Mishmash...
- Facebook Deals was released a few weeks ago, and it's likely going to be a big game changer. Of course Facebook is going to tap into its gigantic user base to compete with the current leaders of the "grouped deals" market: Groupon and Living Social. Facebook doesn't take any cut on deals from retailers (as opposed to its competitors), and it has the most accurate data regarding its users' demographic and tastes... Groupon and Living Social will have to change their business model, and fast. Good news for the retailers, for whom the Groupon experience hasn't always been the promised dream.
- A podcast on Holacracy and polarities. Holacracy is an "operating system" for organizations. It aims at freeing organizations from the forces of people's egos. A sort of organizational Jedi, if you will. I love it.
- Vivek Haldar blogged 2 months ago about treesaver, a HTML5 webapp designed to reading on screen. I've been waiting for a good reading interface for a long time, and Treesaver provides the best simple experience I've seen so far. It's like reading a magazine. You flip pages, the faded view of the adjacent pages gives some context to the current page, yet is unobtrusive. Here a demo with Wide Screen magazine.
- Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 23, code name "Natty Narwhal". The big change in this release is a new desktop environment: Unity instead of the famous GNOME. After DOS, I've always been a Windows guy. When I first tried Linux with Ubuntu 4.10, Gnome didn't really work for me. I installed Mandriva Linux and I liked KDE better, but I eventually left the Linux world all together because it was taking too much time to tweak. While many seem unhappy about the abandon of GNOME, it might be the opportunity for me to install a dual-boot on my netbook to try Ubuntu again, 6 years later.
- Famous French web accessibility champion Alsacréations blogs on the benefits of Mockup designs before jumping to Photoshop. He provides some cool web apps to make Mockups, which can be used for any kind of sketching: Mockflow | Pencil Project | Balsamiq Mockups | Mockingbird | Cacoo
- Is there a life beyond HTTP? Google says yes: SPDY, a new protocol more adapted to the modern web, and web apps that require continuous two-way connections. HTTP is already 20 years old and we all got used to it. Well it will change, and it's huge. We can think what we want of Google, they do make the web evolve.
- Hackertyper: type like a real hollywood hacker. But where are the annoying bleeps?
