That's No Space Station

Showing 643 posts tagged Tech

tech, humor, and nuance by David Chartier—tech distiller, freelance writer, Macworld contributor, wrangler of Finer Things in Tech

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Tumblr and Yahoo

I’m joking around about Tumblr and Yahoo a lot right now, but that’s because making people laugh is my favorite thing. For those who care to hear it, I’ll be clear: let’s give ‘em a chance.

Yahoo lost its way a while ago, but Marissa Mayer has done some good stuff to right the ship in the 10 (yep, only 10) months she’s been there. Yahoo stated that Tumblr will be run as an independent company anyway, so we probably won’t see much “oh no everything’s purple and I have to dust off my Yahoo account” change. The change we do see could very well be great, considering Tumblr’s independence and Yahoo’s crazy resources.

Change isn’t inherently bad, but fearing it is. I’m eager to see where this goes.

Tumblr @ Yahoo: Day 1

  • New purple dashboard option
  • All other dashboard color options are retired
  • By June 1, you will have to update your avatar to be one of those damn cartoon people things
  • All new post buttons (icon and background) are now purple
  • Every sentence you write will automatically get an exclamation point!
  • All exclamation points are now purple
  • Yahoo Mail gets a button to auto-post incoming messages to Tumblr
  • Tumblr’s mobile apps now automatically summarize all text posts so you don’t have to do all that damn reading
  • All photos are also summarized using auto-generated shadow puppet images with dramatic text captions to save on bandwidth costs
  • All posts have a chance to appear on the Yahoo.com front page. None of yours will

Pick your poison: messaging will be fragmented, expensive, or locked-in | The Verge

Everyone’s eager to kick SMS to the curb but Bohn is right, the New Messaging landscape is a messy work in progress right now, partly because none of these apps talk to each other.

If your family, friends, and coworkers aren’t nerdy enough to have a religious fervor for one proprietary message service and an irrational hatred for another, they’re too lazy or simply indifferent to bother signing up for 50 different services.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: the “open” services of Old Messaging—like IRC and email—are all either essentially dead or terrible. IRC didn’t make it far and email is a spammy bag of hurt. If you ask me, good riddance.

We’re in a transition period right now, and it’ll be a bumpy ride. We don’t have all the answers yet, but the user experience and usage of every New Messaging we have now is worlds ahead of the previous generation.

Regular users clearly prefer New Messaging. We can work out the rest of the details as we keep building.

The Verge | BlackBerry bringing BBM to Android and iOS this summer

Everyone loves a good comeback story, but it feels like RIM is just doing it all wrong. For the last year or two it’s been nothing but a bunch of non-announcements of things that are months away from shipping (assuming they ship on time, which they haven’t), instead of in a week or—even better when it comes to software that doesn’t need time to physically move locations—right now.

Actions speak louder than words, and BlackBerry’s actions are saying terrible, terrible things.