As it turned out, lots of people wanted to play it, but very few people wanted to pay for it. We made a free game — we just didn’t know it

Most interesting description of freemium I’ve heard in the gaming sector.

Google fans seem to eat this kumbaya stuff up, to really believe it. But Google is the company that built Android after the iPhone, Google Plus after Facebook

I don’t think anyone understands Apple and has finger on the pulse of how it moves like John Gruber at Daring Fireball.

But what’s equally interesting is just how disconnected he can be at times about other tech brands - perhaps Google especially. He’s so assimilated and in tune with Apple’s way of thinking that he almost can’t conceive how another company may have a different philosophy.

It’s an interesting perspective in journalism today, where so many are generalists afraid to commit too heartily to an opinion too extreme in one direction.

Can you sustain the kind of virtuoso understanding that someone like Gruber has on Apple and still be able to relate to other companies in the same way? I think a range of writers come close but maintaining the mental dissonance of those different perspectives perhaps stops them reaching the same consistent depth and insight as these rare specialists.

Starner has worked with Google on the Glass project since early in the design process. He told me privacy has been a goal from the start, and the team intentionally built in “social cues” like the glow of the video screen to alert people that the device is active.

Stuff like this reveals how much a part of design process privacy concerns are these days. The media constantly pretends tech companies don’t care but it’s not that simple, they are smarter than that.

In his screenplays, populated with broken men who rouse themselves from hangovers and beatdowns to defeat the bad guy, it’s Black himself who emerges as the movie’s most charismatic antihero. He might be a loose cannon with unorthodox methods, but you can’t deny that the man gets the job done.

I find this fact the best and worst thing about Shane Black movies — but still interesting to see how far his voice permeates the script. And a good lesson about breaking “the rules” to win the game.

Speakers of it use the same unspoken rules whenever they use the language, and different speakers apply the same rules consistently. If such speakers were just poor at using standard English, you wouldn’t see most AAVE speakers making the same so-called mistakes identically again and again.

The French comparison made me realise how irrationally unsympathetic I have been to this subject. I definitely fall into the camp that language evolves and studied things like the “Myth of Meritocracy” in sociology that overlap with themes in this about under-achieving demographics in education - but I think this does a good job of rooting the bigger abstract problem into a more tangible crossroads for decision.

iOS could have been both the definitive Facebook mobile device, AND the definitive Amazon shopping device. They could have been integrated from the beginning at a deep level: your social network in contacts; your Amazon 1-click credentials a fingertip away. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, and Steve Jobs on a stage together talking about the truly amazing things these companies have done together. It could have been awesome. But it didn’t play out that way.

Good analysis of current platform pricing and strategy - and it pisses me off how these large companies seem to be getting worse at working together, not better. Trying to build their own little walled empires…

Kind of neat: a draft of the Toey manifesto with Thatcher’s hand written tweaks.

Docs like this make me realise how close PR and politics are as disciplines. But there’s nothing like seeing the work in progress, annotations and improvements people make to writing.

It’s so easy to slip into comfortable and effective habits as a writer and I think this is one of the most helpful ways to expose and learn from the work others put into their drafts. Fully formed and finished documents can be impressive but the best hide their art with skill.

Perhaps with the increasing use of tools like Google Docs (with full revision history), we can expect to see more and more about the construction of writing in the future.