“Destroying Mercury to Build a Dyson Sphere is a Bad Idea”, an article penned by Alex Knapp for Forbes, is a great read if you appreciate people who think about the future, unconcerned about the limitations of the present. If you don’t know what a Dyson Sphere is, there’s a ton of great resources I’ll gather one day (drop me an email if you’d like an unfiltered list).

The always inspiring James Bridle gave a great talk titled “We fell in love in a coded space” about digital storytelling, sentience and robots at Lift 2012, and the video is now up. If you have around 20 minutes, go check it out. On the talk, he mentions Argot and Polari, two languages within other languages. What us programmers might call DSLs.

Spent quite a bit going through some of the things already being planned for @notch’s next game, 0x10c, a game with a CPU (specs) inside a computer inside a spaceship, inside a game, inside your computer. I guess we’ll see where this one will end up, but judging by the community around minecraft, I suspect we’ll see much here too.

This SXSW, Jason Hreha (also at 500 Startups) gave a talk titled “Applying psychology to web design”, but the things he said can be very much applied to other things. Make sure you do listen to it (slides here) if you do user experience design for products and/or services.

I don’t know how Craig Mod does it, but his most recent essay on the translation between the digital and the physical (and specifically about designing Flipboard for the iPhone) is beautifully written – perhaps as beautiful as the idea behind it, and the book created to collect the development process of the app. 8 pounds, is how much the process weighs.

Have a great week.

The signs are quite evident, for anyone who’s looking in the right direction. You’ve certainly noticed the slow cluttering of their once sacred homepage, the increased complexity of their always-redesigning navigation bar (first white, then black, then integrated, then black, now black with a Play link adorned with “NEW” in red). You’ve seen the odd product launches, and the sad product “sunsets”. You’ve struggled to comprehend Google+’s direction, and probably never really used a “Hangout” even though the idea of one sounds “okay”.

If you remember the early days of Google, you know exactly what is fading away. The idea of a large company with a minimal approach to engineering, management, product and design. The idea that your experience using their services (particularly search) was more important than anything else they did. The perhaps naive impression that you mattered more to them than the ads they ran along your search results.

Google is still a stellar company, employing stellar people and working on solving amazing problems – I can’t begin to say how important it is that there is a company out there trying to figure out things like cars that drive themselves, or how to – actually, no-bs – organize the world’s information. But I wish they found themselves again amid all their new services, offerings and changes. While it is easy to understand that as a public company they need to keep value to shareholders in mind, fanning out into a ton of things has made them masters of none.

Someone out in Mountain View should be very uncomfortable about the fact that *hackers* (in the good, true sense of the word) are actively looking for an alternative to google in Search. *Search* – what got Google where it is today; their core public-facing service. Early adopters, current and future opinion makers, are looking for alternatives to it. This is not good.

Now I could say “Google, listen to your users”; and from Mountain View, the word back could be “but we are”. But you truly are not. Because people want the old Google: the company that fought over the pixels in its homepage, stellar search results, sheer speed. The company that was solving great, insane problems through computer science. The company that people, hackers, would never, *ever*, consider trying to find (or build) alternatives to.

And I write this because I care – because Google was for many years a huge inspiration, to me and countless others. And quite honestly, I want to see them going back to kicking ass and taking names.

The first part might make a little more sense to you if you dabble in code – but you will be fine even if you don’t. It’s an amazing talk, by someone who has been doing amazing work throughout the last few years. One talk I will definitely revisit.

There’s certainly meaning in the over 70.000 songs I played on Last.fm, the things I tweeted, the images I saved on FFFFOUND and Gimmebar, the books I’ve read, the bookmarks I added to Pinboard (and before that, Delicious). I know the meaning is in there, lurking beneath the surface of a seemingly infinite number of services; it’s a huge graph of things I care about, and the invisible connections between them. It is huge, I am certain, but I still can’t see it.

I’m calling this “dark data” because much like dark matter, we know it exists even if we can’t grasp it. Dark matter is 83% of the universe and we can’t see it. Dark data is everything we do and we still can’t see it.

I’ve been thinking about this problem of dark data for a while, sketching solutions, putting some into code (certainly not enough code). But I’m not there yet, and sadly, services like Gimme Bar, Bundlr, Evernote are not there yet either. There’s a ton of potential in making meaning out of all our photos, our tweets, our listened songs and our shared articles. Building tools to see the forest from the trees – now there’s something worth doing.

It’s been 13 years since Zeldman‘s own ALA became a website – it was back in 98 and I was 16 years old, surfing on a crap modem, collecting images from random web pages. My favorite website at the time was NBA.com, for some reason. I had been coding for a few years already, albeit never for the web, influenced by what was in hindsight the single most important contribution to my career: a Spectrum ZX and a BASIC manual, both given to me by my parents when I was 6. I remember the moment perfectly – where I was, what my parents were wearing. Somehow that memory remains while others have faded. I remember one of my first pieces of code too: it asked for my name, said hello, and kept my phone numbers. I remember writing a simple text-based game for my sister, which she remembers well too. Again – some memories remain, while others fade.

Looking back lets you connect the dots, and that I have. Telling people how I got to where I am today is then relatively easy – I simply look back, and connect the dots I remember. Looking forward, however, is a futile exercise. I can speak of my passions and where they might lead me, but I can never be certain of anything. I’m not even certain I’ll be around tomorrow – although I suspect I will be. So I will keep suspecting I’ll be around – and while I am, I’ll try to make a dent in things. The universe, sure, but the little things too. Because when I look back and connect the dots, it was the small dents in things, the pokes in some direction that got me here. Like that Spectrum that hooked me on computers, ALA that got me thinking about the web, and the many things (and people) that followed, I hope to dent and poke (people and things) going forward.

Looking forward isn’t possible, but moving forward most certainly is. So I’ll keep looking back, and moving forward. Hopefully, making a dent in things as I go.

Facebook is clearly taking advantage of their lead when it comes to social. Despite the surprising growth numbers on Google+ (Vic Gundotra and Sergey Brin talked a little bit about how positive they were at Web 2.0 Expo), they still have a lot of catching up to do. Google’s in a tough spot. Here’s why:

Even though they’re the clear market lead in search and online advertising, Google is losing what’s possibly the most important race they’re competing in. Social networking have become a layer on top of which all the services we use stand. From the movies we watch, to the music we listen to, to the books we read and the websites we visit, chances are high that these choices emerge out of online social interactions. Now if you think about it, Google doesn’t control any major platform supporting this kind of social interaction – with the possible exception of Youtube.

I can’t think of the last acquisition Google made in the last few years that tipped the social scale in their favor. Blogger’s acquisition is now long in the past, and since then Google has sadly been playing catch-up. By not acquiring Twitter a couple of years ago and instead focusing on products like Wave and Buzz (two social initiatives out of Mountain View that ended up failing), Google became a 3rd spot player in what might be the most critical market in IT going forward.

My guess is that we’re going to see some heavy priority changes out of Google (the social bonus suggested by Larry Page when he took his new job as CEO is a key indicator of that), and possibly more acquisitions in the social space.

So let me circle back to Buffy. Facebook is large enough now that they can focus on taking on a new market (much like Apple did with music, then phones, then tablets), and they’re comfortably sitting in the lead as a social network. Until now, however, Facebook had to rely on third party platforms (like iOS and Android) to bring their non-desktop experience to their users. Not after their phone comes out. They’re now taking a lesson from players like Apple and cutting the middle man altogether – and with a bit of irony, they’re forking Android in order to build their new mobile OS.

This whole thing makes for an interesting imaginary Venn diagram. Facebook, Twitter and Google are in Social; Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are in mobile; None of these companies is naive enough to only focus on their old core business. The new core business for all of them is having access to how we communicate, how we access data, and more importantly, how we share that data back with others. Social, search and mobile used to all be different things – but that’s certainly not the case anymore.

Quite a bit more than search, wouldn’t you say? Mind you, I don’t think this is a bad thing. I for one would like to see Google take a stab at a feature-complete iPad browser, even though I’ll say that mobile Safari does work pretty well. My opinion is then out of knowing how healthy competition would be this particular field.

At this point, I’m not sure any company other than Google can compete with Apple in terms of browser experience on tablets. There are other third-party iPad browsers out there (including Opera Mini – that as some might remember was, for a few years, the only mobile browser people knew), but none that really shines and takes advantage of the platform.

My hope is that Google’s own expertise in building a tablet-oriented OS in Android (and the fact that they have a great team of User Experience designers) culminates not a browser hidden behind a search app, but an actual browser that happens to do search amazingly well.

I would argue that in most startups and consulting companies these days – particularly those with a limited headcount -, the main role of the designer should be that of curating/vetoing ideas. This is particularly true when working in an agile environment when everyone takes responsibility for crafting features and deploying code. In such a team, the development process is probably going to flow better if decisions regarding the experience and UI are consulted with the designer rather than always going through him. In short: developers work higher in the stack (they are expected to deliver interface work), and the designer is able to cover more ground and have a curation role across the project as a whole.

In smaller teams there’s little room for someone that only does design, just as there’s typically little room for an engineer who can only do one particular thing. So, playing on everyone’s strengths by empowering engineers to deliver code top to bottom, and applying design expertise as a curation tool sounds like a way to optimize a company’s process. Less time lost in waterfall is never a bad thing.

“We’re spoiled idiots. We call a dual-core smartphone with a 8mp camera + software that interprets language + fits in pocket ‘disappointing'” – Read on Twitter

I got hundreds of replies, and even though most were positive, quite a few people complained that Apple was now “just following competition” and that there are other smartphone models doing as well or better. I call bullshit. These people are talking about the Galaxy SII, which is indeed a beautiful, great phone, but certainly not ahead of the iPhone 4S (or the old iPhone 4, for that matter). If this claim doesn’t make you sweat, break your computer keyboard and immediately call me an idiot, read on for why I think that. You might still call me an idiot after you do, but at least you’ll know exactly how much of one I really am.

According to a comparison by Samsung themselves (desperate much? Yes), the Galaxy is ahead in terms of network speed (true), screen size (true, although this up for discussion – read this), weight (true), and in the fact that it can control your HDTV. Exhale now – take perhaps a few minutes to control your television with your phone, too, because that’s an important thing to do.

Lets imagine the Galaxy SII was twice as good as the iPhone in every main specification (cpu, speed, memory, network). It would still be a worse device. What people arguing that Apple is now lagging behind competition fail to realize is that Apple is delivering consistent, polished experiences and services that integrate with one another beautifully. They’re not selling you a device because of its new CPU (they didn’t even announce CPU models until the iPhone 4) – they are selling you the ecosystem of device, software, app store, cloud, integration.

Ask someone who bought a mac for the first time recently, what they think of buying a new computer. The reason why they don’t go back to PCs is not because of any particular specs macs may have, but because things are cold, flimsy, unpolished or just plain bad on the other side. When it comes to the holistic experience, they’re not following competition – there simply is none, even though I wish there was.

(A huge idiot, right?)