I recently switched from Reeder to Mr. Reader as my default RSS app on my iPad¹. The main reason is that I wanted an easier workflow to post article snippets to my text editor so that I can either post it to the site, or come back to it later and expand more before posting. Mr. Reader allows for the creation of custom workflows, which makes this possible.

The ultimate article on using Mr. Reader’s custom workflows is Federico Viticci’s characteristically insightful Mr. Reader And The Services Menu for iOS. He goes over several useful workflows, but the one he uses for Notesy doesn’t quite do what I want it to do, so I made my own and thought I might as well share in case anyone else is interested.

I want to have an action that lets me select some text in Mr. Reader, and then create a new note in Notesy with the article title as the note’s title, followed by a markdown-formatted excerpt that includes the author, the title/url, as well as the quoted text — like so:

To set this up, go into the services menu in Mr. Reader, and configure it as follows:

If you want to copy and paste the URL scheme text, here it is:

notesy://x-callback-url/append?name={[TITLE]}&text={[AUTHOR] in *}%5B{[TITLE]}%5D{([URL])*:

> [TEXT-SELECTED]}

Make sure the “Text Selection Menu” toggle is on. Then, all you have to do is a select a piece of text, tap on “More actions”, and call the Notesy action. You can then either keep writing in Notesy, or come back to it later in nvALT on your Mac (see an overview of my plain text setup here).

And if you’re really lazy, just download this file on your iPad and select “Open In Mr. Reader” to set it up automatically: Notesy services configuration for Mr. Reader.

Craig Mod’s Goodbye, Cameras kicked off an interesting discussion on the future of photography and connected devices:

As I’ve become a more network-focussed photographer, I’ve come to love using the smartphone as an editing surface; touch is perfect for photo manipulation. There’s a tactility that is lost when you edit with a mouse on a desktop computer. Perhaps touch feels natural because it’s a return to the chemical-filled days of manually poking and massaging liquid and paper to form an image I had seen in my head.

Yet if the advent of digital photography compressed the core processes of the medium, smartphones further squish the full spectrum of photographic storytelling: capture, edit, collate, share, and respond. I saw more and shot more, and returned from the forest with a record of both the small details — light and texture and snippets of life — and the conversations that floated around them on my social networks.

Also see Camera makers are desperately trying to stay a step ahead of smartphones—and failing and Connectedness for some interesting follow-up discussions.

Mark O’Connell wrote a very interesting article about a fairly unsettling iOS app called Days of Life — “a counter for the days you have left to live.” In Deathwatch he explores just how weird and absurd this app turns out to be:

Days of Life is one of those technologies that seems to incidentally satirize our relationship with technology more broadly. It sits in the “Productivity” folder on my iPhone’s home screen, along with my calendar and a to-do list app called Remember the Milk, but it would be as appropriately housed in a folder called “Existential Terror.”

So much of what we value in technology is its promise to upgrade the hardware of our lives, to make us more useful to ourselves — more productive, more profitable, more effective. Days of Life functions like a reductio ad absurdum of the logic of personal productivity. The pie chart becomes a special way of being afraid: an image of the self as a micro-economy of numbered days.

We sometimes have such a warped view of what it means to be “productive”, and this essay does a good job of shining a spotlight on that.

Alexis Madrigal — who is turning into one of the most interesting journalists of our time — goes deep on Netflix’s 76,897 (often bizarre) micro-genres in How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood:

Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented.

Netflix is putting in a staggering amount of effort on the structured data of their TV shows and movies. And of course, it’s all for one reason — to get to know you better:

They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users’ viewing habits, they become Netflix’s competitive advantage. The company’s main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy. “Members connect with these [genre] rows so well that we measure an increase in member retention by placing the most tailored rows higher on the page instead of lower,” the company revealed in a 2012 blog post. The better Netflix shows that it knows you, the likelier you are to stick around.

And now, they have a terrific advantage in their efforts to produce their own content: Netflix has created a database of American cinematic predilections. The data can’t tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren’t guessing at what people want.

What’s interesting is that similar things are happening in other forms of media as well. Spotify and Rdio’s knowledge of our listening data can be used to inform record labels what type of albums they should invest in. And as David Streitfeld reports in As New Services Track Habits, the E-Books Are Reading You, a new crop of companies are helping authors figure out what type of books they should write:

The move to exploit reading data is one aspect of how consumer analytics is making its way into every corner of the culture. Amazon and Barnes & Noble already collect vast amounts of information from their e-readers but keep it proprietary. Now the start-ups — which also include Entitle, a North Carolina-based company — are hoping to profit by telling all.

“We’re going to be pretty open about sharing this data so people can use it to publish better books,” said Trip Adler, Scribd’s chief executive. […]

Scribd is just beginning to analyze the data from its subscribers. Some general insights: The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all.

All of this raises familiar questions about the loss of serendipity — finding interesting things we’re not looking for. But I still think this is an unnecessary fear.

Megan Garber takes on Instagram Direct¹ in Behold, Facetwitterest: The Standardized Future of Social, and makes this observation:

So one of the biggest challenges facing the major (and the trying-to-be-major) social networks is a structural one: How do you build yourself up and out in ways that balance users’ desire for intimacy with their desire for publicity? How do you merge the web’s ability to create communities with its ability to create universalities? 

You could read Direct as Instagram’s (and Facebook’s) latest attempt to navigate that tension. The service is, basically, attempting to add a layer of privacy to its existing, public-leaning architecture. But Instagram isn’t just Snapchatting itself. It’s offering its users a Snapchat-like functionality within the context of its much more public social network. It’s trying to have it both ways — cynically, but perhaps ingeniously — by offering a refuge of privateness within a very public service.

It reminds me of something Luke Wroblewski said recently:

Every mobile app attempts to expand until it includes chat. Those applications which do not are replaced by ones which can.

Direct appears to be a necessary defensive move by Instagram — private messaging is now a basic expectation for social networks. But it also looks like people are getting more savvy about their privacy and what happens to their data (Thanks, NSA!), so it will be interesting to see how this mixing of public and private plays out in 2014.

Small human beings learn by mimicking and so they learn patience by mimicking patience. Perhaps this means that a larger human being somewhere many thousands of generations back took a long and patient breath as the smaller human being in his or her arms squirmed. Perhaps the smaller human being saw this long and patient breath and internalized it and began to understand. Perhaps all of the patience in the world is a copy of one sigh.

— Paul Ford, What I’ve learned from fatherhood

I’m most aware of my shortcomings when I lose patience with my daughters. Of the many things I know I need to improve on, it’s the one that I wish the most I could fix with the flip of a switch.

“Oh, I see the problem, sir — your patience switch was turned off. It happens sometimes… There you go, that should do it.”

But of course, it doesn’t work like that. Yesterday I was watching a mother trying to get her 3-year old son to stop screaming at her. After a few minutes they were both yelling — which isn’t a very effective way to diffuse a situation like that. The thing is, I’m sure she knows that. And before I had kids I probably would have judged her. Not any more. I’ve made enough bad decisions in the heat of the moment that it would be hypocritical of me to judge anyone for their parenting techniques¹. In fact, I’m pretty sure that no matter what decision I make at any given time (should I give her the cookie, or is this a teachable moment?), there’s about a 50% chance that it will be the wrong decision.

But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t strive to do better — to be better. I’ve already made most of the mistakes I didn’t want to make with my daughters. However, that doesn’t stop my desire to be a better dad. I’m painfully aware of how cheesy that sounds, but hey — it’s the truth.

I often ask my wife if she thinks we’re doing it wrong. It just seems like other parents have it all together, all the time. Yet, every once in a while I see cracks in the veneer — an honest moment on Twitter, a knowing look of camaraderie in a coffee shop — and I know I’m not alone. We all love our children very much. We’re also all human and selfish. And patience — like money — doesn’t grow on trees.

So maybe I need to stop trying to be “a better dad”. That’s just too vague (how will I know when I’m “better” enough?). Instead, I need to focus on that one sigh. The one breath that could be the difference between letting a difficult moment pass, or letting it get the best of me.

One moment of patience. That will be my focus in 2014 — in parenting, but also online, and in my work.

Will you join me?

It’s always worth reading Eugene Wei’s thoughts on Amazon’s strategy, and Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy is no exception. Wei discusses how most analysts don’t understand Amazon’s business at all. In particular, he tears into the idea that at some point, Amazon will just “flip the switch” — increase the prices on all their products and instantly become profitable:

But “flipping a switch” is the wrong analogy because Amazon’s core business model does generate a profit with most every transaction at its current price level. The reason it isn’t showing a profit is because it’s undertaken a massive investment to support an even larger sales base.

How does Amazon turn a profit? Not by flipping a switch but by waiting, once again, until its transaction volume grows and income exceeds its fixed cost base again. It can choose to reach that point faster or slower depending on how quickly it continues to grow its fixed cost base, but a simple way to accelerate that would be to stop investing in so many new fulfillment centers.

Amazon is using their revenue to build more and more infrastructure until they become so large (and efficient) that no one will be able to compete with them. That’s pretty smart.

Speaking of Amazon, Benedict Evans wrote an interesting post discussing Amazon’s “selective” secrecy. He explains in Amazon’s PR genius that there is one area they don’t mind exposing to the world — logistics:

Price is obviously a large part of the consumer story, but talking about logistics is a competitive weapon just like not talking about Kindle sales. Every story about how Amazon has built an amazing, incredibly efficient, incredibly low-cost distribution platform is another ecommerce start-up that doesn’t get funded, or even started. Jeff Bezos famously said that he was happy for Amazon to be misunderstood for long periods of time, but no-one is in any danger of underestimating the scale of Amazon’s distribution. 

Sean Madden makes some interesting points in American-Centric UI Is Leveling Tech Culture — and Design Diversity:

Just as user-centered design transformed technology in the 1990s and early 2000s, cultural fluency needs to transform it today: user experience (UX) design that’s familiar enough with a user’s cultural background to meet him or her halfway.

Cultural fluency demands abandoning the idea that functionality is a universal language, and that “good UX” is culturally agnostic.

He goes on to give some examples of this cultural bias:

Consider the use of gestural interfaces in a world where gestures mean very different things in different cultures. Or using scrolling for timelines when time horizons (among other culturally sensitive dimensions) represent different values to different societies. Even the idea of touching our screens is a culturally sensitive UX action.

We see this not just in how people use products differently, but also how we interact with them during the user-centered design process. Last year I started working on a talk called The challenges and opportunities of user-centered design in developing nations. Somewhere along the line I ran out of steam with it, but I still think it’s an important topic. For example, a usability lab in an office full of Macs and giant screens can be quite intimidating to users if you’re doing research on low-end phone usage, so that’s something you have to account for. Even our user-centered design methods need to be user-centered, but it’s unfortunately something we tend not to pay much attention to.