Perry

Hewitt

Tag: privacy

Friday 5 — 11.21.2014
1. Google is now clearly identifying mobile-friendly sites in its search results. While Google’s search algorithm remains a well-kept secret, it’s not a stretch to infer that sites that perform well on mobile will index better for its search.
2. Wasting time on Facebook at work is a popular pastime, even if you have to access it stealthily on your smartphone. Quartz reports on a new project called Facebook at Work. This would put Facebook head-to-head with LinkedIn for professional networking, and gain a foothold in the coveted productivity and collaboration space.
3. Planning and delivering effective client presentations isn’t as easy as it looks. Watch out for these 13 ways designers can screw them up.
4. Early Twitter adopters beware: now you can search every tweet ever sent. The demise of many popular link shorteners means you may not, however, be able to follow all those links.
5. Although Wikipedia remains the 6th largest site on the internet, a daunting bureaucratic culture around the rules make it a black box for prospective contributors. Communications professionals are particularly flummoxed on what’s fair game and what’s not — this free ebook aims to change all that.
Weekend fun: A book on computer engineer Barbie, who used her subpar coding skills to make cute puppies, was not Mattel’s finest hour. However, the responses brought out the best 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.
November 21, 2014
Friday 5 — 10.10.2014
1. Google has enhanced its search results with an “In the News” box. These results include blogs and other content sites that are not traditionally indexed as news. This would explain the travesty above, where a Chelsea blog is listed related to a search for Arsenal F.C.
2. Here’s a thoughtful recap and lessons learned from the NYTNow and soon-to-be-shuttered NYT Opinion apps. Being smart about mobile can draw in new and younger audiences, but it’s still a challenge to figure out what users will pay for, and to avoid cannibalizing existing channels with lower priced offerings.
3. Did you ever wonder what the advertisers know about you based on your web habits? Data researcher Jer Thorp paid 10 users $5 each to profile him based on the ads he’d been shown, and shares the results. If you are curious about the data online advertisers are gathering about you, download this Chrome extension, Floodwatch.
4. Creative types proficient in Photoshop or InDesign can make anything look good. For the rest of us looking for ways to improve our graphics, here are 23 useful tools to create images for social media.
5. Diehard location check-in fans may like the new Swarm widget for iOS 8, which lets users check in with a single tap. Foursquare is taking another run at serendipitous in-person socializing with a “nearby friends” feature.
Weekend fun: Jimmy Fallon runs down the pros and cons of Ello, the new ad-free social network.

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.
October 10, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.23.14
1. How does your LinkedIn profile rank? LinkedIn taps into inherent narcissism by exposing your percentile in profile views compared with that of your connections, or with others in your company. Disappointed in your results? LinkedIn suggests that you beef up your summary, add more skills, and join more groups.
2. There’s a big opportunity for native mobile apps to take advantage of your handheld’s hardware from camera or accelerometer. This week, Facebook announced an imminent mobile app feature that uses the microphone to identify ambient TV shows, music, or movies. The app then offers up the content to be approved for inclusion in a status update.
3. In a surely wholly unrelated initiative, Facebook changed the default privacy setting for new users to be “friends and family” versus “public” and announced a new privacy check up tool to be rolled out in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping your new privacy settings will keep your mobile device microphone from reporting you are home in your pajamas watching Veep, rather than at the Childish Gambino concert featured in your status message.
4. The internet of things means, sadly but inevitably, ads running on all those connected things. Like on your thermostat. Or your refrigerator. See the full list as well as a couple of clarifications from Google.
5. Why did that video go viral? Success can be attributed to eliciting strong, positive emotion. Be sure to keep it upbeat — people want to see the daring rescue attempt, but no one wants to know that the kitten actually died.
Weekend fun: Speaking of viral video, here’s a slick maneuver from a clever young man who caught a foul ball — and perhaps tried to win a heart.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 23, 2014
Friday 5 — 1.10.2014
1. If you’re not shivering right now, perhaps you were at CES in Vegas this week. Among the loveliest of launches is Yahoo’s News Digest app, the fruit of its Summly acquisition a year ago. With this sleek app, Marissa Mayer is making good on her commitment to prioritize beautiful product. Yahoo is cleverly delivering not only well-designed mobile news, but the far more valuable editorial filtering via morning and evening digest editions (complete with a countdown clock to the next edition).
2. Is it OK to admit we’re all getting overwhelmed by the endless stream of information? This article makes the case for more filters and bridges, and summarizes recent attempts to staunch the flow like nuking your Twitter feed.
3. There’s been a saying for a while now — and Jonathan Zittrain takes a stab at its provenance here — that when something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. In a similar vein, this article asks if we will come to regret the myriad small decisions we make each day — opting into free products like social networks, email provider, file and photo storage in the cloud — where we don’t pay with money, but with our private data.
4. Here’s a compelling argument for building online systems with empathy and not disdain in civic tech. It’s a great example of how digital strategy and communications are inextricable. The best digital platforms with stellar experience design, flawless cross-device rendering, and optimal performance become useless when impeded by content and communications that obfuscate rather then enable.
5. How do African Americans have access to or use technology differently? Pew’s recent report finds that there’s a 12 percentage point gap in broadband adoption, but that African Americans are represented in roughly similar mobile numbers for cell phone and smartphone ownership. And the phenomenon referred to as “Black Twitter” may be backed up by these numbers: 22% of online African Americans use Twitter versus 16% of online whites.
Weekend fun: If you enjoy black humor, you may already have played Cards Against Humanity. If you’re concerned about the future of news and painful linkbait headlines, why not go play Headlines Against Humanity?

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
January 10, 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
Grokking Google+

It’s hard to grok Google+. On the one hand, since January 2013 Google+ user numbers have made it the undisputed second largest social network. In a similar vein, Mashable just published a breathless Google+ for beginners how-to that calls it “an intriguing network for all users.”

On the other hand, web traffic referrals from Google+ are down. Way down, if this recent Shareaholic report is anywhere near accurate. And web traffic sent is a good indicator of the volume of content that users are actively sharing on Google+. Image-rich social sites like Facebook and Pinterest are leading the pack.

The Google+ user experience make it seem more like a loosely-tied set of features than a cohesive network or service. Sometimes this lack of clarity evokes privacy concerns. The Google+ personalization of www.google.com on your birthday is one relatively benign example. The brand you’ve come to think of as your private search tool is surfacing your own information in a way that it’s easy to mistake as public to all.

More disconcertingly, Google+ seems to automatically display birthdays of Google+ “friends” through the Android browser. The experience below led a colleague to ask, “How did you buy screen space on my phone?”

Perhaps it’s more useful to think of Google+ not as a Facebook or Twitter competitor, but as something entirely different. Charles Arthur in the Guardian described Google+ as the Matrix, “an invisible overlay between you and the web, which watches what you’re doing and logs it and stores that away for future reference.” Sure, there are some compelling social network features, like Hangouts. But in the end, you’re serving up your data in return for getting a suite of services like email and search, and only an occasional, visible glitch will remind you of the Matrix. Given the deep embedding of Google service in many of our lives, it’s a tough tradeoff to walk away from.

October 29, 2013
Why digital is bigger than the screen
“Digital is bigger than the screen,” says Zach Dunn, who co-founded digital experience company One Mighty Roar with his brother, Sam. [tweetable]We can already see how digital experiences are transcending the screen[/tweetable], from ubiquitous FitBits and Jawbones to emerging Google Glass to Evernote’s move into Moleskine and PostIts. Arduino experiments are everywhere, with Intel today announcing its entry into the maker movement via Galileo. Cisco predicts that by 2020, there will be 9.4 internet-enabled devices per person, and has even launched a connections counter to track the rise of the so-called Internet of Things.

“Internet of Things” is a bit of a misnomer. [tweetable]Ideally as more interactions become internet-enabled, the device as a clunky intermediary will reduce in importance[/tweetable]. Private home automation is an easier first frontier. If a wearable sensor can tell my house I am home, turning on the lights and turning up the heat are straightforward. Companies like Withings have established home markets with a number of smart devices from scales to blood pressure monitors. Users track their own personal health data, and can opt into more public sharing for motivation and support.

In public spaces, internet-enabled interactions raise security and privacy concerns, but provide opportunities as well as solutions to longstanding problems. Three ideas to consider for physical campuses of any kind:
1. Immersive experiences: Imagine a person picking up a signifying object (example: a gavel for the law school), and interact with it to summon up an immersive digital experience. Images, video, and sound can create this experience in a setting as dramatic as a whitewashed room (museums, take note) or in a smaller surround-sound booth setting.
2. Traffic management: The ability to measure opted-in wearable devices crossing a threshold would improve campus foot traffic management. This could improve wait times at a fitness center or limit time spent in lines at popular food trucks; wearable devices on the alert recipients to could be customized to preference (elliptical, taco truck) in either case.
3. Serendipity creation: At a networking event, how do you find the three-five people most interesting for you to meet? There are analog attempts to solve this problem: events like WebInno provide colored nametag stickers if you are hiring or looking for a job. And skilled superconnectors like Peter Boyce (who pointed me to One Mighty Roar) will always be relevant. But what other personal metadata might spark valuable conversations? Imagine an opt-in system where people’s professional and personal interests display above them, and alert others to proximity of those with similar interest. Might it be possible to create or even just enable serendipity?
Much of this is technically possible, if not yet robust. And the structural lag in both social norms and privacy policies remains enormous. While you may not yet feel the need for your own Internet of Conference Tables, consider the opportunities as internet-enabled interactions through devices come to private and public spaces.

Photo credit: mozillaeu
October 3, 2013
Friday 5 — 09.06.2013
1. We know almost everything about the iPhone 5C except the most critical one: price. Mobile pro Benedict Evans breaks it down.
2. Price point for the new iPhone is highly correlated to its global #2 performance in the face of Android’s dominance. Market share stakes are high with an estimated total of 1.8B mobile phones shipping this year, and 2.3B units predicted by 2017.
3. Does it seem like you spend about twice as much time online as you did three years ago? Apparently, you’re right, and those smartphones and tablets are to blame.
4. If you’ve ever sheepishly deleted your browser history, rest assured that you’re in the majority. According to Pew, 86% of internet users have taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints. Perhaps more surprising was the news that 21% of internet users reported an email or social networking account compromised or commandeered without permission.
5. At last — big data comes to the women’s sport pages! Check out this awesome rapgenius analysis of the New York Times wedding section. Weddingcrunchers.com is a database of ~60K wedding announcements published in the New York Times from 1981 to 2013.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
September 6, 2013
Friday 5 — 08.23.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.
1. Yahoo may be back on top: Comscore names Yahoo #1 in U.S. unique visitors, and that’s without counting Tumblr’s 133 million blogs. A little early for Marissa Mayer to proclaim, “How do you like me now?” — but I sure hope she’s thinking it.
2. Have you checked out Whisper? This mobile app for sharing secrets is getting 2.5 billion page views a month. Some terrific UX work and an interesting network structure where users aren’t featured — each post rests on its own merits.
3. Some good data on teens, mobile apps, and privacy from Pew and the Berkman Center. Teens may be getting savvier about their online footprint: those who seek advice about managing privacy online are more likely to disable the location feature.
4. What’s your 14-year-old doing on the internet? In September, she could be networking on LinkedIn as it opens its doors to teens and enables University pages.
5. From teens to seniors: Y Combinator demo day showcased a number of promising startups, but I agree with TechCrunch that TrueLink is a big idea. It’s a credit card that enables families to help their seniors stay financially independent but avoid scams — huge market opportunity there.
August 23, 2013
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

June 4, 2013