Jacob Friis Saxberg

Facebook acquired Parse

To me, this is sad news as I had high hopes for Parse as the groundstone to build apps or even rewrite cluttered ones onto.

My reason to recommend services like Parse is that most apps need to be fast and utilize real time look and feel. To do that the frontend should intelligently be fed with data from the backend so that it can be shown instantly when the user requests it. With tools like Backbone most logic can be pushed to the frontend, thus the backends job is to be fast, reliable and at a bare minimum make it easy for the frontend to store and obtain data.

Since I heard about Parse I have recommended it to the startups I work with and others who would like to get into programming. I would still recommend Parse if your focus is on getting into building web or mobile apps as in that case you need a simple way to store data and should only focus on the client.

For a business I wouldn’t use Parse. Facebook is a behemoth and will most likely stick around for a very long time, but their focus isn’t Parse but to nurture their money machine, the timeline. Besides Facebook’s lack of focus on making Parse a sustainable business your app is most likely interested in social network integrations other than Facebook and as important as that is, I wouldn’t trust Facebook.

Luckily there are alternatives.

Read-later bins

I have two “read later” lists. My open chrome tabs, and /dev/null (since later never fucking happens let’s all admit it) izs

I must admit that most of my posts in Instapaper remains unread.

Proper mooring knowledge required in case of waves.

tweets about love from 1966-1973 by Susan Sontag. Found here.

Unlike taxes, however, ad-based services target lower-income and lower-education audiences because that’s where they make all of their money. To take the largest example, Google makes $30.00 ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) per year and charges about $1/click on average to advertisers. That’s 30 ads clicked per user per year. I’m certainly not clicking that many Google ads per year and neither are you. I usually know where content stops and ads begin, partly because I’ve had access to the Internet longer than others. I think ads target the same audience that Nigerian scammers do, on average;

- Why We’re Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first | philosophically by Vibhu Norby

– View on Path.

The alternative is to compete against nothing but yourself. To excel merely because the act of excelling without boundaries or incentives thrills you.

And the good news is that once you find that, you’ll always have it.

- Seth Godin