Is a page being auto-refreshed on an open tab in your browser really useful “attention?” I don’t think so.

I saw this first-hand in a previous job. Here is a pro tip: You can be sure much of your traffic is open-and-forget (and therefore useless to advertisers) if you have an auto-refresh (as many news sites do) and your average session duration is equal or nearly equal to that refresh interval.

Anyway, Mr. Malik always has safe advice for business owners and writers alike, so go read the rest of his article.

Former Facebook CTO and Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo, talking to Om Malik at GigaOM:

The real reward is in the response to your answer and the fact that millions can read it. You already see more people giving and sharing knowledge for free. Lawyers and other professionals are using Quora to build their reputation and build their bonafides.

I haven’t seen many lawyers on Quora yet, but I’ll start looking for them to see exactly what D’Angelo means . I wonder if some use cases implicate ethics rules.

Kevin C. Tofel, writing at GigaOM:

This could mean vastly better tablet apps for the higher resolution Kindle Fires similar to the improved iPad apps that iOS developers made instead of scaled-up iPhone software.

I think he’s right: assuming developers embrace this change, it can only bode well for the quality of app experiences for consumers.

But that’s not the only angle here, is it?

I’m not a developer, so I have some questions. My questions imply their own answers, so correct me if I’m wrong:

1. How is encouraging the development and maintenance of multiple simultaneous versions of an app going to be helpful to developers?
2. Doesn’t each version come with its own bugs, complaints, and quirks?
3. Don’t developers want easier ways to incorporate device flexibility into a single binary?

Jeff John Roberts provides an update on Twitter’s latest legal battle over at GigaOM. I think it’s fascinating that Twitter is living two lives:

They’re vigorously defending the rights of their users to maintain control over what happens to their tweets with regard to the government. They’re also perfecting a a cold hostility toward third-party developers.

These two strategies feel, for obvious reasons, very different from one another. But they are both directed at achieving the same two goals:

1. to maximize the user-base, particularly to keep Twitter attractive to dissidents, protesters, journalists, and others whose use cases may involve sensitive or vulnerable action or information
2. to maximize Twitter’s control over user-generated content (mostly individual tweets) and how it is consumed by users

It’s a great time to be a Twitter user who is happy with the service’s in-house apps and undaunted by their increasing bloat. It is a very bad time to be someone interested in providing Twitter users with a better experience that Twitter itself is willing or able to do.