Perry

Hewitt

Tag: messaging

Friday 5 — 12.5.2014
Seen at HarvardX
1. We’re all producing more video, but who’s watching? Unlike written content, where a strong open may draw a reader in, there is a divide between those who press play on a video, and those who don’t. This post suggests that video consumption may not be evenly distributed across your audience — and you may have a very specific segment that forms your core video-watching audience .
2. Anyone still wondering how much people would actually buy via mobile should read these reports [click the + signs at the bottom to see earlier reports]. On Cyber Monday, mobile shopping accounted for 42.1% of traffic, and 22% of sales. Within mobile, purchasers still prefer tablet over smartphone, a preference that may change as more adopt phablet devices.
3. Benedict Evans poses thought-provoking new questions in mobile. Now that Apple and Google have won the platform war, what are the new issues around interaction models and wearables? And how will the industry change as mobile scales to 4B smartphones worldwide.
4. How do Chinese mobile app user interfaces differ from those created for Western consumers? WeChat product manager Dan Grover wrote a fascinating post with everything from the rise of chat as universal UI to the the use of cutesy mascots.
5. What does the way you move your mouse reveal about you? Google announced that it has found a way to use that movement to surmise if you are human. Now you can click a checkbox confirming “I am not a robot” instead of deciphering squiggly text. Those annoyed by Captcha will rejoice, but others may raise concerns about privacy.
Weekend fun: Be sure not to miss the parodies of the new Star Wars trailer. I’ll be watching these trailers with a few boxes of Girl Scouts’ Thin Mints, obtained via the magic of the internet.

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 for a weekly email.
December 5, 2014
Friday 5 — 11.28.2014
1. Technology surrounds us, but what do most internet users understand about it? A Pew survey on web and digital technology found that only 23% of adult users are aware that “the Internet” and “the World Wide Web” are not the same thing. And while 83% of those surveyed could correctly identify Bill Gates, fewer than half knew that Facebook started at Harvard. Take the quiz for yourself before you read the report.
2. I enjoyed this post reframing strategy as less of a blueprint, which was better suited to a predictable analog world, but more of an algorithm (rule) that helps you manage for exceptions. As digital marketers operate in an ever-changing mix of channels, tools, and audiences, it’s essential to rely less on a plan and more on an agile approach that enables flexible, distributed decision-making.
3. Twitter is launching a new feature called “app graph,” which tracks all of the apps a user has installed on their mobile device. The goal is to serve users more applicable suggestions for accounts to follow, and add relevant content (including better-targeted ads) to their feeds. Here’s how to disable it.
4. Alex Breuer gave a thoughtful interview on responsive design at the Guardian. The interview provides insights on ways mobile can influence editorial, the evolution of prototyping, and why speed is considered an integral component of design.
5. WhatsApp is emerging in some contexts as a major traffic driver for news sites — and the rise of messaging apps in the West ensures this trend will continue to grow. Site owners should start gathering data on messaging referrals, and evaluate when it’s time to add a button for WhatsApp sharing.
Weekend fun: Here are Richard Scarry’s Busy Town inhabitants cleverly re-imagined with modern-day professions, like “content aggregator” and “tech start up executive.” Beware the pathos casting of Lowly Worm.

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 for a weekly email.
November 28, 2014
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 — 8.8.2014
1. Snapchat and WhatsApp are emerging as dominant photo sharing platforms. Interesting that a main modality for this sharing is private messaging (quasi-ephemeral in the case of Snapchat) versus Facebook’s one-to-many concept of posting to your profile page.
2. Social networking skeptics often decry the use of “friend” as an organizing principle for everyone from your sister to your teammate on the college lacrosse team a decade ago. Fear not: Foursquare and LinkedIn are embracing the follow model.
3. If you’re still trying to get your head around bitcoin, add Stellar to the list of digital currency projects you’ve got to figure out. Backed in part by online payment innovator Stripe, Stellar is a not-for-profit that seeks to expand digital currencies to a wider audience, and provide an easier way to move money over the internet.
4. Public radio junkies may want to check out the new NPR One app. Native for mobile and web for desktop, the app provides the ability to listen to NPR content in an nonlinear, curated way — and enables serendipitous discovery in the process. Features include the ability to select your home station independent of current location, search from every screen, and an “interesting” button (avoiding the awkward “like” on sobering news pieces). Read an in-depth review.
5. Are your social media posts more popular than you think? This (vendor-written) post explores the varying ratio of creators : commenters : observers online, and offers suggestions for how you might calculate probable reach across the different social networks.
Weekend fun: “We live in a rapidly changing world … the way people get from place to place needs to change, too.” Beyond Uber, there is WYSK.

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 8, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.2.14
1. For a few years now, Foursquare has felt like a location data layer in search of a business model. The company just announced a move toward a more explicit user value proposition by revising its core app and splitting off a new Swarm app — a social heat map that doesn’t require an explicit check-in.
2. How can we stop wasting users’ time? Here are some practical ways to design experiences that avoid common user experience pitfalls. My favorite? Stop the madness of persnickety fields that make for tiresome web forms.
3. User growth is flat and the stock precipitously down — and now Twitter gets its very own eulogy.
4. At Facebook f8, Mark Zuckerberg announced a set of new features, few of which you might associate with Facebook as we know it. They include anonymous login, linking between apps, and a mobile like button. Also, he said trust, stable, and mobile a heck of a lot.
5. Teen-friendly, ephemeral, and visual messaging app Snapchat counters the unbundling trend of Foursquare and Facebook by adding features. Now users can swipe to chat via text or video — and true to brand, the conversation disappears when users leave the app.
Weekend fun: In one minute and twenty-three seconds you could accomplish something productive, like answering an email or flossing your teeth. Or you could watch tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos. And it’s only episode one of the series, so submit your suggestions printed on tiny tortillas via #TinyHamsterIdeas.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 2, 2014
Friday 5 — 2.28.2014
1. Pew released a report on the Web at 25 — and how Americans have adopted and are affected by the internet usage. A full 87% of us now use the internet, 90% have cell phones, and 58% have smartphones. And as you can see from the chart above, many report it would be very hard to give some of these behaviors up. Interesting to see that while 71% of Americans online report using Facebook, and 40% do so several times a day, only 11% reported social media would be hard to give up. Hmmm.
2. Here’s an unscientific yet thoroughly enjoyable analysis of what people have on their homescreens, as self-reported on Twitter. Lots of texting, news, and social apps win top spots on homescreens, compared to gaming and payment apps.
3. Self-confessed map geeks might enjoy browsing Google Maps’ new gallery. Google partners like National Geographic have provided maps and geospatial information which the gallery aims to make more visible and usable. Google sorts them into handy categories, like Historical and Infrastructure and Space.
4. Many who shake their heads at Google+ have a soft spot for Hangouts. Today Google released a redesign of Hangouts for iOS, with the ability to attach a map, add animated stickers, and record a short clip. It makes sense that Google would invest more in the product given Facebook’s aggressive move into social messaging with WhatsApp purchase.
5. If you think people smile a lots less in Moscow than Sao Paulo, you’d be right — at least according to their selfies. Selfiecity analyzed over 120,000 images from Instagram and found that only about 3-5% of pictures posted were selfies, and that women take far more than men. See the site for more interesting findings, and visualizations by city.
Weekend fun: Getting ready for your Oscar party on Sunday? Challenge your guests to identify every single Best Picture winner from these gorgeous and clever icons designed by Beutler Ink.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
February 28, 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 — 12.20.2013
1. Mandatory reading for web design geeks: Snow fail: Do readers really prefer parallax design? New research poses good questions about user orientation to parallax scrolling, which may be better suited for content heavier on video and other visualizations rather than text.
2. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay for the development of a new, presumably mobile-first platform to provide a personalized, location-based listening experience for content from NPR and affiliate stations.
3. Harvard’s Berkman Center published its annual compendium of essays in Internet Monitor 2013: Reflections on the Digital World. Sections include governments, companies, and citizens as actors in the digital world. Favorite excerpt: Potentially lost in the debates over privacy, security, and surveillance, is the fact that access to information plays a critical role in human development, governance, and economic growth across all sectors, including health, education, energy, agriculture, and transportation.
4. What’s App, a company of ~50 employees, is up to 400M users — and added 100M over the last four months alone. But how will all these social messaging apps make money? Some smart plays are emerging around e-commerce, with flash sales and sticker products driving revenue in Asia.
5. This terrific, long read outlines a step-by-step approach to digital marketing success. Written by digital marketing evangelist and bigtime analytics nerd Avinash Kaushik, the piece provides great guidance on how to focus your analytics efforts and avoid endless “data puke”.
Weekend fun: In case you’re suffering through an awkward office Christmas party or Yankee swap today, let me ratchet up your holiday envy: Bill Gates is an awesome Secret Santa.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
December 20, 2013
Friday 5 — 12.13.2013
1. Instagram Direct lets you send your photos, videos, and messages to select recipients. While comparisons to Snapchat feature prominently in the media coverage, this feels more like a catch-up feature like its video announcement back in June. One new ephemeral capability: you can delete your photos from recipients’ phones.
2. In another Snapchat-response move, Twitter announced you can direct message photos — along with a bunch of other enhancements designed to keep you in-app longer. Smooth new swiping action in the mobile app lets you see activity and “discover” more easily.
3. Canadian messaging company Kik at 100 million registered users may already be bigger than Snapchat, which declines to disclose its numbers. Kik’s support for HTML5-based content provides more flexibility to download games and content in-app — a big bet on the Web as its future.
4. Chart geeks, rejoice! In this season of best-ofs, the Wire has compiled the best 2013 charts. Big momentum behind fruit flavored candy with Jolly Rancher, Twizzler, and Starburst rising in Twitter mentions (and, allegedly, sales).
5. Open source software is eating itself, with more projects emerging and competing with one another throughout the stack. How can an enterprise know where to place its bets? Look for a strong community supporting the project, and code activity (releases, commits/month).
Weekend fun: YouTube Trends tell me that most of the country is watching 2013 rewind, so I guess you should be, too. I mean, it would be really depressing to dwell on the fact that all this stuff from 1994 is now 20 years old.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
December 13, 2013
Friday 5 — 11.29.2013
1. Shopping on your mind today? Jeremaiah Owyang posted Ten Trends for the Progressive Retailer. Not sure how far “purpose beyond profits” will go, but some very interesting ideas here about how companies will use data about customers to reward behaviors, and the impact of sharing as a business model.
2. Betaworks, the tech studio that brought us useful services like Chartbeat and bloglovin as well as sinister time wasters like dots, is raising another 20 million. Betaworks has always supported great ideas and terrific design in nascent companies. This round may allow the studio to do more with its existing adolescent companies like bit.ly and Digg.
3. A new report from Ovum determines “social messaging” is big and getting bigger quickly, with over 2B users by the end of 2014. These messaging apps are acquiring users, growing time in-service through expansion into games and payments, and finding paths to monetization. This growth and user behavior change have implications for both legacy “desktop-first” social networks and SMS providers.
4. For years companies and pundits have analyzed Twitter as an input to understand public opinion and predict election results. Now the South Korean Intelligence Service is alleged to have posted more than 1.2 million tweets to sway a presidential election. Not the first instance of astroturfing, but what some are calling “a systematic and massive intervention in elections”.
5. Testing is the least sexy word in any digital development process. You’ll pack the house for a presentation of mood boards or a design review, but your audience vanishes when the conversations turns to usability, accessibility, or load time. Here’s a practical breakdown of useful testing considerations.
Weekend fun: Check out ten hilarious Twitter feeds to be thankful for. My own addition, especially in this holiday season of specious, multi-column trends pieces: The Times is On It (@NYTOnIt).

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 29, 2013