joshuago’s product_ideas Bookmarks

Letter to Amazon's shareholders detailing the nature of investments technology infrastructure. Favorite tidbit, personally, is about how technologies are implemented almost exclusively as services, because it "reduces side effects and allows services to evolve at their own pace without impacting the other components of the overall system."

Provoke emotional reactions instead of informing. Take with a grain of salt, but remember that traffic means ads, ads mean money, and money is like life-giving blood to any business.

It takes balls to abandon features — grow some.

Former design director of the NY Times says it's still too early to tell whether the new paywall will work, but also says that The Times spent too much time and effort on it that could have gone to other innovation.

The Oatmeal gets a thorough and very favourable treatment by The Economist. It's making money.

Much of the world's food supply is transported via an inefficient, polluting, and dangerous system of highways and trucks. The alternative? Move the whole system underground and set up a packet-switched "transport-industry Internet." Probably won't happen anytime soon since entrenched interests are powerful.

A good conversation thread about how programmers can produce great visual design, inspired by the results of Rails Rumble 2010.

Significant AI breakthroughs come from identifying or creating new sources of data, not inventing new algorithms.

For men the holy grail is within reach – you just need to get fit, and then you'll be fine; then you can think about something else. But the messages aimed at women are much more complex and confusing.

There are many shifts coming, but three big ones are an increase in direct participation; an increase in the leverage of the professionals working alongside the amateurs; and a second great age of patronage.