Perry

Hewitt

Tag: humor

Happy birthday, cherished LinkedIn professional acquaintance!

Whether you use LinkedIn on a laptop, the traditional mobile app or the new Connected app, you’ve no doubt encountered the LinkedIn birthday phenomenon. I don’t know how well LinkedIn thought this user experience through, but here’s how it plays out in practice. Remember that slightly sweaty but affable guy you sat next to at Dreamforce back in 2004? And that you talked about CRM and found out you both used to work at Lotus? And then you connected on LinkedIn? Well, now it’s his birthday — what are you going to do about it?

And once LinkedIn has a piece of connection-enhancing information like this, it’s like a dog with a bone. Those birthdays will surface on the mobile app stream, and pop up as “notifications.” They’ll be emailed to you each morning beneath a giant collage of people you vaguely remember from somewhere, who are unwittingly celebrating dubious life milestones like the “work anniversary.” Those birthdays will pop up in the content feed just when you found an Influencer piece you might actually want to read. LinkedIn wants you to know: that guy from Dreamforce? Back in 2004? It is his birthday.

Read the rest of Happy birthday, cherished LinkedIn professional acquaintance! over at Medium.

Photo credit: Tasha Chawner

July 27, 2014
How to use Twitter correctly

Twitter is dead — user growth is flat, its stock this week tumbled below the $40 mark, and the Atlantic has delivered a wistful eulogy. But just in time for the wake, here’s a handy guide to excruciatingly correct Twitter usage, kicked off by the team at bowery.io:

May 1, 2014
IFTTT for the future

Many people in the tech community rely on a canny service called IFTTT. Short for If This, Then That, the service automates conditional statements in our day-to-day lives. For example, if I go the the gym and check in on Foursquare via smartphone, then IFTTT records a workout on my Jawbone Up. These conditional statement “recipes”, a word I am familiar with only from binge-watching Breaking Bad, can be created and shared with others.

The looming New Year got me thinking, though. What great IFTTT recipes will we need in 2014? Everyone claims it’s the year of the internet of things and wearable tech, so shouldn’t we be automating our Glorious Future™ now? These seven recipe ideas would really put the internet to work for me …

Read the rest of 7 IFTTT recipes we desperately need for 2014 over at Medium.

Photo credit: Jeff Kubina

January 1, 2014
Exploring Chinese internet censorship
Lots of interesting thinking in Cambridge in the last few weeks about internet censorship in China. For those of you who missed it, last Monday, June 4 marked the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and spurred online discussion about what was and wasn’t clearing the censors.
- Back in May, Nieman Lab reported on what could be deduced about censorship by analyzing the posts deleted from Weibo, a popular microblogging service.
- EFF reported on an expanded list of censored terms related to the anniversary, including miraculously stopping time by deleting the terms for “today” and “tomorrow.” In a feat of Orwellian absurdity, “Weibo blocked all forms of the numbers eight, nine, six, and four, which resulted in accidental censorship of reports about the Shanghai Stock Exchange when the market index fell 64.89 points.”
- Lastly, finally got around to reading this (nearly equation-free!) paper by Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts, which ﬁnds that the widespread censorship is less about eliminating criticism of local government and more aimed to stop discussions with collective action potential.
I think a lot about ways in which what we see is victim to implicit filtering – captured well by Eli Pariser in The Filter Bubble – and it’s fascinating to see different ways censorship as an explicit goal plays out.
June 11, 2012