Rick Webb dot net

ashleylovespizza:

rickwebb:

(via Doodle.ly for iPad on the iTunes App Store)

Doodle.ly is a company I’ve been advising. It’s a drawing community - a community where you can draw, share your drawings, view and rate other people’s drawings. It’s a good time. The new iPad app is awesome and they have a lot of awesome additional features planned. 

I really like the idea of a drawing based community. It’s like a sort of inner-world alternative to Instagram. And a great creation tool on the iPad. 

You can download it here. 

oh huh. maybe i’ll stop lamenting my terrible fate of needing to purchase an iPad in the near future…

Stall long enough and there might just be one sitting around the house for use by your part time roommates…

(via Doodle.ly for iPad on the iTunes App Store)

Doodle.ly is a company I’ve been advising. It’s a drawing community - a community where you can draw, share your drawings, view and rate other people’s drawings. It’s a good time. The new iPad app is awesome and they have a lot of awesome additional features planned. 

I really like the idea of a drawing based community. It’s like a sort of inner-world alternative to Instagram. And a great creation tool on the iPad. 

You can download it here. 

interweber replied to your quote: “What happens when you click on a weblink? Here’s…

how do you get such fast Internet help

FIOS. God, it’s insane. It is 50mbps down and 20mbps up. My new apt has ethernet all through it, so it’s super fast. I did some tweaking to my WiFi and switched to 802.11n ONLY, and now it’s 48mbps down and 18 mbps down over WiFi. 

“

What happens when you click on a weblink? Here’s one answer: a request goes from your computer to a server identified by the URL of the desired link. The server then locates the webpage in its files and sends it back to your browser, which then displays it on your screen. Simple.

Well, the process was indeed like that once – a very long time ago. In the beginning, webpages were simple pages of text marked up with some tags that would enable a browser to display them correctly. But that meant that the browser, not the designer, controlled how a page would look to the user, and there’s nothing that infuriates designers more than having someone (or something) determine the appearance of their work. So they embarked on a long, vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to exert the same kind of detailed control over the appearance of webpages as they did on their print counterparts – right down to the last pixel.

”

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Graphic designers are ruining the web | Technology | The Observer

Actually, what happened in between those two events was the appending of variables to the URL string to pass data back and forth, via CGI-bin, REST, etc.  It’s been a good, long time since URLs were just links to pages and servers sending specific pages back. That slowed things down right and proper, both because of the added code needed to make pages functional, and because of server latency as actual database calls and calculations were made instead of just spitting back some text. But boy did it sure make pages more useful. 

Seems illustrative: extra usability comes with a file size cost - both for code and for design. A worthy reminder, but hardly evidence that design is killing the web. 

But, then, I just did a speed test on my new internet today and it was 50mbps down, so BRING IT. 

Kent Ave on Flickr.

I am really enjoying our new view.

““They are as good an example as exists of a brand pulling off being a media creator,” says Noah Brier, cofounder of Percolate, which helps brands create content for their social followers. While serving as head of strategy at digital agency the Barbarian Group, Brier worked on the redesign of Red Bull’s brand site. “Actually, they’re getting to the point where it’s not useful to use them as an example since they’re such an exception to the rule,” he adds. “Red Bull is a media company that sells drinks instead of ads, and I get the impression they think of themselves that way.””

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Red Bull Media House: The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2012 | Fast Company

This is a great quote from Noah. When he and I were at TBG, TBG spent about a year working on reorganizing all of Red Bull’s innumerable online properties into a single, integrated platform that was highly media-centric to help in Red Bull’s vision of being a heavy media player. 

At the time, it was hard to get reporters to understand what was going on with the site - it seemed almost boring to them. But here it is, three years later and it’s still killing it, growing and supporting the brand. 

They really are one of the most interesting companies in the world. 

boltron:

Garbage truck + fire hydrant = this. (photo by my 70yr old neighbor) (Taken with Instagram at Bolt | Peters User Experience)

I don’t even know what is going on here. This is craziness. 

nickdouglas:

RVIP Karaoke: The Most Amazing RV On Earth Is Now Much More Than A Hobby | TechCrunch

Congratulations, Jon and Kestrin!

SO AWESOME. Can’t wait to see you again in March. 

“To even have that opinion, Santorum has to have given thought to which sex acts are outside “how things are supposed to be”. I dare say Rick Santorum has a richer fantasy life than most.”

- Ana Marie Cox, taking a creative view of today’s proceedings and the current republican madness. [Sex, Rick Santorum and the conservative imagination | guardian.co.uk (via sciencevsromance)

8:36PM: Emma’s stuff his here and her downstairs home office is taking shape. (Taken with Instagram at The Webbles)

Over eight consecutive nights, MoMA presents a chronological exploration of the sonic and visual experiments of Kraftwerk with a live presentation of their complete repertoire in the Museum’s Marron Atrium. Each evening consists of a live performance and 3-D visualization of one of Kraftwerk’s studio albums—Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), Computer World (1981), Techno Pop (1986), The Mix (1991), and Tour de France (2003)—in the order of their release. Kraftwerk will follow each evening’s album performance with additional compositions from their catalog, all adapted specifically for this exhibition. This reinterpretation showcases Kraftwerk’s historical contributions to and contemporary influence on global sound and image culture. Read more (via MoMA | Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8)

OMG OMG OMG THIS IS SO UNFAIR I WILL BE GONE THE WHOLE TIME. 

fannybottoms:

Hey. Just chillin in my new home. 

Yes. Fannybotoms has joined Tumblr. LOOK OUT. 

““There are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them…””

- Ben Franklin

bijan:

Wow! @fredwilson and I get a shout out on the new @benkweller record. Absolutely stunned. Thanks Ben!

Oh man, you guys are encroaching on my turf of “tech investor also thanked in rock albums.” I am going to have scan the H*** out of all those albums now. IT IS ON. 

rachelmercer:

emmawelles:

XOXO!

Why I love Emma Welles.

That makes two of us!

“Despite efforts from the Bank of England, the owners of the boxes could not be traced and so bank bosses used drills to bust them open - and uncovered gold, sparkling jewellery and valuable master tapes of Salford bands New Order and Joy Division.”

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Jamie Oliver Uncovers Treasures Worth £1.1M In Basement Of New Restaurant

WHAT. (via Cassel)

“There’s this age-old debate in startupland: whether it’s an insider’s game or not. This debate probably rages most in the comments of sites like TechCrunch, Business Insider and here at Betabeat. There are tons of people who are interested in tech, and aspire to have a startup, and read these sites, like any proper student of an industry should. And they see the same names, over and over. They see the same companies funded over and over. It’s not hard to read the headlines of tech blogs for a year and think to yourself that it’s a bunch of friends funding each other, pimping each other, and scratching each other’s backs.”

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Friends Investing in Friends: When It Comes to Startups, Is the Fix Already In? | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.

My latest column. This was a bit of a rant I’d written a few weeks ago - I’ve cooled off a bit, but still, I think there’s a bit of a somethin’ somethin’ there.

Boy Google sure did disrupt advertising. Weren’t we only supposed to need Keywords by this point? 

augstone:

Saint Etienne - Departure Lounge. 

Enters into my head immediately, every time I arrive at Heathrow and see those “Departure Lounge” signs. 

“Essentially, Matchbook is like Foursquare or Yelp, minus the check-ins, reviews, and social networking — just a simple bookmarking feature for favorite places. While this may sound a bit too pared-down for the taste of tech enthusiasts, you have to remember that there are a lot of people out there who don’t use Foursquare, who aren’t comfortable or used to checking-in at every place they visit, or voraciously social networking while on the go. So Matchbook offers users the ability to organize all of their to-dos by neighborhood on a map layout, search bookmarks for date spots, find the best of those bookmarks, along with top places flagged by other users — to name a few.”

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Behind New Funding, Matchbook Wants To Turn Bookmarking Into Action With Intent-Based Deals | TechCrunch

Happy to take part in Matchbook and investing in it. This paragraph pretty much nails why I’m interested. 

I am obsessed with Foursquare, that’s why I invested in it when Dennis invited me. I love it to death. I think that it’s basically becoming a better Mobile OS. But part of what is frustrating for me is how good some of the features are of it, and how people don’t necessarily realize. For example, at this point, for me, Foursquare’s location database and mapping is hands-down better than Google Maps. I use mapping almost exclusively to find businesses, and Google Maps is becoming almost useless for it. An obvious example here in New York is General Assembly which, after a year of being in existence, is still hard to find in Google Maps. I was in Atlanta last year looking for a particular burrito establishment. I checked Google Maps, and started driving towards the closest location. Less than halfway there, I passed another location that wasn’t even IN Google Maps! But of course it was in Foursquare.

Sometimes, though, it’s just too much work to go into Foursquare and use some of the utilities in non-traditional ways. It’s a bit of a pain to use the mapping feature - you have to pretend to be checking in.

And ditto for the lists. Matchbook, which runs on the Foursquare API, is a drop-dead simple list management tool for people who just want to use one feature. For those people who aren’t techies. For people who still like drop dead simple interfaces and single features. And believe me, they’re out there.

I also think companies like Matchbook reinforce Foursquare’s new trajectory of providing utility beyond gaming and socializing. Matchbook is an extension of that, to me: location software for those who are less enamored with gamification and talking about where they are. It’s pure exploration.