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Author: getwired

Friction-free commerce? Hold on to your wallet.

Friction-free commerce? Hold on to your wallet.

I’ll admit it. I have a problem. It’s an iTunes problem. Apple doesn’t think I have a problem, they’re quite happy with me. My wife has the same problem, but it’s with Amazon, not Apple. You see, online commerce has been pushing us all farther and farther down the road of “frictionless commerce”, where we can buy things without dealing with the pesky nuisance of actual cash. I’ve recently started contemplating how frictionless online commerce works, and I’ve begun referring…

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The iWatch – boom or bust?

The iWatch – boom or bust?

In my wife’s family, there is a term used to describe how many people can comfortably work in a kitchen at the same time. The measurement is described in “butts”, as in “this is a one-butt kitchen”, or the common, but not very helpful “1.5 butt kitchen”. Most American kitchens aren’t more than 2 butts. But I digress. I bring this up for the following reason. There is a certain level of utility that you can exploit in a kitchen as it…

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What’s the deal with Facebook advertising?

What’s the deal with Facebook advertising?

For a site that has been tracking my life for years, Facebook’s advertising is horrible. Not just weak, not just bad, but horrible. During the last presidential campaign, I started to realize how bad Facebook’s advertising was, when (as a pretty outspoken liberal) it offered me a Mitt Romney ad every single time I logged on. But take a look below. You really couldn’t get more broken in terms of targeted advertising: Where to begin? Let’s just look at each: I…

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Content, not the chrome. Apps, not the phone.

Content, not the chrome. Apps, not the phone.

Ahead of WWDC 2013, many people were still expecting Apple to add live tiles, and possibly widgets to iOS 7. I didn’t expect either, and as a result wasn’t terribly disappointed to see them not included (that might be an understatement on my part). At first glance, live tiles may seem like a no-brainer in any operating system. Tiles that provide you information from within an app… How could this go wrong? Here’s the problems that I have with live…

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Thomas Jefferson on lawyers in Congress

Thomas Jefferson on lawyers in Congress

“I served with General Washington in the legislature of Virginia before the revolution, and, during it, with Dr. Franklin in Congress. I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point which was to decide the question. They laid their shoulders to the great points, knowing that the little ones would follow of themselves. If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body…

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Twitter zombies and content theft

Twitter zombies and content theft

A few days ago, I noticed a new follower that didn’t look quite right. Check it out for yourself (@KoriWilbur). I’ve never been a fan of people who use Twitter just to spray links – especially if they all lead back to the same site. There’s very little value in such a Twitter account. But when an account like this shows up, and all of the tweets have something in them that looks like a pattern (here the “$ ”…

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Twitter zombies? My favorite.

Twitter zombies? My favorite.

Within the last few weeks, a very annoying trend on Twitter began to pique my curiosity. I saw random accounts that don’t follow me marking some of my tweets as favorites. What was weird though was the tweets that were getting marked weren’t, frankly, my best work. But I started noticing more about these accounts. First of all, as I said, the accounts that seemed odd were generally marking odd tweets as favorites. Take this tweet for instance, which has…

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Beware of strangers bearing subscriptions

Beware of strangers bearing subscriptions

Stop for a second and think about everything you subscribe to. These are things that you pay monthly or annually for, that if you didn’t pay for, some service would discontinue. The list probably includes everything from utilities to reading material, and most likely a streaming or media service like Netflix or Hulu, or a subscription to Amazon Prime, Xbox Live or iTunes Match. I’ve been noticing a tendency for seemingly everything to move towards subscriptions. Frankly, it irritates me…

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