Perry

Hewitt

Tag: visual

Friday 5 — 4.18.2014
1. Now that we’re all shooting more photos and videos than ever before, Dropbox is hell bent on storing them for you. Dropbox knows there’s a high switching cost for moving all your personal stuff (hassle, trust) so they’re making it easy and appealing to store and share, particularly via mobile. And yesterday Dropbox purchased iOS photo app Loom to continue the offensive.
2. This week, Twitter took a page out of Facebook’s monetization playbook by adopting app install ads. With a heavily mobile user base, Twitter provides an appealing audience for app creators looking for new users. Here’s hoping this proven ad revenue model shores up Twitter’s languishing stock price.
3. Hunter Walk illustrates how context matters when serving up recommendations for end users. When YouTube recommended videos to users, the interface explicitly told them why: e.g., “because you watched these puppy videos, we’re showing you this kitten.” As a result, users were less likely ignore the recommendations — and consumed more video.
4. But what if you don’t want your online behavior tracked, for relevant video recommendations or anything else? The Atlantic cites research from Zeynep Tufekci on emerging user behaviors, from passive-aggressive subtweeting to active hatelinking, that regular people are adopting to remain invisible to the algorithms that track online behavior.
5. Also filed under “what your social networks now know about you,” Facebook has launched Nearby Friends, a way for you to find out who’s close by. The technology is based on Glancee, a startup Facebook acquired back in 2012. Needless to say, early messaging is all about user control and privacy settings.
Weekend fun: Done right, Vine videos are a glorious, six-second art form. Here are this year’s winners from the Tribeca Film Festival, with my favorite Wrap Dancer winning the animation category.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
April 18, 2014
Friday 5 — 3.7.2014
1. Getty Images made 35 million images available for free in a move that should send shockwaves through the stock photo business. In an era of rampant copyright infringement, this move seems to imply that defending the photos was a bit like, well, tilting at windmills. Nieman Lab offers some thoughtful insights about the canny brand, data, and advertising rationale behind the move.
2. Kickstarter has raised a billion dollars to date to crowdfund creative projects. Worth noting that it’s a really long tail: the dollars reflect only a few massive hits and many, many small projects.
3. What if newspaper front pages were populated by the stories their readers share the most? Newswhip, a tech company that specializes in measuring realtime content for newsrooms, found out and illustrated the results. Fun fact: readers of the Daily Mail and The Guardian would choose the same front-page story.
4. Yahoo is continuing its spending spree with its acquisition of Vizify, a platform that pulls together a person’s social media posts in an engaging, visual format. Vizify can bring graphics and visual elements to enhance other acquisitions, like Tumblr.
5. Online quizzes have been around for ages, with the occasional new implementation that captures people’s attention. BuzzFeed has managed to reinvigorate the genre with a highly visual treatment and a simple backend interface for the editors creating the quizzes. A good reminder that the best editorial idea can die on the vine without frictionless technology to support it.
Weekend fun: It’s March already — which means SXSW, springtime, and less than a month until Game of Thrones is back on the air. And now you can experience the show’s goriest demises through the magic of eight-bit. (with thanks to Katie Hammer and Becky Wickel for feeding my #GoT addiction)

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
March 7, 2014
Leaning too far back: Women in stock photography

A few weeks back, LinkedIn sent me a recommended influencer post about perceptions of employee underachievement. The topic didn’t grab me, but the photo sure did.

Stock photos are generally risible, with staged pictures of men in suits earnestly shaking hands and flawlessly diverse executive teams ruminating in boardrooms. But something about this image I found particularly disquieting. The woman is in the classic stock art sterile office of unbranded computers, paperless desks, and empty binders. But something about her leaning far back in a sleeveless top, with her feet in six inch stilettos made me pause and wonder, “Does anyone in your office look like that?” LinkedIn is a career networking site, not an office supply catalog — somehow I expected the bar for depicting women to be a little higher.

Turns out I’m not alone in worrying about this. LeanIn and Getty have announced that they are going to take on the portrayal of women in stock photos. There will be a special collection that represents women and families in “more empowering ways” which I hope means more reflective of real women in real workplaces.

As Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty remarked, “Imagery has become the communication medium of this generation, and that really means how people are portrayed visually is going to have more influence on how people are seen and perceived than anything else.” As a more visual language of communication dominates the web, the images we choose to include in articles and blog posts make a lasting impression. This initiative may provide us with the means to tell a more contemporary story of women in the workplace.

February 11, 2014
Friday 5 — 1.31.2014
1. 新年快乐 — or, Happy New Year! Tencent’s WeChat has greeted the year of the horse by allowing users to send lucky money via mobile. This smart marketing move is aimed to inspire transaction among WeChat’s nearly 300 million global active users, and perhaps lure new users drawn by the feature.
2. In another nod to the increasingly visual nature of social engagement, Twitter has released new mobile photo sharing capabilities this week. It’s a move to keep people in the app, and drive engagement by issuing a reminder to @ mention others when you upload a photo containing people.
3. Facebook takes a crack at a “distraction-free” newsreading experience with the launch of Paper. It’s a definite upgrade from its Android Home experience and more like Flipboard — but will it offer too much competition with its own app?
4. Blogging is dead — long live collaborative publishing. Medium, the originally invitation-only content platform has announced a $25M round of investment. Medium pays some of its writers to attract quality content, and provides a lovely admin user experience for all. There are still some questions about Medium’s overall direction — how much is it a curated magazine versus a place for all storytellers?
5. How do you make sense of all the social media noise to inform the news? CNN and Twitter announced a partnership with a new tool aimed at journalists. Dataminr, a firm better known for financial services products, is shifting to help CNN use algorithms to identify accurate, breaking news stories from Twitter.
Weekend fun: Before all those SuperBowl ads go live on YouTube, amuse yourselves with this penguin dance-off. (h/t The Dodo, my new go-to source for all things animal-related).

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
January 31, 2014
Jelly and the visual web

Biz Stone’s new visual Q&A platform called Jelly launched this week. The mobile app lets you use images to pose brief questions to your social network, which is defined rather expansively to include friends of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, the site is positioned more for the helpers than for those seeking to crowdsource the help. Have five minutes in line at Starbucks or the post office? Use it to help someone in your network out.

The site discourages the long back-and-forth threads of Reddit, and at first glance doesn’t seem to attract the thoughtful commentary of Quora. Without any means of sorting by upvoted or downvoted responses, you have to wade through a bunch of bad answers or jokes to find the right one. There’s also an element of randomness to the requests themselves — is it Chatroulette for fleeting questions? — without any kind of categorization for questions you might like to answer, like you’d find on Metafilter or QuizUp.

There are some great details in the UX, like the way a small Harvey ball fills to show you are approaching the character limit as you type a question. The sound effects are terrific, even if the stream of alerts is a little noisy. And the ease with which you can send a civilized and shareable thank you will promote social virality.

But what’s the end game here? Is there a differentiated and solid enough use case to make a visual Q&A platform like Jelly a standalone business? An alternative theory is that this app is a smart approach to analyzing an increasingly visual web. Gathering a large amount of data about how social networks of people respond to, understand, and share images would be a step toward solving a valuable equation. Combine that human sensibility with algorithms, and there might be a real opportunity to develop and scale insights about performance and effectiveness of images in the visual web.

January 8, 2014
Friday 5 — 11.22.2013
1. Spotify closes another $250M in funding at a >$4B valuation. The streaming music service enabling instant listening now has more than 6 million paid and 24 million active free users.
2. Is it inciting generational warfare to imply that the youngs shape the direction of technology differently and more significantly than the olds? Mathew Ingram makes the case.
3. Last year I read Thinking Fast and Slow, a thought-provoking book about the different systems of thinking and their applicability to life and work. Recently Sonya Song wrote in Nieman Lab about how these two modes of thinking, fast and slow, attract two different types of attention. Interesting implications for individuals and organizations sharing content to social.
4. Most people frustrated by carrying a phone and a wallet everywhere they go were pleased by the widely-publicized launch of Coin. The digital all-in-one credit card last week met a $50K crowdfunding goal in 40 minutes. This week, Coin is answering criticisms about security and design flaws.
5. Wondering how to plan for and execute a redesign of a highly-trafficked digital property? You could do worse than read Brad Frost’s write-up of how he and his colleagues achieved the Techcrunch redesign. The part about development being part of the design process is key — the days of designers throwing PhotoShop files over the transom to front-end developers are long gone.
Weekend fun: I’m sure you’ve seen Jean-Claude Van Damme in his brilliant self-parody for Volvo already. Instead, in honor of Harvard-Yale weekend, how about some Harvard students giving fake tours of Yale (“if I hit the floor, you do the same”)?

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 22, 2013