jeffreyrusso

There are a lot of pointless contrarian comments on the post, and I don't agree with everything in the actual article, but I do see the point being raised and the shift in Apple's ads.

Layered on top of the details of the product that used to make up 100% of their advertising are more explicit points about the company, their philosophies, and their process. I don't think that's necessarily wrong - it certainly isn't out of the ordinary in advertising - but its a tactile shift. That being said, they are still a long way from "jumping the shark" with this strategy, and I'd disagree with the writer's point of view that this indicates they have nothing on the product front to talk about.

I was down at the finish line (on the opposite side of the street) a couple of hours before the bombing watching a family member cross the finish line. My worry is that the crowd was so tightly packed that it might be tough to get any footage of what was happening at ground level. If I had simply looked down to see my feet, I wouldn't have been able to see them because we were so crammed in. If an object was on the ground, or if someone carried a backpack in at ground level, it seems like it could be missed by even the thousands of people snapping photos at all angles.

That being said, I'm wondering if you couldn't use some sort of facial recognition in conjunction with timestamps to track/detect unusual movements (like someone who quickly moves into the area of the detonation, then turns around and quickly moves out.)

You could say the same things about the internet or about software... that ingraining these technologies into every part of our society could have major long-term economic ramifications that deserve consideration. Even today, the number of low to middle-wage jobs that could still be replaced with software-driven solutions will amount to a huge number of jobs that will no longer be necessary. Agree with you that we shouldn't label these things good or bad - they represent progress. But we shouldn't ignore the likely ramifications of massive shifts like this until society feels the pain.

Agree with your point. It raises another question for me - if we are talking about shared or non-owned vehicles that people interchangably call and use when they need to go somewhere, aren't we inching closer to the same experience that other means of public transportation provide? And shouldn't we give those equal consideration to a world that is still built for and dominated by cars? For all the benefits we are all citing here, there are still a lot of problems with a world dominated by cars (pollution, the space they take up, the roads they require that cut up communities and are inhospitable to pedestrians / other modes of transportation, etc.)

I love the idea of smaller, more efficient vehicles, but I think we hold too much hope in the fact that they could be "self driving". Why would a smaller self-driving car be more likely to gain in popularity over what most people choose to drive today? Why is it more likely to be electric? Those are two independent characteristics that haven't taken off on their own; I don't see how the self-driving aspect is going to change many of the existing problems we have with car-based transportation.

That point often seems to be left completely out of the discussion about self-driving cars. Is making a 9x14' box an easier and more appealing mode of transportation really the best move for society? It's at least worth considering.

I can appreciate that there are a lot of benefits to self-driving cars - safety, the possibility of reduced traffic and congestion, amongst other things. That being said, I'm always stunned at the complete lack of discussion about the topic of environmental impact (whether the impact of this technology will ultimately be positive or negative.)

If we are going to undertake such a major shift in how we all get from point A to point B, shouldn't that be a significant point of consideration? It is rarely even mentioned in the context of this discussion, which I find to be disappointing.

In Boston, every listing is contaminated with mentions of every single nearby neighborhood to take advantage of Craigslist's comically broken search functionality. Search "back bay", and you end up with listings in Somerville, since it's "NEAR BACK BAY SOUTH END CAMBRIDGE BROOKLINE" etc etc etc.

Apartment hunting on Craigslist is a total nightmare without Padmapper, and I'm resenting Craigslist more and more for relegating us all to using their horrible UI.

Fair point, but when each user adds less and less value over time, that billion plus userbase can be as much of a liability as it is an asset.

Billions of users or not, becoming boring is a huge problem for Facebook. With a revenue model so heavily dependent on pageviews, they need to keep their users engaged and on the site... and that doesn't appear to be the case over the long term. New users ride a wave of heavy usage, but over time, Facebook takes on more of a role as a utility than a diversion. It has for me and most everyone else I know who started using it when it was a shiny new toy exclusively for college students.

Facebook can't keep up the rate of new user acquisition it has enjoyed for the past couple of years forever - and as the userbase collectively ages, interest wanes, pageviews decline, and revenue drops off. Right now, it looks like they will inevitably be caught in the same race to the bottom, doing whatever they can to scrounge up page views, that Yahoo is in.

I watch people use software all day long, and this comes up all the time. 90% sounds about right.

My biggest complaint about the way Gmail currently looks is that it lacks structure - different features and components run right into each other. It's messy and feels cluttered even though it isn't over-designed. (That's a complaint that holds true for most Google products.) This new design looks like a real step in the right direction. It looks much cleaner and more structured. Big +1 from me.

Two prudent things to do when you see someone claiming to have insight into search algorithms -

Ask where they are getting their information. "A source at Google" doesn't cut it.

Ask yourself how much sense it makes. What is the likelihood that this could be a signal that improves search quality without causing significant collateral damage? Pretty low in this case.

I can think of plenty of genuinely high quality sites that do a horrible job with email. They probably send bad user signals through Gmail - but why should that impact web search? It shouldn't, and it doesn't.

This kind of idea might be new to a lot of HN readers, but it's a tired old game that doesn't work all that well anymore. Working with the limited data that Google provides on keywords/search volume/CPCs, you'll be crowded into the same niches that are already hyper competitive with hundreds of other people playing the same game.

Also, this is advocating the creation of classic webspam. Creating thousands of autogenerated pages using data thats already publicly available doesn't "help" anyone.

Puzzles me when I think back to the righteous outcries on HN a couple of months ago about the declining quality of Google's search results.

I see your point, but it's not like there is some sort of +1 on-off switch. Google has some pretty sophisticated and effective means of detecting linking manipulation; I'm sure the same care and set of safeguards would be put in place if +1 was to be used as a ranking factor. Just a casual mention by Matt Cutts that +1 data is used as a part of the algorithm (no matter how small its actual impact) would likely be enough to drive huge adoption.

Why does Google need to have some centralized social product? I think that the strongest thing about +1 is that it's totally built on top of their wildly successful core product. Its social, but it's more passive, and relevance remains at the core. I don't need another timeline of stuff that is relevant to people I know, but not necessarily me.

I don't think I have a place calling other people out for the word they use to describe what they are working on. That being said, I've started lots of projects, but nothing I would call a startup. Some have generated revenue, many have not, but none were really sustainable revenue generators that I saw a future in.

I personally want to reserve the startup label for a project that evolves to show its potential, and that I'm passionate about and ready to fully devote myself to.

I suppose we can all have differing opinions on what an acceptable level of risk is, but leaking radiation, fuel storage ponds on fire, and a situation volatile enough to warrant a 30km exclusion zone says to me that the plant clearly was not designed to handle this kind of situation.

If the problem is the lack of power, then so be it - even more of a preventable problem that wasn't properly assured against.

I'm hopeful for the Gen 4 reactors (don't know much about them, but what I've read gives me the impression that they are a significant leap in the right direction in terms of safety.) But I don't think that this particular article is right in holding Fukushima up as some shining example of nuclear safety, especially so early.

Looking in awe at the fact that the plants are still standing after an earthquake "five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with" isn't the right way to look at this situation. Why were these plants built in a massively earthquake prone zone and not designed to avoid what is happening right now? If an earthquake this powerful was possible, the most sensitive pieces of infrastructure should have been designed to handle it. They clearly were not.

I'm no nuclear opponent... I believe that nuclear could very well be the only safe and scalable answer to the world's energy needs - but if we can't make the economics of building safer plants work, then nuclear is a nonstarter.

Proclamations like this that everything is and will be fine are really reckless at this point. Every day it seems like we are finding out that things are much worse than we had previously been told they are, and it looks as though they are still in the process of losing - not gaining - control at Fukushima.

You might have one identity, but you probably have many personas - and personas are what most people put forth on the web. That's a pretty fundamental fact, and it seems like Zuckerberg is dead wrong on this.

This might be an unpopular statement... but IMO, Google seems to get this on some level (even though they haven't figured out a way to package it.) There is a recurring theme in the occasional bits that leak out of Google about their high level thoughts on what they could contribute to the social web around understanding and helping people separate their personas -

http://mashable.com/2010/07/13/google-social-slide-deck/ (update: creator of this deck now works at FB... wonder if he took his opinions with them, or if this is still indicative of the thinking at Google?)

https://profiles.google.com/ (notice the language around managing what the world sees when it searches for you...)

I half agree with you. I think everyone loves to hate eHow, but it has its place in answering seemingly common sense questions. For queries like the ones you mentioned, I'd say that Demand Media's usual line about "filling in the gaps" on the web is somewhat true. My qualm is that eHow often outranks much better content in places where their basic step by step articles don't deserve to be ranked. This is an example I've cited before... the two eHow articles with highly relevant titles don't deserve a spot above the state department's great resource that I see as #3. (Unfortunately, the state.gov site has a crummy title tag that isn't doing it much good.)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=how+to+renew+an+expir...

I did some casual analysis of data I collected for a small set of queries, and the exact opposite seems to be true - eHow saw substantial increases on many queries following the update. It's possible that this is because smaller sites above it were wiped out in the update, and my set of queries is very small - but it's clear that they weren't hit negatively.

This update seemed to have a much larger impact on user generated article directories than it did the new-wave content farms like eHow. That ezinearticles and Hubpages finally got hit doesn't surprise me much, because they are frequently exploited as a source for followed links by site owners.

This result looks the same to me as it always has - I see two eHow articles above the State Department's passport site (one on how to renew an expired passport, and one on how to renew an expired US passport in person.) While I'd agree that they are decent as far as eHow content goes, I think the Dept of State site really is a fantastic and authoritative resource that deserves to be ranked higher. The DOS isn't doing themselves any favor with that crummy title ("Passports"), but I'd have to say that this is a case of relevancy winning out over authority in a nonsensical way.

I don't know of any resource of ranking information, so you would need to have collected the data beforehand. That being said, I've been collecting data on some queries that showed a lot of eHow results, and I suspect something related to knife sharpening may have been on my list (but I'll have to double check.) Data is stored locally at my office; I'll post a quick update here tomorrow if I have something interesting.

I have a decent list of queries I've been collecting data on to compare once word came that a change was rolled out. This is an interesting one that I saw in a comments thread somewhere...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=how+to+renew+an+expir...

The Demand Media angle is really interesting too. I love the bit quoted in the Searchengineland article from the CEO, wondering how they got tagged with the "content farm" label. Pretty sure this is where I first saw it...

http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/my-summer-on-the-content-farm

Interesting that the New York Times seems to have done all of the footwork in finding & reporting JCPenney in order to have a ringside seat to the public hanging. There is only really a passing mention of the NYT's direct involvement... I don't have any problem with them outing an obvious example of manipulation with paid links, but I wonder if they are unsure how some will react.

Someone (Ferriss?) once said that your success is directly proportional to how many difficult conversations you are willing to have, which is so true. Something that jumps out at me...

"How would you feel about flying on a plane with a pilot who is a “six?” What about the nurse who cares for your mother in the hospital? The mechanic who fixes the brakes on your car? The person who works for your insurance broker and is in charge of making sure your policies are renewed?"

More like "how would you feel knowing you were flying on a plane..." etc etc. There are people all around us operating as 5s or 6s, even in critical roles like the ones mentioned. It's probably closer to the norm than any of us like to imagine.

In some ways, I'm envious of Canada's swift reversal of this horrible idea. In the US, we wouldn't have the populist outcry to force action, and even if we did, it would be met with only a token change to the legislation that would succeed at shutting most people up.

That's a pretty self serving statement (from Gregg Blatt.) On the one hand, it doesn't look good for the future of OKCupid in its current state (I've never used it, but I love the data they publish and the general look/feel.) On the other hand, I guess it opens up some amount of opportunity for a decent ad-supported player in the online dating space if OKCupid goes the way of Match.com.

The ultra wealthy have done a great job of engineering the system to control how much they pay in - so why do we think incentivizing them would work? It may take time, but every perk that could potentially be offered at a premium would be just one more race to the bottom.