If you’re reading this somewhere between finishing your last college final and returning the polyester academic robe crumpled on the floor of your dorm room, you’re in the commencement process. Your brain is on emotional and practical overload: you’re simultaneously figuring out how to say goodbye to friends; planning for (or praying for!) a new …
Friday 5 – 05.17.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. Google celebrated I/O by dialing up the design, it seems. There are some sexy, new fast actions in Gmail and a flat, card-based Google+ re-launch that shows they’ve been doing plenty of pinning over in Mountain View. David Carr on Snooping and the News …
LinkedIn turns 10
So, LinkedIn is turning 10. The Next Web ran this comprehensive recap of the pivotal moments in its evolution — complete with jazzy infographic and a fun look back at its clunky 2003 web design. LinkedIn’s main differentiator was being among the first user-generated content networks focused on expertise. As an early adopter (user 6818 …
Try it: Graph your Facebook friends
Last week, Stephen Wolfram released a long and interesting analysis of aggregated and anonymized Facebook user data from his Data Donor program. He offers some observations about how Facebook behaviors illustrate the trajectories of people’s lives — how many people they friend, where they settle, and how clusters of friends reflect communities (school, friend, neighborhood). …
Morning Prayers @ Memorial Church
Today I was lucky enough to speak at the morning prayers service, a Harvard tradition since its founding in 1636 (more here). Many thanks to Jonathan Walton, who is the Pusey Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences — and a true proponent …
Boston Marathon, and the value of social
Please keep checking in. People often complain about social media. Facebook is time-consuming and pointless and self-aggrandizing and there’s no real connection — yes, all right. Twitter is a constant, exhausting, too-cool-for-school barrage. And both of them leave you feeling a little more distant from everyone, at the price of keeping a line open …
Why social content is extra memorable
Turns out that people can remember social content better than a CNN headline, a sentence randomly selected from a book, or even than a human face. Psychology researchers published a fascinating paper back in January that showed through a series of experiments that Facebook posts — chosen with a range of emotions and writing styles — are extraordinarily …
What words reveal about online community
Research by Bryden, Funk, and Jansen looks at word usage in Twitter, and finds that communities can be characterized by their word choice. Even better, the words used by an individual can accurately predict the community that user belongs to. We all speak in our own workplace jargon and the acronym-laden tech community, myself included, …
What happens in Vegas, Austin, etc. …
What happens in Vegas, Austin, or anywhere else is bound to stay with you forever these days. Many of us now live our lives in public, and embrace social media for the benefits of community and connection and in spite of the risks of indiscretion and overdisclosure. The kids are onto this. High school students …
How to manage your information diet
It’s beyond a truism that we live in an age of information overload. Email is overwhelming, connection is ubiquitous with most of us tethered to one or more mobile devices, and it feels like a new, must-see social web service emerges every day. Unless you’re a full-time social media specialist, there’s a lot more to …