks that Tumblr can increase the number of pageviews from 1bn per month to, well, a lot more. And they think that will help their investment. They don’t care, too much, about how the service gets there just that they increase that number dramatically and – I can only assume – get a much larger round of financing or exit.
I’m not saying that USV doesn’t care if Tumblr gets their downtime in check. You can’t serve 1bn+ pageviews per month if you’re down. I think USV cares very much about the stability of the Tumblr platform – I just think they are focused on the wrong thing which could end up trickling down to the Tumblr team. If the Tumblr team is focused on metrics they will end up losing what made Tumblr’s team so great to begin with – the passion for making something great, simple, and different from everything else out there.
I could be dead wrong. Perhaps the team at Tumblr is focused on exactly that and that the dreams of the investors don’t trickle down too far. I hope USV (and the rest of the investors in Tumblr) understand very well how to stay out of the hair of the core team so that they can continue to do what they are great at. But there must be some reason by Marco Arment (one of the 2-man-team that made Tumblr great to begin with) left to do his own thing and continuously touts that he doesn’t want to take investment for Instapaper. Is he jaded? Has the Tumblr team “sold out”? We’ll see.
Oh, and I’m not picking on Fred Wilson either. I would point to other Tumblr investors that have commented about the growth of Tumblr, like Bijan Sabet, but he powers his blog with Tumblr which means his search simply doesn’t work. Maybe he’s hoping that the millions of dollars that his company Spark Capital has invested in Tumblr will fix that?
Again, I hope I’m wrong and I want Tumblr to succeed. I love the service and would pay money to keep it up and stable. Lets hope someday they give all of us the opportunity to do just that.
March 23rd, 2010
Marco Arment has now confirmed and previewed Instapaper for the iPad. In the post he says “an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a device I want to own.” I agree. Instapaper on the iPad is like the drugs+.
However, having purchased a new Macbook Pro just a little over 8 months ago I will not be getting an iPad for some time. I see an iPad, as I’m sure many do, as a secondary device to a main desktop computer. Not as a secondary device to a laptop. It just doesn’t seem practical. Of course, I could buy an iPad for no other reason than because I want one but that’d be frivolous and I’m generally not a frivolous person. At least I try not to be. I presume that at some point in the future when I need to replace my Macbook Pro (my last Macbook lasted over 3 years) I will purchase both a new desktop computer (some flavor of iMac perhaps?) and an iPad. I’ll let you know in a few years.
January 8th, 2010
This is just wonderful. Marco Arment has recently released a back up application for Tumblr that is currently only available for Mac OS X. This back up application takes a fairly unique approach among blogging platforms in that it backs up your Tumblog using raw files to your hard disk. It saves HTML files directly to your computer rather than, say, backing up the working files and database used to power a Tumblog and it does so with just one-click.
For contrast here is the way that I currently back up my WordPress powered blog. First, I export the database from mySQL. This can be done a variety of ways (as a CSV file, SQL file, etc.) but the result is the same – I back up the data that mySQL stores to be imported should a failure occur. Already I’ve left 99% of the world’s population wondering what the heck I’m talking about. Second, I copy all of the PHP files that run WordPress, my current theme, and any plugins that I have installed. There are a lot of files that run a WordPress powered site. Technically speaking I don’t need to copy the core WordPress files because those can be downloaded online at any time but I do it so that the back up of my site is a much more complete copy. Third, I copy any and all images and/or downloadable files to my local hard disk to be sure I can restore those should the need arise. It isn’t necessarily difficult to do all of this but if someone wasn’t as geeky as I am (Hi Mom) then I have no idea how they’d pull it off.
This isn’t the fault of WordPress. Comparing WordPress to Tumblr isn’t fair. Comparing WordPress.com to Tumblr, though, is a much more fair comparison. The purpose of WordPress.com, like Tumblr, is to bring blogging to the masses. WordPress.com is a service for people that would have no idea how to do what I described above let alone install and set up WordPress on their own. Presumably the backing up of any WordPress.com-powered blog being done in the background all the time. If a catastrophic failure happened to someone’s WordPress.com-powered blog they could just contact support and get it back up and running. Even the chance of someone’s blog having a failure is less because of it being powered by WordPress.com.
However, this doesn’t mean that they have an easy exit strategy for all of their content. Saving everything you need to restore a blog from WordPress.com is, as far as I know, not possible to do easily. The only options available currently on WordPress.com’s “Export” admin page is to export your posts, pages, and preferences as one big XML file that is only readable by another copy of WordPress.
This back up application for Tumblr is altogether different. When the process is complete you’re left with the content of your Tumblog in a very readable, searchable, and even machine readable set of files. If Marco added an “open the back up in your browser when finished” button I think any caveman (sorry guys) would be able to use and understand this application. Using very simple HTML each of your posts are saved separately, as well as together in monthly archives, which can even be searched using Mac OS X’s very powerful Spotlight search. After backing up my Tumblr account as a test of this application I realized how awesome it is to be able to use Spotlight to find something you’ve written on your blog. Inside of the individual HTML files for each post is also an XML schema, using the same schema as Tumblr’s own API, that can be used to pull out the specific metadata for that post. Brilliant.
I’m not sure why Marco decided against using Microformats, perhaps even in addition to the XML included, to make the HTML files machine readable but that doesn’t matter too much. Everything you need to restore your Tumblog is there. Which brings us to the one big caveat of this back up application. Restoring.
Unless I’m missing something I do not believe there is a way to restore your Tumblog using this application but I also believe that if anyone is going to make that much, much more simple than anyone else it will be the Tumblr team. The true sign of an excellent back up workflow is, as Joel Spolsky recently said, in the process of restoring from that back up.
“The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore.”
I think this application is much better than any other backup service or application I’ve seen from competing services. It is dead simple to use and gives you something you can actually use, read, and search on your local computer. Once they get the restore process down they will be ninety-nine miles ahead of everyone else.
September 18th, 2009
Instapaper, a read-later service by Tumblr‘s Marco Arment, has been popping up in front of me for months. I’ve seen two of my friends, Justin and Jonathan, rave about it. So I thought it was time I gave it a spin.
This morning I’ve installed the bookmarklet from the site, installed the free version of the iPhone application, created a Fluid SSB with this really nice Userstyle by Florian Holstein, and I think I’m all set up to begin using Instapaper.
Stay tuned for how it goes.
September 14th, 2009
Nothing is stated on their Twitter account. Their staff blog is silent (yet not down). Of course, neither is Marco Arment’s Tumblog (he’s a staff member). And yet my dashboard is down, my Tumblog is down, and so are many others.
The message appears to suggest that they know about this downtime. But I don’t think so, because they didn’t let any of us users know about it and they usually do an incredible job with this type of thing.
The fact that the staff blog is up, Marco’s blog is up, and pretty much everything else is down (even photo slideshows), suggests to me that they’ve had some sort of outage that only affects some users and not all users. Perhaps they separate out VIP users? That’d make sense.
Hope Tumblr comes back up soon.
Update: As of 7:49a the error message on the dashboard has changed to this:
It seems like an automatically generated message from Squid. Squid, I believe, actually will notify the technical team at Tumblr with an email, SMS message, or whatever they have set up to notify them when an error such as this occurs.
Update again: As of 8:11a EST it is back. We’ll see if anything is said as to why. But, I also saw a lot of Tumblogs that mentioned the downtime and some funny error messages they were getting. So maybe there was some planned downtime?