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Researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center surveyed nearly 1,000 mostly college-aged students on their perception of cool. The three-year study found that more people believe a person is cool when they are friendly, warm, smart and trendy. Today people are less apt to respond to the James Dean-style of aloof coolness that was once so dreamy in yesteryears.

The researchers acknowledged that the study population is limited in scope, since it consisted of "mostly educated, young, Canadian, ethnically white and Asian, [and] predominantly female" in British Columbia, Canada. This is important to note because the idea of "cool" does not necessarily translate between different types of people, experts said.

The leather jacketed, cigarette smoking, rebel to authority is still perceived as somewhat cool, researchers said, but the nice guy next door now reigns coolest, according to the study surveys. Those who are talented and smart and striving to succeed also rated high up on the cool scale. Even nerdiness, which was once the antithesis of "cool," has changed its reputation. Geeks are now "under that counterculture umbrella of edginess" Dar-Nimrod said.

For the study 353 volunteers were asked to submit adjectives they associated with coolness. Surprisingly, the word "friendly" topped the list, followed by "personal competence."

This ranking positioned socially skilled, popular, smart, and talented people as being the ultimate in cool; individualist hipsters featured lower on the list. Bar-Ilan concluded: "Coolness has lost so much of its historical origins and meaning." That is: rebels are not hot. Or cool.

Another attribute figured prominently in this recent study: physical attractiveness. The prominence of "good looks" in the study echoes the results of work I carried out for my most recent book, Brandwashed. During my $3 million study into the way word-of-mouth works, I asked a family of five to secretly promote brands to a cadre of their friends, family members and colleagues. During this experiment, I learned that the key to the family’s success was neither their extensive network, nor their gift of the gab; it was their good looks.

Instagram manufactured a predictable response inside Yin’s brain. Her behavior was reshaped by a reinforcement loop which, through repeated conditioning, created a connection between the things she sees in world around her and the app inside her pocket. When a product is able to become tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing habit, it creates an “internal trigger.” Unlike external triggers, which are sensory stimuli, like a phone ringing or an ad online telling us to “click here now!,” you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in the mind and creating them is the brass ring of consumer technology. We check Twitter when we feel boredom. We pull up Facebook when we’re lonesome. The impulse to use these services is cued by emotions.

o get users using, Instagram followed a product design pattern familiar among habit-forming technologies, the desire engine.

The minimalist interface all but removes the need to think. With a click, a photo is taken and all kinds of sensory and social rewards ensue. Each photo taken and shared further commits the user to the app. Subsequently, users change not only their behavior, but also their minds.

Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what's interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view--providing a reliable context for the content that they discover and organize

Sites like BoingBoing and Brain Pickings are great content curators. And now brands are getting into the act. Harley Davidson's site Ridebook features content in culture, style, music, and travel. And increasingly, curators are emerging as a critical filter that helps niche content consumers find "signal" in noise

anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task. They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details. It's real work, and requires a tireless commitment to being engaged and ready to rebroadcast timely material. While there may be an economic benefit for being a "thought leader" and "trusted curator," it's not going to happen overnight. Which is to say, being a superhero is often a thankless job.

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free

factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

It’s all very well having wearable technology that lets you livestream yourself hang gliding. But if it has all the sex appeal of orthodontic headgear, it’s unlikely to catch on.

Arguably, success in wearable technology hinges on making people look and feel good as much as providing a functional service. Developers might be happy to fork vast sums for the privilege of being a Google Glass owner, but when the product goes to mass market, fashion, or at least some sort of coolness and covetability will be as critical as functionality.

Contests and sweepstakes on Twitter may offer prizes for tweeting a particular update, for following a particular user, or for posting updates with a specific hashtag.

Please be sure to include a rule stating that anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible.

Please don’t set rules to encourage lots of duplicate updates (like saying, “whoever retweets this the most wins”).  Your contest or sweepstakes could cause users to be automatically filtered out of Twitter search. Plus, instead of their followers seeing your cool contest or sweepstakes, their followers might start getting annoyed by your contest. You might want to set a clear contest rule stating that multiple entries in a single day will not be accepted.

Facebook announced the purchase of the mobile messaging service WhatsApp on Wednesday, in a $19bn deal that represents the social media company’s biggest acquisition yet.

The deal is a big bet for Facebook, which has until recently struggled to convince investors of its strategy for mobile.

Facebook’s successful bid comes after Google reportedly made a $1bn offer for the company last year.

Ever heard of the Temporo-Parietal Junction? No, it's not a train station, nor is it a 60's-style rock group. The TPJ, as it's also known, is the area of the brain that gets activated when we're thinking about how to share something and who to share it with. If you want to make something go viral on Facebook or Twitter, in other words, the TPJ is where you want to hit — because it lights up like a Christmas tree before we even know we're going to share something. The more activated it is, the more persuasive the share. And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what we think is cool ourselves.

You might expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated about ideas that they themselves are excited about, but this research suggests that's not the whole story. "Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important."

you know that feeling you get when you see something on Facebook that you have to share with a specific friend? That moment when you get an image of how they're going to react when they see that news story or this kitten? That, apparently, is your TPJ working overtime.