The Social Graph is Neither I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further. The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer. At the time he wrote, Fitzpatrick had two points to make. The first was that it made no sense for … Full Article →

Posted in FountainPens at 7:40 am by a11en A post today regarding some of my thoughts about Fountain-pens and Ballpoints. When someone moves from a ball-point (which most of my generation have been using their whole life) to a fountain-pen, often their comments range from “smooth” to “better feel” to “more responsive”. Another item that short-term users of FP’s experience is that of paper-quality. As I mentioned before, I never realized how bad paper quality had become in this coun … Full Article →

November 2, 2011 The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do. Shit work Take a look at Twitter Lists. The idea behind Twitter Lists was that users would carefully cultivate lists on Twitter of different accounts they’re following (or not following). These could be divided into lists like Family, Friends, Coworkers, People I Find Mildly Attractive, People To Murder, People I Find Mildly Attractive And Want To Murder, and so on. The problem is … Full Article →

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people. Even as a feminist, my … Full Article →

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has an interesting post today about being a developer for Apple's ecosystem. We'll leave aside for now the fact that Jeff isn't and has never been an Apple developer and is, in fact, a strong proponent of Microsoft's developer stack. Despite that flaw, I usually enjoy reading Coding Horror. I think Jeff's a smart guy with a lot to offer the world in terms of insight about software development. But… Jeff's premise today is that third party Apple developers "serve … Full Article →

Michael Walker was acting strangely. The 23-year-old Seattle soundman had just been re-introduced to Sara Merker, a college student a couple years older than he was, and the first thing he said was, "Can I take a picture of you for my blog?" This was the second time Merker had really talked with Walker. The first time was a very brief interaction at a party about a year before. Now Merker was at a bar to meet Nick, a mutual friend, and Walker had tagged along. "I was like, why is this guy being … Full Article →

The ReturnOctober 06, 2011, 11:00 AM EDT Everyone knows the transaction where the board sided with John Sculley and Steve left Apple. Steve sold all of his Apple stock, kept one share, and founded NeXT. Typical Steve maneuver. When I was still at Sun Microsystems, I visited him at NeXT—we did a bunch of deals with him. He was exactly the same way he was at Apple: strongly opinionated, knew what he was doing. He was so passionate about object-oriented programming. He had this extraordinary dept … Full Article →