Group items tagged

Twitter’s re-written Trending Topics algorithm called Tailored Trends is especially clever because it doesn’t directly discourage stupidity, it just funnels it back to people who find dumb things entertaining. Now rather than seeing just the most popular terms and hashtags in your area, you see Trending Topics based on who you follow. So you’ll only see horrible trends like “#UnusualNamesForWhiteGirls” or “#ReplaceBandNamesWithRape” if you follow people that tweet them. Everyone else will get trending topics that don’t make us embarrassed to be human.

Facebook’s taking a similar approach to its new apps marketplace. It recommends apps based on what your friends Like and use rather than the oft-misguided wisdom of the masses like Apple and Google’s app store charts. It also highlights apps based on quality, which is calculated according to true engagement, positive reviews, and the absence of spam reports rather than the number of installs. This editorial philosophy could minimize the spread of pointless, spammy, click-bait apps.

The big risk of insisting on relevance and safety is that we create a filter bubble where we become isolated from those different from ourselves. Facebook and Twitter need to be especially careful that they don’t completely hide critical Trending Topics or novel apps just because they’re not popular in closed little networks. That might require human input, or an algorithm that recognizes when something’s important enough to show to everyone.

Attack of Titans. In addition to Japan, it was also a top 10 search term in Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Combined, the results meant that searches for the show trended higher globally than Mad Men or Homeland combined.

its popularity in Asia helped the valuation of its maker, GungHo Online Entertainment, which TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler profiled in June, soar to as much as 1.546 trillion yen, briefly overtaking Nintendo’s market cap.

In Taiwan, MMORPG Fantasy Frontier was a major hit. An English-language version called Aura Kingdom will be launched soon.

“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

There were 2.4 billion people on the internet at the end of 2012, up 8% from 2011.

While many Facebook advertisers justly focus on the US, UK and Western Europe, a lot can be said about considering other countries.  India, Indonesia and Brazil and Mexico are among the top 5 countries on Facebook according to Socialbakers.

Compared to TV, there is a significant discrepancy in the amount of time consumers spend on mobile devices relative to advertising spend.  While we spend 12 percent of our time on mobile devices, mobile advertising dollars only account for 3 percent of total spending.

social media is becoming a skill, not a job. Companies like Intel and Dell and IBM are leading the way in broadly distributed social participation, giving thousands of employees the opportunity to win hearts and mind in social and with smart content.

This decentralization of social communication has widespread ramifications for social media management software vendors, as it puts additional emphasis on triage and workflow tools.

The days of one social media manager handling Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the rest is coming to a close (as is the era of the one or two person content marketing team) and the same way all of us have a corporate email address and phone number, we’ll all (or nearly all) have a role to play on behalf of the company in social and content marketing, eventually.

At a time when every new piece of tech or service seems to be an app or digital entity, we’re craving the tangible.

Tumblr is letting brands buy their way into the list of what's trending on the platform's mobile product.  The Yahoo-owned social blogging site said today that it would sell Sponsored Trending Blog placements to brands looking to post messages via Tumblr's mobile app. The new ad format is Tumblr’s second on mobile and fifth advertising product overall

For the Xbox to be able to turn on, identify who you are, and log in to your profile at a moment's notice--simply at the sound of the voice command "Xbox on"--it needs to do something a bit creepy: It has to be listening to what people are saying in your living room all the time.

Microsoft almost definitely is not recording, let alone uploading and archiving, every sound that happens in your living room 24-7-365. That said, the fact remains that there is a microphone in your home that's always live and connected to some super-smart computing devices--and a very distant server.

Expect Labs made a smartphone app called Mind Meld that demonstrates their listening tech expertise. Mind Meld can listen to the online conversation of a group of people, and detect what they are talking to such a high level of automatic detection of content and context that it can magically suggest online sources of information that might interest the group.

Miki, like a number of teenagers whom BuzzFeed has interviewed, is using Facebook almost exclusively as a instant-messaging platform. “Messaging is pretty much the main reason I go on,” she says. “I don’t go scrolling through the News Feed.”

“I don’t post statuses anymore,” says another girl, a 14-year-old in the Bay Area, who nonetheless says she’s “addicted” to Facebook. She spends a cumulative four hours a day on the site. It is the first page she goes to when she turns on her computer, and the last one she checks at night before bed. “I don’t want to be that person you see with hundreds of [posts on] News Feeds,” she says.

Facebook’s pitch to investors depends largely on the News Feed and its app ecosystem, where ad placement possibilities are obvious. By contrast, instant messaging is a revenue black hole. If teenagers are an indicator of where Facebook users are headed — or if this is indicative of a larger trend — Facebook might be facing a serious problem.

Defining Skeuomorphism This obscure word describes the way designs often borrow a particular feature from the past, even when the functional need for it is gone. Examples include pre-recorded shutter noises on smartphones to remind us of film cameras, or calendar apps that feature torn paper and metal rings. Or, as Wikipedia tells us [1]: A skeuomorph is a physical ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques.

the digital world has seen skeuomorphism popularized in the past couple years mainly thanks to the recent iOS-inspired trend of rich textures and life-like controls.

By opposition, the other side of the coin would be the newly popular "flat style", of which Microsoft's Metro UI is probably the main example. Flat Style embraces visual minimalism, eschewing textures and lighting effects for simple shapes and flat colors.

Ticlr.com is an example of how Facebook is evolving into a network of networks, a trend that could someday remove any sense of a website having a beginning and end

The Winchester, Mass.-based company depends on getting permission to use members' Facebook contacts in order to make it easy for them to send gifts purchased on Ticlr.com. The gifts can be big to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries or small to break the ice when trying to get a first date.

Tradesparq.com reflects a social networking trend in which sites leverage who a person knows as a way to add credibility to potential business deals. Without LinkedIn, Tradesparq.com would be just another business-to-business site. With the professional network, the company can use a buyer's LinkedIn contacts to put him in touch with people who know the Chinese supplier bidding on a product request.

According to StatCounter global statistics, mobile traffic jumped from about 4% of all Web traffic at the end of 2010 to over 10.5% now.

According to its public statistics, Facebook had "more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 20, 2012." It also claimed "488 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in March 2012."

Facebook's overall monthly active users is 901 million, so that's 55% of Facebook's monthly active user base who access the social network on a mobile device.

According to the many advertising leaders we surveyed, connected devices and wearable technology--or, more broadly, the Internet of things--are top of mind for 2014. But where the last decade of digital experimentation has generally made technology front and center of an experience, the feeling is that the general relationship with technology has now matured to a point where it doesn’t need to be the star of the show. Instead, people are predicting a more seamless integration of technology into brand’s efforts. Or, as Scott Prindle, partner/chief digital officer, Made Movement puts it: “I think we'll see interesting opportunities to use technology to save us from technology.”

We'll see a trend towards ambient intelligence where our devices learn about our individual habits and interests, anticipate the kinds of information we're looking for, and surface it at the right time and in the right place. Our technology will be doing more work for us in the background, helping to free up the time that we're currently spending staring at screens.

It's better to try to invent the future rather than predict it.

according to a study of more than 100 million anonymous U.S. Facebook users and more than 1 billion of their posts — conducted by Facebook and researchers at the University of California San Diego and Yale University — your happiness might spread to your Facebook friends. The Wall Street Journal reported that the study found that emotions expressed in status updates tended to be contagious, but upbeat emotions were more likely to affect friends’ moods than negative emotions were.