Perry

Hewitt

Tag: Friday5

  • Friday 5 — 09.13.2013

    Friday 5 — 09.13.2013

    1. So, the iPhone 5C/5S launched and turned out to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Is Apple more about fashion than electronics these days?
    2. Infographics are everywhere, and their stepchildren “snackables” are likely clogging your social media stream. “Get me an infographic” has replaced “Make me a viral video” as the new top-down, digital/social mandate. Here are five questions executives should answer before requesting an infographic.
    3. The best way to make compelling and shareable content has been a battle between two camps: the automated and optimized for search crew versus the heavily human editorial approach. Here’s how Techmeme is striving for the right mix by having humans power the headlines.
    4. How are adult smartphone users using location services? According to Pew 74% of them are lost like me, and use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location. While more users report activating location as part of their mobile social posts, fewer are using explicit geosocial services like Foursquare to check in.
    5. If you were planning to tweet your way to the top, a position with a social media title may not be the right path. Turns out social media jobs have slowed because social is everyone’s job now. A savvy digital team will turn to empowering the enterprise rather than hoarding the know-how.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.

  • Friday 5 — 08.30.2013

    Friday 5 — 08.30.2013

    1. The New York Times put up an interactive feature on startups to watch. It’s an interesting list of new ideas (Myo) and mass eyeballs (WhatsApp), and a clean way to get reader feedback close to the content, like annotations. Nitpick: the design seems a little unnecessarily spare, and I’d like to be able to share each item rather than the whole story.
    2. Web analytics startup Parse.ly finds that Feedly is the big winner in the feed reader market post Google Reader, and that the Outbrain content discovery platform is driving more than 50M page views. More coverage here.
    3. More internets = more spam, but these algorithms are killing Twitter spammers even before they start. This methodology could be applicable to other social media services. Based on several metrics including content analysis, the system in one model identified and deleted 95% of problematic accounts registered across 27 services.
    4. This week marks ten years of Skype — now, “to skype” is even a verb. Here’s a terrific timeline of internet telephony.
    5. In the U.S. it’s Labor Day weekend. Here’s a great video reminder: it’s time to put down your smartphone and eke out the last moments of summer.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.

  • Friday 5 — 08.23.2013

    Friday 5 — 08.23.2013

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

    1. Yahoo may be back on top: Comscore names Yahoo #1 in U.S. unique visitors, and that’s without counting Tumblr’s 133 million blogs. A little early for Marissa Mayer to proclaim, “How do you like me now?” — but I sure hope she’s thinking it.
    2. Have you checked out Whisper? This mobile app for sharing secrets is getting 2.5 billion page views a month. Some terrific UX work and an interesting network structure where users aren’t featured — each post rests on its own merits.
    3. Some good data on teens, mobile apps, and privacy from Pew and the Berkman Center. Teens may be getting savvier about their online footprint: those who seek advice about managing privacy online are more likely to disable the location feature.
    4. What’s your 14-year-old doing on the internet? In September, she could be networking on LinkedIn as it opens its doors to teens and enables University pages.
    5. From teens to seniors: Y Combinator demo day showcased a number of promising startups, but I agree with TechCrunch that TrueLink is a big idea. It’s a credit card that enables families to help their seniors stay financially independent but avoid scams — huge market opportunity there.
  • 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 — 08.09.2013

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

    1. Anyone who has ever clicked on a search result only to land on an article stub generated by a content farm will be glad to see this latest Google tweak. This update highlights up to three in-depth articles in the right column, pointing users toward deeper content (and perhaps directing their eyes toward the ads). Big opportunity for publishers of high-value, evergreen content.
    2. 72% of U.S. online adults now use social networks, according to Pew. Breakdowns include slightly more women than men, and Hispanics represented more than African-Americans more than white, non-Hispanic. Retailers take note: adoption rates for adults 65 and older have tripled over the past four years.
    3. A good example of how great content strategy combined with optimizing an existing technology can yield significant returns: Zach Seward on Quartz’s email strategy just as their daily brief expands to weekends.
    4. Boston’s Here and Now covered Silicon Valley-funded Watsi, a startup crowdfunding medical care. This approach raises ethical questions, as well as potential positive implications for nonprofits looking to put a face on unrestricted giving.
    5. In yet another take on mobile, visual storytelling, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen launched the Mixbit video app for iOS. There’s a collaborative element to the storytelling and some solid UX to make recording and editing less daunting.

  • Friday 5 — 08.02.2013

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

    1. Starbucks reported solid earnings, and pointed to the “demonstrable impact” of digital innovation. More than 10% of Starbucks transactions in the U.S. are made via mobile, and they’re installing wireless charging mats in more locations (which seems like the smartest loss leader ever).
    2. LinkedIn brought in a strong second quarter, and now boasts 238 million users worldwide. CEO attributed the results to accelerated member growth and strong engagement—and LinkedIn will likely continue to grow into new geographies and demographic profiles.
    3. WordPress continues its user-friendly march toward world domination, now powering 18.9% of the web according to Matt Mullenweg. I’ve seen how WordPress has weathered the transitions Mullenweg mentions: from pure blog to blog/CMS, to app platform. It’s remarkable how the community has retained a strong commitment to user experience rare among open source projects.
    4. Business Insider released a summary of its new paid report on video growth. Social is an explosive driver of both production and distribution, and brands want in on the action.
    5. What does it look like when a brand jumps on the viral video bandwagon effectively? Watch The Camp Gyno to find out how clever startup Hello, Flo makes it look easy.

  • 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 — 07.19.2013

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

    1. Game development company Valve continues to think different. This week it launched Pipeline, an experimental project to introduce high school students with minimal experience to the video game development industry.
    2. Is user experience finally moving beyond the tech domain and being perceived as a strategic business asset? Robert Fabrikant describes how UX is the new black.
    3. A Pew survey finds that middle and high school teachers believe that students’ use of digital tools encourages creativity and personal expression (78%) as well as greater collaboration among students (79%). Regrettably, this doesn’t always translate into effective writing, and teachers expressed concern about students’ ability to “read and digest long or complicated texts.”
    4. Readwrite describes how to get the most out of Google+, with a good explanation of its different (and clever) hashtag behaviors. I still believe the unintuitive navigation poses a barrier to widespread adoption, and that community is hard to cultivate without that critical mass.
    5. Twitter released a gorgeous data visualization of all the verified accounts. It’s colored by category: blue for news, purple for government and politics, red for music, yellow for sports, and green for TV. You can zoom in close to see the verified account names. The yellow patch bottom right shows sports accounts in with music and TV at bottom right — at first glance, it looks like mixed martial arts tweeters are making a big media splash.

  • Friday 5 — 07.12.2013

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

    1. What would reddit be without GIFs? Buzzfeed asks if imgur is not-so-stealthily taking over reddit from the inside.
    2. Coursera brought in $43 million in an allegedly oversubscribed round — raising their total VC funding to $66 million. Goals are to grow team, expand into mobile, and improve third party integration.
    3. The Washington Post reports on new research on women leaders and the Goldilocks syndrome. Still a double bind between being assertive and acquiescent, but some progress in perception of the assertive.
    4. For those of you obsessed with productivity hacks, IFTTT goes mobile with an iPhone app. Who knew back in sixth grade math that if-then statements would be an important part of daily life?
    5. Hard to believe that it was only five years ago that Apple’s app store opened its virtual doors. Here’s a recap of some of the significant advances during that half-decade, like the creation of a $10 billion new industry, and impact of a mobile workforce on enterprise IT practices.

  • Friday 5 — 07.05.2013

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

    1. Coverage of RSS technology that had largely faded from conversation reached a fever pitch this week with the July 1 shuttering of Google Reader. Digg Reader launched; Flipboard experienced some transition pain; and Anil Dash tries to direct attention to what matters.
    2. An undertold story on July 1 was the new COPPA regulations affecting data collection from people under 13 years old. If you’re developing an app for K-12, watch this space.
    3. Pew Internet confirms it: 6% of online adults are reddit users. Males 18-29 lead the category, and a casual glance at the headlines will confirm that many journalists are spending time sourcing stories on the site.
    4. I’ve long been an advocate for devil-in-the-details digital as a greater determiner of online experience than the direction indicated by mood boards. Here’s an interesting argument for the value of “micro-moments” in ux design.
    5. And the Harvard Gazette gets its first major refresh since 2009. Approach is mobile-first, analytics-informed, and media-rich. Baked in WordPress, measured by Google Analytics and Chartbeat, and hooked into social, the site reflects  a create-once-publish-everywhere (COPE) approach. Check it out for yourself.