June 2011
0 posts
“This is all speculation on my part. Not much more than a hunch, or a gut...”
– Media Bistro’s All Twitter blog goes in for the kill with their hard hitting expose on what’s happened with Favorites and List features.
“And Bijan posted recently that he is using an iPhone app called EasySign to sign...”
– Fred Wilson finally defines “torture” for VCs.
May 2011
5 posts
“The news broke really late, and by that time we were already in the middle of...”
– Eileen Murphy, VP of Corporate Communications at the New York Times, reminds us that without that order, no one would have been able to corner the collectibles market for Bin Laden-laden newsprint.
“Initially when I first read about it, I hated the deal. Now, I don’t like...”
– Whitney Tilson, a Microsoft shareholder, on the Skype acquisition, demonstrating that two points make a trend.
“This is the state of tech blogging these days. It’s shifting more towards a...”
– Pot, meet kettle
April 2011
39 posts
“Disclosure: SAI competes with TechCrunch”
– Business Insider’s (“SAI”) disclosure at the end of its story about Michael Arrington’s conflicts in writing about people he invests in. Or something, I was too busy staring at my naval to read the whole story.
“Joining other discarded technologies of late, including the Flip video camera,...”
– Put aside for a second that the main point of the story (typewriters are no longer being produced anymore) is not accurate… I just thought this was the funniest opening line ever.
Facebook, it's time for an iPad app →
OH in Palo Alto: “Oh, snap! What a great idea! Why didn’t we think of that?”
“It’s already become a cliché to say that change is the only constant, but...”
– I know it’s a cliché, but if I admit it in the lede, then it’s OK, right?
“What’s fascinating to me is how eagerly all these fabulously wealthy men and...”
– Michael Arrington auditions for HuffPo’s politics channel.
Al Franken's letter to Steve Jobs →
Dear Lorne Michaels: please turn this into an SNL skit where Al Franken plays the role of Al Franken, and someone steals Jobs’ phone in a bar or something. You’re the comedic geniuses, figure it out.
Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your... →
Sure, the existence of a hidden file on your iPhone (sync’d to your lap/desktop) is a bit disturbing. But the headline on this story is irresponsible. “Apple is recording your moves” implies that there is a server at 1 Infinite Loop overseen by a skinny guy in a black mock turtleneck that’s recording your location data. A more responsible headline would have read “Got...
“Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others. We are...”
– Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, is probably wishing he hadn’t been so free with his own speech to the Wall Street Journal. (And if not, then someone should punch him upside his patronizing head.)
“Twitter allows users to post messages of up to 140 characters in length, and...”
– WSJ editor to writer: Add a graf that explains how Twitter works and the last successful revolution it enabled.
“The wedding procession will be streamed live on the Royal Channel on YouTube....”
– Erick Schonfeld channels his inner Woodward and Bernstein — they love exclamation points too!
Verizon fired The Verizon Guy via email →
To add insult to injury, the guy now has to wear wire-rimmed glasses.
“Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will...”
– Just as soon as we figure out what those are.
“I always imagine kind of the robot you imagined in the third grade with the boxy...”
– Emma Carmichael, a writer for Deadspin, imagines what her robocontent competition looks like. Oh, Emma. That’s so cute!
“Stone also notes that, “Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we...”
– MG talks about balanced journalism: there’s love and then there’s the disappointment when someone you love lets you down.
“How about if a consortium of leading Internet companies - Google, Microsoft,...”
– Oh my God that’s the funniest thing I’ve read all week. Seriously can’t stop laughing.
“In short, please stop sending us emails with STORY IDEAS and EXPERTS and just...”
– Henry Blodget to PR Industry: If you write it like a story instead of as a press release, I’ll publish it.
“No one wants to say Twitter is in trouble. That’s like shooting your best...”
– Yep. Sarah Lacy just called Twitter a dog.
“If Twitter doesn’t own the most popular mobile client, what does that mean?...”
– Parsing this, sentence by sentence.
I enjoy imagining that there’s actual existential meaning being derived for some people out of who owns the most popular Twitter client.
I’m sure someone there has already bought Tweetbot. It’s only $1.99 in the App Store. (Thanks, I’ll...
“It’s a truly custom-built system, and what makes it exciting is that these...”
– CrunchGear gushes over the A5 chip’s negative space.
“I still remember when Dave Winer showed me RSS and what it did. It changed my...”
– Once every hundred years (or maybe it was minutes) Scoble discovers the most important thing to happen since the last most important thing to happen.
“Ceglia responds quickly, with his own thoughts about the business model and...”
– Business Insider on Paul Ceglia’s lawsuit claiming he owns 50% the face book. Sure, this piece has plenty of scans of the lawsuit and walks you through all the details, but completely misses the fact that this guy wasn’t even in the movie. (“Coffee mugs aren’t cool. You know...
“The Flip camera was a pretty neat gadget for a year or two, but video cameras...”
– But it’s easy to see how in 2009 Cisco couldn’t have anticipated that smartphones would one day integrate video too. A minor $590m mistake.
“They made a deal that appears quite favorable in light of recent market...”
– 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Kozinski states the obvious while shutting down the Winkelvi’s latest lawsuit. Kozinski went on to state that they should also be happy that Armie Hammer did such a great job playing both of them in the movie, and thank GOD for the special effects...
“Rebecca Black’s not the only one who thinks there’s something...”
– I used to think the laziest journalists used “it will be interesting to see…” when they had no idea how to conclude a story. Now I realize that using Rebecca Black as your lede is even worse.
“All that’s going to happen is this going to go underground, and people will be...”
– Ad.ly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh lets slip that he’ll just work around Facebook’s ban of their service.
You can tell the writer is trying to prove he has... →
Rebecca Black might have trouble deciding which seat to take in a car, but it’s clear that she’s figuratively in the front seat of the viral video world.
Who Needs Flash? New WebGL And HTML5 Browser Game... →
OH MY GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE IT THIS IS SO F***ING EXCITING THAT I CAN’T EVEN STAND IT! FINALLY I DON’T NEED FLASH ANYMORE BECAUSE THERE’S A LIGHT CYCLE TRON GAME BUILT IN HTML5 FOR MY BROWSER!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES YES YES YES YES YES YES. DIE EVIL ADOBE BASTARDS, DIE!!!!
(Sorry, was just channeling the old TechCrunch commenters there for a minute.)
@dickc... they’re on to you
Google Said To Have High Level Mole At Twitter, Makes Massive Counteroffers To Retain Employees
Who says great headline writing is dead?
HootBar! HootSuite Buys Firefox Add-On TwitterBar
The Vote Is in and Twitter Gets its Tax Breaks.... →
All those local “mid Market” neighborhood* businesses are gonna be disappointed when they realize that Twitter brings in their own chef and no one ever really leaves the office for lunch.
* And since when is that an actual neighborhood? Oh, wait, I guess that’s kind of what they’re trying to solve for.
Outsourcing breathing comes next
So, how does it work? While the company chalks it up to “magic”, we’re assuming they’ve got a handful of people (be it through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or a room full of dudes promised free Internet in exchange for calorie counting) breaking down the meal in your picture item by item. Snap a shot of a chicken salad? They punch in some chicken, some lettuce, maybe some dressing — and bam, they’ve...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/milk-kevin-roses-n... →
We still love Sarah Lacy, but just about everything that could be wrong with social media is contained in this piece.
“NYTimes: Still, I’m amazed you’re trying to tell me that The Huffington Post...”
– Dear New York Times and Arianna Huffington: you’re exhausting.me.
Michele de Bourbon, Oscar de la Renta’s head of marketing for fragrance, says that the brand’s Facebook fan base is becoming increasingly valuable to the company. And while many of those fans might not be able to purchase one of the label’s $4,000 signature cocktail dresses, many will be able to “experience the world of Oscar” through its more affordable fragrance line, she says.
This is the...
I leave it as an exercise for those with more spare time than I to pore over the Chromium code and figure out how exactly this is happening - I see that the issue has been floating around as a reported bug for more than a year. I added my 2 cents to the comments, but I can’t imagine that fixing this is terribly high on anyone’s priority list, mine included, and such is life in the open...
“I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink.
I’m so tired, my mind...”
– John Lennon