Social Decay: How Tweets Can Predict The Death Of An App – BuzzFeed News My takeaway from this is that over time, any serice that is largely geared toward "share what you're doing on Twitter (or Facebook)" is doomed. You have to make the whole widget. If your business relies on people sharing what they do on other people's sites, it's pointless. You want them to come to your site. Your site/app has to be self contained and social in itself.
cantino/huginn Self hosted IFTTT like service. Of possible interest. One of my issues with services like IFTTT is that they're only really useful if you start to give them data like when you're in and out of the house. On the one hand, I don't think there are criminals out there who have hacked these services, and are using them to plan burglaries. On the other, I'm still really uncomfortable with giving third parties access to that data.
The ethics of modern web ad-blocking – Marco.org This is pretty much my position. I don't mind (ell, I do, but I'll live with it) being show a few adds in exchange for content. I *do* mind being tracked by 15 different sources, none of whom I have given informed consent to be tracked by, and none of whom are ever made clear. So I block ads and trackers, and encourage others to do the same.
Eddie Campbell and the Mythology of Minutiae Everyone should read Eddie Campbell. If you have not, I encourage you to read this article, and then acquire a copy of Alec. Any volume. Or any of his other works.
How I Gave Up Alternating Current | Mostly Harmless The creator of Soylent is a bit of a twat, film at 11. What interests me here isn't the ultra-ascetic life he's chosen for himself, or his total obliviousness to a: the horror of it, b: the phenomenal privilege that enables him to do it (c: what he sounds like) – it's simply the fact that he's been able to do it at all. This isn't the unevenly distributed future talking, but I suspect it's a marker on the way.