Interesting Links for 03-06-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Wouldn't everyone's life be better if they could hear the theme music?

(tags:music movies StarWars funny )

2. Searching 32 million academic papers for obscene acronyms hidden in the titles

(tags:swearing research academia funny )

3. We've Known How To Prevent A School Shooting for More Than 20 Years

(tags:viaPatrickHadfield schools guns murder psychology USA )

4. Celebrity culture is the modern morality play

(tags:morality society celebrity )

5. If you're wondering how Britain is doing, the #12 single right now is "Prince Andrew is a Sweaty Nonce"

(tags:monarchy UK music funny )

6. I do not understand why anyone would rely on Google for a chat application

(tags:Google communication epicfail )

7. MBE for Travelling Tabby - very well deserved!

(tags:Pandemic awards )

8. The UK government is having the most ludicrously biased consultation I've ever seen (on Imperial units)

(tags:consultation UK government measurement OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[melchar]

Being able to hear the soundtrack would be SUCH a help! And I giggled reading the idea of both Anakin -and- ObiWan hearing the music.

[naath]

My soundtrack is the Who ploying for puns (like csi Miami)... more usful for Anokin...

[calimac]

3) "Did you not read this stuff 20 years ago?" No I did not, and I've been looking for it. I've wondered for years - everything I read about school shooters professes utter bafflement as to why they do it, but many school shooters survive, hasn't anybody psychoanalyzed them? This is the first thing I've ever seen to report on that.

[mountainkiss]

I rely on Google Chat for a very simple reason: Weezie is on it.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, you have to go where the people you want to talk to are. The network effect is strong.

The UK government is having the most ludicrously biased consultation I've ever seen (on Imperial uni

[anef]

O My God

[jducoeur]

6 - Honestly, Meet is currently my video-conference tool of choice: I just plain like the UX more than I do Zoom. But yes, the constant splitting, merging and rebranding borders on high comedy. (Fortunately, the network effects are actually kind of weak: it's much easier to switch conferencing platforms than social networks.)

8 - Not my country, but yeah, that isn't even trying to make a show of impartiality.

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah, I'm sure it's all functional. But they're not going to get mindshare if they keep changing all the time!

[jducoeur]

I have strong feelings on this point. Y'see, back in 2007-2008, I was in the process of creating a startup called CommYou, which was a very sophisticated text-chat service for its time.

Then Google Wave came along, and was damned near identical -- CommYou didn't have the infinite nestability of Wave's comments (which I thought was a bad idea, but okay), and had much better identity management than Wave's inexplicably bad approach, but other than that they were astoundingly similar, right down to much of the UX.

So I figured, hey, I don't have Google's resources -- they're clearly going to win in the market -- and I shut CommYou down. At least I had a good long-term solution to what I wanted.

When Wave got shut down a year or so later, you could have heard my scream from space.

As a result of that and the constant churn around their products in general, I no longer worry much about Google as a competitor. They have a lot of smart engineers, but as a company it's like a toddler on speed: grabbing every cool new toy, playing with it for a little while, then dropping it and moving on. It simply doesn't have the corporate attention span and focus to build serious businesses, as far as I can tell, and if they ever do compete with me again, I'm going to say that in my own publicity, front-and-center. Just listing all the products that people relied on that they then dropped is a fine message that you can't trust Google with anything important...

[andrewducker]

Makes sense. And yeah, unless it gets on the front page of newspapers Google doesn't care about reputational damage. They'll drop anything that doesn't go worldwide within a year.

[andrewducker]

Oh and I'm so sorry. I wish you'd stuck at it!