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 …
Friday 5 — 12.20.2013
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. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay …
Friday 5 — 11.01.2013
Has a Chinese language photo app become the first one to achieve global popularity? This app allows you to snap a selfie and then modify as a cartoon character. Its meteoric rise has prompted some skepticism — can an app with instructions only in Chinese be so popular in Australia, US, and Canada, or are …
Friday 5 — 10.18.2013
Google Ngram Viewer allows you to search and plot words appearing in books from 1800-2008 — and has just rolled out some new features. The new wildcard feature allows you to find which words appear alongside others. Above, I’ve plotted which noun appears most frequently after “social network.” From about 1990 on, the answer is …
Friday 5 — 10.11.2013
How do the words we use segment us by personality, gender, and age? An open vocabulary study of over 700 million Facebook posts by 75,000 volunteers provides a range of insights into attributes associated with language use. As the word cloud shows, men use profanity and talk about xbox far more than women on the social network. …
Mobile mandate
In case the persistent drumbeat of blog posts, newsletters, and conferences underscoring the mobile mandate were not enough, here’s some compelling new data from Pew: 63% of cell owners are what Pew calls “cell internet users,” people who access the internet via phone. The number has doubled from 31% since 2009. See also that email and …
Friday 5 — 09.06.2013
We know almost everything about the iPhone 5C except the most critical one: price. Mobile pro Benedict Evans breaks it down. 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 …
Friday 5 — 08.09.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. Anyone who has ever clicked on a search result only to land on an article stub generated by a content farm will be glad to see this latest Google tweak. This update highlights up to three in-depth articles in the right column, pointing users …
The science of website design
Few would dispute that website design is a creative exercise. A recent study by Katharina Reinecke and colleagues PDF would imply that there’s some interesting, quantifiable science baked in as well. Both common sense and studies confirm that users judge a site’s appeal within seconds. Reinecke et al. offer some compelling findings on how visual complexity …
How to manage deceptive online reviews
Via Bits Blog, an academic study on deceptive reviews explores why web reviewers make up bad things. It turns out that false negative reviews are not written predominantly by competitors or disgruntled employees. These reviewers are often loyal customers who have made multiple purchases from the company — just not the product in question. Customers writing false …