Category Archives: Web

Readability’s Problem

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Lots of ridiculous stuff over the weekend about Readability that I had already known about for quite some time. Go ahead and checkout Twitter and search for Readability if you really want to get down a rat hole.

Regardless, I think there are some major things that haven’t been brought up with the recent outrage over how links were handled within Readability.

Almost every single defense of Readability comes back to the fact that they are offering to pay publishers. However, they just removed any sort of restriction on their service that would have required people to pay to use their service. So … what about those people who are not paying a thing for Readability? Are they going to pay publishers for the people who are not paying anything to use their service?

Match that with the fact that it sounds like Readability will just keep any unclaimed money after a year and you DO have problems and no matter how “good” those guys are, there are issues here.

I think there would be fewer issues if these two things happened:

  • Readability required every user of their service to pay.
  • They kept the money for publishers indefinitely or had a better system for getting the money to the publishers.

There is still the issue of collecting money on behalf of publishers who might not want to have a relationship with a third part like Readability, but who cares as long as you are making money … right?

Readability has obviously prostrated themselves to the almighty “get all of the eyeballs and make money later” business model by copying Instapaper after initially working with Marco in the past (but who really cares) and then dropping their entry price to “free” because they are flush with money, so let’s not pretend that they are some kind of white knight in armor for the publishers of the web.

They’re trying to do one thing: make money.

Be True to the Web

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James Weiner writes:

Furthermore, designing in-browser exposes mistaken assumptions at the earliest possible stage in a build. This means we fail quickly rather than expending effort on high fidelity mock-ups that were based on mistaken assumptions.

Who is James Weiner? Oh, he only works on the front end of GOV.UK, so he needs to worry about little things like accessibility and making the web work for everyone.

I’d say he is exactly right.

Apple should NOT grab Twitter

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Barry Ritholtz wrote Why Apple Should Grab Twitter over at The Big Picture.

Needless to say, I think this is a terrible idea. The last thing that Twitter needs is to get swallowed up by a larger company and the last thing Apple needs is a large acquisition to possibly steal any focus away from what they do best.

Let Twitter be Twitter and Apple be Apple. The acquisitions need to stop.

Just. Not. Getting. It.

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Trevor Gilbert wrote The Midwest Mentality for Pando Daily and is, to put it bluntly, a terrible closed-minded look at Chicago specifically and “The Midwest” in general. It is probably the most disappointing piece of “journalism” I’ve read on the internet for quite some time (I don’t include most things about Apple here because it is almost systematically terrible).

Matt Moog has written a rebuttal of sorts over at Built in Chicago, so make sure you read that retort.

Here are some choice quotes:

Instead of working on a startup 24/7, employees take the weekend off and don’t work through the night. It doesn’t help in the creation of amazing technical feats, but it does allow people to have lives.

Yup, not burning your staff out is definitely something that should be avoided. Also, don’t forget that good stuff only happens to those who sacrifice themselves to a startup.

Not high school marriages, but rather the idea of getting married at age 21 is no big deal. That’s fine, but it also means that the ecosystem can’t rely on the insane work hours of the independent, no responsibilities generation. Instead, you have a number of people who would normally be able to work into the night, but instead need to go home at 7 or 8 to spend time with their kids and families.

Once again, let’s kill ourselves when we’re young so that we can get married later! Spending time with family is a bad thing because you are not worshipping at the alter of the startup and burning yourself out!

Yes, many people see this as a plus. “You work too much” is something I hear all too often from my non-startup inclined family members. That is a valid argument, but it also is the type of argument that holds an entire ecosystem back.

Riiiiiiight. Not burning yourself out is definitely going to hold the ecosystem back. Isn’t it just as likely that an ecosystem is being held back because its members work themselves to the point of being incapable of doing any good, real, meaningful work after a short time?

I can’t believe this article. Truly meaningless tripe.