What would William Safire or William F. Buckley think?

It was a classic Mittism, as friends and advisers call the verbal quirks of the Republican presidential candidate. In Romneyspeak, passengers do not get off airplanes, they “disembark.” People do not laugh, they “guffaw.” Criminals do not go to jail, they land in the “big house.” Insults are not hurled, “brickbats” are.

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They say that the first step to solving any problem is to accept that you have one. If that’s the case, our problem may just be that we still consider the mobile web a separate thing.

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The entire technology industry uses the word “user” to describe its customers. While it might be convenient, “users” is a rather passive and abstract word. No one wants to be thought of as a “user” (or “consumer” for that matter). I certainly don’t. And I wouldn’t consider my mom a “user” either, she’s my mom. The word “user” abstracts the actual individual. This may seem like a small and insignificant detail that doesn’t matter, but the vernacular and words we use here at Square set a very strong and subtle tone for everything we do. So let’s now part ways with our industry and rethink this.

Via John Gruber.

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For the big newspapers, fully half of their readership is electronic:

Substantial percentages of the regular readers of leading newspapers now read them digitally. Currently, 55% of regular New York Times readers say they read the paper mostly on a computer or mobile device, as do 48% of regular USA Today and 44% of Wall Street Journal readers.

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Brands that do not have a mobile site feed competitors clients, with half admitting they will buy from the company less often if the Web site isn’t mobile friendly. The study found consumers are five times more likely to abandon a task. Some 61% of users said they move on to another site if they don’t quickly find what they need, and 79% that don’t like the unfriendly mobile site go back and search for another. About 66% of consumers find mobile sites through a search engine.

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