If you’re not shivering right now, perhaps you were at CES in Vegas this week. Among the loveliest of launches is Yahoo’s News Digest app, the fruit of its Summly acquisition a year ago. With this sleek app, Marissa Mayer is making good on her commitment to prioritize beautiful product. Yahoo is cleverly delivering not only …
Jelly and the visual web
Biz Stone’s new visual Q&A platform called Jelly launched this week. The mobile app lets you use images to pose brief questions to your social network, which is defined rather expansively to include friends of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, the site is positioned more for the helpers than for those seeking to crowdsource …
Morning prayers @ Memorial Church
Back in December I gave a brief talk at the morning prayers service, a Harvard tradition since its founding in 1636 (more here). Many thanks to Jonathan Walton, the Pusey Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences for the invitation to speak at …
Friday 5 — 1.3.2014
73% of online adults now use social networking sites, per this year-end report from Pew. And more adults are diversifying their online social networking — 42% report using more than one service. Facebook and Instagram boast particularly strong daily engagement. 63% of Facebook users using the site daily, and 40% say they log in multiple …
Search interest: Arsenal vs. Manchester Utd
Highly unscientific, correlation is not causation, etc., but fun to see search interest in Arsenal FC rising and predicted to rise more as they finished 2013 at the top of the Premier League.
IFTTT for the future
Many people in the tech community rely on a canny service called IFTTT. Short for If This, Then That, the service automates conditional statements in our day-to-day lives. For example, if I go the the gym and check in on Foursquare via smartphone, then IFTTT records a workout on my Jawbone Up. These conditional statement “recipes”, a word I am …
Where’s my stuff?
The trend of staying home and spending made for a strong online shopping season. Amazon recorded roughly 426 orders per second on Cyber Monday, and overall online sales were up 21% over 2012. Good news for some retailers, but the high volume combined with bad weather and a shorter than usual holiday shopping season to …
Friday 5 — 12.27.2013
The end of each year brings a slew of “best of” posts — here are five of my favorites: Flowing Data selected data visualizations that told great stories and made meaningful, real-world observations through data. See visualizations of everything from poisoned names to pizza to porn. Looking for a way to spend your gift card …
5 lessons from Justine Sacco
Too busy preparing for the holidays to have heard of l’Affaire Sacco? Buzzfeed has a useful summary of how one woman’s tweet took over the Twittersphere last weekend, and took down a career — at least temporarily. Five quick takeaways: The interplay between social and traditional media has never been greater, so what happens on …
Friday 5 — 12.20.2013
Mandatory reading for web design geeks: Snow fail: Do readers really prefer parallax design? New research poses good questions about user orientation to parallax scrolling, which may be better suited for content heavier on video and other visualizations rather than text. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay …