Friday Five – May 6, 2011

Apologize for the hiatus for the last few weeks, but we had a big project go live at work, and with the Easter holiday and Dyngus Day, things were a bit busy. I actually started this for last Friday and never got a chance to finish it. So let’s get back on track…

 

#1 – Why Photoshop for iPad Marks the End of the Desktop Computing Era [Gizmodo]

When it came out, many said that the “Oversized iPhone” was doomed from the start. Others shrugged at its potential, dismissing it as “just a good way to consume” content, like web pages, books and Netflix movies. Many of those even said it wouldn’t be good to play games. And almost everyone declared that it would never ever be a good content creation device: “There will never be Photoshop for iPad!”

It seems all of those people were wrong.

The article is quite interesting in its viewpoint which pits touch tablets vs. traditional PCs. I don’t necessarily share that they’re two different things. A tablet, to me, is just a more direct, intuitive input device to a computer. A mouse or a touchpad is an abstraction from interfacing with the application running on the device. So I’m not really sure that this is the end of desktop computing as much as it is an end to the mouse, touchpad, and trackball. What you’ll see more of are large format touchscreen monitors attached to traditional PCs with heavy duty computing power, and more, larger, and increasingly powerful tablets.

 

#2 – This History of Web Browsers [TestKing]

Click on the link to view an interesting infographic of the history, functionality, and popularity of the main web browsers since the inception of Netscape launched in 1994.

 

#3 – How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line [KISSmetrics]

Another interesting visual view of a survey on user perception of web page load time. I’m not embedding these due to the large size.

 

#4 – Clive Thompson on How Information Can Fuel Jobs [Wired]

For the past few years, proponents of “government 2.0? have been trying to liberate public data. Their argument goes like this: Our governments collect tons of information about everyday life—crime, health, economics, weather. That data is paid for with taxes and belongs to the public, so release it openly and altruistic geeks can build apps that improve civic life.

But it’s slow going. Bureaucrats still snooze atop mountains of public data, with no political imperative to release it. It’s not something senators and congresspeople fret about while nursing martinis with lobbyists. “It’s not the primary mission of any agency,” notes Tom Lee, a director at the Sunlight Foundation, one of the foremost open-government groups.

So how do we get the attention of the political class? With one word: jobs. Shoving more public data into the commons could kick-start billions in economic activity. That’s because all that information becomes incredibly valuable in the hands of clever entrepreneurs.

The article goes on to illustrate a couple examples of how people formed companies around analyzing and repackaging slivers of the mass amount of public data that exists, but isn’t always in a friendly format. It’s fascinating in its potential not only in the ability to create jobs, but also in how the public sector could in turn improve government faster in many cases than government can reform itself.

 

#5 – YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious [delicious blog]

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.

Providing a seamless transition for users is incredibly important for both companies. Yahoo! will continue to operate Delicious until approximately July 2011. When the transition period is complete, your information will be moved over to Delicious’ new owner.

This is great news for long time delicious users (or del.icio.us for you old-timers) like myself. Yahoo had identified delicious as one of the things they weren’t really going to be supporting anymore, so it’s great that someone else was able to snatch it up and has plans to keep it alive and hopefully continue to improve it. My Firefox 4 is very sadly lacking a compatible version of the the delicious extension, and the new owners have already said that’s on the top of their priority list. Social bookmarking lives on!