Hey Internet!

Nastiness is simply a percentage of your audience, so the more popular you become, the more nastiness you get. Despite all of the wonderful, positive feedback that comes with having a large audience, it’s hard not to take it personally when everything you say or do is greeted by hundreds of people telling you how much of a worthless idiot you are.

mrgan:

Please read marco’s post on a mindblowing web artifact:

(via Zoya)

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

It took me a minute to grok this, since I typically walk around with the conviction that people aren’t THAT naive, but…

What’s apparently happening here is, Facebook users are googling for “facebook login” (because how else are you going to log into Facebook?), clicking the first result (which is sometimes a story about Facebook, on an unrelated site), assuming that the site itself is Facebook, scrolling to the bottom to get to the comment form - still thinking they’re on Facebook - and using the comment form to complain about how this, a wholly different website, is a terrible redesign of Facebook.

I just don’t even know how to start feeling about any of this. It’s like the Twilight Zone episode where you wake up and everyone in the world has started talking a different language.

It’s like… Like if you asked a friend if there was a Starbucks in his neighborhood and he said, yeah I think there’s one half a mile down, maybe. And you drive half a mile and see a big carwash place, and you park and walk in and ask to speak to the manager. And you tell the carwash manager how unhappy you are with this terrible new Starbucks redesign.

Asbestos days are behind us at The Age, writes Raymond Gill.

The darndest thing happened in the last five days and I was fortunate to be privy to it. Apple has gotten people excited about computing. But this time, it’s not nerds or geeks and certainly not IT industry analysts. It’s everyone else. I had a curious set of three conversations this week. One with a grandma, one with a technophobe and the third with a self-proclaimed luddite.

You learned to love technology by tinkering? That’s great! Please explain to me how a closed ecosystem like Apple’s will impede a curious child’s ability to explore in the least way. It’s not 1980. It doesn’t cost a month’s salary to buy a computer. And as long as it takes code to make programs, there will still be plenty of “real” computers around.

Not too long ago the “Heartbeat of America” was Chevrolet and we all clamored to get a look at the next Ford Mustang. Kids today (and the general public for that matter) are no longer obsessing over the new car released at the Detroit Auto Show (can you even think of the last car to get on the cover of the NY Times that wasn’t promoting a new energy solution?) but rather, are focused on when they can get their hands on the newest insert device (iPhone, iPod, Kindle, PlayStation, etc.). We have become a nation that identifies not in the steel and chrome stylings of the automobile but with the smooth glass screen of a phone or other portable device. Smack at the center of this is the institution of Silicon Valley.

Nearly everything we geeks love and adore about a general-purpose computer is a pain point for the average consumer. Browsable file system: They lose their files. Modularity and customizability: They have no clue where to start with the complexity. RAW POWAH: For what, typing in Word? Multitasking plus WIMP UI: They can’t tell what app they’re in.