Author: Connor Tomas O’Brien

Yesterday, Twitter announced #Music, their music discovery platform. It looks beautiful, but conceptually it’s a bit of a mess. (The Verge have a good #Music hands-on, but the idea is that #Music crawls Twitter for links to songs in order to calculate which artists and tracks are ‘trending’ on the network, then allows you to play through those…

or “Why The Best Symbol is the One That Gets the Job Done”   For at least the better part of a decade, tech bloggers and designers have batted blog posts back and forth discussing the necessity of replacing the old floppy disk “save” icon with something more “timeless”. Basically, the issue boils down to the fact…

In late 2011, I wrote a piece arguing that Google operated as an applied research lab, with employees encouraged to pursue interesting ideas as ends-in-themselves. Over the past decade, Google’s search engine has basically functioned as a cash cow, allowing the company to develop two freely-distributed operating systems, self-driving cars, augmented reality glasses, and a…