- Game development company Valve continues to think different. This week it launched Pipeline, an experimental project to introduce high school students with minimal experience to the video game development industry.
- Is user experience finally moving beyond the tech domain and being perceived as a strategic business asset? Robert Fabrikant describes how UX is the new black.
- A Pew survey finds that middle and high school teachers believe that students’ use of digital tools encourages creativity and personal expression (78%) as well as greater collaboration among students (79%). Regrettably, this doesn’t always translate into effective writing, and teachers expressed concern about students’ ability to “read and digest long or complicated texts.”
- Readwrite describes how to get the most out of Google+, with a good explanation of its different (and clever) hashtag behaviors. I still believe the unintuitive navigation poses a barrier to widespread adoption, and that community is hard to cultivate without that critical mass.
- Twitter released a gorgeous data visualization of all the verified accounts. It’s colored by category: blue for news, purple for government and politics, red for music, yellow for sports, and green for TV. You can zoom in close to see the verified account names. The yellow patch bottom right shows sports accounts in with music and TV at bottom right — at first glance, it looks like mixed martial arts tweeters are making a big media splash.
Tag: twitter
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Friday 5 — 07.19.2013
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Friday 5 – 06.21.2013
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Friday 5 – 06.14.2013
- Twitter quietly opened its analytics platform for general use. Now even small publishers can view and track follows, unfollows, and clicks to gauge performance of an account, and even download a CSV.
- Facebook embraced the hashtag. This development has been greeted by many as the ultimate victory of advertisers over users. I agree with this Atlantic piece — the pound sign doesn’t signal the apocalypse as much as a desire to engage users more through search and organized conversations and, yes, help those advertisers.
- It can be tempting to rush to new technologies to pursue the grail rather than optimize what you have. This book excerpt details how the Obama campaign enjoyed success by optimizing a technology people love to declare dead — and by overcoming a dread of being annoying.
- Kids like the handhelds and grownups like the tablets, according to Pew. Tablets skew toward higher household incomes and educational attainment, but apparently there’s no significant difference in tablet ownership between men and women, or among different racial or ethnic groups.
- Did you think it was only your preteen obsessed with Snapchat? Apparently it’s the summer of Snapchat for Wall Street bankers as well. Looks like the startup may have a shot at being worth the 100M round it’s rumored to be raising on a half-billion or so valuation.
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Raju Narisetti in a Q&A with Nieman Labs
I think Twitter — unlike all the fears people had that it’s going to turn us into short attention-span people because we were so focused on the character limit — Twitter actually brought serendipity back into my life in a major way. I now encounter and experience so much more interesting content from around the world that would have been impossible in the days when we had a lot of time and bought a bunch of magazines and a bunch of newspapers.
– Raju Narisetti in a Q&A with Nieman Labs on journalism and mobile and his role with New News Corp. This excerpt encapsulates for me why participation in the social web is worth all the time and effort. And Android keeps me up at night, too.