The inexorable march of time sees a tenth state grant gay and lesbian people the statutory right to marry.
Those states who have yet to get on board would do well to hurry: you’re quickly running out of time to look like you were ahead of the curve in the common sense of twenty-first century civil rights.
or 
This is a good piece on how hard Facebook tries to keep the social juices flowing. Alexis Madrigal, commenting on Facebook’s designer-hiring spree:
As all these designers vanish into the bowels of the company, so, too, does their work. Facebook wants to create design that both allows and guides behavior without calling attention to itself. And what works in the Deep South must also work in southern India and South America. It must work for 16-year-olds and 86-year-olds.
I think this is the primary reason Facebook makes me uncomfortable: it’s too generic. Sometimes I want a service to be just a little in my way. I realize that you can’t generalize my preferences to hundreds of millions of people, but that just means I’ll never really feel awesome about using Facebook.
It feels like it’s been crafted as simply the most efficient way for me to send targeting data to advertisers…
…because it has.
If you’re a Path user, consider, er, reconsidering. This is apparently the best they can do in response.
CNET’s Jennifer Van Grove was told that he #1 request from users is to find friends on Path, hence the aggressive “new-user flow.”
Why does “find my friends on Path” translate to the app’s creators as “invite everyone in my phone’s address book to use Path, without explaining that the message is automated and being sent because I opted in” ?
I would be happy to advise Path on acceptable, reasonable on-boarding and invitation flows for a modest fee. I can be reached at JoeHelpsPath ( @ ) joeross ( . ) me.
I don’t usually cover sports here, but Collins’ coming out is a very important moment in a broader and permanent change in what it means to be and to accept LGBTQ folks. It’s a well-expressed and bold piece, and I applaud him.
or Marco Arment has turned control of his read-it-later service, Instapaper, over to incubator-turned-company-in-its-own-right Betaworks:
I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.
What’s really intriguing about this is that the Betaworks website includes the following teaser:
Want early access to the new Instapaper and other products we build and invest in? Join Openbeta.
I wonder whether the “new Instapaper” is already in the works, or this is just a clever marketing ploy to get Instapaper fans signed up for Betaworks’ Openbeta mailing list.
All in all, Instapaper is an amazing product, and if Betaworks’ reanimation of Digg is any indication, they’re a good custodian.
or Marco Arment, he of Instapaper, and of excellent commentary:
If you sell a 99-cent app to just 1% of the people who bought new iOS devices in the 2012 holiday quarter alone, you’ll clear about $519,750. Not a bad quarter.
Not bad indeed.
or Ellis Hamburger, writing at The Verge:
Mirroring its rollout of free VoIP calling for iOS, Facebook has updated its Messenger app for Android to allow free calling for users in the US.
I think this is Facebook’s true sleight of hand: everyone is looking at Home and how they’re taking over the launcher and Android. Meanwhile they’re backdooring this VoIP technology that lets you call people using only wifi.
Facebook is asserting its primacy in the minds of millions of mobile users not only to dominate Android, but to put itself in a solid position to dominate carriers as well. Simple, user-friendly VoIP: one of the biggest and potentially most profound opportunities Google ever missed with Android.
or Okay, I admit going overboard with the headline, but it’s accurate, at least in the majority of US jurisdictions. Animals are property, and the types of animals not frequently appraised, like your standard family dog, probably won’t be considered as having any monetary value at all. That makes suing for negligent euthanasia a long shot that may only add insult to injury.
or Google’s head of search rankings, Amit Singhal, talking to Farhad Manjoo of Slate:
“The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.”
And then this piece of potentially Gruberian claim chowder1:
“And in five years you won’t believe you ever lived without it. You’ll look back at today’s search engine and you’ll say, ‘Is that really how we searched?’” Singhal says.
I hope he’s right though. I already love using Google Now to start music or open the navigation app to my destination with my voice. I can’t wait for the next generation of this kind of technology.
“Claim chowder” is a term I think John Gruber of Daring Fireball coined to refer to a silly claim that is eventually proven completely wrong (Gruber’s list is extensive and fun to read). The first use I can find of it on the internet is in this 2008 Gruber post, but corrections are welcome. ↩
The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf quoting the grand jury report (PDF) on Philadelphia “abortion” monster Kermit Gosnell:
The Department of State, through its Board of Medicine, licenses and oversees individual physicians… Almost a decade ago, a former employee of Gosnell presented the Board of Medicine with a complaint that laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion patients; even the over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street. The department assigned an investigator, whose investigation consisted primarily of an offsite interview with Gosnell. The investigator never inspected the facility, questioned other employees, or reviewed any records. Department attorneys chose to accept this incomplete investigation, and dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.
Truly horrifying.
While it’s a loaded topic that deserves more space than I have time these days to give it, suffice it to say that I am against any outright ban on abortion. Note that I placed the word abortion in quotes because the late-term procedures Gosnell did were not what legally can be considered abotions under any current law or jurisprudence: they were murders.
Buffer, the service that will schedule your social network posts to go live throughout the day, also happens to have a wonderful blog. They focus on productivity and customer service.
Buffer’s customer service is excellent: I emailed them asking why I have to select publishing times for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other services individually instead of setting a global schedule for all services, and they replied within the hour.1 The infographic they posted was created by HelpScout, the folks who do Buffer’s customer service, so know where to find this data.
The takeaway? Customer service is absolutely as important as feature development and marketing, and not enough companies know that.
Note that it’s not always wise to set a global publishing schedule, as each service has its own peak times-of-day for usage, but I’m only sharing a smattering of links that are interspersed with “direct” posts I manually do all day, so it’s not a concern for me. ↩
This post is exactly what it says on the tin: I’ll share two recipes from if this then that (IFTTT), the service that connects otherwise unconnected pieces of the internet together in epic productivity bliss.
or Richard A. Oppel Jr. reports at the New York Times:
But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.
This is abhorrent.
This is an encouraging development. The bill introduced by Councilmen James Kenney and W. Wilson Goode would establish a:
6 percent tax credit for businesses that did not previously provide health care to transgendered employees or life partners[. This] is a key aspect of this bill and would be the first credit of its kind in America.
The ordinance would also require gender-neutral restrooms in city building and protect the right to dress as appropriate to one’s self-identified gender.
While the article also quotes law professor Kermit Roosevelt’s sense that the law may not survive if challenged in state court, it’s heartening to see my home city championing legislation to improve the resources available to LGBT employees. Even more heartening is the focus on transgender rights, which are often lost in the much louder debates about homosexuality.
Attorney Michael C. Sullivan, representing California schools in a spate of fraud suits brought by students over shady job-placement numbers:
“What I find most ironic is that those individuals advertised themselves to law schools as great critical thinkers,” Sullivan said of the law-grads-turned-litigants. “Now they say they never considered the possibility that employment might include part-time jobs.”
Mr. Sullivan’s statement is ludicrous. The students pay, so the schools market. His clients, if the allegations prove true, marketed themselves as producers of very employable law graduates. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that when a law school shares post-graduation employment rates, the law school is referring to legal employment.
My incredulity at Mr. Sullivan’s absurd position does not mean that I’m ignorant of the fact that many students didn’t try very hard to get a job, or didn’t like the jobs they got, or should have known the market for legal jobs is, to put it mildly, in dire straits, and has been for some time now.
In fact, I have little sympathy for people swindled by Mr. Sullivan’s clients’ number games. Just search “legal job market” or “should I go to law school?”.
I knew when I signed up for law school in 2009 that things were not going well for recent graduates, and that they were not expected to recover before I graduated. I went anyway because I want to be an attorney. Never do something that requires years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars without doing your research.
Due diligence is too strong a phrase for it: it’s common sense.
