Waxy.org is the sandbox of In 1992, Sabeer Bhatia posts a classified ad from his Stanford e-mail account offering his '88 Toyota Tercel for sale. In June 1996, Jack Smith mentions Hotmail for the first time in Usenet. One month later, on July 4, they publically announced the product they created. Three years and eight million users later, they sold Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. It's a good story, if you haven't read it already.
The Roots of Hotmail
Posted May 7, 2002
March 11, 2010
Danc on the release of Ribbon Hero
— turning Microsoft Office into a game, with competition against your friends
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March 10, 2010
"Play" by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman
— avatars as Russian nested dolls
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Chatroulette Map
— I think I'd rather not know, thanks
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Steamshovel Harry
— not sure how I missed this one last year, metagaming with music by Brad Sucks
El Fin Del Mundo by Alberto González Vázquez
— there's so much I love about this, I can't quantify it all
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March 9, 2010
Wired Reread, blogging the best ads from '90s-era Wired
— also, the complete SPIN archives are on Google Books
Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg perform Lazy Sunday live
— for the first time, backed by The Roots
Adam Savage's pursuit of the perfect Blade Runner gun replica
— related: his quest for the perfect replica Maltese Falcon and dodo skeleton
The Panic Status Board
— the instant feedback made work more game-like
March 8, 2010
Valve ports game library and Steam service to Mac
— Portal 2 will be released for Mac simultaneously with PC, along with "all of our future games"
Maciej Ceglowski on the discovery, loss, and rediscovery of the cure for scurvy
— fascinating story of bad science and the unintended effects of new information
March 7, 2010
8-Bit NYC, Brett Camper's videogame map of New York
— he's using Kickstarter to expand to 15 other cities worldwide
Sleep Is Death, Jason Rohrer's new conversational two-player game
— watch the slideshow for details; I just wish it was on the web instead
Obama appoints Edward Tufte to advise on stimulus transparency
— "Maybe I'll learn something."
PS22 Chorus sings Phoenix's Lisztomania
— I love how expressive they are
Echo Nest and SCHED's guide to SXSW Music
— very nicely done, uses Echo Nest's recommendation engine
GameInformer's Portal 2 exclusive cover story
— scans, since it's not on GameInformer's site yet; Valve hired the TAG: The Power of Paint team right out of Digipen
March 5, 2010
Cal Henderson on gaming probability in World of Warcraft
— he's collected 118 pets, some of which only drop 1 in 10,000 attempts
March 4, 2010
LiveJournal rewrites outbound links with affiliate codes
— looks like the regex was a bit greedy
NYT on Chinese "human-flesh search engines"
— very similar to the H+ article on the topic from last year
YouTube launches auto-captioning for all videos
— a free, automated audio transcription service based on YouTube should be viable now
OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass"
— Rube Goldberg machine built by Synn Labs in Los Angeles
Roger Ebert starts subscription service
— $4.99 for a year, goes up to $5.00 on April 1
March 2, 2010
Yelp's official response to the business extortion accusation
— nicely lays out the case against the conspiracy theories
Valve updates Portal with mysterious achievement and ARG trailhead
— radio transmissions convert into Morse code and images pointing to a telnet BBS with ASCII screenshots
The Skull of Regret
— even Pictures for Sad Children's guest comics are great
March 1, 2010
NYT's auralization of crossing the Olympic finish line
— hear the women's 1,000-meter speedskating gold medalist win by .02 of a second
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Activision shuts down 8-year King's Quest fan project
— even though Vivendi, the former IP owners, granted them a non-commercial license
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3:21 PM
I also should have mentioned that the reason I'm so interested in this right now is because I'm reading Po Bronson's Nudist On The Late Shift. It feels like it was written a decade ago.
4:04 PM
Wasn't it? Oh yeah, that's right. Time just sped up.