Nick Heer

The Facebook Offering: How It Compares

Nick — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:10:41 +0000

The New York Times compares Facebook’s $104 billion valuation against a number of other IPOs. The second graph is the most visually shocking representation of how it stacks up on day one. The fifth graph is interesting due to the vast number of failed companies, and how they compare to the few that have been enormously successful three years later.

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Why I Lost My Faith In Facebook Advertising

Nick — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:29:59 +0000

Ryan Holiday, for Forbes:

People go to Facebook to interact with their friends. It is fundamentally different from the ad platform that is Google. People go to Google to find something they need, possibly ready to buy, which a good percentage of the time can in fact be solved by someone’s ad. Facebook ads, on the other hand, annoy users. They yield no real value, and thus no profits.

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Blogging Is Not a Thing, It’s an Attitude

Nick — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:07:06 +0000

Jim Dalrymple:

A blog isn’t about the feelings of the company, but rather a personal look at the writer. You can’t assign a blogger a story and hope the audience doesn’t get the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about or worse yet, they don’t really care.

A-goddamn-men.

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It’d Be a Shame if Something Happened to Your Nice Operating System

Nick — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:51:17 +0000

Andrew Cunningham, for Ars Technica:

Preinstalled trial versions of useless software have been slowing down new PCs for years, and Microsoft is finally offering a solution: bring your PC into a Microsoft Store and pay them $99 to install a clean copy of Windows.

Isn’t this a little like paying a car dealership to wash a mud-caked car after they sell it to you? A hundred bucks to remove things that shouldn’t be installed in the first place.

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Flickr’s Larger, More Liquid Photo Pages

Nick — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:07:19 +0000

Yahoo may not be doing Flickr any favours, but at least they’ve kept some of the team on. The giant photo pages look great. Put your browser window into fullscreen mode and give it a try.

This change also ensures that photos on the new iPad look really crisp.

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The Best of Twitter in Your Inbox

Nick — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:52:42 +0000

Starting today, you can discover the best of Twitter in a weekly email digest delivered to your inbox. This summary features the most relevant Tweets and stories shared by the people you’re connected to on Twitter.

If only there were another way to keep up with Twitter, other than via email.

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WSJ: Next iPhone to Feature at Least a 4-Inch Screen

Nick — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:49:49 +0000

The fact that both the Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting this with their own sources is enough to lend credence to it. This will be the biggest form-factor change since the iPhone debuted.

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Felidae

Nick — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:59:49 +0000

Of course I have to link to today’s xkcd. I think Apple’s solution is simple: they can call OS X 10.9 “Cougar”, and it will only install on the youngest Macs.

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Dell Apologizes for Hiring ‘Shut Up Bitch’ Moderator

Nick — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:58:37 +0000

“Mads Christensen made a number of inappropriate and insensitive remarks about women. Dell sincerely apologizes for these comments,” Dell wrote Monday in a post to its Google+ account. “Going forward, we will be more careful selecting speakers at Dell events.”

This obviously shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but it’s much better than the non-apology they offered earlier.

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In Praise of Pixels

Nick — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:19:49 +0000

Shawn Blanc:

When it comes to pixels I can’t get enough. Ditto my need for a huge desk. I want a lot of pixels on my screen and I want a lot of space on my desk.

It’s not because I want to use these spaces to store application windows and external hard drives. Quite the opposite: I want to use this space for nothing. I work well when I’m sitting at a large and oversized desk that has little on it beyond a big glowing screen and a clicky keyboard. The same goes for my computer monitors. I like a lot of pixels available so that I can not use them.

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