Perry

Hewitt

Author: Perry Hewitt

Friday 5 — 11.13.2015
1. Who are your top 9 — the people who appear in that mysterious box on your Facebook profile page? Turns out it’s not the people whom you stalk (or who stalk you). Instead, Facebook’s algorithm displays these people on your profile page as subtle encouragement for you to interact with them.
2. Benedict Evans has a new post on mobile as the new scale ecosystem. As Android and iOS devices outsell personal computers 5:1 (and soon 10:1), these environments become the new center of gravity throughout computing. Fun fact: 50% of all online time (not mobile time) is now spent in apps — a number skewed by Facebook, but still amazing considering the smart phone is less than a decade old.
3. How do you design your app for maximum growth? This comprehensive survey of best practices for growth and retention includes a deep dive into effective user onboarding.
4. No UI is the new UI, brought to you by advances in technology. As we are able to interact more directly with computers, what is the purpose of a designed interface (and the fate of those who create them)? Read to learn about the emerging trend away from explicit UI, and how to avoid a mindset that creates a “technological tiller.”
5. This post on data at the heart of sharing economy makes observations about how reputation is represented on (and across) online platforms. It includes some concrete suggestion on ways businesses can better use data to promote the right behavior.
Weekend fun: Frank Underwood or Hannibal Lecter? Walter White or Piper Chapman? Now there’s a bracket for bingewatchers to determine the worst character on television. If you prefer to focus on heroes rather than villains, watch every Easter egg in Spectre, the new James Bond film.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
November 13, 2015
Friday 5 — 11.6.2015
1. Tired of drafting the same email reply over and over? Google is here to help with SmartReply, a new Inbox app feature that suggest replies to your email messages. You can edit the reply as suggested, or delete it and write your own. Extra credit: Geek out on the machine learning under the hood.
2. If you are responsible for data storytelling, new research explained by Storybench may come in handy. Read more about the study and key takeaways on what makes a visualization memorable. Glad to see validation of one I’ve long suspected: title and text really matter.
3. Content publishers often think of social networks when it comes to sharing, but messaging apps are building a huge audience. To better understand the direction of messaging apps, read these product insights from WeChat (600M monthly active users).
4. This year, the New York Times is paying attention to push — the notifications that drive you to engage with content. Notifications are moving beyond breaking news (perhaps factoring in location?), and the team is measuring to learn how much is too much.
5. Paul Ford is characteristically eloquent and thoughtful in this article on ephemeralist reading. For anyone who has ever lost an afternoon pulling the thread of an idea through an online database, this is a must-read.
Weekend fun: If you use Twitter, you couldn’t miss the kerfuffle over a star changing to a heart. Intended to simplify the experience for new users, the switch ended up provoking some hilarious reactions. It’s the norm for established Twitter user to express outrage over feature changes; basically, we’re guinea pigs responding to a dinner bell.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
November 6, 2015
Friday 5 — 10.30.2015
1. In the early 90s, corporate marketing departments produced physical brand books, illustrating dos and don’ts for print, TV, signage, trade shows, etc. Fast forward a couple of decades, and the digital world requires a wide-ranging brand treatment that enables variations in volume, and concepts like stacking. See this gorgeous Netflix brand rollout for a best-in-class example.
2. I’m a longtime fan of Nuzzel, a useful service to see what your friends and colleagues are sharing online. Pro tip: try the dropdown that allows you to sort content by timeframe. This week Nuzzel rolled out a new automated newsletter to attract audiences other than superusers (the polite term for addicts) of Twitter.
3. How (and where) are we using the internet of things? A study by Accenture found security (hello, dropcam!) and quantified self apps topping the list of applications. A bigger takeaway comes at the end — rather than connect just our homes there’s a greater opportunity to connect ourselves to the context of the physical world as we move through it.
4. Organizations are adjusting their tactics as digital capabilities become more broadly distributed. Hence the New York Times recently shut down its City Room blog, citing DNA [that] has spread throughout the newsroom.
5. 68% of U.S.. adults now own a smartphone — double the number who did back in mid-2011. And iPhone growth naysayers be damned: Ben Thompson explains that the ever-increasing importance of smartphones in people’s lives means that the market size of people willing to pay a premium for their smartphone is actually growing.
Weekend fun: If the pumpkins weren’t enough of a tipoff, the sheer number of inbound Snapchats of costumes remind us that it’s Halloween. Spruce up your digital self with Halloween icons from the Noun Project, and check your actual costume’s popularity using Google search data. But if Halloween is just not your thing, hide at home this weekend watching all of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting on Twitch (well played, Adobe!).

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 30, 2015
HUBweek moments

HUBweek 2015 is a wrap. 46,000 people took part in this weeklong celebration of the work and impact at the intersection of art, science, and technology in Greater Boston. The festival was co-founded by Harvard, MIT, MGH, and the Boston Globe, and benefited from creative collaborators from dozens of institutions across the region.

A few of my favorite moments:

“Who you are; who parents think you are; who your computer thinks you are can be three totally separate people.”

– Alexis Wilkinson on the role of technology in our lives at Fenway Forum [video]

“We live in the Golden Age of surveillance, where law can subvert technology and technology can subvert law … the most intimate surveillance device I have is my cell phone.”

– Bruce Schneier, presenting on The Future of Privacy and Security in a Big Data World

“Metadata isn’t neutral.”

– Andromeda Yelton, sharing big ideas and practical truths in Libraries: The Next Generation [liveblog by David Weinberger] [video]

“Narrative of podcast can be as technology, business, or the art form – and the most interesting is the art form.”

– Benjamen Walker, in State of the Podcast 2015 [video]

Below are selected images from the week — find more on the HUBweek Instagram account, or stay tuned for HUBweek 2016.

Chris Shipley kicks off SOLVE conference at MIT

Arianna Huffington, Yo Yo Ma, Andrew McAfee, Sherry Turkle, and Alexis Wilkinson in Michael Sandel’s Fenway Forum

Bruce Schneier on privacy and security in a big data world

Cafe Art Science

Science and movement at ILLUMINUS

#Tech4democracy event at Harvard Kennedy School

Strawberry fields at Harvard Innovation Lab

Jellyfish art on the walls at Le Laboratoire Cambridge

Perfect sunset reflections at MIT

Making robotics fly in Harvard Stadium with Hugo Van Vuuren

October 25, 2015
Friday 5 — 10.23.2015
1. “Just a Brown Hand” takes a look at the decision process behind a seemingly small detail: the skin color of the hand depicted in the new Add to Slack feature launched this week. It’s a good reminder of the normative defaults often hard coded into software we use.
2. Curious about the future of tech and media? If so, this 136-slide Activate 2016 Tech and Media Outlook is definitely worth the time. A few points in particular stood out for me: the rise of messaging over “traditional” social media; the 31(!) hours a day we now have for consumption thanks to multitasking; and the difficulty of getting rich via the app store.
3. Tom Davenport explains five essential principles for understanding analytics. I particularly like the point about getting close to your organization’s small, structured data, the value of which often gets lost in the endless big data hype.
4. Buffer blogged this week about the sharp, year-over-year decline in social traffic to its blog. The post reviews in detail the likely suspects causing the decline, and then posits two potential solutions: paid reach and more targeted content. They’re opting for the latter, but I suspect the combination might be the answer.
5. Facebook is now making public posts — all 2 trillion of them — accessible via its powerful search engine. A robust search capability gives Facebook a stronger foothold in breaking news and following live events, which has traditionally been Twitter’s turf. But let’s cut to the chase: here’s how to hide yours.
Weekend fun: So we didn’t get our hoverboards in time for #BacktotheFuture day, but we did get this insane Magic Leap video. If you’re looking for a more manageable digital achievement, you might want to try Instagram’s new Boomerang app. There are already more than 125K boomerangs in the wild — here’s one for inspiration:

Synchronized Sisters 👯 – #boomerang from @instagram

A video posted by Harlow, Sage, Indiana & Reese (@harlowandsage) on Oct 22, 2015 at 9:33am PDT

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 23, 2015
Friday 5 — 10.16.2015
1. When you’re in love, you text daily. Or at least our teenagers do 72% of the time, compared with only 39% who talk on the phone daily. And when they break up? 43% untag or delete photos shared online. Read the full report on teens, technology, and romantic relationships.
2. How do you manage product feedback in a period of exponential growth? Slack’s first product manager explains the value of smart hypotheses, his approach to quantitative and qualitative data, and common biases to avoid. Many of these process recommendations are as applicable to product management for enterprise digital services as they are to a rapid-growth startup.
3. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages — Google’s recent attempt to improve mobile rendering speed while preserving content monetization models. With mobile usage exploding, creating an open web standard that improves content consumption that supports existing business models is a problem worth solving.
4. Twitter has navigated a revolving door of CEOs, a stock price in free fall, and a significant layoff this week — but the product may have doubled down on its core value with the launch of Moments. Ben Thompson explains why a tweet-based newspaper may be a valuable product renewal, offering improved, more accessible user experience and a better, more targeted advertising model.
5. If you’ve been using the web since the 1990s, you’ve likely experienced vanishing content — being unable to find something that existed before. In order to ensure the survival of the content we’re all putting on the web, we need to preserve not only the websites but maintain the technical environments in which they first appeared. This story of a nearly-lost journalism series posits that we may be living in the internet’s dark ages.
Weekend fun: Try to get away from the tech this weekend, now that a photographer has shown us just how creepy our screen addiction has made us. Before you unplug, though, you might want to check out this virtual reality demo. Demos like these help us see how Oculus Rift can create shared human experiences closely aligned with Facebook’s mission.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 16, 2015
How Budweiser won the Nobel Prize in chemistry

It’s easy to spot the difference between an organization with digital DNA and an organization still making the transition. Here’s an example highlighting different approaches to breaking news.

On Monday morning the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced. The Wall Street Journal was pushing the story via multiple Twitter accounts. So I clicked on one of their links in my feed.

Beer. Suddenly I found myself reading a story about Budweiser beer, and wondering how on earth this won someone a Nobel Prize. My morning brain had to click in and out of the story a few times via both WSJ Twitter accounts until I noticed the breaking news banner at the top. That red and black bar isn’t an ad or a design element: it’s the lead story the tweet was directing me to. Banner blindness, a known phenomenon since 1998, caused me to ignore it entirely.

At around the same time, a tweet came through from Buzzfeed. I clicked through, and here’s what I saw:

Buzzfeed sent me straight to the content on the Nobel Prize site. I can’t recall whether they framed the copy in some way on their own mobile site, but Buzzfeed took me straight to the news without any confusion. Several minutes later, I checked the Buzzfeed site again, and they’d written their own story:

It’s a small example, but a reminder of the stark difference between an old media organization still working on the transition to a mobile, social environment, and a new media organization that can’t envision news consumption any other way. As someone who has worked in large organizations making the shift to digital, I can empathize with the challenges. User experiences like this can be telling ‘iceberg’ examples, though: when you see these kinds of misses on the surface, they are signs of problematic software design practices and business processes lying beneath.

October 9, 2015
Friday 5 — 9.25.2015
1. Facebook has already established itself as a formidable video-serving rival to YouTube. This week, with the help of its Oculus acquisition, Facebook launched 360 degree videos — click and drag the video above to see what is now possible. This interactivity is terrific for all kinds of immersive experiences from tours to product demos, as well as myriad off-label uses.
2. Digital marketing, and then the rise of programmatic advertising, promised marketers a seeming nirvana: the ability to reach a unimaginably large volume of very specifically defined audiences. But reality is more complicated: here’s a great explanation of the murky world of bots, click fraud, and fake traffic.
3. Starbucks is known for its forward-thinking digital approaches. Their latest mobile order and pay initiative (MOP?) is designed to defeat ‘line anxiety’, which is what you experience seeing 12 other caffeine addicts between you and your morning joe.
4. Tracking how people get to your site is important — yet many organizations don’t have sophisticated analytics software in place. Buffer has released a basic guide to UTM codes to help you parse that traffic.
5. As internet access rises, many marketing departments are migrating to web-only surveys. Pew analyzes the audience you miss with a survey reaching 89% rather than 100%.
HUBweek hiatus: I’m taking a two-week break for HUBweek, which will have no shortage of amazing sessions on digital topics including the state of the podcast, ventures brewed in an Innovation Lab, and whether social media is ruining politics. Back Friday, October 16.

Weekend fun: Curious how much longer you have before being shuffled off this mortal coil? This bouncy animation uses Social Security data to calculate the likelihood you will live to see next year. If that’s too grim, enjoy the internet’s best GIFs in a music video.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
September 25, 2015
Friday 5 — 9.18.2015
1. A survey of >4,000 designers revealed the most commonly used design tools, from brainstorming to wireframing to project management. As a big user of different project management platforms, I found it interesting to see the fragmentation of the market.
2. In a similarly complicated arena, Growthverse is an interactive visualization of marketing technologies, a tool for marketers who have a need and want to browse solutions. A recent update makes the information easier to access, with direct links to categories like social content analytics or workflow collaboration.
3. Imagine the meanest email you ever wrote, searchable on the internet. Security expert Bruce Schneier paints a sobering picture of our vulnerability to organizational doxing in an era of cloud computing.
4. If you were hiding under a rock this week, you may have missed the Ahmed Mohamed, a 14 year old Muslim boy who was suspended for bringing a homemade clock to school in Texas. #IStandWithAhmed generated well over half a million tweets, serious invitations to the White House and to Facebook, along with the inevitable funny responses.
5. 18F launched Federalist, a platform for quick creation of static government websites. Web platform solutions for website or mobile apps are notoriously hard to propagate in a world where people gravitate toward the bespoke. Federalist is an excellent example of combining open source software, canny feature tradeoffs, and excellent design to deliver a platform users will adopt.
Don’t miss: HUBweek is a weeklong series of events celebrating the innovative work happening at the intersection of art, science, and technology in and around Greater Boston. Check out a masterclass in Fenway Park, flying robotics in Harvard Stadium, all the Harvard events, or the full listing. The week starts October 3: most events are free or low cost, and open to all.

Weekend fun: Worried about our robotic drone overlords? Consider befriending some professional ice hockey players.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
September 18, 2015
Friday 5 — 9.11.2015
1. If you’re thinking about mobile as just another line item in your overall internet strategy, Benedict Evans will set you straight.
2. Some company cultures are more conducive to digital transformation, while others hinder progress. This HBR post discusses the risks of excessive focus on technology, and the benefits of distributed decision-making.
3. Your digital footprint — gleaned from likes and comments on social media — may reveal more about you than you think. Research confirms that computers analyzing data can discern a surprising amount of personal information from online interactions. Click wisely.
4. Despite the apparent absence of groundbreaking news, the Apple announcements dominated the news cycle. Stratechery weighs in on Apple’s approach to products and platforms, including the strength of the high margin iPhone and the weakness of the iPad developer ecosystem.
5. Buzzsumo and Moz analyzed 1,000 pieces of content and drew some conclusions about shares and links [PDF]. Some were unsurprising — authoritative domains matter, shares are more personal than links — and others were encouraging, like the relatively strong performance of longform (>1,000 words) content.
Weekend fun: Miss the Apple keynote? Catch up with some Apple pencil jokes, or see how this cartoonist foretold the future.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
September 11, 2015