- Facebook’s Q2 numbers are in and the company appears to have mastered mobile ads — which now make up 41% of ad revenue.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Tag: google+
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Friday 5 — 07.26.2013
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Friday 5 — 07.19.2013
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
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Google Reader, you still autocomplete me
Google Reader may be nearly two weeks gone, but Google Chrome’s autocomplete feature just took me back to our 7+ year, highly co-dependent relationship. Reminder: you have until tomorrow (12pm PST July 15, 2013) to download a copy of your Google Reader data via Google Takeout.
Where should you go from here? Some people aren’t replacing their readers at all, where others view this time as an unexpected RSS renaissance. I’ve been deep in feedly for a while, but look forward to checking out digg.
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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.
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
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Try it: Visualize search worldwide
Add another curiously mesmerizing big data visualization to your procrastination list. This colorful visualization serves up a (presumably filtered for a G rating) constantly-updating view of all the Google search terms people in the U.S. are entering in near real-time. For fun, toggle over to see search terms in ten other countries, including Australia, India, and Russia.
Feature request: a customized version for brands to visualize the terms most frequently associated with the brands, like “Arsenal + Wenger” or “Harvard + financial aid.” There are other ways to discover those terms, but would be terrific to visualize them out of the box for a presentation on brand associations.
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5 tips for your post-college social media self
If you’re reading this somewhere between finishing your last college final and returning the polyester academic robe crumpled on the floor of your dorm room, you’re in the commencement process. Your brain is on emotional and practical overload: you’re simultaneously figuring out how to say goodbye to friends; planning for (or praying for!) a new internship, job, or grad school; and wondering how on earth to pack up all the stuff you’ve accumulated during your college years. Here’s a manageable to-do list: five ways for new graduates to get your digital and social media presence in order.- Set up and clean up your LinkedIn profile. Of the five profiles sent to me this week from recent grads, three of them had typos — and two candidates had misspelled their major. Have a friend read your profile for common sense, grammar, and spelling. Do the same for a Google+ profile. Pro tip: try your name on Google image search and see what comes up. If you don’t like what you see, update your online profiles and let indexing do its work.
- Review your social media privacy settings. If you’re 21 today, you were 12 when Facebook launched, 14 when Twitter emerged, and are now far too old to be messing around on Snapchat. Younger users tend to be savvier about privacy settings, but just in case: read these Facebook basics and settings controlling who can find you, then hop over to Google and check out Me on the Web. While not all companies will hire through Twitter like this the web is, increasingly, your resume.
- Put together a listening system. Are you still looking for a job or entering a new field? Set up a system of alerts and feeds to keep you informed. Google Alerts have been around forever but are surprisingly useful — enter one or more terms relevant to your area of interest. For blogs and sites you follow, try feedly and its fantastic mobile interface. Use the content you follow to your advantage — at very least you’re staying informed, and at best you’ll have current and relevant ideas to share with co-workers.
- Manage your inbox and contacts effectively. Email is an overwhelming and unwieldy system where, some say, information goes to die. Gmail does have a number of features to improve email management from starred senders to priority inbox; check out Lifehacker for a useful selection of hacks. Mobile email ninjas may do well mastering all the swipe actions of Mailbox to prevent overload. And while a new grad won’t need a fully-fledged contact management system, be sure to keep your contacts in a way that ensures they’re accessible and in context.
- Own your own domain and a sensible email address. It’s true that each new release of gTLDs makes your URL less relevant and search and social more important. That said, for less than 10 bucks a year you can have your own domain name, and refer it to a profile page on LinkedIn or about.me. And now’s the time to set up email forwarding via your academic institution, if they offer it, or settle on an email address that omits your year of birth or favorite Twilight character.
Congratulations! The good news is that it’s neither difficult nor costly to set up a reasonable online presence. The even better news is that digital and social technologies provide you with the keys to find and connect with people and ideas to continue learning beyond the campus you’re leaving behind.
Photo credit: Ladies Home Journal 1931, courtesy George Eastman House
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Prepare for your digital afterlife
100% of the people who read this post will die. As will 100% of the people who have accounts with Google. And Google’s finally doing something about it with the launch of Inactive Account Manager, an awkwardly-named but sensible service for deciding what to do with your digital legacy. I’ve written about death in the social era before and the need for social web services to develop new protocols for the decease; as personal online data accumulates, the need is ever greater.Google has created a straightforward step-by-step process: select what “inactive” should mean for your account; verify your mobile phone number; and select the data (email, contacts, photos, etc.) you’d like to share with a designated recipient; or, delete your account entirely.
I did pause at the hardest screen of all: a blank email to complete to your digital heir. We don’t often take the time to consider or have the opportunity to craft our last words in pixels. What subject line is appropriate from the afterlife? What’s the optimal email length from a deceased sender? Save some time for this; that email message was short, but took far longer to write than I ever imagined.
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Google+ today: From sausage fest to ghost town
Throughout 2011, it was clear that Google+ was mostly a male bastion. Mashable reported that if you were to throw a dart at Google+, it would be more than twice as likely to land on a man’s profile as a woman’s profile. Ensue hue and cry.This week, the Wall Street Journal puts Google+ on ghost town watch, pointing out that users spend a mere three minutes a month on site versus six-seven hours on Facebook. Meanwhile, Pinterest is soaring, with growth driven largely by women. Think about it, guys.