{"id":18788,"date":"2013-05-17T15:09:34","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T14:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adendavies.com\/?p=18788"},"modified":"2013-05-17T15:09:34","modified_gmt":"2013-05-17T14:09:34","slug":"friday-reading-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/?p=18788","title":{"rendered":"Friday Reading #19"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am fascinated by the ‘acquihire’, the act of a large company buying a smaller company to either take on its excellent staff members or to take its competitive prodcut out of the market or for numerous other reasons. Ever since Facebook acquihired my once beloved FriendFeed, a four man startup, in 2009 for around 50 million dollars<\/a> I was fascinated by the trend. The main acquihire was the CTO of FriendFeed Bret Taylor who became CTO of Facebook, until he left last year to start up again. He had previous with Google on their Maps product and is clearly a clever chap (lots of features that FriendFeed had years are ago are still drip feeding into Facebook). The interesting thing though is the attempts to shoe horn in these founders to a larger corporation, many don’t last, Bret included as they year for the freedom and challenge of their own company but what about the others staff members? How do they fare? What about the users who helped build these companies with their usage only to see them left to rot, ala FriendFeed or closed down with a cheery ‘our incredible journey<\/a>‘ type message. \u00a0I wanted to write something about this but time, ability and focus means I haven’t but thankfully someone else has that is better than anything i could have dribbled out (see first link of the week). Other topics for reads of the week include the failure of hackathons, the destruction of the middle class, advertising tyranny, Ikea love, AI love, Apple photo hate and an interview with Jason Fried. Enjoy.<\/p>\n

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The Corrosive Downside of Acquihires<\/a><\/h3>\n

I know the buyers try the best to believe that [insert well known founder name here … David Sacks, Max Levchin, Dennis Crowley, Keith Rabois] will stay and help lead their company in a totally new direction. But evidence suggests otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class<\/a><\/h3>\n

You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two as the digital world has grown?\u00a0<\/strong>Well, there\u2019s a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that in a market society, a middle class has always required some little artificial help to keep going. There\u2019s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There\u2019s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The tyranny of digital advertising<\/a><\/h3>\n

Let’s be clear: big businesses have grown up around the availability and theory of mass media and buying attention. Any big client older than15 years old will have grown up with the reassuring ability of tv and print advertising to reach mass audiences. Those were methods of advertising predicated on guaranteed access to peoples\u2019 attention through interruptions in mass media.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Jason Fried: Interview<\/a><\/h3>\n

Are you satisfied creatively?\u00a0<\/strong>Yes, but I\u2019m also impatient. I\u2019m satisfied in that I get to build what I think is right. I don\u2019t feel repressed in that way. I have a lot of friends in this business who feel repressed because they have an idea, but can\u2019t act on it for whatever reason. I feel very free, but I\u2019m also always slightly frustrated with the fact that there are more ideas and more things I want to do, but can\u2019t because I don\u2019t have time or knowledge to do them yet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The ‘IKEA Effect’: When Labor Leads to Love (PDF & free subscription required)<\/a><\/h3>\n

Labor leading to value thus appears to be a very basic process, and an effort justification\u00a0account predicts that effort and valuation increase in lockstep.\u00a0We suggest, however, that the psychological process by which labor leads to love\u00a0requires consideration of an additional crucial factor: The extent to which one\u2019s labor is\u00a0successful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Dear Apple, let\u2019s talk about photos<\/a><\/h3>\n

So Apple, I think you\u2019ve got a bit confused. Don\u2019t worry about sharing, we don\u2019t need you for that. Your job is to take photos, organise them and make sure they don\u2019t get lost. So let\u2019s talk about how you can do that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Hackathons Don’t Solve Problems<\/a><\/h3>\n

\u2013 and certainly not big problems. The big problems are big for a reason. They’re hard, bordering on intractable, and people are working to solve these problems constantly, spending much more energy and resources than a single hackathon could ever do. There is nothing magical about putting a bunch of technologists and creatives in a room which will suddenly solve disasters, world crises, the economy, or anything else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Love machines<\/a><\/h3>\n

Then again, isn\u2019t love always uncertain? And isn\u2019t the fear that our children will turn against us also an aspect of love? Partners and children might indeed abandon us, regardless of what good we did for them. But perhaps it doesn\u2019t have to be this way. MIRI suggests that we should embed a fail-safe program in all future AI to prevent them from ever hating us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Bonus self promotion link\u00a0– Web Curios the spreadsheet edition<\/a><\/h3>\n

This week I made a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet version of the wonderful Web Curios. You can read about it here<\/a> and see it mentioned in this weeks Web Curios here<\/a>. While you are there read the rest of it, every single bit of it.<\/p>\n

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If you want to subscribe via email to these weekly(ish) posts then do that here\u00a0http:\/\/tinyletter.com\/aden_76<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am fascinated by the ‘acquihire’, the act of a large company buying a smaller company to either take on its excellent staff members or to take its competitive prodcut out of the market or for numerous other reasons. Ever since Facebook acquihired my once beloved FriendFeed, a four man startup, in 2009 for around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friday-reading"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adendavies.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}