The NYT's Bits section, which up until now I thought was doing a wonderful job of evolving technology reporting to a higher, "post-blog" level, has left me stunned with a bizarre editorial in which the author requests compensation for his contribution to Facebook's success.

Is it just a tongue-in-cheek opinion designed to attract eyeballs and -- yes -- goad bloggers into responding? Probably. But it inadvertently highlights how seriously people are taking the alien business of social networking -- so seriously, in fact, that as usual they appear unable to understand it at all.

Take, for example, this opinion:

“The idea that a business benefits from social interaction is not so strange or new. A lot of cafes and small restaurants will let people hang out because they attract other people,” said Yannis M. Ioannides, a professor of economics at Tufts University. “What is unusual and new is that Facebook takes access to information about these people to make its business more powerful.” He added: “The proprietor of a cafe doesn’t use personal information about me and my friends to make money.”

Really? Cafes don't use your personal information to make money? Find me a cafe that doesn't tailor its menu, prices, inventory, background music, specials, wifi, tables arrangement, etc. etc. based on the interests of its customers. Tell me that Starbucks has never once run a focus group (yes, Internet, there actually was A/B testing before there were computers). My preferred cafes in New York are those where the people behind the counter greet me by name and have my order ready before I have a chance to ask for it.

The difference between Facebook and your average cafe isn't that the experience (and more importantly, the key inventory) is tailored to the customer; it's that Facebook's inventory is virtual (unlimited) and their profit margins are insane. The fact that user-created content draws people in is no different than a cafe hanging paintings by local artists, or people being attracted to busy establishments. The social aspect, as the professor does point out, is not new. And therefore (among other reasons), the op-ed's entire point -- that because the author contributed to the social aspect, he deserves compensation -- is absolutely ridiculous.

Mashable has a new standard for fact-checking rumors:

...While you should look at all of this information with a skeptical eye, a raised eyebrow and folded arms, the rumor sounds slightly more credible than the junk typically spewed out from Taiwan industry pub DigiTimes. For starters, reviewing various prototypes before deciding on the final production model is a standard practice in manufacturing, unlike many rumors that imply certainty about what something will look like.

Also, the overall vagueness of the rumor (no precise screen measurement, no photos, nothing about the insides) at least gives an appearance of authenticity. After all, if you were just going to make something up, why not be more detailed? There’s certainly no shortage of potential features to choose from.

To answer that last question: it's because desperate sites will apparently publish it anyway.

(via L)

I'm very impressed by the broad reach of today's internet blackout. For those living under a rock, the logo above belongs to Google; the search giant probably reasoned that a full-scale shut down a la Wikipedia or Reddit (which got the blackout ball rolling in the first place) would be too disruptive. Just think how all the kids with research papers due tomorrow must feel!

(For future visitors: read about the SOPA/PIPA strike here.)

A few weeks ago, I complained that Google Maps' new WebGL version was being artificially -- and unnecessarily -- restricted to high-end machines, creating a sort of "minimum system requirements" for the web. Therefore, I was very interested to see that Nokia's competing maps product, Maps 3D, has just released its own WebGL product.

Unlike Google Maps, it doesn't have a hardware lockout (that I'm aware of). It does have a software requirement, however. Currently, and somewhat ironically, it only runs in Google's Chrome browser.

Nokia's product provides a full 3D map, not unlike Google's Earth plugin. I can rapidly call up a full reconstruction of Manhattan in which even the individual trees in Central Park have been modeled with some fidelity. By contrast, Google's current WebGL product only provides vectorized (non-3D) maps, with realtime vector shadows as the "crown jewel." I stand firmly by my claim that Google's hardware throttling is completely arbitrary.

Nokia could use a win -- maybe this will help. Try it out here (and let me know if you see any hardware restrictions).

I remember when the concept of "minimum system requirements" became important. It was during the late 90's, as 3dfx and Nvidia battled to own the nascent market for hardware-accelerated graphics. For the first time, you had software which simply wouldn't run on a computer unless it met certain criteria, namely the ability to perform certain types of linear algebra (though that wasn't part of the marketing, for some reason).

Over the next near-decade, the GPU would become a near-standard piece of equipment, 3dfx would disappear (bought, in fact, by Nvidia), and ATI (now AMD) and later Intel would arrive as new competitors. But the concept of "minimum system requirements" quietly disappeared. The binary outcome (will or won't your system run this software?) was replaced with a spectrum (how well will your system run this software?) as manufacturers found ways to gracefully degrade their products. It's been a while since I came across a product that simply wouldn't run, in one form or another, on a modern computer.

And that's why I was so surprised to discover this evening that "minimum system requirements" are not only back, but they're on the web! I'm not talking about some shadowy site that only a handful of people will stumble upon. I'm talking about one of the most widely-visited properties in the world: Google Maps.

Google announced that its more daring customers may enable an experimental WebGL mode in Google Maps, which allows smooth vector rendering and other visual niceties like 3D buildings with shadows that actually track the local sun. It also appears that Street View fully integrates the 3D data collected along with the imagery, to enhance the illusion of motion.

But this all comes with a catch -- unless your system is packing a modern browser AND a recent GPU, the experimental renderer will refuse to load. I have no problem with the browser requirement. Browsers are free; it astounds me that someone wouldn't run the latest available version of their preferred browser. But the GPU requirement bugs me. First of all, this technology is currently available on mobile phones; let's not pretend it requires significant hardware capabilities. Secondly... it runs on mobile phones. I constantly wonder at the fact that my iPhone is orders of magnitude more powerful than my first computer, but I've never considered for one second that it was more capable than my current machine.

I'm going to choose to believe that the "minimum system requirements" is an artificial gate akin to Google's infamous "beta" tags: a simple way to disclaim any bugs or errors without having to provide full support. What better way to test an experimental rendering engine than having your testers self-select based on a preference for high-end graphics work? I really can't argue with the logic.

In the meantime, I'll sit here and dream about exploring WebGL maps on my MBA. While I wait, maybe I'll play around with the Google Earth browser plugin. It's really kind of incredible: I can fly over a faithfully rendered 3D globe, filled with textured buildings and trees, without ever leaving my browser*, but if I want to see building shadows that update in realtime, I need to buy a new GPU. Something doesn't add up.

*I know, I know, it's a plugin. It doesn't count.

The other day, I was unexpectedly asked, "What's the easiest way to make a sepia-toned image in WordPress?"

The questioner has a blog with an "antique" theme, and wanted to use the sepia images inline. However, the blog is quite image-heavy and she (understandably) didn't want to dive into Photoshop for every single post. She wanted a "plugin" approach: just tell WordPress to make the image sepia-toned, and let the software work its magic.

Unfortunately, that plugin doesn't exist... so I hacked one up. I'm posting the code here for future reference and in case anyone finds this useful.

Objective:

A drop-dead simple way to create sepia-toned images for a WordPress blog, performing three actions:

1. Resize the source image to a standard size
2. Apply the sepia tone
3. Add a CSS class
4. Remove any "width" and "height" settings from the original HTML

Solution:

I started with the TimThumb PHP script. TimThumb was originally conceived as an idiot-proof image resizer for WordPress (to automatically generate post thumbnails). It does so by dynamically generating a new image from a source image based on provided dimensions. More recently -- and more interestingly, for my purposes -- a hook was added for PHP's imagefilter function. Imagefilter can apply a variety of simple effects to an image, including grayscale, colorize, blur, etc.

With TimThumb in hand, I needed an easy way to apply it. For this, I created a WordPress shortcode. Shortcodes allow bloggers to execute PHP functions (with arguments!) without ever leaving the text editor or seeing a word of code. To make the execution as smooth as possible, I wanted to pass a standard WordPress-inserted image to TimThumb, but this meant I would have to do some parsing, because WordPress wraps the image with all the required HTML and TimThumb accepts just the source URL.

The following function takes in the HTML code that WordPress automatically generates for an image, replaces the source image with one dynamically-generated by TimThumb, and parses the HTML to add a new class (sepia) and remove width and height parameters. The sepia-toning is accomplished by combining imagefilter's contrast, grayscale, and colorize functions.

function sepia($attr, $content = null) {
    preg_match('/< *img[^>]*src *= *["\']?([^"\']*)/i', $content, $matches);
    $old_src = $matches[1];
    $new_src =  home_url("/wp-content/timthumb/timthumb.php?src=").$old_src."&w=375&h=275&q=100&f=2|4,-10|5,50,20,0";
    $content = str_replace($old_src, $new_src, $content);

    preg_match('/class[ \t]*=[ \t]*"[^"]+"/', $content, $matches);
    $old_class = substr($matches[0], 0, -1);
    $new_class = $old_class . " sepia\"";
    $content = str_replace($old_class, $new_class, $content);

    preg_match('/width[ \t]*=[ \t]*"[^"]+"/', $content, $matches);
    $old_width = $matches[0];
    $new_width = "";
    $content = str_replace($old_width, $new_width, $content);

    preg_match('/height[ \t]*=[ \t]*"[^"]+"/', $content, $matches);
    $old_height = $matches[0];
    $new_height = "";
    $content = str_replace($old_height, $new_height, $content);

    return $content;
}
add_shortcode('sepia', 'sepia');

And the following line creates the WordPress shortcode:

add_shortcode('sepia', 'sepia');


By adding these two bits of code to the blog's functions.php file, a blogger can create a perfect sepia-toned image simply by placing a normal WordPress image in between two tags, like this:

[sepia] (the image goes here) [/sepia].

And voila: a foolproof way to create sepia-toned images without ever leaving the post editor! Moreover, the applied "sepia" class allows these images to be easily styled with CSS.

Here's an example, from the beach in Tel Aviv. Original:

And with the sepia shortcode (note that I'm not running the code on TGR, so this is just a screenshot!):

Via my friend Will Gaybrick (@gaybrick), I discovered an excellent programming tutorial called Eloquent JavaScript. Not only is it extremely well-written, clear and friendly, but it features a completely interactive console allowing readers to run and experiment with every single example. You'll never have to struggle to decipher what a piece of code is doing -- just hit the arrow next to the code block, and it jumps into the console and prints its output.

Obviously, the guide is about JavaScript but the concepts apply almost universally to any language, making this by far the best interactive tutorial I've seen. (That's from a completeness standpoint -- for user-friendliness the hands-down winner is tryruby.org!)

I actually found myself enjoying reading the text despite covering topics I was intimately familiar with, and certainly learned a thing or two in some of the more advanced chapters. I can't recommend this enough for anyone looking for a gentle introduction to programming.

Also, I want to mention that Will will be teaching HackYale, a semester-long course at Yale focused on new web technologies like HTML5, JavaScript and Ruby. Unfortunately, it isn't an open enrollment like Stanford's new AI class, so the rest of us will have to watch enviously from afar.

I just unsubscribed from a Travelocity flier for the third time in as many days. Each time, I've noticed the following disclaimer:

Your request to unsubscribe from all Travelocity promotional emails has been submitted.... Please allow 5-10 business days for your request to be processed.

Let me get this straight: I can search millions of hotels and flights in less than a second, but deleting my name from a list takes two weeks!?

This is either the worst marketing idea in history ("If we keep emailing him, he might change his mind!") or I've discovered the poster child for humans with jobs that should be done by machines.

It's amazing what you can see when you refuse to open your eyes -- or need to talk your book. Take, for example, Marc Andreessen's article in the WSJ titled "Why Software is Eating the World." I became skeptical when this line appeared in the introduction:

And, perhaps most telling, you can't have a bubble when people are constantly screaming "Bubble!"

It would seem this is what passes for conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley: utter denial of facts on that grounds that if people recognize them, they can't be true. It's cute, like they're really trying to understand finance but haven't quite got it right. Maybe someone told them that due to efficient markets, if everyone knows something it will be completely priced in. Like anyone with a vested interest, these people have decided that their markets qualify as efficient and so the axiom must hold (or, to the extent that markets are inefficient, it's in such a way that they will profit enormously). Unfortunately, the entire statement represents terrible investment logic, a perversion of the fact that we can not know the magnitude of a bubble except in retrospect. That says nothing about the existance of a bubble. It's critical to remember that we can -- and good investors, by definition, do -- know if there's a bubble before it bursts.

But Marc's statement itself isn't even true. Hardly anyone is screaming "Bubble!" In fact, methinks the technology investors doth protest too much. The most telling sign of all is that the bubble-apologists cry much louder than their accusers! For every journalist who dares write that there is a bubble, two write articles saying that the low current prices of 2011 IPO's prove the opposite.

But onto the real absurdity of the article. Specifically, the very next sentence:

But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies.

I choked when I read that, having written a post a few weeks ago arguing exactly the opposite. There is no debate about financial valuation of software companies -- they have it. They have way too much of it. On the other hand, what justifies it? Most value investors -- who define holding periods in years, rather than seconds -- regard this industry with skepticism.

Don't worry, though, because Marc provides examples to support his idea.

The first "software company" he mentions is Amazon. This is a confusing choice because it has a P/E of close to 80, and would seem to run counter to his argument that there are "all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies." Also, it's not a software company. Software services are a growing fraction of their revenue, but Amazon ships physical products to physical people. They have a massive software architecture to support that, and major software projects like the Kindle, but this is not a software company. The recent news that ebook sales are surpassing those of physical books means they are closer to this definition, but still far from it. Not a software company.

Next up: Netflix. Another "software company" that ships physical products to physical people. Yes, they recently rolled out an on-demand service, but its selection remains limited when compared to the physical catalogue. Not a software company.

Next up: music companies. First, Apple's iTunes -- a software product completely devoid of value when not linked to the (only) mobile devices it supports. For all Marc's talk about how Apple is the most valuable company in the world, I wonder if he's thought about how much of that value comes from software. The answer is: very little. His other two examples, Spotify and Pandora, have both failed thus far to show a profit. That hasn't stopped the latter from IPO'ing, however.

Next up: video game companies Rovio and Zynga. No arguments here -- these companies successfully use software platforms to deliver content that people want. Neither of them pushes the state of the art or has any remotely defensible position because their products are commoditzed, but software companies they are.

Next up: Pixar. Pixar makes software, sure, but how can they be a "software company"? Their revenue is solely derived from me getting in my car and walking into a movie theatre. Is Toy Story a software product (not a product of software)? If it is, I have to take back what I said about video game companies, because Marc says that "traditional" game companies like EA are failing -- but their products are as much software as Pixar's if not more, since you don't have to leave home to use them!

Next up: Photography. Marc is really starting to reach here -- he's comparing revenue-lacking software sharing companies to a hundred year old photographic film and paper company (Kodak).

Next up: Local companies. Sorry, now he's stretching. Comparing Google to companies like Groupon and Foursquare, whose accounting practices of "earnings before costs" make them the laughingstock of the investment industry.

We're not done: Skype is next, and Marc uses the $8.5 billion price tag to justify his choice (despite earlier claiming that valuations are at an all time low). No mention that the next best bid was half that. Skype is followed by LinkedIn, another 2011 IPO that has a long way to go before demonstrating real success.

You get the idea. The balance of the article argues that because other physical industries like Wal-Mart and oil/gas use software, they represent the triumph of software over more traditional methods.

No one is arguing that software doesn't make things better, more efficient, cheaper. No one is arguing that software isn't growing tremendously as an integral part of modern corporations. But the bubble apologists continue to ignore the actual state of software. Merely mentioning Groupon, LinkedIn, Pandora, etc. doesn't make them successful -- and yet article after article continues to be written about them completely devoid of justifying arguments. Cloud companies like Salesforce trade at ratios of over five hundred times earnings! 

The companies Marc describes -- at least, the successful ones -- could be best described as software-aided companies, or software-centric companies. Most of his choices exhibit strong selection bias, or rose to prominence in hardware before moving to software. Google -- which he mentions as a competitor of the software companies! -- is one of the only good counterexamples.

So here's  my question: where does the hardware to support all this software come from? I'd like to see that company, because they must be doing unbelievably well. Who knows, maybe the next great "software company" will be an infrastructure firm in disguise. After all, if they have a website, they must be in software!

Jason Calacanis writes:

Sad to see Demand Media getting crushed in the market.

Demand Media is a content farm (in every negative sense of the word) which (by some accounts) was crushed by Google's most recent "Panda" update that was aimed at removing junk spam Demand Media from search results.

So to put this tragedy in perspective, have a look at DMD since IPO:

Do you see that dip at the far right? The tiny little negatively sloped segment? Yeah, that's what Jason is so upset about. Forget that these investors have lost 53% in six months (or only 37% off the IPO price of $17), that's irrelevant. Talk about missing the forest for the trees!

But Jason inadvertently brings up an interesting point -- yesterday was the first day that company insiders were allowed to sell shares since the IPO. So at first glance, today's selloff screams "Thank God I can finally divest from this awful company!"

But that's not quite right. Yesterday's volume was not extraordinary; in fact, the stock was actually positive until 3pm, when it headed decidedly south (for an amusing take on that, see here). So what we really have here is a massive and sudden absence of demand for DMD shares, causing the price to collapse. In other words, this was investor-driven, not insider-driven.

But why would investors suddenly sell? The lockup expiration shouldn't be a surprise -- it's public knowledge. It should have been priced in all along. Maybe not, though -- it's so hard to conceive of rational investors owning this stock that it's equally difficult to give them the benefit of rational analysis. Let's suppose that a news article about the lockup came out - and then was finally noticed by one large holder, who changed behavior accordingly. Then someone else notices, and pretty soon the herd is in a stampede. To be honest, the best evidence for this is Jason's G+ post, which is otherwise completely unwarranted.

But the thing about rational investor analysis is that it doesn't matter what reasons I can or can't come up with -- the facts are this: the stock of a terrible company happened to fall closer to its fair value ($0?) on the same day that its insider lockup expired. This attracted the attention of an individual, who for some reason gave it more weight than the stock's long term collapse, furthering the degree of attention paid to the myopic event. I must assume that there is a rationale (rational or irrational) for this behavior; to be frank, I don't really care what it is.

Jason's remark about DMD is quite bearable -- without such armchair analysis I'd be out of a job -- but the balance of his post, on how cruel Google was to change its algorithm at the expense of DMD (and, by extension, his own company Mahalo.com) is just ridiculous. Specifically:

The Google Panda Update was handled horribly by Google, which crushed hundreds of good companies without warning. Google has to take more responsibility for how they deploy big changes.

For someone whose past marketing pitch has been that algorithmic search engines are subject to manipulation, complaining that a refinement of the algorithm constitutes bad behavior is insane! After all, if companies legitimately deserve their search result rankings, then they shouldn't change much in the aftermath -- only if they achieved them through manipulation/optimization in the first place would there be repercussions. Caveat: you have to assume, and I do, that Google is interested in improving their product with any algorithm refinement, particularly one so publicized and welcomed by the community.

Because of this, I'm forced to perform my first Google+ "uncircle" (truthfully, as much as I love G+, "unfriend" is a much more satisfying verb). I just don't have time to waste with this kind of nonsense. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I love this video from Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Attend a startup conference and you'll find that people there seem to believe that the mark of a successful company is the amount of money it's raised, not the amount of money it makes. Naturally, by this metric, Color is the greatest company in the world (spoiler: despite $41 million in the bank, it bombed). It shouldn't surprise anyone that Techcrunch, a recent AOL acquisition that has somehow managed to pass itself off as an authority on such matters, gushed about the company when that number was disclosed.

I have to imagine that the trend of comparing valuations arose because it was difficult to boast about negative earnings. The truth is, there's nothing wrong with negative earnings - in the absence of arbitrage, a startup's upfront cost should be greater than its early profits. But it's not just startups - even mature companies that still attract the Techcrunch set (read into that what you will) are reporting bogus "earnings before costs" numbers, as Dealbook reports.

Is there a rationale for valuation comps? Sure, since it's a measure of how much value a company has created. Strike that: it's a measure of how much value a company has convinced a small set of investors that it has created. So when we compare valuations, we're really comparing the perceived ability of venture capitalists to properly measure and allocate capital according to value. I have yet to see any evidence for that ability. Outside a few lottery tickets, venture firms tend to lose money -- and anyone with a true finance background can tell you that a positive track record characterized only by a few outliers is garbage. A recent update to Cambridge Associates' venture capital index revealed that the median return to venture investors has not been positive since 1998. That seems beyond absurd to me -- especially because the IPO bubble wouldn't end for two more years! The very best funds have averaged less than 6% IRR's, and those were launched in 2001 -- in other words at the bottom (one might speculate by chance rather than by design).

Derek's video is poigant because it cuts to the chase: you either have a good idea, or you don't. An efficient market will allocate capital accordingly. But in the current funding bubble, capital is being over-allocated to under-thought ideas. Valuation has become more important than value -- a textbook bubble. As if to force the point home, most of the links I found to this video came from Techcrunch-esque blogs who missed the "good idea" point and instead used it to argue that people should start companies because "it's easy and free!"

For further details, please see my recent post.

The good news: a new study from the Pew Research Center shows that over a third of Twitter users read other users' tweets at least once a day.

The bad news: nearly 50% of Twitter users do not look at other users' content more than once a week. In fact, 20% only browse other people's tweets every couple months, and 21% never read them at all!

Not a good sign if you're trying to position yourself as a revolutionary communications medium. Then again, I'm not surprised at all.

David McCandless's TED talk on data visualization is excellent -- you can catch it here -- and Mathias Mikkelsen has highlighted a single analysis that investigates when people are most likely to break up (according to Facebook) (Update: original here):

What makes the chart so appealing is how easy it is to understand, despite the lack of scale and minimal labels. I almost wish that the blue comments were missing, as part of the fun with a chart like this is interpreting it without influence.

So, when do people tend to break up? Clearly, the peaks are over spring break and just before Christmas. In fact (as ?if "spring break" wasn't enough of a tip-off), this graph seems heavily skewed toward a still-in-school demographic, as it mirrors features of the academic calendar. Then again, that population is more likely to a) be breaking up and b) putting it in their Facebook status.

The Christmas "blip" is interesting. Merely "being with family" is probably not enough to account for it, or Thanksgiving would probably show a analogous dip. The "Mondays" weekly pattern in the spring is also somewhat amusing.

April Fool's Day illustrates the importance of scrubbing data - without an intelligent review of the data, a researcher might include those points as legitimate though clearly they are not! (or are they?).

Finally, the heightened frequency around Valentine's Day is surprising to me. Perhaps times during which couples spend more time with each other also illuminate the factors that drive them apart (viz: Valentine's Day, the time leading up to Christmas/Thanksgiving, weekends [culminating in Monday breakups]). But so too do periods when couples actually are apart, like vacations. I should note that Valentine's Day is labeled on the graph, which (because of the behavior of the other labels) instinctively leads me to assume it is a "break up day" - even though it is no higher than the days around it. Unlike the other days, it is labeled due to topical relevancy, not as an interesting datapoint. Yet another reason why labels can be misleading.

I would really like to see the opposite chart posted of when couples tend to get together, as well as a comparison of data culled from Facebook statuses and data based on Facebook relationships.

Update: The original chart may be seen here.

Max Gadney writes on the rise of "tower graphics" - those giant infographics popping up all over the net which require scrolling endlessly to follow their narratives.

He notes:

Every time I try to hate these, I imagine people who are just interested in the facts finding them easy to use. (albeit hard to search and re-size etc etc).

This immediate gratification is something quite satisfying. Tom mentioned it is echoed in the production of flash movies which bake in all  their content - the baking-in helping their sendability and virality. Often these tower graphics comment on popular ideas, again, making them sendable social currency. Other baked in stuff, going against the open, searchable text principles are the explosion of informative videos like here.

Well, let me say: I do hate these things. Having to scroll to collect morsels of information is almost (but not quite!) as bad as a non-ajax'd slideshow.

The reason these things are so big is because their designers think that large type + bold colors = information. It doesn't. Typography and design are critical elements of proper data presentation, to be sure, but they alone do not constitute "good visualization."

Max shows two large infographics at the top of his post. (I will not - can not - bear to display them hear. I'm sorry.) The first outlines a few notes about each version of Windows, headlined by the year in which the OS was released. That's the extent of its quantitative (read: data) aspects. The rest of its length is dominated by images of the software's loading screens accompanied by small paragraphs of text. This would have made a perfect slideshow.

The second asks us to imagine a "world without Apple", accompanied by two enormous two-tone graphics of I'm-not-sure-what (or why). This is followed by a bizarre mix of lines, bars, spokes and text annotations, all taking far too much space to convey a very simple set of information.

The most egregious flaw, in my mind, is at the bottom of the graphic, where a note about "250,000+ applications" is accompanied by 132 Apple icons. I had to count them twice to confirm there were, in fact, 132 -- the first four rows contain 30 and the last row contains 12. Why represent each group of 1,893.9 applications with one icon? I have no idea. Why lay them out in a ragged array? Again, no idea. At least the "28,000 developers" that followed were represented by one icon per 1,000 people - no fractions here. Why use these icons at all? The numbers alone were more than sufficient -- icons are only useful if they convey additional meaning (they don't here, since they only serve to demonstrate the number) or are used to visually compare two quantities (they don't do that either, since they use different scales and are not laid out on the same grid). No, the icons are typical of the "eyeballs over information" attitude that these tower graphics represent.

I do completely agree with Max that these graphics provide "social currency" -- a one stop shop for information that can be posted or distributed with little hassle -- and that is their most compelling aspect. So what if they break every principle about storage, searching or data presentation? This stuff is viral!

Are there good tower graphics? I don't consider the NYT's excellent visualization work to conform to the genre, but apparently people feel that this piece does. If so, then yes -- it's an excellent tower graphic. I do believe it could have been made smaller on the vertical scale, saving me from having to scroll (remember - I can only compare what I can see!). Then it would have been an even more excellent non-tower graphic. But that's just splitting hairs.

(via Daring Fireball)

If you visit The Huffington Post using Google Chrome, you'll see this alert bar appear at the top of your screen:

It looks just like a standard Chrome alert, sharing the same coloring, fonts and icons as the browser's notification bar. But it isn't. It's generated by a piece of code on huffingtonpost.com and is just a <div> like any other on the site. There are only a couple of clues to its true nature: unlike a true Chrome alert, it won't stay at the top of the page when you scroll (surprising, since that's an easy CSS property to set) and the text of the alert can be highlighted. Finally, most blatantly, the ruse is revealed by right-clicking the alert and choosing "Inspect Element" from Chrome's menu.

I think this is pretty awful and irresponsible. We live in a time where online fraud and phishing is rampant -- malicious attacks in which a  site passes itself off as a different, trusted site in order to fool the user into taking some action. It's a terrible practice that ensnares millions of people. Usually, such fraud is perpetrated by hackers trying to trick their victims into downloading malware or revealing confidential information. The victim is led to believe that the software they are downloading or form they are filling out is from a site they trust.

And that brings us to The Huffington Post, which is trying to cajole its readers into downloading software by making it look like the download link was generated by their trusted Google browsers! When I first saw the alert, I wondered if Google and The Huffington Post had entered into some sort of partnership, but they haven't (although the extension in question is a "featured extension" on the true Chrome extension site). Then I wondered if the alert bar was being generated by some suspect third party, but quickly determined it originated from The Huffington Post itself.

I think it's insane that this idea was implemented. The only good news here is that the software in question is not malicious. But the means by which it is being advertised is fraudulent. The Huffington Post is completely misrepresenting Google and their browser by stealing its look and feel for the purpose of harvesting clicks. At the very least, borrowing the look and feel of another application of site is an infringement of intellectual property. I'm stunned by the lack of commentary on it -- either people don't realize, don't care or - most likely - haven't equated this version of phishing with its more dangerous analogues.

And HP isn't the only one -- the well-known site DownloadSquad was fooled by a similar scam at The Independent.

I see no difference between an email spoofing my bank and an web site spoofing my browser. I rely on both to provide me with information that I can rely on, and any attempt to hijack that trust is contemptible. The decision to spoof my browser bar should have been accompanied by a highly-visible disclaimer that the message did not originate from Google or, preferably, been scrapped altogether.