firehose

“

Let’s be clear that this has nothing to do with revenue vs operating costs. Reader never made money directly (though you could maybe attribute some of Feedburner and AdSense for Feeds usage to it), and it wasn’t the goal of the product.

Reader has been fighting for approval/survival at Google since long before I was a PM for the product. I’m pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened. It was often for some reason related to social:

2008 - let’s pull the team off to build OpenSocial
2009 - let’s pull the team off to build Buzz
2010 - let’s pull the team off to build Google+

It turns out they decided to kill it anyway in 2010, even though most of the engineers opted against joining G+. Ironically, I think the reason Google always wanted to pull the Reader team off to build these other social products was that the Reader team actually understood social (and tried a lot of experiments over the years that informed the larger social features at the company)[1]. Reader’s social features also evolved very organically in response to users, instead of being designed top-down like some of Google’s other efforts[2].

I suspect that it survived for some time after being put into maintenance because they believed it could still be a useful source of content into G+. Reader users were always voracious consumers of content, and many of them filtered and shared a great deal of it.

But after switching the sharing features over to G+ (the so called “share-pocalypse”) along with the redesigned UI, my guess is that usage just started to fall - particularly around sharing. I know that my sharing basically stopped completely once the redesign happened [3]. Though Google did ultimately fix a lot of the UI issues, the sharing (and therefore content going into G+) would never recover.

So with dwindling usefulness to G+, (likely) dwindling or flattening usage due to being in maintenance, and Google’s big drive to focus in the last couple of years, what choice was there but to kill the product?

Personally, I think that there is still a lot of value a service like Reader could provide — particularly in a world with increasing information overload coming us from many different sources. But Reader at Google was pigeonholed as an RSS-reader explicitly, and didn’t have a chance to grow beyond that to explore that space. But that’s neither here nor there.

[1] See Reader’s friends implementations v1, v2, and v3, comments, privacy controls, and sharing features. Actually wait, you can’t see those anymore, since they were all ripped out.

[2] Rob Fishman’s Buzzfeed article has good coverage of this: Google’s Lost Social Network

[3] Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? I was a lot angrier then than I am now — now I’m just sad.

”

- Brian Shih - Quora

Breaking: Google Has Begun Purging Ad-Blocking Apps From The Play Store

Medieval knight remains found in Edinburgh car park - Heritage - Scotsman.com

Tim Lewis film (by Flowers Gallery)

Posted by Alan Green, Software Engineer We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience. To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so you have sufficient time to find an alternative feed-reading solution. If you want to retain your Reader data, including subscriptions, you can do so through Google Takeout. Thank you again for using Reader as your RSS platform.
Labels: reader, sunset

The Real Harlem Shake (by SchleppFilms)

Handsome, bratty, and maybe a bit vulgar: Apollo Justice

Since scans showing Apollo Justice’s return in Ace Attorney 5 hit last night, artists have churned out an impressive amount of tributes to the character’s new look. The artists behind these pieces:

• Glimmerousfap
• Umberon
• Hellowinter
• Dilosaur
• Hermajestysass
• Goodjobjules
• Stepladderer

I’m amazed at their ability to create such quality and clean-looking work despite simultaneously crying and shrieking while drawing these. 

BUY Ace Attorney games, upcoming releases

And you thought a cat walking on your keyboard was bothersome (via)

a longing for old friends.

(more Magic Rum Fairy)

With recent years' blossoming of interest in artisinal bitters and infusions and the growth of local micro distilleries, Portland has become home to a vibrant and lively cocktail culture. All we're missing is knowledge of the gardening side of cocktail culture. Which begs the question: what plants can we grow in our gardens that will provide inspired infusions, garnishes, swizzle sticks and muddling herbs for our mixed drinks? I asked Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist, what she recommends growing for the Portland cocktail aficionado's garden.
 
Here are six of her favorite cocktail plants, hand-picked for Portland's climate:
 
'Mojito' mint - According to Amy, it's the actual strain of spearmint grown in Cuba, which is only available because Canadian tourists were taking it out of their mojitos and bringing it home with them.
 
'Red Venture' celery - Amy says, "I would have never in a million years thought it worthwhile to grow my own celery, but this stuff is fabulous. The stalks are much smaller than those big green bunches you by the grocery store, so they actually fit in a drink, and they are beautiful dramatic red. The flavor's much stronger than regular celery, so it's great for muddling into a savory drink. And they will pretty much keep going all year round. You will find the once you have a steady supply of celery, you'll use it in everything."
 
Black currant - "The Pacific Northwest is great for any kind of berries, and I'm very excited about growing my own black currants to make cassis.  Really, any kind of berry belongs in a Portland cocktail garden."
 
Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers - "Not technically a cucumber, but a very close relative. Each one is about the size of a grape or an olive. The flavor is a bit more tart than a regular cucumber, but they pair very well with gin and they make a beautiful garnish — and the vines are freakishly prolific, so this is one really worth growing."
 
Grafted tomatoes - "Portland's climate is kind of like mine [northern California], where summer comes late in can be kind of iffy. I am very excited about these tomatoes that are grafted onto sturdier commercial rootstock. This is what commercial tomato farmers do, but it only recently occurred to anyone to start selling them to home gardeners. It's the same concept as a grafted fruit tree — you'll get more disease resistance and therefore a more vigorous, productive plant.  You can also get a combo plant with two varieties grafted onto one rootstock. I know it sounds like a freak of nature, but it's just very old-school technology — you're pretty much just mashing the cut stem of one plant up against another."

Stewart has put together six collections of cocktail-friendly plants to go with her book - the Drunken Botanist Plant Collection, grown by Log House Plants and available through Territorial Seed Company and at garden centers up and down the West Coast this spring. The collection is comprised of six different tray packs themed around particular spirits: the Old Havana Rum Garden, the Heart of Agave Tequila Garden, the Farmers Market Vodka Garden, the Old Tom Gin Garden, the Southern Belle Whiskey Garden and Mixologist's Simple Syrups Garden. According to Stewart, "the challenge was coming up with an assortment of plants that pair well with that spirit, but also grows in jumbo sixpacks. So I would normally want to put peaches with whiskey, but we can't exactly put a peach tree in a sixpack!" The pairings may not all be 100% conventional, but they are inspired and sure to delight. The same link, above, brings you to a list of other great plants that are essential for summertime cocktails. Recipes making use of all the plants are included (on the plant tags). Here is what Amy wrote about the collections on her website.
 
The plants should be available this spring at New Seasons Markets as well as a number of garden centers including Cornell Farms, Portland Nursery, the Urban Farm Store, Drake's 7 Dees, Portland Homestead, The Garden Corner in Tualatin, Good News Gardening in Hood River, Schedeens in Gresham, 13th Street Nursery in Salem, Garland Nursery in Corvallis, and Bird's English Garden in Ridgefield, WA

If you're intrigued about designing a cocktail garden of your own, check out Amy and her fellow bloggers' writings about it on Garden Rant here (the design of Amy's cocktail garden) and here (the design before-and-after). And here are tips on growing a cocktail garden, with lots more plant suggestions.

Of course, no writing about cocktail gardens would be complete without a seasonal recipe making use of the delectable late winter citrus:

Here's a drink I made for a gathering of librarians and booksellers in Seattle.  I called it the Dewey Decimal 580, 580 being the section in the Dewey Decimal system devoted to the botanical sciences.  I thought the librarians were going to be much more impressed with that than they were, but I guess they've seen it all. —Amy Stewart

Dewey Decimal 580
1 oz gin
1 oz Lillet Blanc
1.5 oz fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice  (about 1/3 to 1/4 of a grapefruit, depending on size)

Shake over ice, serve over ice in short rocks glass. Garnish with a long strip of grapefruit peel.

For more home and garden ideas and inspiration, sign up for our weekly At Home newsletter, subscribe to our RSS Feed, and visit our Home & Design page.

Type lovers rejoice: Firefox DevTools is getting a Font Inspector, available in the latest Nightly - The Next Web

William Laren will you be mah fren?

thedavidoreilly:

This is a simple motion-diagram thing I made when talking about animation to non-animators.

Mar 12th 2013 By: Andy Khouri

"A hole in the wall of reality, a mass-market TV show based on violent military suicide, a world where the laws of physics don't work quite right, and -- yes -- a f***ing enormous primate with a f***ing enormous gun" is how longtime 2000 AD and X-Men: Legacy writer Simon Spurrier has described his audacious new project from BOOM! Studios, a dystopian sci-fi saga based on a public domain pulp fiction character whose true creator's name has been lost to history. A proposition that Spurrier admits is as absurd as it is potentially awesome, we must say that the early cover artwork by ComicsAlliance favorites James Harren (B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth) and Ramón Pérez (Tale of Sand, Wolverine and the X-Men) go a long way towards winning us over.

The first I'd heard of Six-Gun Gorilla was when CA contributor Sarah Horrocks created a pin-up of the character that we featured in a 2012 edition of Best Art Ever (This Week). As it turns out, the character originally appeared in British publications throughout the 1930s and was, according to the great pulp historian Jess Nevins, a what you see is what you get kind of serial. Played completely without irony, the Six-Gun Gorilla aka O'Neil wandered the Old West on a quest for revenge after the murder of his human mentor.

Also the writer of numerous sci-fi works for 2000 AD including Judge Dredd and Tharg's Future Shocks and a contributor to what we've called the best crossover event of 2012, Spurrier became enamored with Six-Gun Gorilla after acquainting himself with Nevins' research. "Part of what made Six-Gun Gorilla so enticing to me -- besides all those conflicting layers of absurdity and awesome -- is that the maestro who wrote all those original stories was never named," Spurrier wrote on his blog. "Nobody knows who he or she was. That plays so deliciously into the mythos of The Western as a trope - as a thing responsible for its own legend - and it'll come as no surprise that on the acknowledgement page for this series, right beside Jess's name, you'll find a dedication to '[CREATORS UNKNOWN].'"

Drawn by newcomer Jeff Stokely, Spurrier's intention is to use the bizarre premise as a way of synthesizing his passions for the various genres it inhabits, particularly the Western. "I love Westerns," he wrote. "Six-Gun Gorilla is the culmination of all my obsessive theorizing and cultural sampling: a love-letter to the most beautiful, most tragic, most self-fulfillingly-obsolete genre of them all.

"It's is not about a Gorilla in a cowboy hat."

(click to enlarge)

BOOM! Studios' solicit text offers more insight into the book and its world:

Welcome to "the Blister" -- a bizarre other-world colonized by humans sometime in the 22nd century, which quickly became a hotly-contested source of fertile land and natural resources long ago exhausted on Earth. In this new frontier, a rogue gunslinger and his companion wander across a wilderness in the grips of a civil war, encountering lawlessness, natives, and perversions of civilization in a world at the crossroads between the past and the future. The fact that said gunslinger is a bio-surgically modified silverback gorilla toting a pair of enormous revolvers is neither here nor there.

Six-Gun Gorilla debuts in June from BOOM! Studios.

Almost

Libraries of the Future is a optimistic cartoon by London-based illustrator and cartoonist Tom Gauld that shows possible ways that a library could work in the future. It was created as a weekly cartoon for The Guardian, an online news and media website. It is one of many that will be featured in Tom‘s upcoming book, You’re All Just Jealous Of My Jetpack. The hardcover book is due out on April 2, 2013 and currently available to pre-order from Amazon.

image via Tom Gauld

via Tastefully Offensive

sherlockology:

Dressed and brilliant. Who would live in a place like this?

Check out the full panorama from Arwel Jones here: http://www.teliportme.com/view/95021

“I came over at once to London, called in my own person at Baker Street, threw Mrs. Hudson into violent hysterics, and found that Mycroft had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been. So it was, my dear Watson, that at two o’clock to-day I found myself in my old arm-chair in my own old room, and only wishing that I could have seen my old friend Watson in the other chair which he has so often adorned.”

:)

veggiezombiex:

atlinmerrick:

Get thee to the British Library’s exhibit “A-Z Murder in the Library” to see an original, hand-written Arthur Conan Doyle manuscript for the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman.”

Stand before it and marvel at ACD’s precise penmanship! His lack of strike throughs! The fact that this is a genuine draft of one of his later stories and you’re not sure you’ve read it!

Or click on the image above for a fairly blurry close-up!

You can read it here or download it for free from iTunes and/or Kindle in one of the collections there.

It’s a beautiful hand, isn’t it…

Universal Truth

A white lion cub named Kwanza has a new friend: Honey, the dog belonging to keepers at Darling Downs Zoo in Pilton, Queensland. When when Kwanza’s mother stopped producing milk, keepers started to spend more time with the cub, with Honey right beside them. Now, the two are bestest anipals.

*No, not Kimba the White Lion, because that would have been just too perfect! (caution: earworm)

Filed under: Uncategorized

Nerval's Lobster writes "Andy Rubin is stepping down as head of Google's Android division, according to the company. 'Having exceeded even the crazy ambitious goals we dreamed of for Android — and with a really strong leadership team in place — Andy's decided it's time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google,' Google CEO Larry Page wrote in a March 13 note on Google's official blog. 'Going forward, Sundar Pichai will lead Android, in addition to his existing work with Chrome and Apps.' If Rubin had any other reasons for departing, the blog posting left them unexplained. Android has been activated on 750 million devices around the world, according to Google, on top of some 25 billion apps downloaded from the Google Play storefront. It remains to be seen whether 'start a new chapter at Google' is some sort of polite corporate euphemism for Rubin's eventual departure from the company, or if he really is taking over another project or division. Page suggested in his blog posting that Pichai 'will do a tremendous job doubling down on Android as we work to push the ecosystem forward,' which doesn't offer a lot about the operating system's future direction: Pichai does have direct control over three core platforms, raising the possibility that Google could try and exploit further crossovers between the three. But what form that will take is anyone's guess."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

““It was like waiting for the birth of a baby, only better, ” said a Roman man. A child sitting atop his father’s shoulders waved a crucifix.”

- Cardinals Elect Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as New Pope - NYTimes.com

I've written five different openings to this SimCity review over three days. Some felt ignorant of the game's disastrous launch, an element I openly wrestled with before writing this review. Others were too aggressive and awkwardly angry. I fired blindly with some fluffy paragraph about the fun of building, but that seemed disingenuous. I'm unlikely to go back to SimCity for some time. The game simply isn't fun.

Like 2003's SimCity 4, this new SimCity uses a regional map divided into playable zones that interact with one another, transporting commuters and allowing for a level of specialization in particular zones. Unlike SimCity 4's sprawling megalopolis created from a massive grid of connected tiles, the new SimCity's region zones are separated by gaps (think of a subway map where you play the stations but not the lines between). The current region selection supports as little as two and up to 16 zones.

SimCity is very user friendly and a hallmark of modern interface design and simulation transparency. I must stress that I'm speaking specifically about when players are in their particular zone, not when they are trying to discern anything from a regional perspective. Pipes and electricity now run along roads, removing two dull mayoral duties seen in previous games. Crime, pollution, education, and just about every other chart is no longer presented in some tiny pop-up window, but is instead delivered in full graphical glory as an overlay on the main game screen. It's also great that players can now expand on buildings, like giving the police more cars or adding classrooms to schools, but this also begins to highlight the cramped size of the zones.

Gallery: SimCIty (02/19/2013)

Continue reading SimCity review: They built this city to shock and troll

SimCity review: They built this city to shock and troll originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The teams of Who veterans who’ll be putting their knowledge to the test on the left-field quiz show are: Bernard Cribbins (Wilfred Mott) and Jacqueline King (Sylvia Noble), Nicola Bryant (Peri) and Andrew Hayden Smith (Jake Simmonds), Sylvester McCoy (the Seventh Doctor) and Sophie Aldred (Ace), and Louise Jameson (Leela) and Frazer Hines (Jamie).

Hosts Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman will also have some help on the show from the Doctor’s robotic helper K-9.

The aim of the game in Pointless is to score the fewest points possible by answering questions with obscure bits of knowledge. Each question on the show is asked to a panel of 100 people to determine both the most obvious and bizarre answers, and the show’s Holy Grail is an answer that none of the survey’s sample thought of.

AUSTIN, TX—While attending the fourth day of this year’s SXSW conference, Chicago-based marketing associate Tim Danner told reporters today that the music, film, and interactive festival is just about as cool, as alternative, and as real as it...

The 8 Worst-Dressed At The Papal Conclave