My article for this month’s Read & Trust was published today. I wrote about the future of technology. Here’s a small excerpt:

But what if the vanguard of the post-PC, the touch smartphone and tablet, are disrupted on a much quicker schedule? What if, unlike the PC era (where the PC’s form was relatively fixed, whether desktop or laptop), the post-PC era has many different forms? What if the true disruption of the post-PC era isn’t that the smartphone and tablet end up replacing the PC, but rather that computing is something that begins to inhabit many different devices and objects, so our entire lives are influenced by computing, rather than just the part that deals with PCs?

If you’d like to read it, and the other excellent articles published each week, you can check it out and subscribe here.

Federico Viticci:

And now the problem: some people don’t like free on principle. The backgrounds are different, but the core issue is that they are used to one type of business model (the single purchase) and they want every other service to work that way.

How ironic that I’ve read many of these complaints on sites that are, effectively, using a freemium model with ads and premium subscriptions.

Nate Weiner explains why Pocket, the new version of Read It Later, is now free:

By being a paid app, Read It Later was charging like the fast food case, even though the value of our product maps much closer to the second and third graphs. Put simply: From a business perspective, having a user pay $2.99 up-front once and then use the app for 4 years just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

After this realization about our previous revenue strategy we knew we had to change it. We’re moving towards a new model that better fits our business and our users. In the end this will allow us to provide a better service to all of our customers.

He argues their plan is not to get acquired, and going free is a step toward their plan for making money. The argument makes sense, so I’m curious what the plan is.

Pocket looks great, too.

Earlier this year, Instagram’s co-founder Kevin Systrom talked with Kevin Rose and explained their vision for the future of the service. Chris Tackett provided a transcript of it for the Atlantic. Systrom said:

I think you alluded to it earlier when you said you could explore the world. Imagine a service that collects all of the visual data that gets produced all around the world so you can tune in to anyplace on earth to see exactly what’s happening, whether that is a friend’s birthday party that you’re missing or a wedding happening that you didn’t go to or a riot breaking out overseas. Or something as personal as a baby’s first steps. 

These are all moments that are happening around the world and that we capture with our cameras, right, and that is visual  media that before was sitting on someone’s camera or phone and just sitting there. What happens in the world when you take all that data and combine it in a network?

It’s a great, exciting idea, something I hope we’ll still see from Instagram. But it should be obvious while that’s also exciting for Facebook, but for different reasons.

It’s absolutely worth watching the full discussion between Systrom and Rose, too. He talks a lot about what led to founding Instagram, the design decisions they made, and the mistakes they made, too. Fascinating discussion.

Andy Ihnatko explains why Instagram is worth $1 billion to Facebook:

That’s what the people want. Facebook could have kept trying to figure out how to make mobile photo sharing frictionless, fun, and engaging…or they could have simply bought a company that figured it out two years ago. As Steve Jobs used to put it when demonstrating a simple and effective answer: “Boom. Done.”

And it eliminates one of their most threatening competitors.

That all makes sense. Facebook now has a very good way of posting photos, something they never had before, and eliminated a competitor. What’s going to be difficult, though, is how you handle two networks. Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom have said that Instagram will remain an independent network, but is that really going to be their plan long-term? To manage and develop two services, with separate user accounts and followers?

Probably not. Perhaps the solution is to allow users to use their Facebook account for Instagram, and eventually Instagram-only accounts will decline as a percentage of total users until they are irrelevant. But at that point, keeping “Instagram” as a separate brand and service will be confusing for users and dilute its usefulness for Facebook users and impact for Facebook.

Facebook acquired Instagram today. Mark Zuckerberg explains why:

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

The price is $1 billion dollars in cash and stock. Let that sink in for a second.

Both Zuckerberg and Instagram say that Instagram will remain independent.

I don’t begrudge Instagram’s founders for selling their company. There’s nothing inherently wrong with acquiring businesses or selling one. What I think this shows, though, is what Silicon Valley’s venture capital-fueled motto—”build now, get big, and figure out how to make money later”—does to companies. It ends up meaning that getting acquired is the only viable means of continuing the business, or ending it. It means that the business isn’t long for this world.

Perhaps Instagram will remain more or less the same in the future. I don’t know. But what’s sad is that a company that created the best way to share photos, a unique network where what people are doing is communicated entirely through photos, and has 30 million very loyal and very active customers, couldn’t figure out a way to make enough money to sustain the business and grow it into what they wanted it to be.

Randall Stross writes for the New York Times about how different schools are introducing computer science courses intended to teach students from unrelated fields “computational thinking”:

At Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., Mark D. LeBlanc, a professor of computer science, teaches “Computing for Poets.” The only prerequisite, according to the course syllabus, is “a love of the written (and digital) word.”

Professor LeBlanc has his students learn the basics of Python, another modern language used in the software industry. But this course is tied to two courses offered by the English department on J.R.R. Tolkien and Anglo-Saxon literature. Students in the computing course put concepts to immediate use by analyzing large bodies of text. The syllabus is more like what one would find for a humanities course.

“In the class, we take on big problems,” Professor LeBlanc says. “The majority of the students are overwhelmed — ‘Where do we start?’ ” This provides opportunities to illustrate the concept of decomposition, which he describes as “breaking a large problem into small manageable problems.”

I love that, and I love the trend toward trying to teach people who aren’t going to necessarily develop software for their occupation how to think like programmers do. The sort of things you learn—breaking a larger problem down into smaller problems, thinking very precisely and step-by-step, thinking about things as a system—are skills that are widely applicable and useful. It teaches you how to analyze a problem, how to move from “we want this accomplished” to “to accomplish this, we are going to break it down into these pieces,” and it teaches you how to see how systems work. Both are incredibly powerful.

I’m not sure that everyone needs to know how to program, but I absolutely believe that people are better off when they’re exposed to it and the kind of thinking it requires. Moreover, it is only growing more important for people to have a good idea of how software works, because more and more things are being replaced by software. It’s important that most people move from understanding software as some kind of magic created by shamans that, if given the right incantations, does what they want, to having a good idea of what it’s doing. If we don’t begin to fix that, we’re going to allow a very large technical divide to develop between people who can work with software and people who can’t, and that’s going to lock out a huge number of people from the benefits of our future economy.

Michael Schechter points out that because SimpleNote now has a URL scheme, users can send selected text from Instapaper to SimpleNote.

This is great. I routinely read articles in Instapaper and come up with a specific idea to write about on TightWind based on it—but by the time I post it, I’ve usually forgotten what my thought was. I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time.

(Via Shawn Blanc.)

Horace Dediu analyzes Charles Arthur’s report that Android has only generate $2.5 billion of revenue since 2008:

My take is that it’s not a bad business. But it’s also not a great one. As long as there is exponential growth in units, Android will improve its position inside Google relative to iOS. But from Google’s perspective, iOS is today a bigger business. And iOS is not standing still. It’s growing not only in terms of units but in revenue per unit.

Dediu figures that Google only makes about $3.50 per Android device sold over its lifetime, and that revenue per device has decreased since 2009. As usual, outstanding work by Horace.

Mike Davidson:

The anger about the financial side of Readability seems to come from the opinion that the company is “keeping publishers’ money” unless they sign up, but I guess I look at it differently: I don’t think it is the publishers’ money. I think it is Readability’s money. Readability invests the time and resources into developing their service and they are the ones who physically get users to pay a subscription fee. It’s hard to get users to pay for content and they are the ones who are actually doing it. They realize that the popularity of their service is a direct result of content creators’ efforts so they are voluntarily redistributing 70% of it back to publishers in the only way it is feasible to: based on pageviews from publishers who register themselves.

Very measured take from Davidson.

Speaking of killing blockbusters, my friend Pat Dryburgh made a short film called The Rose Is White, and it is excellent.

Watch it, then consider that they made this film in 62 hours. 62 hours. I love short films like these, that are actually telling a story about individuals (what a concept!), because it’s something Hollywood rarely does anymore. Most movies now tend to be about something greater, some disaster or big event happening in the world or superheroes or whatever. It’s rare to see a movie now that’s simply about people, and a story about them and their otherwise normal lives. They don’t have super powers, they aren’t involved in some fantastic conspiracy or disaster or world event, they’re just people trying to live their lives.

I’m attracted to stories like this because I think these sorts of stories ultimately tell us more about ourselves and our society than big movies do. I think we learn more from the micro level in film than we do the macro.

Matt Wigham, one of Big Cartel’s co-founders:

I want to challenge you to forget about the Hollywood dream of huge rounds of funding and giant acquisitions, and instead focus on building something you’re proud of. I think you’ll find that the joy of doing something you love, and the freedom to control the vision to be uniquely yours, is worth much more.

Make something with value.

Charles Arthur:

Android generated less than $550m in revenues for Google between 2008 and the end of 2011, if figures provided by the search giant as part of a settlement offer with Oracle ahead of an expected patent and copyright infringement trial are an accurate guide.

Ouch. Last December, I speculated that Android could be contributing as little as $833m in revenue to Google over the course of a year. Google just confirmed that estimate was wildly off—Android is contributing much less than my estimate.

Remind me again, please, what Android is providing Google? Because it certainly isn’t revenue from mobile devices. They have Apple to thank for that.

Dan Abelon:

One of the most exciting trends of the early 21st century has been the explosion of hacker culture around the world. By hackers, I don’t mean people who pose security threats to computer networks. I’m referring simply to people who use technology to create useful products. For a number of reasons, the next few decades will see more hackers added to the global population than at any time in history.

What’s exciting, too, is the mindset, and that it’s becoming increasingly prevalent. The mindset is that the world is something to look at curiously, experiment with, move things around and see how they work together, and build better stuff. It doesn’t have to stay in the technology industry. It applies anywhere, and we’re all better off if there are a lot of people looking around, asking how something could be better, and then trying to make it better.

Patrick Rhone tells the story of how they designed the cover for his new book, Enough:

In coming up with the cover for enough, the layout and design team (Randy, Aaron, and I) needed to strike a balance using the same methods, questions, and strategies that  I share in the book. We needed to come up with a cover that was minimal, communicative of the ideas within, yet compelling and readable even at very small thumbnail sizes. In other words, it was as much an example of the idea of enough as any other.

Beautiful work.