Twitter has modified its bird logo and cemented it as the solid logo and visual brand for the company:

Starting today you’ll begin to notice a simplified Twitter bird. From now on, this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter. (Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter.) There’s no longer a need for text, bubbled typefaces, or a lowercase “t” to represent Twitter.

This is definitely a huge improvement. The new bird feels like it’s flying.

Chris Ziegler has written an epic about the rise and fall of Palm, through its last hurrah:

Thirty-one.

That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract.

Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore.

This is a must read.

Samsung’s new Chromebox (which runs Google’s ChromeOS) has a familiar form factor. But all small computers are built with circular openings in the bottom, right? It’s a natural method of construction. How else would you build such a thing?

Shortly after returning to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs shared his thoughts about the future of the company with attendees at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Here’s part of his speech (which I transcribed), where he clearly describes “the cloud” fifteen years before it would arrive. This is the definition of vision:

Let me describe the world I live in. About 8 years ago, we had high speed networking connected to our now-obsolete NeXT hardware … and because we were using NFS, we were able to take all of our personal data–our home directories, we call them–off of our local machines, and put them on a server. And the software made that completely transparent, and because the server had a lot of ram on it, in some cases it was faster to get stuff off the server than off your local hard disk because in some cases it would be cached in the ram of the server, if it was in popular use.

But...

By 2008, SpaceX had launched three rockets. They all failed to make it into orbit. Shortly after the third failure, Elon Musk was interviewed by Wired Magazine’s Carl Hoffman:

Wired.com: At the end of the day you’re still zero for three; you have so far failed to put a rocket into orbit.

Musk: We haven’t gotten into orbit, true, but we’ve made considerable progress. If it’s an all-or-nothing proposition then we’ve failed. But it’s not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.

Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?

Musk: Do I sound optimistic?

Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.

Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.

Yesterday, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International...

In early 1997, an ambitious healthcare startup called Dr. Koop, which was founded by former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, went online. It was during the era when internet portals reigned, and the company spent its first year struggling to gain exposure. By the end of 1997, with no traction and zero revenue, it was running out of money.

On April 6th, 1998, the company closed a respectable $1M Series A financing. It wasn’t enough, apparently, because just 22 days later, it closed another $6.8M Series B round. By the end of 1998, Dr. Koop had taken about $8 million in financing, made just $43,000 in revenue, and suffered a net loss of $8.997 million.

Nine months after the series B money was in the bank, and in desperate need of more cash, the company raised another $3.5M. It was January of 1999, at the height of one of the largest valuation bubbles in history, and Dr. Koop was...

Yahoo has just announced Axis, a browser extension thing and mobile app that “redefines what it means to search and browse the Web [sic].”

• A group of people at Yahoo, including engineers, designers, and product managers had to conceive of, design, and build this product, which works basically identically to browser toolbars from the early 2000’s. It does have a sync feature, but it requires that you use a new custom, dedicated browser on your mobile device.

• A group of people at Yahoo had to make the marketing website, which describes the product ambiguously and does not actually contain any real screenshots or information.

• A group of people had to write, design, direct, and edit the advertisement on that marketing website. It’s an advertisement of a man punching 15-foot-tall transparent glass websites, followed by a giant pepper tree growing out of cement in an empty...

This morning, I received a LinkedIn message from a man named James Holm, who identified himself as a corporate recruiter with Weyland Industries. Weyland is the corporation that funded the the Prometheus project in the upcoming Ridley Scott movie of the same name.

This message was clearly tailored specifically for me, and I think it’s pretty awesome. But it does raise some interesting questions about the divide between so-called viral marketing and reality. Mr. Holm has a complete profile on LinkedIn which documents his career. But he does not exist.

Because these kinds of campaigns have to exploit existing reality, marketers have to find places where the benefit of advertising revenue for a distribution, content, or platform company (like LinkedIn) outweighs the cost to that company of sacrificing user trust in their experience. In this case, LinkedIn was probably paid a bundle...

“It’s almost a mathematical impossibility to imagine that, out of the thousands of things for sale on a given day, the most attractively priced is the one being sold by a knowledgeable seller (company insiders) to a less-knowledgeable buyer (investors).”

WARREN BUFFETT

Congratulations to $FB.

In a blog post today announcing Twitter’s new tailored suggestions system is something that has left me shocked: an overt admission by Twitter that it is transparently tracking your movements around the web. Othman Laraki, on the Twitter blog:

These tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies — including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube — do when they’re integrated into websites. By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.

Basically, every time you visit a site that has a follow button, a “tweet this” button, or a hovercard, Twitter is recording...