richoakley.com

A reading workflow that works

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:41:00 +0300

It’s hard not to fall prey to information overload these days. There is quite literally an always-on, never-ending stream of it being fed into our lives, and staying on top of it all and sifting out what might actually be useful can be incredibly difficult. Personally, I’ve come up with a system that works for me, and am quite structured about it. Being the kind person I am, I decided to share that recipe with you.

The tools

I do 85% of my reading on my iPad. It really is made for it, and being able to lie on a couch or in my bed at the end of the day and catch up on the cool articles from the day is an enjoyable experience. It’s a great device, if for no other use than this.

Most of my actual ‘discovery’ of articles takes place on my day-to-day machine. Most of the discovery is through Twitter - I follow people that generally share cool articles, as well as a few publications such as The Next Web, Wired, and the like. While Tweetdeck runs on my machine in a tab all day, I occasionally open Tweetbot on my iPhone (a great client!) if I’m bored, or possibly the official Twitter app on my iPad if I’m particularly bored during a meeting :P In addition, the nature of my work means that I often get interesting articles emailed to me from other people in the office. Lastly, I open up Hacker News if I have a few minutes during the day and do a quick scan down and click through to anything that catches my eye. I gave up on Google Reader and RSS readers a while ago; not because they’re not useful, but because I realized that the vast majority of the good articles that I would read there find their way to me in some other channel (like Twitter). Ultimately, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort I was putting into staying on top of it, or the sinking feeling of opening it up and seeing “1000+ unread articles”.

The process

If I see a tweet with what looks like it might be an interesting article, I generally don’t open it up. Instead, I favourite it. One of the tasks I run on Ifttt (one of the best services on web!) then triggers and sends the link in the tweet to Instapaper - here’s a link to that recipe. (The exception to this rule is that if I’m in Tweetbot on my phone, I can hold down on a link and send it straight into my linked Instapaper account - brilliant!).

If I do open a link in my browser (Chrome) - either from clicking on a link in a tweet, an email from a colleague, or a story on Hacker News - I use the Instapaper Read Later bookmarklet to add it to my account.

When the day ends, or I have a break and want to do some catching up on reading, I fire up the Instapaper app on my iPad. At $4.99, its worth every cent - it saves all articles for offline reading (eg for the plane), looks great and is easy to read, has a dark mode for nighttime reading, dictionary lookups, and sharing built right into it. This is where the majority of my reading takes place.

If there’s an article I really enjoy, I ‘like’ it from within Instapaper. This triggers two actions: 1) it shares it to Twitter for my followers to see and 2) it pushes it into my Evernote account (which you can link up within Instapaper). If I liked an article, i’m likely to want to reference it at some point in the future, and being able to search through that text in Evernote (either on my laptop, or my iPad in a meeting) is a godsend. If I don’t ‘like’ the article, I archive it to a Instapaper folder called ‘Read’, which helps keep my account uncluttered and means that whenever i open the app, I see only the articles that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. If I got absolutely nothing out of the article (or its a dead link etc), I simply delete it.

In conclusion…

The result of following this fairly structured process is not only an efficient way to deal with the information flow during the day, but an end-of-day/weekend reading experience that I thoroughly enjoy. I get so much out of the amount of reading I do, and this allows me to keep doing that.

I’d love to hear what works best for you.

(Outside of this workflow - which is specific to web articles - I subscribe to both Wired and FastCompany on my iPad, and buy far too many ebooks, which I read on my iPad in either iBooks or the Kindle app. And I still love an old-school book here and there.)

Quite possibly the most brilliant real-world marketing effort...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:01:00 +0300

Quite possibly the most brilliant real-world marketing effort I’ve ever seen.

Edit: It seems there are still people out there who don’t understand how the Internet works, and have blocked it from being viewed in some countries. If you fall into this unlucky bunch and are looking for a direct link, here’s one: http://f.cl.ly/items/1G3O053k2V2D0D0d3N00/drama_ad.mp4

This is not another post about Instagram

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:38:35 +0300

Well, not entirely, at least. Instead, it is a post about how an industry has lost it’s way.

I have a huge deal of respect for Kevin Systrom and the team of guys he has built up around him. And I love and use the product they have built, and appreciate the approach they took in building it in the first place. In short, I think they deserve every bit of success that comes their way. Including being snapped up by Facebook.

Does any of that equate to a valuation of $1bn? Not a chance. But it also doesn’t have to. The Instagram/Facebook deal has a lot more to do with Facebook than it does Instagram. Facebook has, deservedly, become the force to be reckoned with in the online space, and have the financial backing to support their position in the food chain. At the core of their success is their product, and the Facebook product, in turn, consists of a number of cores, including photos. It has been key to their success thus far. And yet, they aren’t dominating the highest-growing sector (mobile) of one of their product cores (photos) - Instagram is. With money to throw around, the acquisition of Instagram was a no-brainer. It’s one part product decision (it’ll improve Facebook’s competency in the photo and mobile spaces) and one part pure strategy decision (it prevents another company beating them at their own game).

So, is $1bn a completely irrational figure that has no relation to the actual value of the product? Yes. Does that matter? No. What does matter is the equally-irrational valuation of $550m that allowed them to raise $50m of funding just 2 weeks ago.

As an industry, tech and Internet-related startups have reached a point at which, in no world, do valuations match product. One can’t help escape the feeling that the investment community is nothing short of desperate to get their money behind the “next big thing”, and the size of the cheque is irrelevant in making that happen. Investment FOMO is destroying an industry. 42Floors founder Jason Freedman, in a fantastic post, outlined what it’s like being on the receiving end of this and it makes for a read that is nothing short of scary. None of the blame for this should sit with the founders and entrepreneurs, as so many seem to suggest. But it will be where the effect is most felt.

Bubbles burst and, when they do, industries collapse. And if you have any doubt that we’re in one, you haven’t been reading enough.

The (hypothetical) way to access Rdio from South Africa

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:51:00 +0200

Rdio is an awesome application. The UI is fantastic, the music experience is fantastic, and I think they could give Spotify a serious run for their money. There is only one problem. As with many other streaming applications, you cannot use it from South Africa. Unless you follow these instructions, which I have (of course) neither tried or attempted to.

Get yourself a cloud server, or borrow one from a very nice friend. I recommend Linode (they are awesome). Make sure that, whatever service you use, the datacenter is based in the US.
Set up a SSH tunnel to this on port 9999. On a Mac, it’s as easy as running “ssh [user]@]server IP] -D 9999” from Terminal. if you’re a Windows user, you can do it through Putty. Either way, you’ll then need to enter your username and password and log in to the server.
Open up your browser (or a different one to your primary browser), and go into your proxy settings. Make sure that there is only an entry for the Socks5 proxy, and set this to ‘127.0.0.1’ and the port to ‘9999’.
Save your changes and check that you can browse the web (albeit slowly).
Go to rdio.com and sign up for an account. It should see you as a US-based user and this should be a pretty easy process.
You’re now done with that whole tunneling business, so go ahead and close the connection, and put your proxy settings back to normal.
Head back to rdio.com and you should be prompted to sign up to be notified when it launches in your country. You can do this if you really like. Or you could click the “Sign in” link on the top right, and sign in with the details you’ve already created when you happened to visit the site on your brief trip to the United States.
When you browse the music, you should be told you can’t stream it thanks to regional restrictions. But the good news is that Rdio subscribers can stream music without restrictions while on indefinite holidays. So all you have to do is upgrade your account.
Go ahead and upgrade your account. Assuming you’re using a SA Mastercard, enter all those details, but enter your billing country as Denmark. You will be asked if you’re happy to be billed in a currency you’ve likely never seen before, and you can go ahead and accept that.
Find some great music and start streaming it!
Download the desktop apps, which make the experience even better.

Have fun, and let me know how it goes. Add me as a friend and the next time I’m visiting the US, I will be sure to (legally) log on and check out your taste in music.

I really like this concept from S7. Innovation at work.

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:48:24 +0200

I really like this concept from S7. Innovation at work.

The Mac apps I couldn't live without

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:48:45 +0200

While I’ve been using a Mac for the past 2 years, just a couple of weeks ago I changed over to using one as my primary machine. The experience of using one as my main machine - for work and personal use - has been a slightly different one. For anyone making the change-over, I thought i’d put a bit of a list together of the apps that run my life.

Dropbox.
Evernote.
Skype.
iTunes.
Twitter. I used to use the Tweetdeck Chrome app, but having a native app is just better. I generally leave Twitter running, along with my mail, on a 2nd screen.
Alfred. By far the most useful app I have installed. Spotlight is cool - Alfred is better.
Caffeine. It sounds silly, but being able to quickly press an icon and not have your Mac go to sleep is incredibly useful. Think Skype calls and presentations.
Wunderlist. I’ve bounced around a couple of to-do apps, but Wunderlist has stuck for me. It’s simple and yet does more than I usually need from it, syncs across devices, and pretty much runs my life.
CloudApp. Right click and share with a link - that’s all I need, and it’s become how share almost anything with people.
Bitcasa. This is the newcomer to my life, but essentially ‘cloudifies’ any folder on your Mac, allowing infinite storage in the cloud. I’m using it, at the moment, to cloudify by music and image collection, being the largest folders and the ones I most want backed up.
iTerm. If you spend any time in Terminal, this is an awesome replacement. If nothing else, just for having autocomplete.
TextMate. Absolutely perfect for doing the odd bit of coding or editing, and customizable enough to make it pretty powerful, too.
Cyberduck. My choice of FTP client. Works really nicely with Amazon S3, too.
Transmission. For the odd entirely-legal magnet or torrent link I receive.
Abobe CS. Illustrator and Photoshop form part of my daily life, no matter how bad I am with them.
MS Office. As much as I’d love to change over, in a corporate world dominated by Microsoft, there’s no other option. Despite my best efforts, Outlook just works better with Exchange mail. And I use Word and Excel an excessive amount.
iCal. I have a couple of calendars, but iCal is my go-to look at when I have time, as well as how I often go about scheduling things across the different calendars.

The Hacker Way - by Mark Zuckerberg

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:02:59 +0200

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

"Holy shit! [any fact from Facebook’s S1 filing]"

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:01:05 +0200

“Holy shit! [any fact from Facebook’s S1 filing]”

Picked up one of these bags for my new MacBook Pro today. If...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:28:54 +0200

Picked up one of these bags for my new MacBook Pro today. If you’re somebody like me, and just generally have way too much ‘stuff’ on you - laptops, iPads, cables, notebooks, etc - this is perfect. A separate and nicely lined compartment for a laptop, and then a big front storage area for throwing in whatever you like. So far I’m super impressed.

1 minute and 53 seconds on SOPA and PIPA

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:05:41 +0200

1 minute and 53 seconds on SOPA and PIPA

rel=nofollow and how 'experts' are getting it wrong

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:58:29 +0200

rel=nofollow and how 'experts' are getting it wrong:

I suppose this acts as a bit of a followup to my post on Search+ yesterday, in which I defended Google in their move to include social context in search. In it, I stated that the reason Google+ features so prominently is because its what they are able to index. And yet, endless tech experts have gone after Google for not including links shared on Twitter. Luigi Montanez, quite rightly, calls them out for this misinterpretation…

There is no great conspiracy against Twitter here. Google is simply following the rules of rel=nofollow.

In defense of Google. And, more importantly, the user.

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:00:13 +0200

MG is pretty angry. And I understand why. Google’s Search+ (or “Search plus Your World”, apparently) seems to be a blatant attempt to push a product that would otherwise have very little traction, by leveraging an industry in which they have almost a monopoly; web search. The truth is, though, that the functionality is awesome. We all know very well that social context is the next revolution in web search, and for Google to ignore that would be their downfall. It’s the reason I’m calling out Facebook and Microsoft for being stupid and not doing the same thing, within Bing, a long time ago. No; the issue isn’t the functionality - it’s the fact that it’s Google’s own product that is being pushed. And the reason that is the case is equally simple - Google are building this functionality with what they have access to. Matt Cutts just took the time to explain what it is that Google is exposing through the new feature, which includes public content outside of Google+. Is this is a bit of a “fuck you” to Twitter, who decided to end their agreement with Google last year? Of course. They’ve essentially just strong-armed Twitter and Facebook into exposing their services to be fully crawlable by Google. And that is going to make for a fantastic search experience for all of us.

Microsoft may not be very cool. But their products are.

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:29:03 +0200

Microsoft just made a point of telling everyone at CES that they are still very much cool. In fact, you know you might be trying a bit too hard when you pay Ryan Seacrest to walk out onto the stage with your CEO. And they’ve already lost that battle. Microsoft will never be a “cool” company in the same way that Apple or Google is; a consequence of corporate culture and branding that, despite dwarfed market caps, places them firmly as the ‘corporate giant’, rather than the cool and rebellious underdog. Bleached-teethed TV personalities and tweet-singing choirs won’t change that any time soon. The only thing that will is cool products.

The good news is that Microsoft has more than one of those.

The new Metro UI is truly brilliant. Bright colours and icons and intuitive interactions make it a joy to use, and is innovative in a way that will see it move away from being a mere clone of Apple and Google OSes. The updated Microsoft experience will see a unification between desktop, mobile and gaming products. Its hard to not love it.

The second bit of true innovation is XBox and Kinect. With 66m XBoxes already sold, it isn’t struggling for popularity and the Kinect-enabled gaming innovations and Metro UI have positioned Microsoft firmly in competition for the centre of home entertainment. And, at the end of the month, Kinect will come to PC, bringing a new interface potential to the world of mice and keyboards.

Will Microsoft have people camping overnight outside of flagship stores in a hope of being the first to get their hands on their products? Probably not. Will people travel from the world over to hear them announced in a spectacular stage show? Probably not. But will customers love using their products? Very possibly. Leave the awe-inspiring keynotes to Apple and focus on making more of those awe-inspiring products, Mr Balmer.

"Since rejoining the Company in 1997, Mr. Jobs had not sold any of his shares of the Company’s stock...."

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:16:57 +0200

“Since rejoining the Company in 1997, Mr. Jobs had not sold any of his shares of the Company’s stock. Mr. Jobs held no unvested equity awards. The Company recognized that Mr. Jobs’s level of stock ownership significantly aligned his interests with shareholders’ interests.”

- Apple’s 2012 Proxy Statement

In a world where the likes of Steve Ballmer and many others routinely sell huge portions of their shares, Jobs kept all of his. $2,319,515,000 worth, as Dustin Curtis points out.

That’s dedication and loyalty. That’s putting your money where your mouth is.

(via parislemon)

The state of online video

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:58:59 +0200

The state of online video:

the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population.

The online video industry is at a strange crossroads right now. While penetration is at an all-time high, the time spent watching video is still at just 1.4% of that of traditional television. But the lines between the two are increasingly blurring. With television and cable internet access bundled in their delivery to consumers, and devices like Xboxes (with their Metro update) and smart televisions becoming increasingly prevalent, it is easier for traditional television viewers to access ‘online’ video content within the same environment that they would ordinarily watch television. Whether it be an on-demand episode delivered over IP, or a PVR-ed cable episode, their is a decreasing concious decision and action required to differentiate the two. As the barrier-to-access to online services such as Netflix and Hulu continues to decrease, time spent watching will climb at an incremental rate, and an online video offering will be a more and more attractive to advertisers, being substantially more targeted and measurable than the traditional counterpart. The ball is your court, television networks…

15 minutes with the iPhone 4S

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:23:00 +0200

So I’ve just got my iPhone 4S up-and-running, and I thought I’d put together some initial thoughts, having spent 15 minutes with Apple’s latest flagship phone.

The phone is as beautiful as ever. There’s no better than Apple when it comes to unboxing a product and being struck with quite how well-designed it is. I honestly think that the iPhone 4(S), despite lacking the screen size of the Samsungs, is the best-looking phone on the market. And I’m intrigued to see how they’re going to beat it with the 5.
The camera is fantastic. It’s definitely sharper, and images seem to have a deeper range of colours. I’m looking forward to trying it in a low-light setting, though.
Siri is great. I was surprised with quite how accurate it was, and with the range of commands/requests it supports. That said, I can’t see myself using it any more than occasionally, and when I’m at home, or exercising and using a handsfree.
A lot of location-related Siri features don’t work in South Africa yet. Which sucks.
It feels snappier. Not enough to blow you away, but comparable to after you’ve done a format of your PC. Definitely faster.

Would I recommend you upgrading if you already have the iPhone 4? No. Unless you are due for an upgrade on your contract anyway (like me). But if you have an older iPhone, or haven’t yet made the move over, there is no doubt that it is an incredible phone. 15 minutes with it will be enough to convince you of that…

Facebook Actions about to be launched

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:40:23 +0200

Facebook Actions about to be launched:

This really is the next big move from Facebook, allowing for what is best described as ‘frictionless sharing’. Essentially, it will see actions taken all over the web being pushed back into Facebook (assuming you give Facebook permission, of course) for all your friends to see. The ‘shares’ appear in the Ticker, and summaries of actions taken by a user appear in their Timeline. This is only half the story, though.

What is truly innovative about what Facebook is doing is that the are building a new data model around real-world objects and interactions in the same way as what the Social Graph is to social interactions and data. This VentureBeat article, for example, suddenly becomes more than just a web page - it is now defined as an ‘article’ with users able to make actions against it, for example ‘reading’ and ‘commenting on’. This approach to defining virtual objects as real-world objects is a game-changer.

It has already proven very successful for the partners that Facebook launched with, including Netflix, Spotify and WSJ.

Sticking the Web Together

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:27:45 +0200

Sticking the Web Together:

So chuffed to see the news that IFTTT has raised a seed round of $1.5M from some top-notch investors, including Betaworks, SV Angel, Founder Collective, CrunchFund and David Tisch.

I was lucky enough to be pointed to the service by Womers some months ago, and have since been using it to automate a load of useful tasks, including archiving photos to Dropbox and sending liked articles on Instapaper to Evernote.

TechCrunch’s description of IFTTT as “a glue gun for sticking the web together” does it justice. It allows you to create tasks from existing ‘recipes’ - which perform actions between two web services including RSS, Dropbox, Evernote, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook (you get the idea..) - or to create your own ‘recipes’ which are then available for others to use. Designed with large (very large) fonts and simple graphics, it is incredibly simple to find your way around and to accomplish otherwise-complicated and time-consuming tasks.

All the best to Linden Tibbets and the growing team as they put the new-found cash to good use in the coming months. I’m incredibly excited to see what happens.

Clay Shirky: Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:08:00 +0200

Clay Shirky: Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users:

Clay Shirky has, once again, tackled the issues around the commercialization of the print media industry online; an industry that has been continuously erroded financially since the precedent for free online news was set in the early days of the Internet.

He points to a principle problem - that there is, as yet, no tried and tested revenue model. The traditional print business model allows revenue to be realized through 2 streams - readers and advertisers. The problem in an online context is that the readers won’t pay, and that advertisers won’t pay as much for the audience as they would in a print context. And yet, the costs of the production of the same content remains exactly the same.

“The easy part of treating digital news as a product is getting money from 2% of your audience. The hard part is losing 98% of your advertising base.”

The tradeoff between advertiser and reader income continues, so when newspapers such as The Sunday Times introduced a paywall, 98% of readers disappeared and the advertising revenue decreased dramatically. While threshold paywalls (in that you pay for reaching more than x articles a month) seems to address this, the reality is that 80% of the readership will never reach that threshold.

Shirky argues that commercializing the core audience is the answer, who are more active, in exchange for being more demanding about the content. What that means for advertising revenue is still uncertain, but the idea of a niche and focused audience is certainly an attractive one from a commercial standpoint.

In ‘traditional’ media, revenue comes from controlling the media itself, rather than the content. Newspapers bundle content and sell the paper, and satellite and cable TV providers bundle channels and sell access to them. That model has failed to work in an online context. Instead, users pay for individual pieces of content. Even CDs have been unbundled into individual songs.

The problem is more cultural than it is economic. It requires that publishers shift their thinking from product to content.

A brilliant quote from Steve Jobs and some even better...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:29:00 +0200

A brilliant quote from Steve Jobs and some even better typography.