joshuago’s product_ideas Bookmarks

News is important. It’s so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is and has always been irresponsible.

When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.

CPU of choice for mobile devices. Low licensing fee. Fungibility of processors between manufacturers. Closing performance gap with x86.

The idea is Deal Brokering. You use your knowledge of the local scene, your brand and your contacts to negotiate group deals with local businesses from bars to restaurants to dry cleaners. The businesses offer big one-time discounts to attract new customers, your audience gets access to great deals, and you broker the deal on your site and get a substantial cut of the money. It’s already happening around the country.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else.

If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don’t deserve those customers and won’t retain them. If explanation is required for information acquisition, then the explainer comes “before” the informer as a pre-requisite. We typically have it the other way around.

Detailed, pessimistic account of problems in making data secure, legible for centuries to come. Do the obvious things—back up, print out—but they won't be enough.

Decent and insightful list of technical specifications on what the replacement for the IMAP protocol should look like, given what we know now. Good argument for HTTP/HTTPS but seems to argue for more more developer-efficient than byte-efficient approach.

Neat ideas for improving email clients such as detecting/organizing/displaying emails into project- and task-based threads and visualizing the thread structure of a given email thread. Good luck getting people to use this stuff, though.

Graphical user interfaces are full of symbols. Symbols need to be reduced to their essence. This helps avoid cluttering the user interface with meaningless distractions, and makes it easier for people to «read» the symbol and figure out the meaning of an interface element. Realistic details can get in the way of what you’re trying to communicate to your users.