Music
There was a window in the 120 years of the record business where performers made loads and loads of money out of records. But it was a very small window — say, 15 years between 1975 and 1990. Mick Jagger, on the rise of illegal file sharing, in an interview with
Social Media
Facebook or MySpace [...] feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter. Sci-Fi Author William Gibson on on Why He Loves Twitter, and more
Design
Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit. Seth Godin, in a instantly popular post The inevitable decline due to clutter
Mobile
As more and more business mobile optimize their websites, downloading an app in order access businesses is going to seem archaic VentureBeat, in favor of web apps and why The iPhone app is the Flash homepage of 2010
Media
They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all. Khoi Vinh, on iPad Magazine Apps
Clutter and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. Edward Tufte, on Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S)
Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy. Jeffrey Zeldman argues why publishers are doing the wrong thing, and use iPad as the new Flash
In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, what’s best for the customer, fragmented versus integrated. Steve Jobs, on Why Android isn’t open
Versus merely trying to stuff a product, burrito-style, with as many different features as possible, they target specific user experiences, and build the product around that accordingly. Mark Sigal explains Apple’s segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom (Wayback Machine)
Psychology
Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic. The excellent Psychological weblog “You Are Not So Smart” explains The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
Writing interface language is like writing dialog for a play. You want to make it clear who is speaking at all times. Erika Hall explains why not to use My in UI’s, in Super Unsuck It! Bye-Bye, My.
If I’d have asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’ Henry Ford, as cited by Steve Jobs, paraphrased in Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere