…there’s more to building a great product than just addressing pain points. Pain points make for good features, but passion makes for good (and hopefully great) products. flickr helped people who loved photos showcase their photos; twitter helps people follow things they care about. Here’s a good post from TechCrunch on how not all products need to be painkillers. There is no greater pleasure than the absence of pain, but…

Yahoo is like your yuppie friend who takes up triathlons. He just keeps spending money on fancy gear, thinking that it will make him them competitive. But then the gear just sits in the garage for years until his wife finally makes him sell it on Craigslist. Yahoo’s terrible track record with acquisitions.

Hot on the heels of my earlier post, the New York Times talks about the Economist, and how it’s been one of the only news magazines to grow in the past few years. The Economist Tends Its Sophisticate Garden By JEREMY W. PETERS Published: August 8, 2010 The Economist, a bible of world news with a heavy dose of business, seeks readers who see themselves moving up in the world. More…

From my perspective, United Airlines had two things going for it: membership in Star Alliance, and that lovely arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue that they play as you board. Things got better when they aligned themselves with US Airways (America West, re-branded). I had received consistently good service from America West, and that seems to have carried over through the various mergers and bankruptcies. Plus, it’s nice to be able to add a long connection in Vegas, so you can play a few hands on the way out of California.

The Economist launched a new version of their homepage a couple weeks ago. Their designers had an interesting challenge – taking a premium, text heavy weekly and making it work on a web obsessed with the visual, social, and real-time. They loosened the paywall, added more daily content updates, and moved the site away from being simply an online reflection of their print publication. You can read a description of the new design on their site.

It’s been a long week. Starbucks finally announced my main project. I’ve been juggling calls with both India and California, taking care of the dog-in-law, and not sleeping much. We’re building a new kind of web UI on top of a lot of complicated technology platforms (location detection, a content management system, etc.). It’s a fun change from my last two prducts (Yahoo! Toolbar and My Yahoo!), which both required engineering rebuilds of existing products with big audiences.

Robert Scoble had a great post yesterday about how location-based services will integrate to automatically provide you with help and useful information as you move around. He got a lot of it right, but my main concerns are with his beliefs that: users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don’t mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone – this is consistent with Scoble’s belief in the end of privacy carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web – they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so – why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?

Mendoza line. The figurative boundary in the batting averages between those batters hitting above and below .215. It is named for shortstop Mario Mendoza whose career (1974-1982) batting average for the Pirates, Mariners and Rangers was .215. The figurative boundary in the batting averages between those batters hitting above and below .200. “When a struggling hitter pulls his average above .200, he has crossed the Mendoza Line.” (Sports Illustrated, Sept.

To my parents, New York is - or at least was - a dirty, crowded, and dangerous place. They like to tell stories about their trip there as newlyweds in the early 70’s. We returned there twice as a family, although I never quite understood why. It was a tough place to take a suburban family for a road trip, especially one from Toronto. The New York that I know is completely different from that of my parents.

Now that the f8 keynote has passed, everyone is wondering why Facebook didn’t launch a check-in feature. The reality is that check-ins are just a hack – a workaround for the fact that smart phones are still pretty dumb when it comes to location – at least in terms of the features that App developers can freely use. Smarter devices, near-field communication (NFC), better applications and more savvy advertisers are going to revolutionize how we go about our daily business.