Russian spacecraft returns to Earth with most of its furry crew dead

You have to love an article with quotes such as “the newts were fine” and “flying pet store of death”.

The One-Person Product

This write-up by Tumblr’s first employee is also quite good. Sounds like good times were had by all.

High Scalability - The Tumblr Architecture Yahoo Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars

Another look at Tumblr’s mind-boggling infrastructure requirements and their approach to scaling (here is the last one). Interesting how they went with Scala to rework the platform driving the core of the business. Admittedly, my initial reaction to seeing the words JVM or Java was to recoil in fear and say “Eeeewwwww”, but hard to fault the reasons. Of course, I’m sure I’d change my tune if I had a mega-scaling problem with my site, too.

Tumblr Now Yahooized

Tumblr:

Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.

If it had been Facebook or Google, I’d be running for the exits right now. Good job to Tumblr for not picking one of… those!

JC Penney Fires Ron Johnson, Former Apple Retail Chief

He went from a retail chain selling high-quality, highly desirable merchandise to a chain selling lower-end, commoditized merchandise. No matter how nice the experience might have been changed to be, the customer base is frugal enough where the prices are paramount. I’m not surprised at all that this didn’t work, though I wanted it to.

What It's Like to Die

Within the unlucky club of people who were clinically dead at some point, it’s interesting that their stories seem to have wildly different experiences of death. Of the ones I’ve read, though, the one recurring trend is that they all see life differently afterwards. It’s fascinating how mortality affects people.

Mailbox Bought by Dropbox

Now we know for sure that Dropbox is building an email platform.

“Hold your horses”, you might say, “Mailbox depends entirely on Gmail!” Of course it does. For now. Remember that Dropbox is a fiercely independent company, rejecting buyouts from big names and dedicated to building a great product. On top of that, they are the cloud service provider with the greatest track record - they’ve made the foundation of their business on it, unlike Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

They’ll definitely want their own email platform, they have the infrastructure to do it, the capabilities to make the sync experience great, and now with the Mailbox team the proven ability to make a great user experience. They have just about everything they need to take on the world here - and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Google Reader Shuts Down this Canada Day

The Google Blog:

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

If you’ve got some cash and time, the best alternative would be to get setup with Fever, a self-hosted RSS service. You can use NearlyFreeSpeech.net to get a cheap, minimal bandwidth hosting provider. You might, however, instead be able to use the Windows Azure web sites feature to set it up for free (the method I’ll be trying first). You wouldn’t think that’d work, but WordPress works fine there.

Otherwise, we’ll wait for a startup to replace it. I’d expect to see it from somewhere like the Readability group, or maybe one of App.net’s random cloud services. Or, if everyone you know uses Tumblr, just use that.

Startups With Balls: Outbox

The postal service: it is an incredible organism that takes physical objects from one location daily and uses a massive logistics system to deliver it to another location within a few days.

Outbox: grabs these physical objects from one location every other day and uses what will likely be a massive logistics system to deliver it to the internet within the same day.

They won’t be “recreating” the postal system from a functional perspective - but they sure as hell plan on building its evil twin. Remember as well that the postal service requires massive amounts of money and infrastructure that have traditionally required governments to (not) fund - Outbox thinks they can do this by getting $5 a month from each person using it. Gutsy move.