CmdrTaco's Trove
trove.com
trove.com
(For you youngun's who don't get the joke: http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...)
It's easy to compare specs, it's harder to compare the things that really matter: usability, elegance, workflow, functional performance, robustness, and aesthetics. These are the enduring characteristics of every product, and often it's easy to ignore such things given that they are very difficult to objectively measure.
Performance, for example, can be measured easily in terms of responsiveness of the UI, etc. But that doesn't reflect the actual end-to-end performance and perception of performance as experienced by a user performing real-world tasks. The same goes for usability, which is almost impossible to fully objectively measure.
It's easy to dismiss a product as inferior because it lacks features or has a different set of characteristics compared to an existing popular product, but that only works when there are no significant underlying differences in the above meta-features.
When Japanese car makers started to introduce their automobiles to the American market a lot of people made fun of their cars. Often the cars were small and underpowered in the muscle car dominated American market. But what those detractors didn't realize at the time was that those cars were extremely reliable and efficient, even if they lacked power and "cool" points. And eventually those types of cars came to be hugely popular.
Today, Apple occupies a special place in the market that very few players could approach. In 2000? That market was wide open for anybody who could get their crap together and do the same things Apple did - well-designed products with a good marketing campaign. The PC industry was only just starting to abandon the ugly beige metal boxes.
"from the well-thats-not-very-exciting dept."
FireWire (400Mbps) data syncing _and_ recharging at the same time. That's cool.
I wonder if it's hackable for a bigger drive...
Plus, you can use it as a portable disk. No "content protection". Yay!
I thought when he retired from Slashdot it was because he wanted to do something different.
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot retires you?
One of the sad facts: "We do not honor Do Not Track requests."
It looks like it allows me to browse articles shared by friends and experts I choose to follow, exactly like Twitter + Flipboard.
Instead, I'd like to see more automated filtering of the many streams I already have. I think Summify was on the right track here (before they were acquired).
Thinking back to the good old days, my main forms of discovery were IRC, Usenet (with its underlying structure it made it easy to dig into weird/different niches at will)...
A few things were consistent about these mechanisms: Each one allowed you to start in a specific niche/community, explore outside of it and become entrenched in wider/more diverse communities/interests.
They had some basic structure (channels on IRC, top level groups on Usenet), some form of curation/moderation (channel operators, news server admins who could white/blacklist content, rules/guidelines about cross-posting, some proactive moves against spam/off topic trolling), but ultimately were "open."
Anyone could get their foot in with some basic software, anyone could add their voice, and engage either with a group of people or one-on-one.
These days, about 70% of my exploration online starts at HN. There's a bit from Kottke and Coudal, a couple of Twitter feeds, and various music labels (Stone's Throw, Mad Decent).
Is Delicious the answer? It's got tags for bookmarks _and_ discovery -- there go two of the HN front page stories from this past week. Remap Ctrl-D in Chrome, and I don't think you'll find a better, more open solution for the Web out there.
Of course, I half expect to be proven wrong because I've now voiced my doubts.
Most importantly, as far as I can tell, there's no way to share an arbitrary link. If you create a new trove it's a requirement to specify an existing trove as a source - your "picks" from the source troves comprise the newly created trove.
Therefore, users can't share and curate so much as sift and sort what the editors have already deemed worthwhile. Apparently, the only recourse for seeing specific content added is sending an email [0].
Does this mean: Bezos bought the WaPo, the parent company rebranded, CmdrTaco works for the old owners, and thus is not affiliated with the WaPo any more?
This will be a success only to the extent that it fosters a diversification of voices. If all it does is to create more ideological group-think news bubbles, then it's just more of the same for a culture obsessed with self-selecting their news, and hearing only the viewpoints that they already agree with.