I found that Zite did an incredible job of presenting high-signal content for me. I became so reliant on it that I would have paid a significant amount to subscribe, probably on the order of a spotify subscription. But that was after years of use and training; I can't imagine anybody selling me on a curation service at any price without that experience.

I didn't realize just how much I relied on Zite until it was gone. I tried to launch it several times a day in the week after it was turned off.

If anything, Flipboard has taught me that the UI of flipping pages is best left to physical magazines, where each page can have enough information density to make it worthwhile. Maybe the flipboard flip action works better on a tablet; but on a phone I can't bring myself to use it, no matter how much of Zite's technology they fold in.

Flipboard has sadly hidden the Zite per-article training options in "Up Arrow" -> "Tuning Options" which is the last menu item under the Share menu. What was one Zite click (up/downvote) is now Flipboard's click, swipe, click, click.

It brings you to a dialog which offers:

  More Like This
  Less Like This
  Mute Site
  Report Site

Gone is the Zite option to whitelist/subscribe to a site, which was the equivalent of following an RSS feed. Tragic. At least medieval cathedral builders would leave behind ruins to remind future generations of what was attempted. Software just vanishes.

Note to News App Developers: read Claude Shannon on the role of surprise in information theory. If your app shows the same articles being regurgitated in every other app, there is no surprise, i.e. news or information. Zite excelled at surprise.

Flipboard is something people actually use?

I recognize the name as some crapware pre-installed on my Samsung phone.

It's useful on tablets when combined with Twitter lists. Each list becomes a Flipboard magazine, you can then flip through meta-pages with substantive link previews, surrounded by tweets. This gives the benefit of Flipboard's UX with Twitter's manually curated content. This use case is buried:

  Profile
  Following
  Accounts
  Service Name (e.g. Twitter)
  Your Lists
  List Name

Before it was turned off, Zite allowed their users to migrate their data (topics, white/blacklist, votes) to Flipboard. For longtime Zite users, there were thousands of data points. Sadly, that data has not resulted in a Zite-like filter of Flipboard's content.

What do your friends say about content protection? It seems like the least important thing to worry about since it's so hard to protect your content no matter what the medium.

You can hear audio previews of all the detours here: https://www.detour.com/detours

I really think that Slack's best quality is as an email killer. I get close to zero emails from within my company. It's kind of shocking how much more productive that makes me.

This is true. I have an email account that gets effectively zero email (other than Slack notifications). Don't know if this makes me more productive - IM seems like more of an interruption than email, but it's definitely interesting.

That's the main benefit for us as well. I compare inboxes with friends who don't use Slack at their company and its a stark difference. They'll have tons of giant chain emails about pointless stuff.

Agreed. I've been a super user for years, and I was happy to give foursquare all of my data because they did two great things with it:

1) they gave it back to me so I had an accessible record of my check-ins which is very helpful if you travel frequently, and very lovely if, like me, your personality combines deep nostalgia with shocking forgetfulness. It also made Timehop worth opening.

2) they used it in seemingly intelligent ways to give me surprisingly good recommendations when I needed them, and showed me where friends had checked in, even if they hadn't left tips. A check-in from a friend can be a tiny endorsement of its own in absence of anything else.

Both of those benefits are what keep me checking in. Which is what keeps me using the app. I fully recognize that there isn't enough of me to support foursquare. I get that. But I'm still sad to see it go.

Honestly, I used the app the same way you did... I'm a bit dismayed with the new direction. It seems like they could have still left the checkin feature but made it less prominent (I still would have been happy as a super user)

Not a fine arts department, but rather a school for creative technologists: http://itp.nyu.edu.

Right, though it's part of the "Tisch School of the Arts".

I like to imagine that Google Cardboard is an internal company joke at the expense of Google Glass.

How can this not be some kind of internal sniping?

If you've never had Bart break on you or be delayed, then you weren't taking it enough.

SF public transportation is limited in its geographic coverage and the fact that it's not 24 hours. And that sucks. But San Francisco is also a much smaller city then Madrid, New York, Chicago, and the other places listed. Add a couple more million people to SF, South SF, and East Bay, and you can bet that public transportation will improve.

Sorry, but that is BS. SF too small? Really.

Go and visit other countries in the world. Public transportation works pretty well also in smaller cities with a couple 100.000 people. Go look to Nuremberg, Germany with about 500.000 people. Go look to Jena, Germany with about 100.000 people. Cities in France or Spain or Estland or Lithuania. Look in Denmark or Sweden.

The reason in the US is simple: you love cars.

We love cars simply because of the fact we could fit all of Europe INSIDE the US and still have room left over for Japan, the Philippines and a few other Asian countries.

It's about the only way to get around if you are traveling from one state to another - which we frequently do. Also, ~330M people.

You are traveling cross country with your car? o.O

Yes, a road trip in the US is cool, but I would never ever do it for just getting somewhere.

There is another nice public transport system called airplanes. Works pretty well, is comfortable, and is fast. It works also pretty well in the US. I used it several times as my frequent millage card tells me.

BTW: The US aren't that big compared to Europe. Don't mix up US and Russia, which interestingly many Amercians do, as they believe that the US is the biggest country in the world. Actually, Russia is the biggest country in the world, size wise.

That's kind of odd as Europe (the Continent - 10,180,000 km2) is actually larger in area than the United States (the Country - 9,826,675 km2).

I take it you mean the EU - which covers less than half the area of Europe?

Yes, you are correct. I pulled up a map off Google that overlayed 'europe' over the continental US. That map omitted Ukraine and Turkey, which are included in Europe (among other non-EU countries).

Only a small part of Turkey is in Europe - making Istanbul one of the few transcontinental cities :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_spanning_more_th...

I actually think that result aligns perfectly with the creator's intent: "This is intended as a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you."

I can't tell if they are like me or not because I can't read the tweet in another language. It might be my french doppelganger also complaining about his current lack of caffeine.

I think you're taking only half of a comment and changing the context. "We often think that people use social networks the same way that we use social networks. This is intended as a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you."

I understand that you're using "not like you" in the context of what language they speak, but it seems pretty clear that the author is referring to "the way that we use social networks".