Drewbot

The Verge reports:

Arc90, the team behind Readability, is today introducing Readlists, a new website / web app that lets you create your own ebooks from your favorite articles online… The concept is simple: click “create Readlist,” paste in whichever URLs you’d like in your book, add a title and custom descriptions, and share.

You can export your book in either the near-universal ePub format, or send it directly to your Kindle. The option to send to iPhone/iPad does exactly the same thing as “Email e-book,” and seems to be there just to push Apple users in the right direction.

While I’ve been enjoying Instapaper’s similar feature for some time now, I worry about such an official, explicit, marketed product. It’s hard for the publishing industry, the people paying most of the writers whose pieces you include in your custom magazines, to view this as anything but a threat.

Watch: with a few editoral successes, sites will start attempting to lock down their content.

Of special note is article 13:

Article 13: Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:

1. Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution

2. Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation

3. Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the the honor or interests of the nation

4. Incites ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, undermines ethnic unity, or harms ethnic traditions and customs

5. Promotes evil teachings and superstitions

6. Spreads rumors, disrupts social order, and destroys societal stability

7. Promotes illicit activity, gambling, violence, or calls for the committing of crimes

8. Calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings and assemblies

9. Has other content which is forbidden by laws, administrative regulations and national regulations.

(Via Caijing English, via China Digital Times)

90wpm:

Web technology is great for many things. Replicating a native app experience is not one of them.

If you’re thinking of going with HTML5 for your company’s app, read this and think again. Great arguments from someone who seems to know their ass from a hole in the ground.

AKA: don’t judge a framework/language/technique by its demo app.

This not only applies to HTML5, but also to bridge efforts like Ruby Motion. Sure, it’s crazy simple to write an example app, but once your app grows to a practical size, and you start spelunking in the API, the benefits of the bridge becomes moot.

However: the writer’s Facebook example is poorly chosen. FB’s app is largely HTML5, and for their specific situation this makes a lot of sense.

Update: Pete Warden (who is much better qualified to address this than I) responds much more vigorously (and convincingly) against this article’s claims, especially with regard to HTML5 performance claims.

Nate St. Pierre writes:

Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”

He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”

A patent request for Facebook, filed by Abraham Lincoln in 1845.

I’ve long argued Facebook is working towards natural or timeless (for lack of better words) human interaction. That their central idea is relevant in any age should not be surprising.

(Though it is astounding Lincoln was imagining a nearly identical privacy system.)

(Via The Next Web)

Update: And it looks like a hoax! And we all fell for it… Patents, Facebook, and the Lincoln-twist. Gets ‘em every time.

Update, Part 2: The Atlantic explains it all.