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Tag: facebook

Friday 5 — 9.19.2014
1. Facebook is updating its News Feed, again. This set of changes focuses on putting more weight on trending topics, so your feed reflects more discussion of what’s going on right now. Now the recency of the likes and comments on posts will matter more, perhaps reducing the frequency of those odd moments when a friend’s heavily-liked wedding post resurfaces in your feed as they’re celebrating their third anniversary.
2. Compared with the emphasis most organizations put on growing a house email list, it’s surprising how little effort is spent to re-engaging those subscribers when open and click rates falter. Here are some tips on how to clean and re-engage your list.
3. Google Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik makes a compelling case for better mobile site analytics (and throws in some fighting words about responsive web design for good measure). If you are working with Google Analytics to measure mobile, his comprehensive post provides useful examples from implementing Google Tag Manager to advanced Cross-Device Tracking.
4. Wired delivers with 15 insanely great tricks to master Apple’s iOS 8. Word to the wise: don’t make your first trick downloading iOS 8 on your iPhone 4S.
5. That said, there are some clear advantages to downloading iOS 8 on a newer device. Do you spend too much time swiping through your emoji keyboard to craft a perfect, visual response? Then, you might need Keymoji, a downloadable keyboard that converts your text into emojis as you type.
Weekend fun: Tough week? Nervous about going long on today’s Alibaba IPO? Go ahead: watch some puppies playing with a GoPro.

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 to get a weekly email.
September 19, 2014
Friday 5 — 7.25.2014
1. The New Yorker has updated its web presence to take advantage of the internet’s love affair with quality, longform reads. The mobile design gets it right, with smooth interactive elements like a fly-in hamburger menu. This Guardian review credits the re-design for avoiding looking “like a middle-aged man dropping the ends of his words in an attempt to be down with the kids.” One quibble: given that their goal was to increase readership, I’m surprised they buried their email signup at the bottom of the page. But the best news of all? The archives since 2007 are free for three months, so dig in.
2. The most important product design work is usually the ugliest, according to this Intercom post on The Dribblisation of Design that kicked up a kerfuffle online a while ago. It’s still a good summary of why the most interesting part of design is not the PSD, but the problem-solving.
3. Remember back when Facebook was going to die because they were too old and uncool to get mobile? Yeah, me neither. Now they’re making money, handheld over fist.
4. Reddit launched a new Live feature for unfolding news to better serve and reflect the high activity on the site when news breaks. The updated format makes the story easier to follow, and allows users to add content without starting a new thread and fragmenting the conversation.
5. Should you buy an Amazon Fire phone? Unless you’re an Amazon-loving, domestic-only-traveling, early-adopter type who adores AT&T, Engadget suggests you hold off.
Weekend fun: Emoji karaoke is a thing, and the folks who came up with the one below are undisputed masters. Read more via Nate Matias, and try it yourself.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
July 25, 2014
Friday 5 — 7.18.2014
1. With a growing and highly engaged (dare I say fanatical?) user base, Instagram has remained a social media darling. This comprehensive piece describes how its founders make the business tick, keep user engaged in a landscape of mercurial tastes, and prepare the app for monetization in the future.
2. There’s a new Facebook app, but only for famous people. Features focus on ease of use for content publishing (rather than perusing friends’ vacation pics), tracking mentions, and hosting Live Q &As.
3. Anonymous app Secret, famous for airing the tech industry’s dirty laundry in a mobile-friendly, passive-aggressive art form, raised $25M this week. Here’s how.
4. Is the internet dumbing us down into a culture where we merely share attention-grabbing headlines without consuming the content? Or can content that’s not aggressively shared find a readership over time? If you’re publishing online, it’s worth understanding how the curve of content consumption that dives into the valley of “meh” sometimes results in the hill of “wow”.
5. Did you ever write an email in haste and repent, well, immediately afterward? If you use gmail, these tips on un-sending that email might help.
Weekend fun: Who’s the biggest Star Wars ~~geek~~ fan: Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart? Watch and find out.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
July 18, 2014
Friday 5 — 6.13.2014
1. Amazon launched a streaming music service — a relatively commoditized offering with competitors like Spotify, Beat, and Rdio. The differentiator may not be a more robust feature set, in part because Amazon’s offering does not include Universal Music Group’s catalog. Instead, as this article points out, the Prime bundling with free shipping and book lending may tip the balance over its competitors.
2. Can Twitter survive against the Facebook juggernaut — and other rapidly growing social networks? Today, Twitter usage hovers at about 19% of U.S. online adults, versus 71% for Facebook. This Pew Research Center article suggests that Twitter may have niche staying power, with use cases around breaking news, political influencers, and activists.
3. What is the impact of unmoderated comments on your website? In one study, respondents rated articles with comments as lower quality— with as much as 8% difference in perception.
4. With over 200M active users and a top ten smartphone app, Instagram is a draw for many brands. Buffer offers a great how-to guide for businesses getting started on the photo sharing social network. Also included: best times to post to various social media outlets.
5. We’re in the midst of a hardware renaissance, and excitement about the promise of virtual reality (VR). Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe talks about the potential of the technology and its role within Facebook, which acquired the tech company back in March for $2B. Salient quote: “When you put on Oculus, people are just streaming with ideas, dreaming about things.”
Weekend fun: Irritating linkbait meets brutal satire at the Onion’s new venture, Clickhole. And it’s a winner whether people know it’s satire or not.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
June 13, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.23.14
1. How does your LinkedIn profile rank? LinkedIn taps into inherent narcissism by exposing your percentile in profile views compared with that of your connections, or with others in your company. Disappointed in your results? LinkedIn suggests that you beef up your summary, add more skills, and join more groups.
2. There’s a big opportunity for native mobile apps to take advantage of your handheld’s hardware from camera or accelerometer. This week, Facebook announced an imminent mobile app feature that uses the microphone to identify ambient TV shows, music, or movies. The app then offers up the content to be approved for inclusion in a status update.
3. In a surely wholly unrelated initiative, Facebook changed the default privacy setting for new users to be “friends and family” versus “public” and announced a new privacy check up tool to be rolled out in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping your new privacy settings will keep your mobile device microphone from reporting you are home in your pajamas watching Veep, rather than at the Childish Gambino concert featured in your status message.
4. The internet of things means, sadly but inevitably, ads running on all those connected things. Like on your thermostat. Or your refrigerator. See the full list as well as a couple of clarifications from Google.
5. Why did that video go viral? Success can be attributed to eliciting strong, positive emotion. Be sure to keep it upbeat — people want to see the daring rescue attempt, but no one wants to know that the kitten actually died.
Weekend fun: Speaking of viral video, here’s a slick maneuver from a clever young man who caught a foul ball — and perhaps tried to win a heart.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 23, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.2.14
1. For a few years now, Foursquare has felt like a location data layer in search of a business model. The company just announced a move toward a more explicit user value proposition by revising its core app and splitting off a new Swarm app — a social heat map that doesn’t require an explicit check-in.
2. How can we stop wasting users’ time? Here are some practical ways to design experiences that avoid common user experience pitfalls. My favorite? Stop the madness of persnickety fields that make for tiresome web forms.
3. User growth is flat and the stock precipitously down — and now Twitter gets its very own eulogy.
4. At Facebook f8, Mark Zuckerberg announced a set of new features, few of which you might associate with Facebook as we know it. They include anonymous login, linking between apps, and a mobile like button. Also, he said trust, stable, and mobile a heck of a lot.
5. Teen-friendly, ephemeral, and visual messaging app Snapchat counters the unbundling trend of Foursquare and Facebook by adding features. Now users can swipe to chat via text or video — and true to brand, the conversation disappears when users leave the app.
Weekend fun: In one minute and twenty-three seconds you could accomplish something productive, like answering an email or flossing your teeth. Or you could watch tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos. And it’s only episode one of the series, so submit your suggestions printed on tiny tortillas via #TinyHamsterIdeas.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 2, 2014
Friday 5 — 4.25.2014
1. Are you reading this on your phone right now? Do you find you’re checking your phone compulsively? Then you might just be a mobile addict — defined by mobile analytics firm Flurry as someone who launches apps more than 60 times a day. High risk groups are identified as Teens, College Students (skewing female), and Middle Aged Parents, all of which ensures college campuses are teeming with the Infected.
2. Facebook makes nice with the media by launching FB Newswire, a service that helps users find, share, and embed newsworthy items from its vast trove of user-generated content. A partnership with social media news agency Storyful provides content verification to separate wheat from chaff. No doubt this service will do some useful sifting for overtaxed newsrooms, but ultimately Facebook and its algorithms retain editorial control by deciding what’s newsworthy enough to make the wire.
3. Fun fact from Q1 earnings report: Facebook now has 1.1B mobile monthly active users. Not including its Messenger app. Or Instagram. Or newly-acquired What’s App. For context, those monthly mobile users united would be the third largest country in the world, after China and India.
4. This week Airbnb, the website that lets you make a buck renting out your pull-out couch or luxury vacation home, closed a round of 500M on a 10B valuation. Looks like the collaborative economy is starting to have quantifiable impact at least at the lower end of the hotel market: The Economist reports on research suggesting that if Airbnb’s growth continues at its current clip, budget hotel revenue will be down 10% by 2016.
5. Codeacademy, an interactive platform that teaches people to code, relaunched its website. Here are the 10 design principles that informed their approach. Elevated social proof, commitment to fewer form fields, and enabling focus stand out as drivers of superior user experience.
Weekend fun: Wait — you’ve already seen Brian Williams rapping gin and juice? Well, you should probably watch it again, because it doesn’t get any less funny the tenth time around. Jimmy Fallon’s video editors are a force to be reckoned with.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
April 25, 2014
Friday 5 — 4.18.2014
1. Now that we’re all shooting more photos and videos than ever before, Dropbox is hell bent on storing them for you. Dropbox knows there’s a high switching cost for moving all your personal stuff (hassle, trust) so they’re making it easy and appealing to store and share, particularly via mobile. And yesterday Dropbox purchased iOS photo app Loom to continue the offensive.
2. This week, Twitter took a page out of Facebook’s monetization playbook by adopting app install ads. With a heavily mobile user base, Twitter provides an appealing audience for app creators looking for new users. Here’s hoping this proven ad revenue model shores up Twitter’s languishing stock price.
3. Hunter Walk illustrates how context matters when serving up recommendations for end users. When YouTube recommended videos to users, the interface explicitly told them why: e.g., “because you watched these puppy videos, we’re showing you this kitten.” As a result, users were less likely ignore the recommendations — and consumed more video.
4. But what if you don’t want your online behavior tracked, for relevant video recommendations or anything else? The Atlantic cites research from Zeynep Tufekci on emerging user behaviors, from passive-aggressive subtweeting to active hatelinking, that regular people are adopting to remain invisible to the algorithms that track online behavior.
5. Also filed under “what your social networks now know about you,” Facebook has launched Nearby Friends, a way for you to find out who’s close by. The technology is based on Glancee, a startup Facebook acquired back in 2012. Needless to say, early messaging is all about user control and privacy settings.
Weekend fun: Done right, Vine videos are a glorious, six-second art form. Here are this year’s winners from the Tribeca Film Festival, with my favorite Wrap Dancer winning the animation category.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
April 18, 2014
Friday 5 — 3.28.2014
1. This week, Facebook acquired virtual reality purveyor Oculus Rift for $2B in cash and stock. This purchase gives the social networking company, which was only two years ago struggling to get its arms around mobile, a leg up in virtual reality hardware. What will they use it for? Gaming’s an obvious first use case, but there’s a big vision opportunity. Semil Shah penned a terrific, if pun-laden piece on Facebook’s strategy and direction.
2. In an effort to boost Google Wallet, Google enables friction-free money transfer for Gmail users. The simple user interface — as easy as adding an attachment — is sure to attract entice more people into signing up for Google Wallet.
3. What’s content marketing, again? This piece breaks down this generic term, and explains why companies like NewsCred and Percolate are closing significant financing rounds.
4. From the Something Useful Now department, the Starbucks app has added a couple of handy features. The app now enables shake-to-pay, which uses your mobile’s native accelerometer to pull up the scannable barcode, and a feature than enables tipping for up to two hours after your visit.
5. Nieman Lab runs an extensive review of NY Times Now, a mobile product launching in the app stores on April 2. The launch is a step forward into current digital news best practices (mobile-first approach, briefs, curation of third party content). But will it lure more subscribers with this new app, or introduce product confusion with too many similar offerings?
Weekend fun: Are you still immersed in March Madness this weekend? Then check out @NailbiterBot, which will tweet to you when games are close in the second half. Follow the account now, so you can quietly excuse yourself from your in-laws and tune in.

IOWAST (3) v. UNC (6) is 74-76 with 2:59 left. Watch on CBS. http://t.co/zwra5bpZ3T

— Nailbiter Bot (@NailbiterBot) March 23, 2014

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
March 28, 2014
Friday 5 — 3.21.2014
1. Medium has released its first mobile app, bringing its elegant, curated reading experience to your iPhone. Login requires Twitter, and they made the somewhat curious decision not to “bog users down” with a homepage. Still to come: more robust search and a mobile writing experience.
2. The internet of things garnered a lot of attention in January when Google shelled out $3.2 billion for Nest, its patents, and its people. Is the next step for IoT consumers an app store for hardware? NEX band is making an early foray, counting on the viral sharing behaviors of youth to attract developers and ideas.
3. If you manage a Facebook page for a brand, you might want to double-check those reach numbers. With an upcoming algorithm change, the organic reach for a brand page may fall to as little as 1-2% of the fan base. Facebook is looking to migrate organizations to a paid acquisition and retention model.
4. Why do people edit Wikipedia? Here’s a quick explanation — part of a useful short series on the who, why, and how of Wikipedia editors.
5. Is Twitter ditching @ replies and hashtags? Sounds as though they will keep the functionality, but lose some of this “visible scaffolding” around user behaviors. Expect to see ongoing evolution of the user experience as Twitter seeks the user growth needed to buoy its newly-public stock.
Weekend fun: Ever wish you could go back and erase or edit your early online ramblings? For better or worse, Twitter is breathing new life into them by featuring “my first tweet” for its eighth birthday. Here’s how you can look up your own very first tweet.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
March 21, 2014