If Autonomous Vehicles… →

Benedict Evans brings up a some insightful questions for electric and autonomous vehicles becoming mainstream:

If autonomy ends accidents, removes parking and transforms what congestion looks like, then we should try to imagine changes to cities on the same scale as those that came with cars themselves. How do cities change if some or all of their parking space is now available for new needs, or dumped on the market, or moved to completely different places? Where are you willing to live if 'access to public transport' is 'anywhere' and there are no traffic jams on your commute? How willing are people to go from their home in a suburb to dinner or a bar in a city centre on a dark cold wet night if they don't have to park and an on-demand ride is the cost of a coffee? And how does law enforcement change when every passing car is watching everything?

iPhone 8 with Iris Scanner? →

Seeing sketchy rumors that iPhone 8 may have an iris scanner like the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. I'm still having a hard time seeing how that it better than a fingerprint scanner under the touch screen.

But to Samsung's credit, the most interesting part of having both a fingerprint scanner and an iris scanner is the software aspect — two tiers of security and authentication. Works great for parents who need to protect access to certain data while giving their kids freedom to play games.

A more Apple solution would be to simply let different fingerprints unlock different things instead.

Proposal: Channels for Micro.Blog

Twitter makes the assumption that when you follow a person, you want to follow all of their posts. But I don't think that's a good assumption — I follow a person because I want to follow a particular interest they post about.

How many of you guys are techies who just love to see your favorite tech personalities blow up your feeds with TV shows or football or politics that you don't care about?

I've always loved the way Pinterest was set up — the main focus is you follow a person's interests in the form of Pinterest Boards, not the person.

If micro.blog is truly meant for microblogging as opposed to being a traditional social network, then we should make it easy to follow an person's interests (i.e. an account's categories).

One possible solution is presenting interests/categories like this: @username/channel

So some examples would be:

  • @theverge/apple
  • @gruber/baseball
  • @parislemon/football
  • @amc/TheWalkingDead_EST
  • @amc/TheWalkingDead_PST
  • @espn/nba_highlights
  • @espn/warriors_news
  • @samsung/usa
  • @samsung/korea

Granted, most of those examples are with real-time live-tweeting in mind, but you get the idea.

Of course, the simplest alternative solution is to say, "just create another account", but keeping all categories under the same roof strengthens the main account. Plus, nobody likes to rebuild a following for a new account from scratch.

The idea is not to just "be better than Twitter"; I'm trying to solve the problem that following specific interests should be much more efficient than what is currently out there.

I'm embracing the idea that microblogging does not equal tweeting. And I'd argue that if microblogging is really about sharing content instead of having conversations, we should have more efficient ways of organizing what we share and how we follow it.

Cities in the Smart Car Era →

Johana Bhuyiyan at Recode, imagining how cities will evolve with self-driving cars:

Local governments will have to reimagine how cities are designed. Will roads become shared space for self-driving cars and pedestrians? Will infrastructure like traffic lights and signs need to communicate with vehicles? And since you'll be able to automatically summon your car, from a parking lot miles away, who needs a garage attached to their house? […]

And cities may look drastically different. Sidewalks could go away, as pedestrians and cars share the roads. There will be no street parking, just parking garages outside of city centers. And traffic signs and infrastructure may disappear — replaced with smaller, cheaper equipment that only needs to communicate with cars. Their drivers will be gone.