See what the internet looked like on February 19th, 2011. See what it looked like ten years today for a handful of popular sites (CNN, NYT, Amazon, Apple, IMDb, GoodReads, etc.).

🌱 A small project by Ben Moren: gardening, but with emojis and less time 🌿

The non-technical parts.

How to install Mastodon.

There’s an old saw about the web that says that when the web democratized publishing, everyone should have become a writer, but instead most of us became consumers. (Nevermind that email and SMS have most people writing more in a day than their Victorian ancestors wrote in their entire lives.) There’s more than a hint of disparagement and elitism in that saying: everyone should have taken up writing, which is obviously superior to reading or watching or (gasp!) consuming. And I worry that that same sentiment creeps in when we argue the supremacy of text over image on the web. Writing is an important and valuable skill, but so are many other things. Here’s another way to think about it: over the past year, video after video has emerged showing cops shooting unarmed black people. Those videos have been shared on the web, and while they haven’t yet led to anything resembling justice for the victims, they have contributed to profound discussions around race, militarized police forces, guns, and more. They are not sufficient to bring about desperately needed social change—and there’s an argument to be made about whether they are at risk of becoming mere spectacle—but I think it would be hard to deny that they are an important element in the movement, that they have had a major impact. … I worry that the push to keep the web defined to words, while pragmatic and reasonable in many ways, may also be used to decide what stories get told, and what stories are heard. Many more people are using their tiny computers to record video and audio and take pictures than are writing; as much as I may love writing, and as much as I know that transmitting writing via cables and air is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper than transmitting video, I’m not sure I can really stand here and say that the writing is—or should be—primary. One of the design principles of the web is to pave the cowpaths: it looks to me like there are some new paths opening up, ones we may not have expected, ones that aren’t going to make many of our jobs easier. Maybe instead of putting up signs saying there are better paths elsewhere, it’s time we see where these ones take us.

The Web started out as a way to publish and share documents. It is now an operating system: a big, digital sensory apparatus that can tell you about your phone’s battery life, record and transmit your voice, manage your e-mail and your chats, and give you games to play. It can do this all at once, and with far less grand of a design than you might assume.

A directory of direct links to delete your account from web services.

This is smart, and prescient. Through this lens, a huge part of the entire mobile app phenomenon that iPhone really catalyzed is merely an impact of moving so much computing power to the edge of the mobile phone network, instead of trying to provide so many services through archaic centralized infrastructure. Put simply: Move the brains to the edge of the network, and you get great new kinds of apps. We don't know what the Angry Birds or Draw Something of the server-side web app world looks like right now, because right now there's no way for consumers to buy it.

Paul Ford: I don’t really make decisions. Instead, I pick my friends carefully. Then I go where people ask me to go; when no one needs me to go anywhere or do anything I work on longer essays that I’ll publish some day.

Which brings us back to the question: Have we reached peak Facebook? And no, we haven’t. Even if Facebook never adds another user, it will keep growing: It has become a fundamental substrate, a difficult-to-avoid component of any site or app that requires users to register—making it essential to nearly every major web innovation now and in the future. There’s a related question: Is Facebook ever going to be cool again? That’s like asking “Is the phone company cool?” The interface may not be exciting anymore, but the network is very, very cool, in the disruptively awesome way that enormous things are: volcanoes, aircraft carriers, the New Deal.

Yahoo’s misplaced focus ruined every aspect of Flickr that was ahead of the curve, and so they became behind all of them.

Instagram succeeded for many good reasons, including its design, its viral qualities, its simplicity, and the fact that its engineers focused so obsessively on making sure that it works all the time. Part of its success, no doubt, is the fact that it was just in the right place, at the right time, with the right, crowd-pleasing mix of features.

‘Once granted, all of these services are issued a token that gives unlimited access to your complete Gmail history. And that's where the danger lies.’

‘There are lots of loud, pointless headlines about companies getting money from venture capitalists or angel investors. What I’d love to see more of in 2012 (and beyond!) is headlines about how a few small successes with users are a demonstration of a small company outperforming and out-innovating the biggest companies in the tech industry by being focused and disciplined in their execution. That, actually, is my most favorite Foursquare feature.’

‘Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender.’

Why Anil favorites so much. ‘In short, favoriting or liking things for me is a performative act, but one that's accessible to me with the low threshold of a simple gesture. It's the sort of thing that can only happen online, but if I could smile at a person in the real world in a way that would radically increase the likelihood that others would smile at that person, too, then I'd be doing that all day long.’

‘This is a timeline of sexist incidents in geek communities.’

‘I’m asked sometimes for advice on building an internet presence, and I usually have to fumble for an answer ± because I haven’t pursued any particular strategy beyond the glaringly obvious: create original, relevant content repeatedly.’

This is 100% true. “Because if your website is full of assholes, it's your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don't do something about it, you're one of them.”

I should install this. “Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.”

“Tumblr2WP makes it super simple to transfer your Tumblr content to your own, self-hosted WordPress install. This tool will create a WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) file from your tumblr site which can be imported into WordPress.”

Powered by the WebKit engine, Safari offers leading performance, compatibility, and a great set of built-in web development tools.

"Let me think about that." In other words: with a glut of information, we're trying to form opinions and take action on it all just as fast as it's coming in, and we're suffering for it.

What 'the web' actually is, and why building desktop-class applications on it is not what it was built for.

On what Farmville is (not a game) and what it means (nothing good).

A stylish, simple, infographical, curt, and summarily realistic at the world in which we currently live.

I want to read this collection of articles someday, but I doubt I will.

This bookmarklet makes reading things on the web very simple and thus enjoyable by removing all of the often-useless and often-flashing worthlessness surrounding the content.

"We had an idea. Go to a place. Ask fifty people the same question. Film their responses."

What will call these new forms, these non-books, these "texts"? Hmm, that could work.