Alan Adams: Twitter Kills the QuickBar, Why Google Books Failed

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Twitter Kills the QuickBar, Why Google Books Failed

Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web.

Read:

So, then...if you jump The New York Times' paywall, are you stealing?

It's familiar logic - the same kind of analog-economics-for-digital-content thinking that fuels all those "People! Don't you realize that X months of The New York Times is just X Starbucks lattes?" comments. What it overlooks, though, is the very real possibility that, not just physically but economically, atoms have different properties than bits.

Six Reasons Google Books Failed

Instead, Google chose to make its opponents its partners in a gigantic new library and book business, Google Book Search. The business plan led to a second misstep, because it included a dubious opt-out clause. Authors of out-of-print books who failed to notify Google of their refusal to participate in its project were deemed to have accepted it.

The Trouble with Humanoid Droids

But rest assured, robots that resemble their flesh-and-blood creators are on their way to the world's battlefields. According to a 2004 Darpa survey, US military officers believe that humanoid robots will begin filling out infantry units as early as 2025. Those android grunts will likely be descendants of Petman, a bipedal Boston Dynamics robot funded by Darpa that walks more gracefully than C-3PO.

Watch:

Autonomous Flight with a Kinect

Know:

Why can't we just have simple, minimal calendars? Looks like Apple is bringing the luxurious leather-bound, torn paper of the iPad's calendar to iCal in OS X Lion. [From: TheNextWeb]
The much criticized QuickBar has been banished from Twitter for iOS. [From: Twitter Blog]

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