Perry

Hewitt

Tag: instagram

Friday 5 — 9.26.2014
1. Even with the meteoric rise of social media, search remains a significant driver of traffic for most sites. Google released a helpful, scrolling infographic reviewing the basics of how search works.
2. Visual social network Pinterest is a treasure trove for publishers. Not only a resource for trendspotting, Pinterest can in some cases drive more referral traffic to publishers than Facebook or Twitter.
3. Social media anxiety most often takes the form of FOMO (fear of missing out) — that feeling you get when you realize all your friends are on a fabulous ski weekend while you’re home in your pajamas binge watching True Detective. A new site aims to ease the pain of a different form of social media anxiety — when you fret over your unliked Instagram photos.
4. Are messaging apps taking over your mobile device? Here’s a breakdown of the trends that are sticking (e.g., disappearing messages, ambient messaging) and leading to the app proliferation.
5. If you work in marketing or publishing, chances are you spend some of your time sourcing digital design. 8 tricks to selecting a design partner underscores the value of a designer who understands business goals, and who will stand up to you and your bad ideas.
Weekend fun: The time-honored geek ritual of unboxing a new tech product is re-imagined in Blue Man Group’s video of the iPhone 6. But once unboxed, will it bend? Here’s a roundup of internet reactions to #bendgate.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.
September 26, 2014
Friday 5 — 8.29.2014
1. It didn’t take long for Hyperlapse, a new, stand-alone app for time lapse videos, to reach the #3 spot in the app store. Created by the team at Instagram, the app has a sleek, simple user experience that belies the sophisticated capabilities under the hood. At right, my first attempt to magically speed up traffic in Harvard Square. Click to view on Instagram.
2. A few weeks back, it looked like Google was going to buy Twitch, the livestreaming platform for videogames — much to the consternation of the site’s 55 million users. This week, Amazon picked up Twitch for just under $1 billion. Here’s why.
3. One way to visualize the impact of the Napa Valley earthquake is to take a look at how many people woke up. How would you do that? By charting anonymized user data from the Jawbone Up API.
4. What makes the most shareable content on social? KISSmetrics’ marketing blog shares useful specifics including word count for various platforms, and the optimal length for Facebook (just over 4 minutes, apparently). Longform content can spread, but articles must be formatted in a way that’s easy to read, with lots of visuals interspersed with the text.
5. This clever project meets a need we didn’t know we had: one pagers for tech trends. Each one-pager comes in both a long and a compact version, with useful charts and must-reads.
Weekend fun: How can you make Game of Thrones even geekier? Add in some old school video game sound effects. You’ve been warned: serious nostalgia trigger for gamers over 30. Fun fact: there are now more adult women gamers than teenage boys.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.
August 29, 2014
Friday 5 — 8.22.2014
1. Brands are active on social networks to reach engaged audiences, and the networks are finding creative ways to monetize their involvement. SoundCloud this week announced a new advertising platform, just as Instagram rolled out its analytics tools for brands. Both SoundCloud and Instagram have afforded brands huge organic growth; the challenge will be to offer them new business tools without alienating individual users.
2. We’re all suffering from The Stream, a deceptively gentle term for the firehose of ideas and links aimed at us every day by well-meaning friends, colleagues, and social network connections. Can radical scarcity improve quality? That’s the premise behind This., a social network incubated at the Atlantic which allows users to share a single link each day.
3. Twitter is addressing onboarding issues to make the platform more compelling, but both the 140 character limit and a longstanding, insider-y community can mean that new users encounter daunting jargon. If you’re struggling to tell your RT from your MT, here’s an illustrated guide just for you.
4. Launching a digital project can be like pulling the thread on a sweater — the more the new site/app/service makes possible, the more internal processes get disrupted and ideas get awakened. In a newly-launched responsive design podcast, Miranda Mulligan of the Boston Globe describes the politics between the newsroom and the design team, and how responsive design brought them together.
5. In far too many organizations, potentially transformative digital and social strategy is outsourced to agencies or relegated to interns. Or at least, it’s reliably blamed on the interns when it all goes horribly wrong.
Weekend fun: Take your pick: you can watch a fascinating brief look at texting and the internet in film, or while away the hours with Serendipity, a gorgeous visualization of songs played simultaneously on Spotify.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.
August 22, 2014
Friday 5 — 7.18.2014
1. With a growing and highly engaged (dare I say fanatical?) user base, Instagram has remained a social media darling. This comprehensive piece describes how its founders make the business tick, keep user engaged in a landscape of mercurial tastes, and prepare the app for monetization in the future.
2. There’s a new Facebook app, but only for famous people. Features focus on ease of use for content publishing (rather than perusing friends’ vacation pics), tracking mentions, and hosting Live Q &As.
3. Anonymous app Secret, famous for airing the tech industry’s dirty laundry in a mobile-friendly, passive-aggressive art form, raised $25M this week. Here’s how.
4. Is the internet dumbing us down into a culture where we merely share attention-grabbing headlines without consuming the content? Or can content that’s not aggressively shared find a readership over time? If you’re publishing online, it’s worth understanding how the curve of content consumption that dives into the valley of “meh” sometimes results in the hill of “wow”.
5. Did you ever write an email in haste and repent, well, immediately afterward? If you use gmail, these tips on un-sending that email might help.
Weekend fun: Who’s the biggest Star Wars ~~geek~~ fan: Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart? Watch and find out.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
July 18, 2014
Friday 5 — 7.11.2014
1. LinkedIn launched an app called Connected to simplify and enhance networking. The app provides members with more information about the current status of their contacts, including new jobs, media mentions, and the dubious milestone of the “work anniversary”. The calendar sync allows for pre-meeting intelligence, which means pushing you information about contacts just ahead of your meeting with them. Standalone apps have been offering similar functionality for a couple of years, but I suspect the breadth of LinkedIn’s user base will make it difficult for new entrants to compete.
2. Monthly subscription costs for digital services, now available to you via a single, impetuous click on your smartphone, can really add up. Streaming media services like Netflix and Spotify and storage services like iCloud and Dropbox make life easier but tend to accrue. Here’s are some quick tips on how to reduce your monthly payments for digital services.
3. What happens before, during, and after the moment you sign up for new social networks says a lot about the culture they are trying to foster, and the specific behaviors they are trying to encourage. Here’s a step-by-step review of how Instagram onboards new users.
4. In any web design meeting, there’s someone who wants to know exactly what’s above the fold. But in this era of myriad form factors and scrolling on your smartphone, there is no fold. Really, there isn’t.
5. How do you make time for social media — but not automate to the degree that you’re mistaken for a robot? Here are 10 time-saving social media tools to consider.
Weekend fun: Maybe you and your friends have a bunch of random stuff on your Instagram feeds. But it likely pales in comparison with what the TSA posts.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
July 11, 2014
Friday 5 — 6.13.2014
1. Amazon launched a streaming music service — a relatively commoditized offering with competitors like Spotify, Beat, and Rdio. The differentiator may not be a more robust feature set, in part because Amazon’s offering does not include Universal Music Group’s catalog. Instead, as this article points out, the Prime bundling with free shipping and book lending may tip the balance over its competitors.
2. Can Twitter survive against the Facebook juggernaut — and other rapidly growing social networks? Today, Twitter usage hovers at about 19% of U.S. online adults, versus 71% for Facebook. This Pew Research Center article suggests that Twitter may have niche staying power, with use cases around breaking news, political influencers, and activists.
3. What is the impact of unmoderated comments on your website? In one study, respondents rated articles with comments as lower quality— with as much as 8% difference in perception.
4. With over 200M active users and a top ten smartphone app, Instagram is a draw for many brands. Buffer offers a great how-to guide for businesses getting started on the photo sharing social network. Also included: best times to post to various social media outlets.
5. We’re in the midst of a hardware renaissance, and excitement about the promise of virtual reality (VR). Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe talks about the potential of the technology and its role within Facebook, which acquired the tech company back in March for $2B. Salient quote: “When you put on Oculus, people are just streaming with ideas, dreaming about things.”
Weekend fun: Irritating linkbait meets brutal satire at the Onion’s new venture, Clickhole. And it’s a winner whether people know it’s satire or not.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
June 13, 2014
Friday 5 — 2.21.2014
1. Facebook forked over $19 billion for WhatsApp, and the internet is full of articles explaining why. Among the most compelling is Buzzfeed’s take that WhatsApp posed a significant threat. WhatsApp is growing fast globally, consumes a great deal of young users’ smartphone time, and fills that critical “staying in touch” niche that Facebook would like to own.
2. The visual social network Instagram, another Facebook purchase, is looking like it might be living up to its relatively modest $1 billion price tag. Explosive growth and high engagement mean that Instagram is increasingly attractive to brands. It has exceptionally high engagement with affluent, young women — a demographic particularly attractive for retail.
3. If you’re an online publisher — and pretty much all brands are these days — you might be interested in Echobox. This analytics package offers data-driven insights about your content’s performance both on site and as shared across social channels. The end result is fewer charts and numbers, and more specific recommendations for your content.
4. LinkedIn this week entered the realm of “platisher” — the dreadful coinage for part platform and part publisher — as it opened up its content marketing Influencers program to everyone. Like Medium, LinkedIn will cultivate brand names and high-quality submissions, but sees value in building a broad-based content empire.
5. Just where will we wear the internet of things? We’re easing in with wristbands and the stunningly awkward Google Glass, but there’s more to come. Quartz provides a list of body parts likely to be adorned with tech in the near future.
Weekend fun: Jimmy Fallon took over The Tonight Show this week with a celebrity-studded vengeance, but the #hashtag2 performance sealed the deal.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
February 21, 2014
Friday 5 — 1.3.2014
1. 73% of online adults now use social networking sites, per this year-end report from Pew. And more adults are diversifying their online social networking — 42% report using more than one service. Facebook and Instagram boast particularly strong daily engagement. 63% of Facebook users using the site daily, and 40% say they log in multiple times per day.
2. Facebook itself has released a comprehensive (and highly visual) report for partners with aggregated international and mobile data. After its early bad bet on HTML5, Facebook’s 2012 pivot to mobile has been effective: roughly a third of German, Spanish, French, and Italian mobile phone users using Facebook.
3. Reddit released its own 2013 year-end numbers — 56 billion pageviews is impressive, and nearly 16 minutes per visit is staggering. From the top ten threads it’s clear that laughter sells and that Reddit was, for good and for ill, a go-to source in the murkiness around the Boston bombings. One question: With 21% of Canadians on Reddit, why isn’t it a nicer place?
4. In the U.S. and frustrated with your internet service? It’s likely you’re paying more and that your internet speed is lagging behind the rest of the developed world. The impact of faster speeds on productivity, the article points out, is the “the difference between thriving and surviving.”
5. Wondering how to make sense of all this digital, social, and mobile activity? See this roundup of 2013 digital media scholarship from John Wihbey. One article examines gender and language use on Twitter, and finds that women use higher levels of first person plural and first person singular pronouns, intensifiers, and emoticons in their speech.
Weekend fun: Have 23 minutes to avoid your in-laws if you’re at home or avoid your work if you’re stuck in the office? Try this compilation of ridiculous/hilarious/profane Vine videos.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
January 3, 2014
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.
June 21, 2013