Back in in 1999, just as Ebay was coming into bloom, William Gibson wrote a piece on his experiences buying expensive watches online. He called the article My Obsession and it details his youth as a picker in the 1970s.
He writes:
This “job,” if it can be called a job, is all but dead these days because of some of the basic properties of the new market. Barring those folks on American Pickers who find items that will eventually hang in a TGI Fridays, the potential for making a lucrative trade in a post-Internet world by finding and selling odd items is nearly nil. First, a picker depends on arbitrage. Arbitrage depends on incomplete information on someone’s part or, in the case of collectable, desire. → Read More
The front page of the Internet, also known as the social news community Reddit had seen its fair share of ups and downs over the years, but in September of last year, many in its community saw a silver lining when its owner, Conde Nast, spun it out as a standalone site, and recruited co-founder Alexis Ohanian to sit on its new board of directors.
As it so happens, when Reddit became a (somewhat more) independent entity in September, it also launched a search for a CEO to lead the site to infinity and beyond. Today, Reddit is finally announcing the hiring of (what I believe) is its first CEO, Yishan Wong. → Read More
First, if you want to get right down to it, here are the codes you type into Facebook chat to get various faces:
Huzzah! We are truly living in an age of wonder!
Second, why does this work? → Read More
Folks who use iOS devices can enjoy the fine, fresh flavor of Reddit any time day or night with the official Reddit app. But what about Android users? What are they, chopped bacon?
BaconReader is a new Android reader produced by OneLouder. It is, as you’d expect, heavily text-based but it allows you to view your own account and submit news to Reddit as well as browse image links like a champ. → Read More
Created by a young man named Jonathan Bouman, Scrolldit is a thing that scrolls Reddit for you, thereby allowing you to avoid the hard, hard job of scrolling Reddit. Why, you ask, is this news? Because we like Reddit and it’s really cool.
The site essentially takes Reddit feeds (including NSFW ones, hurr hurr hurr) and places them in little boxes that march across the screen. Because most people don’t read too good, there are lots of pictures and the occasional video, available for easy and quick consumption. Most of the rendering happens in the browser and it even feeds in Reddit’s own ads.
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Happy Tuesday after Labor Day everybody! In other news, beloved Internet hangout reddit has spun out of Conde Nast and will become its own independent entity, reddit inc, owned by Conde Nast parent company Advance publications.
In a blog post coincidentally enough entitled “Independence,” reddit General Manager Erik Martin implies that the organizational change was due to a combination of technical issues related to company’s ever expanding growth and a culture clash with Condé Nast. → Read More
After spending far too much time with far too little support from their owners at Condé Nast, Reddit is on a bit of a roll lately. They’ve gone on a handful of hiring sprees this year, moved into a bigger, better office… and now, they’ve made their first acquisition: RedditGifts.
For the non-Redditors out there (yeah, yeah, Narwhal bacons at Midnight and all that), RedditGifts is a user-to-user gift exchange service first launched by Redditor kickme444 for Reddit’s record-breaking Secret Santa back in 2009.
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Earlier today, a handful of members of the Google Docs team announced that they were doing something fairly unusual for employees at a large company: they’re giving members of the popular link-sharing site Reddit a chance to ask them anything (you can find the thread right here).
The team has now responded to plenty of questions, offering some insight into where Google’s free online productivity suite is headed over the coming months. Sure, they’re being a little vague with some of their answers, but they still hint at plenty of nifty upcoming features. Here are some of the highlights so far: → Read More
What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it. → Read More
Right now I’m neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I’ve been here before . . .
Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some think that we planned all along to start a live platform, and that the Justin.tv show itself was a way of promoting that platform. While this ended up happening, none of it had crossed our minds at the time.
Emmett Shear and I had been working on Kiko, the first Javascript web calendaring application in the Microsoft Outlook style. We prototyped the application in our final year at Yale, went on to raise money from Y Combinator, then continued working on it for over a year.
Then Google Calendar was released—boom—absorbing most of our nascent user base and capturing most of the early adopter mindshare. But to be perfectly honest, Kiko would have failed regardless. We were too easily distracted and hadn’t really thought through the strategic implications of owning a standalone calendaring property (hint: no one wants a calendar without email). A short time later we were burned out and spending most of our time playing Xbox with the Reddit guys in Davis Square—hardly a startup success story. → Read More
Normally, when you hear that a company is doubling their programming team, you’d likely assume it’s some red-hot new startup. But this time, it’s actually a company that’s over five years old. And one that was acquired well over four years ago. Reddit.
By most accounts, the past several years under Conde Nast rule have seen Reddit run very lean — probably far too lean. And after an explosion of growth this past year, they’re finally doing something about it. Earlier this week, the service revealed that they had carried out a “dramatic expansion” of hiring by adding four new team members. And today they’re announcing their intention to double the programming team by adding three more there as well. → Read More
Google has made a big deal recently about not making a big deal about the version numbers of Chrome. “It’s just a number” is the basic take these days. In fact, they care barely be even bothered to announce them at all sometimes. But today, they did actually take some time to acknowledge the latest version — and a funny partner who made it all possible.
Google has officially rolled out Chrome 9, meaning the stable version of the browser has been updated to that iteration. They don’t make any mention of the number in the blog post about the update, but trust me, it’s version 9. Instead, Google focuses on the three new major features available to all in this build: WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store. → Read More
Something just happened online that is highly indicative of where we’re headed in terms of new media. Look at these two stories on VBS.TV and Reddit. They are totally independent from each other and nine months apart, but the two sites are presenting readers with unparalleled access to a fascinating story: how an Oklahoman was inspired by a ’60s-era underwater adventure show, went on to work at NASA to develop self-sustaining habitats, and is now developing an undersea colony off the Florida coast. One did the video and the other is hosting a nearly-live conversation with the NASA engineer right now.
It’s stories like this – stories that would once rate a few feature pages in Discover magazine or Omni (remember Omni?) – that are now percolating through the Internet, to our benefit and to the detriment of old media who can’t keep up. Now we get the real story sans any nonsense graphics, anticlimactic taglines or fluff. It’s the future, everyone. → Read More
Social news site Reddit has just posted some interesting statistics on a remarkable 2010 filled with traffic spikes and user engagement growth. Most notable? The jump in pageviews from 250 million in January of 2010 to 829 million in December of 2010, a 232% growth.
Reddit has increasingly become a favorite haunt of many in the social media community, especially since competitor Digg’s v4 redesign underwhelmed both its casual and core users leading to an exodus in September. → Read More
Editor’s note: Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple).
One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of “serendipity”—showing people what they want even if they didn’t ask for it.
Despite its seemingly ubiquitous invocation, however, the concept of serendipity remains ill-defined and put forth as some vague panacea for a slew of emerging innovations hoping to attract new users in droves. What is needed is a closer look at what we actually mean when we talk about serendipity. → Read More
This morning, top Reddit administrator/engineer Chris Slowe announced that he was leaving the social link sharing site to join Hipmunk, the flight search startup that closed a hyper-competitive angel round last month. Slowe joined Reddit back in 2005 as the company’s first employee — now he’ll be reunited with Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both of whom are now at Hipmunk.
But why is Slowe leaving now?
Reddit’s traffic has been hitting record highs in the wake of Digg’s failed redesign, so the timing on this seems strange. → Read More
Digg founder Kevin Rose cheerfully responds to the mountains of criticism around the newly launched Digg 4. His overall theme is that users need to deal with it.
Rose says that he’s “gotta take risk” with the service in his quest to push it beyond the 30 million or so monthly visitors to the masses. He wants 20,000 – 30,000 diggs on the top stories v. the few hundred diggs that most top stories get today.
To do that Digg is pushing stories that it thinks are more relevant to you, because people and entities you follow have pushed those stories, too. It’s a lot like Twitter, most say, and the soul of Digg is gone.
Video is below. → Read More
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