Everpix and Everyone

A bummer of a coincidence from yesterday: after using Everpix for several months and enjoying it immensely, I decided to pony up for the US$49 annual fee. Hours later, I happened to read that Everpix is shutting down. A note signed by the Everpix team said: “We were unable to secure sufficient funding in order to properly scale the business, and our endeavors to find a new home for Everpix did not come to pass. At this point, we have no other options but to discontinue the service.”

Possibly losing forty-nine dollars doesn’t bother me so much, since Everpix promises to refund all of its subscribers (they hope to do this by 15 Dec). It’s the fact that Everpix was a terrific product that in many ways fit the bill for what I think a modern photo experience should be: an inexhaustible storage locker in the cloud that effortlessly backs up my photos from every source.

Facebook, Twitter, Path, Instagram, my phone’s camera roll, even pics that people sent to me via MMS; Everpix comprehensively backed up all of these sources to the Web and made them navigable through an intelligently self-organizing and elegantly designed web interface. It was really a pleasure to use, especially its Flashback feature, which would send me daily emails to remind me of photos taken a year or two ion the past.

While I have no inside knowledge of what went wrong with Everpix (the writing was on the wall for a long while, apparently, and The Verge has a lengthy account of the wind-down), I have some guesses.

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DP Review First Impressions of Nikon Df

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Nikon’s new hotness is a full-frame digital camera styled in a flagrantly retro fashion. It looks fantastic, if you ask me, a welcome break from the Nike sneaker-esque styling of digital SLRs from the past decade-plus.

Nikon Df Front
Nikon Df Top

On the other hand, DP Review, in its first impressions of the camera, has some thoughtful comments about the practicality of this nostalgic sensibility.

“As far as I can see there are no unequivocally good reasons, either from an engineering or ergonomic point of view, for the Nikon Df to look like an over-sized [Nikon] F3… My worry about the Df is that Nikon might have gone too far backwards for the sake of cosmetic appeal, without really adding any practical benefit to the shooting experience… from a cold, hard practical point of view, I can’t shake the feeling that the Df is a little bit… silly.”

Read full DP Review piece here. There are also some good pictures at The Verge.

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Steven Soderbergh on His Favorite Bond Film

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The prolific director writes about his affection for “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”:

“For me there’s no question that cinematically ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ is the best Bond film and the only one worth watching repeatedly for reasons other than pure entertainment (certainly it’’s the only Bond film I look at and think: I’m stealing that shit). It’s like [director] Peter Hunt (who cut the first five Bond films) took all the ideas of the French new wave and blended them with Eisenstein in a Cuisinart to create a grammar that still tops today’s how-fast-can-you-cut aesthetic.”

I agree, it’s a terrific film, though I’m not sure it would edge out “From Russia, with Love,” for me as the most interesting installment in the franchise. Read full article here.

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The Guardian’s “NSA Files Decoded” and Multimedia Journalism

A new multimedia extravaganza from The Guardian takes an in-depth look at what Edward Snowden’s leaks “mean for you.” It comes replete with plenty of high quality video, a gorgeous custom page layout, and lots of doodads throughout. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that it’s The Guardian’s volley in the “Snowfall” game first served up by my former colleagues at The New York Times.

I’m pretty ambivalent about this new strain of multimedia journalism. As well executed as these early examples are, both this and “Snowfall” clearly cross the line from utilitarian storytelling to superfluous bells and whistles. Also, in my own personal, decidedly unscientific polling, of all the people I’ve met who marvel at “Snowfall,” no one has ever told me that they actually read it. (That’s actually not true; someone told me they did read it, but then again that person has three newspapers delivered to her doorstep every morning, so I would say she’s an outlier.) I suspect the same thing will be true of “NSA Files Decoded.” These kinds of things, I think, are meant to be marveled at more than they are meant to be read.

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FAQs on the FAA’s Relaxation of Personal Electronic Device Usage on Flights

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

From this press release today:

“The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Michael Huerta today announced that the FAA has determined that airlines can safely expand passenger use of Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) during all phases of flight, and is immediately providing the airlines with implementation guidance. ”

It shows you how established the agency’s obstinacy had become that the introduction of this completely obvious bit of common sense had to be accompanied by a press release. Practically speaking, what this means is that airlines must first prove that they can “safely handle radio interference from portable electronics” before passengers can start openly admitting that they’re not turning off their tablets, phones and laptops when they’re told to. Read the frequently asked questions here.

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Lou Reed, R.I.P.

Ratings

5 of 5 stars
What’s this?

I don’t have a great Lou Reed story, though I wish I did. I saw him around downtown Manhattan a few times, but never talked to him. The closest I really ever got to him was through his music. When I was fourteen or fifteen and living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., my family took a trip to New York. I was already in love with the city at that time, and I remember stopping by an open air market — probably the one on Broadway near Fourth St — and bought this album:

The Velvet Underground

Actually I bought it on tape, which tells you how old I am. I think I was a dollar short of the cost, but the vendor let me have it anyway, almost like an elder hipster passing along an heirloom to a wannabe hipster.

It didn’t change my life the way rock albums are supposed to do, but I did fall deeply in love with it, listening to it constantly for years. It was a big part of that era of my life, as were the other Velvet Underground albums and many of Reed’s solo albums. Thanks, Lou.

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ThinkUp Transforms

Since leaving Etsy over the summer I’ve had the good fortune of working on lots and lots of interesting things with lots of interesting people. At some point, I will provide a more thorough accounting of what that stuff is, but one of the best projects on my plate is helping my friends Anil Dash and Gina Trapani with their new company ThinkUp.

ThinkUp was actually an app before it was a company. In fact, you can download the open source version right now, which you can install on your own server. Even with that old school distribution model for Web software, the product has already gained a devoted following of tens of thousands of users. Now Gina and Anil are transforming it into a centrally hosted service, easy enough for everyone to use without having to wrestle with the complexity of running your own server.

What is ThinkUp? Anil and Gina answer that question in great detail here and here, but I like to think of it as an insight engine for your social network activity. It looks at your postings and returns a myriad of fascinating statistics and revelations about the who, what, where, when, why and how of your tweets and updates. Aside from being really smart, it’s also loads of fun.

Gina and Anil’s ambition is not just to transform ThinkUp into a much easier to use, much more robust product, but also to build a new company in the process — a different kind of company. Like any startup, they want to achieve hockey stick growth, but they also want to do that in the framework of “a great tech company that’s focused on doing the right thing for our users, our community, and the Web.” They are just as proud of the list of privacy-compromising features that ThinkUp doesn’t engage in as what the software does do.

To pull this off, they are in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign that will fuel this journey. I encourage you to read all about it on the campaign page to get a sense of how unique their mission is, and join the campaign.

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