I’m back from Catalunya — beach ultimate and delicious tapas — and a blissful Easter weekend in the hills and forests of Luxemburg. Quite a few interesting things happened during my absence, but see for yourself:
After only 551 days (!), Instagram gets acquired by Facebook for a reported one billion (!) dollars.
Inside Instagram: How Slowing Its Roll Put the Little Startup in the Fast Lane (Feb 2012) // Gizmodo portrayed the startup just two months ago: “Instagram isn’t just small; it’s tiny. It’s miniscule. (…) Instagram isn’t in Twitter’s old office, it’s in Twitter’s old conference room. The entire company is nothing more than a collection of desks arranged bullpen-style in a room that is smaller than most two-car garages.”
Om Malik on why Instagram is so valuable for Facebook: “Instagram is all soul and emotion.”
Mat Honan offers advice to Instagram’s new owners: “Don’t Make It Facebook”.
Business
Incremental Change Wins Apple Big Gains // Healthy mix of disruptive game-changers (original iPhone, original iPad) and regular incremental improvements. Allow long lifetime of products by allowing OS upgrades years after product release.
1 Startup, 2 Startups, Big Startups, Little Startup // You don’t have to become the next Facebook to be successful: “small expected value, small variance” VS. “big expected value, big variance”.
Caine’s Arcade // A nine-year-old builds a cardboard arcade. He proves a great sense for pricing: 1$ lets you play four times, 2$ buys you a hundred times. Which would you choose?
Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success // Jesse Thorn on Transom with inspiring vignettes for each of his pieces of advice.
Dataviz
Wind Map // Mesmerizing map of air currents in the USA.
Language communities of Twitter (Oct 2011) // Twitter usage is the new Earth at Night: You can clearly make out roads, coastal lines, and get a rough idea of technological progress. (via Spatial Analysis)
Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750–1800 (Spatial Analysis) // Beautiful maps.
Culture
Why don’t Americans walk more? The crisis of pedestrianism (Slate Magazine) // Great thought-provoking opener: “If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied someone approaching at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, ’Here comes a pedestrian’?”
Real-time tweets from the Titanic // Follow on Twitter to experience a dreadful sense of foreboding. Currently on its third day out. Also: People on Twitter Learn That The Titanic Was Not Just A Movie.
Design
The of course principle of design // Om Malik explains why “of course” is better than “wow!”.
500px / Terms of Service // “Basically, …” – all Terms of Service should be like this.
Programming
PHP: a fractal of bad design // A few months ago a good friend urged me to continue developing our dormant PHP-based Facebook app. I felt almost physical pain at the prospect of grappling with both the Facebook API and the subjective yuck of PHP. Now I can point my friend to @eevee’s mind-boggling list of WTFs. (Absolutely Wat material.)
Apps of the Week
Drafts (via Ben Brooks) // I don’t like the visual design at all, but very much appreciate the thought that went into the interaction design. I’m tentatively replacing Mail with Drafts in my iPhone’s dock. Similarly, I find Readability prettier but prefer the Instapaper’s no-nonsense UI — not to mention its no-nonsense business model. Ultimately, design is how it works.
Paper (iPad) // Again, I agree with Ben Brooks that “yes, Paper is overly simplistic in the UI design, but that is actually the point of the app — it’s meant to be a sheet of paper residing in a Moleskin (sic) notebook.” I admire how FiftyThree managed to make so much empty space not look empty but zen.