Google DNS Will Probably Be Fine, Guys

I have a feeling Kottke’s analysis is pretty spot-on: every tenth of a second longer a site takes to load, Google is losing revenue from ads. That might seem nuts to you or I, but Google isn’t exactly in the same ballpark, scale-wise, the stuff you and I work on:

Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

For the Google behemoth .5 seconds is a serious problem, and with Google DNS they’re trying to whittle that down as much as possible. Do I trust them? Not really. Do I need to? Not really. I can change my DNS whenever I want, and so can you, and Google’s DNS privacy policy seems, as Gruber put it, utterly reasonable.

2d Boy: Results of the “Pay-What-You-Want” World of Goo Sale

Great detail and some analysis from 2d boy. Points of interest:

  • A not-insignificant portion of purchases were for less than 30 cents, which PayPal took all of.
  • There are a lot of charts and stuff in the post, I love them for the amount of detail they’ve gone into and shared with the rest of us.
  • They say 57,000 copies at about 2.03 per copy. By my math, that’s $115,710, not counting PayPal fees OR the spike in their Steam (+40%) and WiiWare (+9%) sales over the same period. Not a bad chunk of change.
  • They’ve extended the sale to October 25th. If you haven’t bought it yet, the only way to redeem yourself is to do so now, and pay more than $2.03.

Overall, sounds like a win for everybody.

Preliminary Notes on Apple’s Recent “It’s Only Rock and Roll” Music Event

In no particular order:

  • App recommendations: Wholly necessary, but we aren’t out of the woods yet regarding App Store curation. I bet there’s a good deal of money to be made just doing that: Curating collections of apps. Boing Boing got huge during the blog boom for curating other blogs, why wouldn’t it work for applications on a still-new platform? Someone’s going to get rich digging down on serious Touch applications.

  • iPod Touch No camera, no mention of 3GS-type speed bump. Kinda got the shaft. I can’t think of a single good reason for not including a camera that doesn’t involve trying to trick people into buying a Nano. Surely they aren’t afraid a (not that great) camera is going to steer fence-sitters from the iPhone to the Touch? Update: It’s now come out that the 8gb ($199) iPod Touch has the older, slightly slower, hardware, and all the others in the Touch line have the upgraded “3GS” innards. You’ll notice on the “Compare iPod Models” page on Apple’s site, the 8gb is sectioned off from his higher-capcity and speedier brothers.

  • iTunes 9 Now with more bloat and cumbersome, non-portable, versions of the extra features that people who illegally download albums already get in more useful formats. Still a 32-bit Carbon app. Gruber was right about WebKit.

Froot Loops: Now A “Smart Choice”

The New York Times reporting on a new pip appearing on cereals and other glop made by General Mills, Kellogg’s, etc. Here’s a great example of WHY we’re all so fucking fat:

She said the program was also influenced by research into consumer behavior. That research showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them.

Gee, do you think? Telling people that your cereal is going to contribute to their ever-growing man-tits won’t help sales? Incredible.