Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. 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 …
Friday 5 — 07.19.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …