What We’re Reading Today
Business Insider featured a tour of Facebook’s data centers, which are not only energy efficient, but also possibly the set of a sci-fi film. Seeing this made me realize I know nothing about how major websites actually work. I kind of thought that Facebook just happened in the cloud, stupidly not realizing that it involved countless walls of alien tanning beds.
Can we take a moment to appreciate this picture, provided by The Open Compute Project? The way Mark Zuckerberg’s smiling face is Photoshopped in front of the walls of cryogenically frozen martians perfectly follows the rule of thirds. Wow.
Artsy, designery people rejoice – Adobe is releasing a bunch of new iPad apps. Color Lava is a bit lame, just letting you make color palettes. Nav lets you use CS5 with your iPad as a sort of Wacom tablet. But the one garnering the most excitement is the awkwardly-named Eazel, which lets you export paintings in any size, features a five-finger touch interface and is apparently going to make Sketchbook Pro as irrelevant as the Kindle (ooh, burn). Too bad I don’t have CS5.
This wine that uses Pantone colors to identify grape varietals is pretty cool. (via The Dieline)
This article in The New York Times points out that literary journals seem to be thriving because they often follow the same business model of online ventures: small staff, tight budget and niche audience. At the end it consents that thriving is all relative with a depressing quote from The Rumpus founder, Stephen Elliot, “No one has ever been able to make a good living writing or publishing literary fiction.” Moral of the story: All writers should go into marketing. (Just kidding. Kind of.)
This photo series, A Girl in Her Room, by Rania Matar is captivating. She photographed dozens of teenaged girls from the U.S. and the middle east in their bedrooms. There are a surprising amount of porn star posters and teddy bears.
