I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

PandoDaily

17 Jan 2012

Subscribed: PandoDaily, the new techblog by former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy.

Public spaces

31 Dec 2011

Does it really need to be explained why all this is bad? The courts have spent centuries determining reasonable limits of free speech in public settings: we don’t need private corporations absorbing the public sphere, providing governments and themselves easy mechanisms to marginalize anyone unwilling or unable to play nice inside the walled gardens.

Rob Beschizza – Why we shouldn’t let Google (or anyone else) claim their private services are public spaces

Hipster.

21 Dec 2011

By Dominik Schwind

Hipster. Hipster… Hipster!

“the experiment really worked”

14 Dec 2011

By Dominik Schwind

It has been a few days now since Louis CK started selling his latest stand-up special online, DRM-free for 5 US$. Today he posted an update on the state of the project:

I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all get to know that about people and stuff. I’m really glad I put this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again.

As a big fan (and who isn’t, these days?) I am happy to see that we internet people did not disappoint. And it’s good to see statements like

The development of the website, which needed to be a very robust, reliable and carefully constructed website, was around $32,000. We worked for a number of weeks poring over the site to make sure every detail would give buyers a simple, optimal and humane experience for buying the video.

because it shows how much care can be put into a site that basically “only” consists of three or four pages. And it shows. Buying the video has been simple and painless.

This is how the web should be: good content, delivered in a simple, useable way. And we the folks who create on the web should ask ourselves why the pages we built are not like that and don’t get the same amount of care and love.

Path and Death

09 Dec 2011

By Dominik Schwind

Sleeping in DÌùsseldorf

There is an uneasy feeling when you see someone setting their status in Path to “Sleeping in…” and then it doesn’t change back for a long time.

Of course that someone probably just forgot about the Path app, because it’s silly and this someone only dabbles in silliness and is not (like so many of us) a full-time connoisseur of it.

And yet.

Flipboard

08 Dec 2011

By Dominik Schwind

So yeah, I like Flipboard a lot. Can I pay for it so it stays around?

Graffiti

17 Nov 2011

By Dominik Schwind

You’ve created graffiti, but are keeping out Banksy.

Fred Oliveira’s comment on Why Mixel Requires Facebook Login

The secret of how to make awesome online communities

09 Nov 2011

By Dominik Schwind

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long – image, timestamp, text.

The Social Graph is Neither

Time and Time again.

03 Nov 2011

By Dominik Schwind

Time and Time again.

Bastards.

31 Oct 2011

By Dominik Schwind

They went ahead and did it. Bastards. I don’t know anybody who likes that change.

Are there any alternatives?

Google Reader

22 Oct 2011

By Dominik Schwind

We haven’t quite seen yet what exactly is going to happen with the redesign of the Google Reader but that blogpost did not look good at all and people are rightfully unhappy about it. It sure looks like Google Reader has to pay the strategy tax and get rid of features in the hope to lure people to use Google+.
And yes, I am a bit worried. Google Reader is by a far margin my most used site on the web.

<3, my ass.

13 Oct 2011

By Dominik Schwind

Yesterday I wrote a really angry blog post which I didn’t post in the end. I saw an email from Ilya and the Diaspora* team with the title <3 and the preview just showed:

Dear Dominik –
We love you. Yes. Really, we do.

and then I started to rant. How stupid and irresponsible it is to send an email like this and how much it annoys me and that they are a bunch of numbnuts and can just go and put their mail where the sun doesn’t shine. I wrote it, I saved it, I had a lie down, read two thirds of the absolutely magnificent “Snuff” from Terry Pratchett, updated my MacBook and went to sleep. This morning I looked at it again and decided not to post it. Who cares about Diaspora anyway?

It is worth noticing that at this point I did not read the email, just the first two lines in the preview.

So this morning I saw a couple of tweets referencing that email and often linking to two blog posts: Did Diaspora Just Ask for More Money? and The State of Diaspora and Fundraising Round Two so I decided to read that email. The level on my WTF-meter went through the roof.

So there is this bunch of Ruby-hipsters, completely over-funded through Kickstarter, which even got coverage in my local radio station, who decided to start a new “open” social network which completely ignored all open interoperability standard.

And now they ask for more money.

To quote that blogpost by Jonha Revesencio:

Yet after missing several deadlines and not clearly showing your backers as to which direction the project is heading, how could you ask for more money?

Bundestrojaner

08 Oct 2011

By Dominik Schwind

So, the CCC got their hands on something they think is the fabled “Bundestrojaner”¹ – the software the German government is using for computer surveillance. F-Secure, maker of a popular anti-malware software, announced they’ll add that software to their list of malware. The news should be rather interesting tomorrow. (Of course there’s a thread on Hacker News)