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Riding the New Silk Road

nytimes.com

31–40 of 161 posts

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#31

It's great to try new formats, but the experience is completely broken on my now-slightly-aging Windows laptop. I wish web developer/designers would test their pages on regular hardware instead of 27" iMacs or rMPB... The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black: http://prntscr.com/1gq4he http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6

[deleted]

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#33
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because it wasn't meant to be read from a mobile device? Not everything needs to be mobile.

Point taken, but... "In the US, 67% of mobile internet users surveyed by Decision Fuel and On Device Research in November 2012 said they mostly or only used mobile, as opposed to the desktop, to go online and surf the web." Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-Divvy... If your goal is to connect with people, then ignoring the mobile experience for the sake of optimizing the web experien…

By your own source, news and media is only 5% (/4% as part of the table below it) of mobile use. This would fall into that category.

Furthermore, I get the impression that their definition of "mostly or only" means more than 50%, which is not the most helpful. It'd be more helpful to do a category-based breakdown for that, which will probably see desktop usage being higher than mobile for news/media.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#34
Time to trot out trivia. As the article points out, the Silk Road faded in importance in the 1400s. But it doesn't say why.

There were three major reasons why it faded.

The first was the final fall of Constantinople in 1453, ending the last remnant of the original Roman Empire. This made trade with Europe harder.

The second was the development, initially by the Portuguese but followed by others, of direct sea routes to India, and then China, which bypassed the much more expensive land routes.

The third was the opening up of the Americas as potential sources of commodities.

The result was a long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East. The extent of which was not realized by the West until Napoleon conquered Egypt.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#40
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken, but... "In the US, 67% of mobile internet users surveyed by Decision Fuel and On Device Research in November 2012 said they mostly or only used mobile, as opposed to the desktop, to go online and surf the web." Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-Divvy... If your goal is to connect with people, then ignoring the mobile experience for the sake of optimizing the web experien…

By your own source, news and media is only 5% (/4% as part of the table below it) of mobile use. This would fall into that category. Furthermore, I get the impression that their definition of "mostly or only" means more than 50%, which is not the most helpful. It'd be more helpful to do a category-based breakdown for that, which will probably see desktop usage being higher than mobile for news/media.

Right - so, the stats say that there are a lot of people using mobile devices to surf the web, many of whom are using mobile almost exclusively. A fraction of the time those users spend on the web is spent on news sites. Does the fact that those mobile web users split their time across different destinations really lead you to believe it's not worth optimizing for them?
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