I’d like to propose a Moore’s Law for social networks. This of course is entirely unscientific, but it seems appropriate, at least anecdotally.

The life of a prominent social network doubles the life of a preceding successful social network.

When I think of Facebook, I’m struck by the weight of the service. I’m not talking about the billion+ users, almost the size of China, but the scale of the platform itself. It’s a bloated mess of options, settings, features, apps and undocumented support for all of the above. It reminds me of the SNL skit Taco Town.

Saturday Night Live - Taco Town from alyssa sarfity on Vimeo.

At its core Facebook is really a messaging and photo sharing site. That’s it. Plain and simple. That doesn’t really seem like a core feature set that’s difficult to upset but for some reason it is. So who are the biggest contenders to take on this behemoth? Certainly...

We’ll have self-guided drones delivering groceries for Amazon, self-driving cars dropping our kids off at school and self-piloted airplanes shuttling passengers around the country (isn’t this already a thing?)

Self-driving grocery carts would allow us to focus on the shopping while the cart does the steering, maybe the cart could even point us toward sales and hot deals?

While I kid about the grocery carts (though it would be handy) this is the question I often hear, Why is Google building self-driving cars? As in, what’s the point?

If you think about it, the money probably isn’t going to be made in the manufacturing and distribution of cars but in the operating system. If you think about it, Google doesn’t make money selling Android phones, they make money from manufacturers using the Android OS.

I answered a question on Quora about self-driving cars back in August, take a look.

The idea of paying for something online, reserving it at a store and then driving to the store to pick up the item seems antithesis to the modern web. With Google, Amazon and others vying for the same-day delivery space big box stores like Wal-Mart have to play catch up. And in this Wal-Mart fails miserably.

In a world that’s constantly innovating, leveraging the latest technologies to appease the masses and improving upon both costs and production time, Wal-Mart has jumped off the bandwagon and decided to walk the rest of the way home.

If Wal-Mart wants to transition to a same-day delivery system without having to build out the infrastructure, a myriad of services like Kanga or Deliverish exist to fill the delivery needs of a customer base demanding same day service.

In-store pick-up ≠ Innovation

Like Nicholas Felton I kept busy tracking the books I read, the movies I watched, the music I listened to, what I spent my money on and so on. I had grand ambitions for this data until a thought occurred to me - who gives a shit?

So I stopped collecting, well, I stopped collecting the data I had to manually track. I still use Mint and Last.fm and the services I can pull data from like Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and so on.

Individually the data from these services have little use for me from a big data perspective BUT in aggregate the potential is tremendous. Eventually we’ll see a platform that aggregates all of these service and kicks out reports ABOUT US that are much more meaningful and insightful than we have access to currently.

So what will we see? We’ll see the frequency of how we communicate with friends and family (Google Voice + Gmail). We can track when and how we consume...

Services like AirDrop and Bump have allowed phones to share data wirelessly but remained platform exclusive. So my question is why has it taken so long for sharing between Android and iPhone?

According to Engagdet, Google will release something called Copresence that will allow cross platform sharing. The app will be limited in what it can share at first and open up as the API matures.

Finally. That’s all I can say.

For more information, check out this post

I came to the realization that unless you’re actually Avinash Kaushik, you know Google Analytics just about as much as the next guy, which isn’t necessarily a lot.

At a previous job I had I began to realize amongst the “experts” that worked with GA, there were conflicting opinions as to what various dimensions and metrics, reports and custom variables meant. And when Google Analytics upgraded to Universal Analytics, an entire swath of knowledge went out the window.

Now, given there’s documentation around how the various functions and features in GA, that didn’t stop any of my colleagues to come to a solid conclusion on what one thing or another meant.

Here’s an example, I created a series of reports to pull data from a website because these reports, individually, used a methodology distinct to the area it was culling. These reports were approved by three people, my manager, my GA...

Jony Ive spoke of the new Apple Watch, “With every bone in my body I know this is an important category, and this is the right place to wear it.” While he might be correct, the watch is the most uninteresting and uninspired piece of technology since the Palm Pilot.

For a tech company as innovative and ground breaking as Apple, producing a new wearable device that looks exactly like existing wearables strikes me as mundane if not rushed. It’s like Elon Musk inventing a gas station.