Levi Mills:

I like my friends. I like the same things as many of my friends. Do I want my friends to be the curators of the content I consume? No. A thousand times no.

Interesting take on the latest Facebook redesign. I barely use Facebook anymore because I find little-to-no value in the content posted there with the sole exception being pictures of my nieces and nephews.

Mills’ piece, I think, gets to the core of why I’m not interested in Facebook: I just don’t care about most of the crap my friends link to. They’re still my friends, but I can do better at finding what to consume elsewhere.

Google Reader is shutting down on July 1st. By chance I actually switched to Fever a few months back, so this doesn’t really effect me as a reader.¹

The biggest issue doesn’t seem to be the loss of Reader itself, but the recognition that Google’s priorities have shifted.

I imagine most people, especially daily users of Reader, still like to think of Google as the company described by Chris Anderson in his 2009 book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price² (emphasis mine):

For Google, almost anything that happens online can be seen as a complement to its main business. Every blog post put up is more information for Google’s Web crawler to index, to help Google give better search results. Every click in Google Maps is more information about consumer behavior, and every email in Gmail is a clue to our human network of connections, all of which Google can use to help invent new products or just sell ads better.

The interesting thing about the consumption of complementary products is that they tend to rise in tandem. The more people use the Internet, the better it is for Google’s core business.

That’s not Google in 2013. The Web is a very different place than it was back then. Users used to demand openness across the Web. That’s why we have RSS and XML-RPC and APIs and all the goodies that make it easy to use data from one site on another, or to make it simple to just plain leave one product for another. Anil Dash put it best in a blog post titled “The Web We Lost.”³

But walls have sprouted up. Google can’t access the massive amounts of data people pour into Facebook and Twitter, so they built Google+ as their own social walled garden. Twitter is exerting control over how users experience their product, which shuts out competitors like Instagram (which is owned by Facebook), which can no longer display images inline in tweets. The Web is getting smaller, not bigger, with each company working to become the umbrella under which you experience the Internet. So Google has taken steps to make sure that the Web as users know it exists under their company banner, and Reader doesn’t fit in with that plan anymore.

I was once a Google cheerleader. Like many I believed their goal was to make a better Web for everyone, with the one major tradeoff being that they would sell ads instead of charging users. That may once have been true but the Google of 2013 doesn’t want to build a better Web, it wants to build a better Google. I don’t think that goal is aligned with any of my own.

And now Reader is gone. What’s next? I’d rather not play that guessing game, so I’m making efforts to remove as much of my data as I can tolerate from Google products. Now might be a good time for you to start to do so as well.

Michael M. Grynbaum for the New York Times City Room Blog:

“I sat through an hour of trailers, and every one was stupider than the other,” Mr. Bloomberg complained[…]

An hour! He then went on to complain about the state of dumbed down news media.

At least his media empire is doing its part.

Visual Idiot strikes again:

MailappApp lets you quickly and hipsterly create another mail app, because that’s totally what everyone wants.

I can’t tell you the joy this brings to my heart.

Letters of Note:

In March of 1980, a school librarian by the name of Jo Ellen Misakian wrote to Francis Ford Coppola and, on behalf of the students at Lone Star School in Fresno, California, asked him to consider adapting their favourite novel, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, for the big screen. Also included with her letter were a copy of the book, and a petition signed by 110 of the kids. Amazingly, three months later they received an unexpected and cautiously optimistic reply from producer Fred Roos, who soon advised Coppola to read the book. He did exactly that, and two years later, production on the movie began.

So cool.

From the blog of a new short film marketplace called Elevision:

We believe there would be a cultural renaissance if “short filmmaker” were a viable career. If there were a place for the best filmmakers to sell their work, and for viewers to discover them, we would experience a surge of visionary storytelling.

With the hope of unlocking this vast and hidden potential, we proudly introduce Elevision — a carefully-curated collection of amazing short films that you can preview and buy.

Films are $2 a pop. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure why a filmmaker would want to be on Elevision and sell their film for so little. Still, it’s neat to think there is a shelf life for short films, which usually just disappear or go on YouTube to die.

Addy Dugdale for Fast Company:

A small indie British film will be the first to be released solely through a gaming console. Pulp, a crime caper about the comic book industry, will be available exclusively to users of Xbox 360 from today–and, says Microsoft, using its gaming system as an exclusive film distribution pipe will not be a one-off.

Everyone’s doing it.

Wes Fenlon over at The Wirecutter:

If you’re ready for a major storage expansion, these are some serious options.

You know, the options Wes discusses here are pretty expensive, but in perspective, it’s pretty damn nuts that you can get 10 terabytes of storage that writes at 700 MB/s for $1100.

Not that long ago a setup like that not only would have cost an insane amount, but the computer and fibre card for it would have cost a bundle as well. Today you could (probably) edit uncompressed media on an iMac. That’s wild.

As you may recall, back in 2007, Palm needed to innovate and fast. Whatever faithful consumers they had left were eyeing Apple’s revolutionary iPhone; without a major new product, Palm would fall into obscurity. (Spoiler: they did.) The company had a trick up its sleeve, though. Palm had the Foleo.

On the cusp of the netbook craze, Palm figured the future of mobile was not only in your pocket, but in your briefcase as well. The Foleo was a sort of laptop screen and keyboard for your Treo (or whatever). Link your smartphone and Foleo and you could clack out emails, browse the Web and update spreadsheets from the comfort of a 10” screen and full-ish sized keyboard.

Reaction was swift and near-universally negative. At $500, the Foleo was already in spitting distance of a laptop. Worse, it couldn’t actually do anything without a paired Palm device. Famously, Peter Rojas, Ryan Block, and Joshua Topolsky, then the editors of Engadget, published an open letter to Palm articulating the problems with the device and the company as they perceived them. Two weeks later Palm killed the Foleo without ever releasing it.

There are a million reasons why the Foleo was a terrible idea (and a million more why Palm failed), but the one that sticks out in my mind is the fact that it was just a brick until paired with a mobile device. Consumers don’t like paying for a gizmo that can’t do much of anything without another device. Consumer electronics seem to be moving away from paired ecosystems. Even Apple has decoupled iPhone/iPad setup from syncing with a desktop machine. Buy one device at a time, use as needed.

So it is with Glass, Google’s wearable computer. On its own, the visor-like device sports a WiFi chip, which puts it head and shoulders above the Foleo. However, most users of Glass will pair it with a mobile device, which will give it a persistent connection without ever requiring one to enter a WiFi password.¹ Glass, likely, will be either useless or unendingly frustrating without a paired device.

There are more than a few reasons I see Glass failing, but this one in particular, the emphasis on Glass as a secondary device, not a primary one, is ultimately the reason I see it not catching on.

Google is asking a lot of consumers with Glass. I keep hearing chatter across the Web that it is some kind of cool, futuristic device, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as a plaything for the ultra-wealthy, the sort of thing that only makes sense for Google executives.

Consider, for example, the Glass Explorer program. The buzzy social media campaign invites people in the US to apply to be among the first to own Glass.

We’re looking for bold, creative individuals who want to join us and be a part of shaping the future of Glass.

If your fifty word, five photo and fifteen-second video application gets selected, you will get the opportunity to drop $1500 on Glass before anyone else. To boot, the only way to actually retrieve Glass will be to attend a “special pick-up experience” in New York City, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Again, this is for the privilege of buying a device that warrants the presence of yet another device in your pocket. All of this sends a clear message, at least to me: if you don’t have a whole lot of disposable income, Glass isn’t for you.

I think Glass is a joke, Google’s Spruce Goose du jour. Augmented reality is a technology that perennially mystifies and impresses, but its value remains little more than a parlor trick, an admittedly cool one. Sure, if you’re jumping out of an airplane, it’d be nice to have a head-mounted camera with a data connection (in your pocket, remember), but is that really an every-day device?

Google, as ever, makes products for Googlers. That’s the driving force behind the way Gmail is organized, that’s why Buzz rolled out to the world with a hilarious number of privacy holes and that’s why the company thinks a Willy Wonka-esque contest feasible only for residents of the company’s backyards is a good idea.

Google has loads of cash and is probably burning through it to bring Glass to market. They can afford for it to fail because if not, who cares? They dominate the online advertising business; Glass is an attempt to get more computers in more places so they can serve up ever more ads (or at least collect more data).

The Foleo was the wrong device because it solved a problem no one had and in a rather cumbersome, expensive manner. The trick in this game is to solve problems no one knows they have. Does Glass do that? Not for me, and I’d venture not for enough people on a daily basis.

It’s probably unfair for me to judge a product I’ve never seen in person so harshly, but I’d like to air this grievance now. If I’m wrong and we all wear some form of computer visor in the future, I’ll look back on this and have a laugh. But, come on, no one needs a Foleo for their face.

Amazon has some great albums on sale for the ridiculous price of $2 today.¹ You really should get Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ The Heist if nothing else.

On a related note, I just whipped my music library into shape and signed up for iTunes Match. Amazon’s MP3 downloader makes adding new tracks to iTunes dead simple, and with Match turned on my iPhone populates with the new tracks almost instantly.

It’s not as convenient as buying from iTunes, which auto-downloads new tracks to all my devices, but considering Amazon has albums at a $10 discount today, it’s worth the elbow grease.

Related: Andy Baio’s aforelinked “Indiepocalypse” piece from January was the reason I bought The Heist recently. “Jimmy Iovine” is a great track, but I think “Wing$” might be my favorite.