Perry

Hewitt

Tag: facebook

  • Friday 5 — 11.15.2013

    Friday 5 — 11.15.2013

    1. snapchatSo, lots of talk this week about Snapchat turning down a 3B acquisition offer from Facebook. Was this a shrewd move, or an example of millennial entitlement run amok? Facebook’s 2012 purchase of Instagram for 1B is starting to look like it was a pretty good deal for a company concerned about its waning teen audience. And Google snapping up YouTube for 1.65B in stock back in 2006 now seems like a steal.
    2. Where are those teens who are eluding Facebook? A lot of them are immersed in messaging apps like What’s App or Kik. The line between messaging and more traditional social is starting to blur as messaging apps add features like gaming and music. Also unclear: Will these services grow on their own, or be snapped up by the tech giants?
    3. Wondering how much effort to put into optimizing your news site for social? 30% of U.S. adults get news on Facebook. And people who get news through social networking sites are more likely to get their news on mobile, underscoring the mobile mandate for publishers.
    4. Dropbox announces 200M users and a total revamp of its platform for the relaunch of Dropbox for Business. Which they should totally just call “Dropbox for Business that You Can Admit to Using” because it’s already pervasive in the enterprise in a clunkier and less secure version.
    5. How much does employee co-location matter when you’re building a company? According to Automattic’s recent 1B valuation, not a whole heck of a lot. The money quote from Matt Mullenweg: “if you give people autonomy to execute on something meaningful, and bias the environment to moving quickly, amazing things can happen.”

    Weekend fun: Want to see something cool, even if it makes you (OK, me) regret your own slacker parenting? Check out Dinovember.

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

  • Friday 5 — 10.25.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.25.2013

    1. For a number of years instinct and analytics have been telling us that photos are effective in social posts. That hypothesis seems validated by this week’s confirmation of Facebook and Pinterest domination of web referrals, with the former putting heavy emphasis on images in the newsfeed and the latter a nexus for image curation.
    2. In an entirely related vote of confidence for the visual web, Pinterest has raised another $225 million. Pinterest is developing a global strategy, with more than a dozen country managers slated to be hired this year.
    3. LinkedIn is going long on the mobile use case, rolling out a new iPad app and the compelling LinkedIn intro email feature. LinkedIn intro aims to provide color and context to your mobile email by surfacing relevant LinkedIn info about the sender.
    4. Facebook is home to the accidental news consumer — most users come for other reasons, but many end up seeing the news. An important finding is that younger people who are far less intentional about going to news outlets are consuming news via the social network.
    5. Wikipedia remains an invaluable news source — but how is it developing and replenishing its stable of editors? Unlike the rest of the web, which has become more global and female content creators, Wikipedia’s skew toward technical, Western, and male-dominated subject matter has persisted. Does this limited pool ensure Wikipedia’s decline?

    Weekend fun: Eight million people have already watched this toddler in his Halloween costume, but in case you’d like some inspiration for your own …

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

  • Tale of a social media meme

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a social media account will eventually have a regrettable public post. Certainly, that’s the assumption of 59% of teen social media users who have deleted or edited something they posted in the past. Adults are not immune to social media remorse: 74% of 18-34 year olds claim to have removed social media posts for fear of career detriment. Privacy settings may mitigate the risk, but don’t eradicate it entirely.

    In the spirit of the Roving Typist’s I Am An Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything, I offer up a personal story of a Facebook post gone viral.

    Nearly a year ago, my then-18-year-old son went on a three-month backpacking trip with NOLS. Upon his return to Wyoming, he shared this unfortunate selfie of his newly hirsute self on Facebook:

    beard reddit

    I couldn’t resist commenting, “Shave, or we’re changing the locks. Love, Mom.” A friend of his quickly shared both the photo and the exchange to Reddit. Sure, the names were lightly redacted, but the profile photo matches mine on Twitter. Within a couple of hours, an enterprising Harvard College junior — let’s call him Zach, because that’s his name — posted this:

    beard tweet

    So, less than a day for a theoretically private comment to travel from Facebook to Reddit to Twitter. I posted quickly on Reddit to implore the Redditors with pitchforks not to show up at the door, and assumed it would be an amusing anecdote about social media and the futility of privacy settings for a couple of weeks.

    unconditional loveTen months later, it’s a minor meme that wouldn’t die. Cheezburger. Fark. Failbook. Runt of the Web. New captions emerge: “Positive Family Interaction,” “On Facebook, Sometimes You Win and Sometimes You Lose,” or, my personal favorite, “A Mom’s Unconditional Love.” The beard meme surfaces often enough that in the past month it’s surfaced at a staff meeting and a nonprofit event in D.C.

    So, what lessons can we learn from all this? Like the recent New York Times article on mugshot extortion and editorial on revenge porn, it’s a vivid reminder that images uploaded in any context can persist on the web, and take on nefarious or amusing lives of their own. Secondly, nothing you post to a social network is truly private whatever your settings, so always presume a scenario where your post turns up on your boss’ desk. And finally, parenting is all about compromise:

    goatee

     

  • Friday 5 — 10.18.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.18.2013

    1. ngram social network wildcardGoogle Ngram Viewer allows you to search and plot words appearing in books from 1800-2008 — and has just rolled out some new features. The new wildcard feature allows you to find which words appear alongside others. Above, I’ve plotted which noun appears most frequently after “social network.” From about 1990 on, the answer is “analysis” as mapping social connections becomes more an established internet-era discipline.
    2. Facebook announced that teens 13-17 will have the ability to share posts publicly, as they do on platforms like Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Facebook has a real names policy that may result in more real world consequences for teens.
    3. Lots of high stakes digital project failures in the media this week, from the heavily covered healthcare.gov to the buggy first release of the college admissions Common App. These projects are complex, with data and system integration challenges, multiple stakeholders, and large, public constituencies.
    4. When do Americans use mobile apps? News app usage peaks around 7am, while entertainment and games get big at 9 pm. And it turns out we’re surprisingly heavy consumers of mobile apps throughout the weekend.
    5. As the world goes mobile, so does YouTube. Mobile on Youtube is now 40% of all video views from 25%  in 2012 and 6% in 2011. Starting in November, an upcoming YouTube mobile release will allow users to save and watch videos offline.

    Weekend fun: Conquer your acrophobia and bring Peg Man down to Earth by playing Map Dive.

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

  • Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

    1. Social media study word cloudHow do the words we use segment us by personality, gender, and age? An open vocabulary study of over 700 million Facebook posts by 75,000 volunteers provides a range of insights into attributes associated with language use. As the word cloud shows, men use profanity and talk about xbox far more than women on the social network.
    2. Direct messaging, long the neglected stepchild of the Twitter user experience, are about to get a lift with experimental new feature @eventparrot. Follow the account and it will direct message you with personalized breaking news, defined as news items noticed by the people you pay attention to.
    3. GigaOm posits why app-based tablet magazines are a failure, despite a few notable exceptions. Paid individual magazines titles continue to draw only a very small market. The desire to create the bespoke apps seems to stem, as one commenter put it, from an obsessive need for control of font and layout rather than a more sensible embrace of the messy, social open web.
    4. Perhaps the other end of the continuum of perfection and permanence is analog and ephemeral, like the live performances of Pop Up Magazine. As many of us relentlessly record and document, a new niche emerges for a live 100-minute show, where nothing goes online or is recorded.
    5. 91% of US adults own a cell phone today, and 41% of them use it to watch video. Pew’s latest report on online video shows continued growth not only in consumption, where comedy and education videos lead the pack, but an increase in adults posting video online to 31% from 14% in 2009. A full 35% of those video posters harbor hopes of their video going viral.

    Weekend fun: fancy a little telekinetic rage with your coffee?

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

  • Friday 5 — 08.16.2013

    Friday 5 — 08.16.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. User generated content as hypnotic and addictive: watch and listen to Wikipedia being edited. According to the creators’ blog, the sounds indicate addition to (bells) or subtraction from (strings) a Wikipedia articles, and the pitch changes according to the size of the edit.
    2. Facebook is not quite over yet — Pew finds that 94% of teens have Facebook accounts, and 81% report it’s the profile they use most often. Facebook’s deep integration via API and login mean that this traditionally fickle demographic may find it hard to detach from the mothership (even if their mothers are on it).
    3. Millennial news outlet Policy Mic gets kudos for its viral success, driven by smart adoption of behavioral analytics. Policy Mic understands that serious content can still be shareable, and the difference between optimizing for social and search.
    4. The role of social channels as a significant content distribution vehicle was underscored when a site outage compelled the New York Times to publish breaking news on Cairo via Facebook. If your organization is still treating “traditional” digital and social as different beasts, now’s a good time to rethink your approach.
    5. Ready for the weekend yet? I’ve previously covered the banana slicer, but Amazon has compiled a most excellent list of its funniest product reviews.

  • Friday 5 — 07.26.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Facebook’s Q2 numbers are in and the company appears to have mastered mobile ads — which now make up 41% of ad revenue.
    2. Google delivered Chromecast, a device that lets you watch the web on your TV for $35, and competes with the likes of Apple TV and Roku. Its approach is fundamentally different, though, using your smartphone as the interface for the TV experience.
    3. YouTube releases customizable subscribe buttons to allow users to follow channels from anywhere. It’s another way to promote the high-value content channels, channels you might develop a fondness for and watch on your TV screen via, say, Chromecast.
    4. Flipboard affirmed its position as both distributor and competitor to its content providers by launching a web-based version of the service. Publishers have used Flipboard to reach audiences on iPad, but may have questions about a web-based version that runs ads like their own sites.
    5. Visiting your parents this summer? Just how many times do you think you’ll see them before they die? This app offers up a best guess based on WHO health statistics — and provides great material for guilt-purveying mothers everywhere.

  • Friday 5 – 06.21.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Facebook, as widely predicted, rolled out a comprehensive Instagram video offering. Instagram opted for a 15-second format — practically longform compared to the mere 6-second Vine. Will 13 filters, editing capability, and a stabilization feature topple Vine?
    2. Twitter purchased Boston-area Spindle. The mobile-only discovery app had a talented former Microsoft team behind it, and will add an important location data layer for Twitter.
    3. Highland Capital Partners announced a $25 million fund to jumpstart Leap Motion development for “solving human scale problems” in sectors including education, healthcare IT, big data, and productivity. There’s a post-mouse world coming, and 3D mobile tech will need developers to beef up the application ecosystem.
    4. WhatsApp now has more than 250 million active monthly users. Messaging is a crowded space, but it’s already bigger than Twitter and has the telcos concerned.
    5. Fascinating read for marketers and scholars alike: English is not the dominant language of the web. Ethan Zuckerman explains how this understanding changed Global Voices editorial approach.

  • Friday 5 – 06.14.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Twitter quietly opened its analytics platform for general use. Now even small publishers can view and track follows, unfollows, and clicks to gauge performance of an account, and even download a CSV.
    2. Facebook embraced the hashtag. This development has been greeted by many as the ultimate victory of advertisers over users. I agree with this Atlantic piece —  the pound sign doesn’t signal the apocalypse as much as a desire to engage users more through search and organized conversations and, yes, help those advertisers.
    3. It can be tempting to rush to new technologies to pursue the grail rather than optimize what you have. This book excerpt details how the Obama campaign enjoyed success by optimizing a technology people love to declare dead — and by overcoming a dread of being annoying.
    4. Kids like the handhelds and grownups like the tablets, according to Pew. Tablets  skew toward higher household incomes and educational attainment, but apparently there’s no significant difference in tablet ownership between men and women, or among different racial or ethnic groups.
    5. Did you think it was only your preteen obsessed with Snapchat? Apparently it’s the summer of Snapchat for Wall Street bankers as well. Looks like the startup may have a shot at being worth the 100M round it’s rumored to be raising on a half-billion or so valuation.

  • The perils of context collapse

    Social scientists call this “context collapse.” A joke that you make among friends would not be understood if you made the same joke among, well, everyone else. And even when you say things to a group of like-minded people — say, at an obscure conference where attendees might be tweeting or taking video — you can no longer assume that the thought will stay in that context.

    — Mike Rosenwald in an interesting Washington Post opinion piece, Will the Twitter Police make Twitter boring? This article garnered some backlash as well as thoughtful dissent from Alex Howard on the value of Twitter as social media watchdog.

    free speech area
    It can be easier to spot relevant context in the physical world

    It’s worth pausing on this idea of context collapse, especially as we interact online in more decontextualized, default-public settings. It’s not only the distant nature of all internet interaction, but the way social networks have over the past decade have created quasi-intimate settings (Look! Another baby picture!) while simultaneously removing physical context of your current social sphere (I’m wearing a suit, in an office.). Today, social networks are places where you can interact from the palm of your hand with your boss, your brother, and your barista — all at once, 24 hours a day. It’s a new normal for both communications and context.

    While Facebook  privacy settings and Google+ circles exist, the reality is that few use them to a significant level of granularity, and Twitter defaults to public. As content creators we’re charged with figuring out the new social norms that apply — and as consumers we’re learning to strike the balance between appropriate call-outs for bad behavior and online vigilantism.

    Photo credit: arbyreed