thisistheverge:

Failure is a feature: how Google stays sharp gobbling up startups

Ben Popper looks at Google’s decade of acquisitions (and click through for a much larger version of the above chart).

When I joined Facebook in 2004, it became the place where I was my best self, not my real self; where I curated a life that seemed like one big success, fantastic party and exotic vacation after another. So did you (be honest), and so did your friends. While we might have felt guilty checking up on each other, the voyeurism was enticing enough to attract 900 million people and keep us glued to Facebook.com for hours each month.

These days, my life according to Facebook looks less fabulous and more consumption-filled than ever before. We’re encouraged to share not only engagements, birthdays, deaths and births, but also, right alongside them, the equivalent of each time we flip through a catalog or pick up a pair of socks.

Having a record of what sales I browsed or what purchases I’ve made — precisely what Gilt Groupe will share with Facebook if you allow it to — doesn’t benefit my social media experience nearly as much as it helps a retailer’s.

We’re in the midst of a Jekyll-and-Hyde moment in the evolution of online social networks: sharing that will get us to shop is taking precedence over sharing that can strengthen social ties. We’re made to share our business because it’s good for business. And this suggests a looming identity crisis for “social media” that, more and more, appears to be “marketing media,” a tech-fueled hunt for ways to leverage our friendships, interests and activity to produce a “ching” at the register.

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Great post from HuffPost Tech’s Bianca Bosker on what e-commerce means in an age of super sharing.

Facebook, Gilt Flashed My Granny Panties: Why That’s A Problem

(via huffingtonpost)

wired:

“In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed.”

Read more about how Apple and Amazon security flaws led to the EPIC HACKING of our very own Mat Honan [@mat].

Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban have just launched the Defensive Patent License, an agreement meant to let companies use each other’s patents without fear of lawsuits. Any group that used the license would agree to make all its patents available, royalty-free, to any other signatory. They’d also agree not to launch a patent suit against anyone else who had signed: a kind of mutual non-aggression pact.

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Berkeley Law professors propose ‘tactical disarmament’ agreement for patent suits

Ad-based models continue to erode, and the online subscription programs of many commercial publishers have yet to take off. For publishing to have a healthy future, we need to find better ways of paying for the content we value. Readability’s publisher payment plan was one such attempt—the first of many, we hope.

Why It Didn’t Work

Reading behavior on the Web is incredibly fragmented. Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers. And the great majority of those publishers never registered. Out of the millions—yes, millions—of domains that flowed through Readability, just over 2,000 registered to claim their money. As a result, most of the money we collected—over 90%—has gone unclaimed. As of today there’s nearly $150,000 in earmarked money sitting in a separate, untouched bank account.

— An Important Announcement | Readability Blog (via extraface)

This is my favorite thing I made today./Caitlin

Who knew?

theatlantic:

Japan: The Country Where 59% of Households Still Have a Fax

For most industrialized nations, the arrival of e-mail quickly heralded the beginning of a very slow decline for fax technology. But for a mix of reasons, Japan hung on. First, there’s language: Early word-processing software couldn’t work with kanji, Japanese characters, so handwriting (and therefore fax) was the best way to transcribe and send messages electronically. Additionally, Japanese document seals — used much like a signature — are often required for paperwork. Finally, high-speed Internet has remained costly in Japan, pushing much of the communication we do online to either mobile or … fax.

Read more. [Image: &_yo/Flickr]

Apple: Rise of the Gadgets in One Graphic