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 — 10.25.2013
For a number of years instinct and analytics have been telling us that photos are effective in social posts. That hypothesis seems validated by this week’s confirmation of Facebook and Pinterest domination of web referrals, with the former putting heavy emphasis on images in the newsfeed and the latter a nexus for image curation. In an …
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. …
Friday 5 — 10.04.2013
Have fun playing with bitly’s new Real Time Media Map, which visualizes how content from different media outlets is being consumed across the U.S. As you can see from the drilldown above, we read a lot of The Onion here in Massachusetts. Next week Google Analytics opens its free, online Analytics Academy. Another example of …
Friday 5 — 9.27.2013
Kudos to the Boston GlobeLab team on the beta launch of 61 Fresh, which features the most popular local stories shared on Twitter. Great to see the Harvard Gazette make the top-tweeted, and I’m buying a drink for the genius who added the “mute sports” feature. Maintaining a website requires constantly updating rapidly deprecating software, …
Friday 5 — 9.20.2013
Upworthy, a curated service providing a “steady stream of important and irresistibly shareable stuff” received another $8M. Here’s the post. Irresistible stuff of a more tangible nature remains wildly popular at Pinterest, which now claims 70M users. Unsurprisingly, Pinterest announced ads are coming in the form of promoted pins. Measurement is beginning to catch up with …
Friday 5 — 09.13.2013
So, the iPhone 5C/5S launched and turned out to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Is Apple more about fashion than electronics these days? Infographics are everywhere, and their stepchildren “snackables” are likely clogging your social media stream. “Get me an infographic” has replaced “Make me a viral video” as the new top-down, digital/social mandate. Here …
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 — 08.30.2013
The New York Times put up an interactive feature on startups to watch. It’s an interesting list of new ideas (Myo) and mass eyeballs (WhatsApp), and a clean way to get reader feedback close to the content, like annotations. Nitpick: the design seems a little unnecessarily spare, and I’d like to be able to share …