The first edition of the Read & Trust newsletter is coming out tomorrow, and I’m excited for it.

Each week, subscribers will receive a new long-form article from one of R&T’s writers—an article written exclusively for newsletter subscribers. $5 a month gets access. That’s pretty neat.

I’ve seen who’s scheduled to write, and I can’t wait to get this started. It’s going to be fantastic.

This is Color’s business model:

Advertising through the app. We’re going to build a intelligent system that allows businesses to participate with their customers. So when you walk into a restaurant and you use Color, and they’re also customers through a self-service Web interface — or actually a self-service iPad interface — every time you walk into the restaurant, your [first] name will show up with your picture. The maitre d’ or receptionist will know who you are, they’ll be able to welcome you, they’ll know the last time you were here, they’ll be able to see pictures if you took them here. They’ll be able to provide you better service than they’ve ever before, that’s going to drive up their revenue by increasing repeat business because we always want to go back where we feel welcome.

Let’s set aside privacy objections for a moment here.

This depends on a large, active user-base to work. A restaurant, or some other company, would only pay for this sort of service if a large number of their customers use the application, or would possibly use it. If they don’t, or can’t be encouraged to, there’s not much benefit.

But acquiring a large user-base requires Color to be a useful service all on its own, and at this point, it isn’t. There’s nothing for me to do with Color right now because for me to benefit from it, a large number of people around me need to be using it, too. There’s no immediate benefit to using Color, which makes it very difficult for the service to take off.

Instagram is immediately useful because users enjoyed taking photos and applying filters to them, whether they had any friends using the service or not. That stickiness gave Instagram the ability to gather users, because people didn’t stop using it after using it for the first time.

There is no equivalent feature in Color. It’s entirely dependent on others using it and those users being around you. It’s puzzling why Nguyen thinks Color will be the social network that makes this business model a reality when they don’t seem to even have a way of building up a respectable user-base.

Justin Williams speculates about an Android-powered Amazon tablet:

It is entirely possible that Amazon is building their own, full-featured tablet platform but cutting Google out of the equation entirely, save for it being powered by Android at its core. The question is with Amazon handling movies, music, books and apps, would Google be willing to an Android powered Amazon tablet to run the Google apps such as. My first inclination is to say yes given that 96% of Google’s present revenue is from advertising, though they have been wanting to make inroads into selling more content with YouTube, the forthcoming Google Music, and its own bookstore.

It makes sense that this is what Amazon wants to do: make their own end-to-end platform. They have the most successful ebook store, a fantastic music store, and an increasingly good video store, too. The only other company in as good a position to build a complete mobile platform is Apple. The only kind of content they are missing right now for a potential mobile platform is applications, and they’re certainly working on that with their App Store—err, Appstore.

There are many good reasons for Amazon to enter the mobile market. Currently, Amazon is a content supplier for other people’s platforms—ebooks and music—an important and lucrative role, but also quite risky and unexciting. Apple and Google are defining the future of mobile devices are, what they do and what they look like, while Amazon’s selling books and music on their devices. Not only could Google or Apple—especially Apple—cut them out of their platform and ruin their business, but worse, Amazon’s just a bit player. They’re not defining the future of computing devices, they’re just selling wares.

Amazon has greater ambitions than merely selling stuff. They want to fill that same role, and it makes good business sense for them to do so. Since Apple and Google are defining the future of mobile devices, making it in their image, they are also inherently carving out a role for themselves. Apple isn’t just selling great mobile devices; they’re saying software, and the experience created by the integration of fantastic software and hardware, are what’s important for these new kinds of devices. Conveniently, Apple’s unique talent, that no other company has been able to match, is an obsession with making incredibly well-designed hardware and software that fit together beautifully. If that’s what consumers expect from mobile devices, Apple has a significant opportunity to sell a lot of devices. And make a lot of money.

That’s why being the industry innovator—the company that defines what the industry is—is so important. And Amazon wants to fill that role, and they have the opportunity to do so. Think about it; they have the media no one else besides Apple has, they have good industrial designers, and they have a ready-built operating system, Android, to power their devices. They would be crazy not to enter the mobile devices market: they have the potential to use Google’s own operating system to marginalize them.

Google, of course, wouldn’t be powerless; they would still control Android, but they would almost certainly be in a lesser position than they would like to be. Google wants to build Android into a full platform, with as much media choices as iOS, but Amazon may beat them to it.

Read & Trust is launching a weekly newsletter. Aaron Mahnke describes it like this:

Looking forward, however, it’s clear that we can do more. So beginning in April, Read & Trust will be launching a weekly email newsletter that will deliver exclusive, long-form content to our subscribers. Each week, one of the many talented writers in our network will craft a post built around a monthly theme (topics such as creativity, beverages, workflows, etc) that will be exclusive to Read & Trust. For just $5 each month, you’ll receive a weekly, quality piece in your inbox that you won’t find anywhere else.

I’m excited to be a part of this.

Stephen Hackett is selling a really neat t-shirt to support St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and the fantastic work they do:

St. Jude treats patients without regard of their ability to pay. That’s pretty cool. To put this into perspective, Josiah’s medical bills — after just 6 months — totaled almost a million dollars. After a year, he was at just over $2 million. Just stop and think about that. It’s pretty mind-boggling. Needless to say, St. Jude is an unbelievable blessing to families with children affected by diseases like Josiah’s.

He’s donating 100 percent of the money made to St. Jude.

What a great idea and what a great thing to support.

Jack Dorsey isn’t pursuing the ephemeral. He’s trying to do something worth doing:

One recent town-square meeting, in fact, was devoted to the aesthetic virtues of the Golden Gate Bridge. “We’re the only payments company in the world that’s concerned with design,” the Prada-clad Dorsey begins. He shows a dramatic photo of the bridge taken from atop one of its towers. “This is what I want to build. This is classy. This is inspiring. This is limitless. Every single aspect of this is gorgeous. . . . So your homework this weekend is to cross this bridge, think about that, and also think about how we take those lessons into doing what we do, which is carry every single transaction in the world.”

He started a company that, fundamentally, does sale transactions, yet he’s talking about the Golden Gate Bridge as not just art—but something at once eternally beautiful and elegant, and perfectly functional, and that that’s what he wants to achieve.

This is what business, what creating, is about. Profit is not the goal, but a necessary condition for what you are trying to achieve. That is the purpose.

Ryan Lawler thinks Netflix is, in part, pursuing original TV shows to gain leverage over networks in content negotiations:

By bidding on an original show like House of Cards, Netflix is sending a message to the cable networks and distributors: “If you won’t license shows to us, we’ll cut our own deals for the shows you want.” In the same way that a shrewd end-around with indie studios gave it access to an Oscar-winning movie before anyone one else, Netflix is going to TV producers directly and cutting out the networks they’ve previously depended on to fund their shows. And, as Kafka points out, that could give it some leverage as it strikes future network deals.

That certainly makes sense; networks want to use Netflix as a dumping ground for old and second-rate content:

The prevailing feeling among the studio managers I spoke with is that Netflix’s streaming service will be a good outlet for the least-valuable material. If they have their way, Netflix will be the Internet equivalent of a swap meet, where only the most dated and least popular titles are available. The studios are betting that eventually people will get bored with the service.

Gaining their own original content—good original content—could do three things: first, as Lawler argues, it could give them leverage in negotiations with networks for top-tier content; second, it could make Netflix not just a place for consumers to watch old material, but a must-have channel for new, original TV shows, like HBO or AMC, which would put pressure on networks to cut deals with them to distribute their content; and three, it could justify higher subscription prices, which may be necessary to keep their current content and add new movies and TV shows at higher prices.

That’s all good for Netflix, and they are in a unique position to own a TV series. Netflix is available on game systems, DVD players, televisions, Internet media boxes like the Apple TV and Boxee Box, and mobile devices. That’s a huge potential for distribution and makes it relatively easy for consumers to get it.

It’s a good reason why it would be more difficult for Apple to pull off something similar—to watch iTunes on your TV, you need an Apple TV or a Mac connected to your TV. Netflix has the means of distributing a TV show like this. It’s a brilliant move.

Panic is donating 100% of today’s sales to relief efforts in Japan:

You might be sick of it — being told to donate to a charity. If you’re like me, donating to a charity is an abstract, disconnected affair. So, we thought we’d make it a little more tangible, allowing you to help Japan directly while getting Panic software with one swift click.

Panic will donate 100% of today’s proceeds directly to the Japanese relief effort.

If you’ve been thinking about buying one of Panic’s great applications—like Coda or Transmit—today would be a great day to do it.

Wil Shipley:

But I don’t take Twitter’s statement at face value. Honestly, I think what it means is, “Hey, guy, we’ve been providing a free service for five years, and now we need to make money off it. And if that involves us selling advertising on the clients instead of you doing so, well, you’re going to get hurt.”

That’s a hard thing to hear for developers who have written Twitter clients. Some of these guys are my friends, and my heart goes out to them, it does. But, seriously, the value of Twitter is that it’s a huge network of people who are posting all kinds of interesting things. If you write a client that accesses this data for free, and then you find a way to monetize your client (ads or sales), well, you have to expect maybe Twitter is going to want this money, right?

Ben Brooks:

The fragility of free is a catchy term that describes what happens when the free money runs out. Or — perhaps more accurately — when the investors/founders/venture capitalists run out of cash, or patience, or both. Because at some point Twitter and all other companies have to make the move from ‘charity’ to ‘business’ — or, put another way, they have to make the move from spending tons of money to making slightly more money than they spend.

Exactly right. Ben argues that rather than go the free route, build a user-base and “figure out how to make money later,” companies should just charge from the beginning. This makes sense for a number of, if not most, services—it makes the service stable for users and the company, and that’s good for everyone.

Ben applies this to Twitter, saying the recent quickbar controversy in their Twitter for iPhone app is due to their lack of a business model, and that rather than deal with the quickbar or a timeline full of advertisements, he would rather just pay for the service.

He certainly diagnoses the problem correctly—Twitter never knew how they were going to make money (that is, be a business), and now they are offending users by doing a number of unsavory things. The solution for Twitter, though, wouldn’t be to charge for the service from the beginning—Twitter never would have taken off if they did. You could argue that there isn’t anything wrong with that, because the people worth following would pay and it’d eliminate spammers and people on the border of it, but that would be a very different service than what we’re using now and love to use. We wouldn’t be using Twitter as a means of coordinating events or meetups; we wouldn’t be hearing details about news events moments after they happen, things the regular media has no way of reporting on until days after the event; and, to the extent Facebook and Twitter have been used to organize protests against the Iranian government and the Mubarak regime, Twitter would have no role in that whatever.

Twitter’s value lies in it being a communication utility, where anyone and everyone can quickly communicate information. That’s incredibly powerful, and it simply couldn’t exist if it wasn’t a free service. This doesn’t mean the strategy Twitter pursued is correct; rather, it means their error was in being so cavalier about a business model. They assumed if they reached a critical mass of users, turning it into a profitable business would be easy—and they’ve discovered that isn’t really true. It takes just as much thinking as building the actual product does.

They need to get creative, and an overlay of trends and advertisements in a first-party Twitter client isn’t it. Foursquare, a dramatically less useful service compared to Twitter, is taking their business model very seriously. It’s integrated into the service’s very concept. Allowing businesses to provide deals for users who check-in is the first step, but imagine the potential.

What if Foursquare allows you to save restaurants you want to try into your Foursquare account, and then when you check-in there, Foursquare serves as an intermediary so the restaurant can pay the source that you heard about it from? E.g., let’s say you read about a restaurant in the New York Times, and add that restaurant to your Foursquare account using a Foursquare button on the page (or whatever other better way they can come up with). Then, when you check-in at the restaurant, they pay the New York Times through Foursquare.

There’s a lot of potential there, and Twitter needs to get creative in the same way. Move away from advertisements, and move toward making money by being useful to your users. Rather than work against what made your service successful—third-party developers, enthusiastic users—work with them. There’s ways to do it, and Twitter’s sin was not taking their business model seriously.

Marco Arment just released Instapaper 3.0, and it’s a big release.

“Starring” articles is now “liking” them, and you can browse your friends’ liked articles. This is incredibly exciting.

Instapaper’s going places. Big places.

Mike Rundle just announced Design Then Code, which are his iOS app design and development tutorials.

Mike is a fabulous designer, and based on past articles he’s written on his weblog about iOS development, I think it’s safe to assume his development tutorials will be top-notch, too.

Aaron Mahnke:

Do I imagine bouncing ideas off of Kyle or chatting with Chris about coffee in a few years? Or do I envision a future where this was all just a phase and I have lost touch with everyone in favor of “real” friendships?

I think you know the answer.

Great piece by Aaron. I know it’s something I don’t do nearly well enough—fostering and growing friendships that have sprung up with some truly wonderful people I’ve met through writing TightWind and Twitter.

Marco Arment comments on the success of Instapaper’s subscription option:

“That was a huge surprise to me how well it’s doing given there’s no real incentive to do it besides good will. But it ends up that good will is powerful,” Arment said. “It shows that people will pay for something they like because they want to ensure its future.”

Alex Payne describes what Simperium, the company behind SimpleNote, is working on:

What Simperium will eventually offer is an easy-to-use platform for building apps that sync. I’m happy to announce that I’m now an advisor to and a (very minor) investor in Simperium.

Exciting.