- Yahoo may be back on top: Comscore names Yahoo #1 in U.S. unique visitors, and that’s without counting Tumblr’s 133 million blogs. A little early for Marissa Mayer to proclaim, “How do you like me now?” — but I sure hope she’s thinking it.
- Have you checked out Whisper? This mobile app for sharing secrets is getting 2.5 billion page views a month. Some terrific UX work and an interesting network structure where users aren’t featured — each post rests on its own merits.
- Some good data on teens, mobile apps, and privacy from Pew and the Berkman Center. Teens may be getting savvier about their online footprint: those who seek advice about managing privacy online are more likely to disable the location feature.
- What’s your 14-year-old doing on the internet? In September, she could be networking on LinkedIn as it opens its doors to teens and enables University pages.
- From teens to seniors: Y Combinator demo day showcased a number of promising startups, but I agree with TechCrunch that TrueLink is a big idea. It’s a credit card that enables families to help their seniors stay financially independent but avoid scams — huge market opportunity there.
Links
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Friday 5 — 08.23.2013
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Friday 5 — 08.16.2013
- User generated content as hypnotic and addictive: watch and listen to Wikipedia being edited. According to the creators’ blog, the sounds indicate addition to (bells) or subtraction from (strings) a Wikipedia articles, and the pitch changes according to the size of the edit.
- Facebook is not quite over yet — Pew finds that 94% of teens have Facebook accounts, and 81% report it’s the profile they use most often. Facebook’s deep integration via API and login mean that this traditionally fickle demographic may find it hard to detach from the mothership (even if their mothers are on it).
- Millennial news outlet Policy Mic gets kudos for its viral success, driven by smart adoption of behavioral analytics. Policy Mic understands that serious content can still be shareable, and the difference between optimizing for social and search.
- The role of social channels as a significant content distribution vehicle was underscored when a site outage compelled the New York Times to publish breaking news on Cairo via Facebook. If your organization is still treating “traditional” digital and social as different beasts, now’s a good time to rethink your approach.
- Ready for the weekend yet? I’ve previously covered the banana slicer, but Amazon has compiled a most excellent list of its funniest product reviews.
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Friday 5 — 07.26.2013
- Facebook’s Q2 numbers are in and the company appears to have mastered mobile ads — which now make up 41% of ad revenue.
- Google delivered Chromecast, a device that lets you watch the web on your TV for $35, and competes with the likes of Apple TV and Roku. Its approach is fundamentally different, though, using your smartphone as the interface for the TV experience.
- YouTube releases customizable subscribe buttons to allow users to follow channels from anywhere. It’s another way to promote the high-value content channels, channels you might develop a fondness for and watch on your TV screen via, say, Chromecast.
- Flipboard affirmed its position as both distributor and competitor to its content providers by launching a web-based version of the service. Publishers have used Flipboard to reach audiences on iPad, but may have questions about a web-based version that runs ads like their own sites.
- Visiting your parents this summer? Just how many times do you think you’ll see them before they die? This app offers up a best guess based on WHO health statistics — and provides great material for guilt-purveying mothers everywhere.
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Friday 5 — 07.19.2013
- 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.
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Friday 5 — 07.12.2013
- What would reddit be without GIFs? Buzzfeed asks if imgur is not-so-stealthily taking over reddit from the inside.
- Coursera brought in $43 million in an allegedly oversubscribed round — raising their total VC funding to $66 million. Goals are to grow team, expand into mobile, and improve third party integration.
- The Washington Post reports on new research on women leaders and the Goldilocks syndrome. Still a double bind between being assertive and acquiescent, but some progress in perception of the assertive.
- For those of you obsessed with productivity hacks, IFTTT goes mobile with an iPhone app. Who knew back in sixth grade math that if-then statements would be an important part of daily life?
- Hard to believe that it was only five years ago that Apple’s app store opened its virtual doors. Here’s a recap of some of the significant advances during that half-decade, like the creation of a $10 billion new industry, and impact of a mobile workforce on enterprise IT practices.
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Friday 5 — 07.05.2013
- Coverage of RSS technology that had largely faded from conversation reached a fever pitch this week with the July 1 shuttering of Google Reader. Digg Reader launched; Flipboard experienced some transition pain; and Anil Dash tries to direct attention to what matters.
- An undertold story on July 1 was the new COPPA regulations affecting data collection from people under 13 years old. If you’re developing an app for K-12, watch this space.
- Pew Internet confirms it: 6% of online adults are reddit users. Males 18-29 lead the category, and a casual glance at the headlines will confirm that many journalists are spending time sourcing stories on the site.
- I’ve long been an advocate for devil-in-the-details digital as a greater determiner of online experience than the direction indicated by mood boards. Here’s an interesting argument for the value of “micro-moments” in ux design.
- And the Harvard Gazette gets its first major refresh since 2009. Approach is mobile-first, analytics-informed, and media-rich. Baked in WordPress, measured by Google Analytics and Chartbeat, and hooked into social, the site reflects a create-once-publish-everywhere (COPE) approach. Check it out for yourself.
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Friday 5 – 06.28.2013
- Is the 800 million dollar valuation of Snapchat the sign of the bubble poised to burst or a smart bet on the need for ephemeral content in an always-on world? Here’s an interesting read on the valuation and the parallels with Instagram, including shared focus on experience over revenue.
- Fragmented operating systems and the mobile-first world we live in are just two of the drivers for content management systems that encourage the right amount of structure for content. Contentful headed into beta this week, seeking to solve the problem with a publish-everywhere, API-driven approach.
- Enterprise is heading for mobile to reap productivity gains, and enterprise mobile is heading for the cloud, largely via backend-as a service. Here’s a take on how it’s all playing out.
- What’s a library these days if not card catalogs, dark wood and walls lined with books? Lots of smart people hard at work on this problem, and Pew Internet weighed in this week with a report on Younger American’s Library Habits. Unsurprisingly, Americans ages 16-29 expressed a strong interest in apps for finding library materials within the library or accessing library services on their mobile.
- Since it’s the Friday before a holiday week, and everyone’s planning their barbecues and/or reading reddit, why not craft your invitation using this handy new meme generator from Imgur?
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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.