The author starts off by asserting that Ford never said what is popularly thought he said.
And then he starts his discussion with his own assumption:
"Here are some of the things people would have responded with if you asked a mid-late 19th century city planner what he needed with regards to equine transportation:"
I think it would have been a stronger argument to just list a few sources of information.
But besides that, I think the article raises some interesting points. For me, I don't want a faster car, I want fuel efficiency. I want a car that doesn't require too much maintenance and repairs.
Googling isn't immediately getting me anything and I don't recall the source, but I used to read a lot of urban planning books and I recall seeing a quote from that era to the effect of "Mud! Mud everywhere!" and complaining about it. "Mud" was a euphemism for horseshit. So that was a real complaint of the time.
Though the internet did not exist at the time so I don't know if it is even possible to find quotes/resources about it online. That may be part of why he kind of speculated rather than listing a few sources of information.
Here's a classic piece of data journalism on the topic:
'This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted... “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”'
It might have become sensationalized over the last 115 years, but you can google the Urban Planning Summit of 1898 to see where it all originals from. The sentiment. I did have to make up and just guess at what real manure problems would be besides "faster horses", but they at least make some sense and paint a mental image. I'm no historian =D
Well, I made the assumption on the springboard of the World Urban Planning Summit of 1898, where horse manure was discussed for 3 of the 10 days with international city planners from all types of cities.
Granted, it's a thought piece on the abuse of "faster horses" myth that is often used to subtly circumvent user research and experience discussions.
But even today, like you say, no one says they want faster cars. I think today people might say they don't want a car at all, or a affordable Tesla, or if you go back 15 years, we thought it was a Segway.
> For me, I don't want a faster car, I want fuel efficiency. I want a car that doesn't require too much maintenance and repairs.
If we're talking about cars, my version of "horseshit" is traffic and parking. I do not want to drive in traffic, and I want parking to either be a non-issue or abundant.
I think the point is that I don't really care how it's done, I just want it to work. I'd love to pay for road use, up to the point that transaction costs swamp things (like when people have to stop or slow down when going through toll booths). Hopefully it'll be solved through pricing. Maybe there's a technological solution (potentially if short-distance air travel were cheaper you could imagine that a 3D space with very little infrastructure to maintain might solve at the very least the traffic problem).
I then used Google Maps and created a custom map with all the suggested sites, activities, and eateries. I was also able to share it with my friends and collaborate over it.
I think this is a great opportunity for Google to streamline all this and make another great product.
I've do the the same thing for my trips and think it's great. If Google could integrate the travel guide content with the "view offline" feature in GMaps it would reduce the need for roaming too.
We need "tabs" and "contextMenus" from Chrome to access the current tab (get tab url, title and highlighted text) and add options to browser context menu. It's unfortunate that Chrome doesn't allow more limited API access and it's understandable that these might sound excessive.
Kippt's extension is open sourced and available at https://github.com/kippt/kippt-chrome so you can make sure that there isn't anything fishy going on (I ensure you, there's not). Installed Chrome extensions can also be taken a part with just few clicks.
Uhmm...I'm going to ignore your snarkiness and condescension and just present the below data from Google's Support page for Chrome plugins:
"
Your data on all websites
This item can read every page that you visit -- your bank, your web email, your Facebook page, and so on. Often, this kind of item needs to see all pages so that it can perform a limited task such as looking for RSS feeds that you might want to subscribe to.
Caution: Besides seeing all your pages, this item could use your credentials (cookies) to request or modify your data from websites."
I think it is not unreasonable to take pause when an extension asks for such permissions.
> Often, this kind of item needs to see all pages so that it can perform a limited task such as looking for RSS feeds that you might want to subscribe to.
This is Google's issue. They provide a limited set of permissions (you want access to data about the site, you need to give permissions to read the site).
Maybe you could answer this: how else is the plug supposed to get the title of the page you are looking at without having access to the contents of the page? The title, after all, is part of that content.
> I think it is not unreasonable to take pause when an extension asks for such permissions.
It's not. It is, however, unreasonable to unfairly and dishonestly characterize a plugin without doing any research yourself.
How much does the book go into the first few weeks and months of Reddit? I've always been curious about how community sites get started and I was wondering how much in depth the book goes into how you guys bootstrapped Reddit. For instance, does the book go over how you and Steve create dummy accounts and content to seed Reddit? (I'm not saying this is a bad thing, in fact I think it's a legitimate technique) Was the process automated? And how did you guys get the first real users after you tapped out family and friends? I'm hoping the book goes into detail about the nitty gritty stuff like this when it comes to getting users for a community site.
Steve and I submitted under different usernames (no comments back then) but it was entirely manual. Most of the submissions were from "kn0thing" and "spez" but from time to time we'd submit as a different username, to give the appearance of a 'live' site (nothing sadder than an empty reddit).
The first real users after friends and family came after PG linked to us in an essay, fortunately a number of them stuck around and (1% rule) some even started submitting.
I exhausted bloggers pretty equally and back in 2005 there weren't any options beyond that for getting the word out -- just facebook.
What a difference 5 years made. It made launching hipmunk so much easier.
As one of the 1% who followed PG's link (6 year club member), I still consider reddit to be one of the more valuable destinations on teh webz due to the community structure.
Like HN, I often don't even bother with the linked article because the comments usually have so much more value. I think there's even more value to be extracted there if one can find a way to bump back up the S/N ratio....
>> Just look at what the data might look like for the 17 people. -They all sign up in a period of a few weeks. -They all review this one place and nothing else. -16 of the 17 never sign back in again.
Looking at the 17 filtered reviews, 16 of them are 5-star reviews from people with 0 friends and less than 5 reviews (mostly only have 1 review). There's also a 1-star review from a person with 0 friends and 1 review.
It seems like to me that their filtering algorithm is working pretty well.
By hack, they mean that two teens who know how to use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, help musicians use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.
By "hack" I think they mean they know how to hustle the shit out of SV tech companies and some of the top musicians in the world. Not an easy hack at all.
Don't be so harsh... and they do know something about developing facebook pages:
>Require yours fans to like you on Facebook before playing certain tracks and videos.
(I find that extremly annoying though)
I actually found this more confusing. My immediate thought of the up/down arrows was that they'd up/downvote the comments, but they instead take you to others. I don't really get how they're grouped either, since they don't seem to be replies...
The arrows let you cycle through the replies of the above comment. This way, instead of using indentation to indicate a parent or ancestors, you simply look at the comments above. I find it easier than following indentation or indentation lines to mentally juxtapose a comment with its parent and its ancestors.
Topics describe your interests, and you can subscribe to multiple topics. The 'Best Posts' feed is a list of recommendations ranked by a combination of matching topics and points.
The end goal is that you start getting a feed of only content you're interested in.
And then he starts his discussion with his own assumption: "Here are some of the things people would have responded with if you asked a mid-late 19th century city planner what he needed with regards to equine transportation:"
I think it would have been a stronger argument to just list a few sources of information.
But besides that, I think the article raises some interesting points. For me, I don't want a faster car, I want fuel efficiency. I want a car that doesn't require too much maintenance and repairs.