Perry

Hewitt

Category: General

Friday 5 — 1.10.2014
1. If you’re not shivering right now, perhaps you were at CES in Vegas this week. Among the loveliest of launches is Yahoo’s News Digest app, the fruit of its Summly acquisition a year ago. With this sleek app, Marissa Mayer is making good on her commitment to prioritize beautiful product. Yahoo is cleverly delivering not only well-designed mobile news, but the far more valuable editorial filtering via morning and evening digest editions (complete with a countdown clock to the next edition).
2. Is it OK to admit we’re all getting overwhelmed by the endless stream of information? This article makes the case for more filters and bridges, and summarizes recent attempts to staunch the flow like nuking your Twitter feed.
3. There’s been a saying for a while now — and Jonathan Zittrain takes a stab at its provenance here — that when something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. In a similar vein, this article asks if we will come to regret the myriad small decisions we make each day — opting into free products like social networks, email provider, file and photo storage in the cloud — where we don’t pay with money, but with our private data.
4. Here’s a compelling argument for building online systems with empathy and not disdain in civic tech. It’s a great example of how digital strategy and communications are inextricable. The best digital platforms with stellar experience design, flawless cross-device rendering, and optimal performance become useless when impeded by content and communications that obfuscate rather then enable.
5. How do African Americans have access to or use technology differently? Pew’s recent report finds that there’s a 12 percentage point gap in broadband adoption, but that African Americans are represented in roughly similar mobile numbers for cell phone and smartphone ownership. And the phenomenon referred to as “Black Twitter” may be backed up by these numbers: 22% of online African Americans use Twitter versus 16% of online whites.
Weekend fun: If you enjoy black humor, you may already have played Cards Against Humanity. If you’re concerned about the future of news and painful linkbait headlines, why not go play Headlines Against Humanity?

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
January 10, 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
Morning prayers @ Memorial Church

Back in December I gave a brief talk at the morning prayers service, a Harvard tradition since its founding in 1636 (more here). Many thanks to Jonathan Walton, the Pusey Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences for the invitation to speak at morning prayers. If you’re interested in the writer Flannery O’Connor, either this prayer journal or this biography are great places to start.

Good morning. Today’s reading comes from the prayer journal of Flannery O’Connor:

What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. O Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that — make mystics out of cheeses. But why should He do it for an ingrate, slothful & dirty creature like me. I can’t stay in the church to say a Thanksgiving, even, and as for preparing for Communion the night before — thoughts all elsewhere. The rosary is mere rote for me while I think of other, and usually impious, things, But I would like to be a mystic, and immediately.

Flannery O’Connor kept a prayer journal from 1946-47, begun when she was all of 20 years old. At the time, she was attending the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she studied under Paul Engle in an intoxicating atmosphere of competitive creativity. O’Connor was also a daily communicant at St. Mary’s, wrestling with living out her Catholic faith in a diverse, intellectual community. Iowa was a place where Savannah-born O’Connor would have for the first time seen African Americans interacting freely with whites. She would have met GIs returned recently from Europe and Asia, come to study at the university under the GI bill. As she is exposed to new ideas and begins writing her novel Wise Blood, O’Connor documents her both base desires and fervent hopes in this prayer journal.

Why does O’Connor speak of “cheese” and of a “mystic”. The former is easy — the journal is has several rueful references to her stomach and her appetite, and her not-always-successful governance of the latter.

But why does she mention a mystic? Modern definitions of Catholic mysticism portray a human soul in intimate union with the Divinity. Most importantly, this extraordinary, personal union is unmerited and God-given, one that no human effort or exertion can produce. Mysticism is a kind of grace on steroids, and O’Connor remains among the most adept literary observers and proponents of grace.

O’Connor’s prayers portray a vivid juxtaposition of her earthly foibles and aspirations with her longing for and recognition of grace. She yearns to be a published writer, and to overcome her all-too-human weaknesses. This would include her habit of saying, as she put it, “many many too many uncharitable things about people everyday…because they make me look clever.” As direct and unaffected as these prayers seem, it’s very likely that the handwritten journal was extensively edited with entire sections excised and carefully emended. These are heartfelt prayers, but prepared painstakingly for human consumption. At the same time O’Connor acknowledges her own mortal efforts are subjugated to the role of God’s hand. After finishing a strong piece of writing, O’Connor tells God that she is “nothing but the instrument of Your story, just like the typewriter was mine.”

How does this balance of studied, human effort and entreaties for grace apply to us here today?

Being at Harvard has a way of inspiring self-doubt in the face of so much seemingly effortless brilliance. Who among us, faced with the energy and intellectual achievement of so many in this community, does not secretly fear themselves to be a prosaic cheese surrounded by mystics? We fear we are plodding along, lurching from lecture to essay to attain mastery while others are easily communing with an intellectual higher power. I can imagine that Flannery O’Connor, steeped in an atmosphere of writers and heady, public critique, experienced the same anxiety. Her struggle is our common struggle — to see the brilliance in others and strive for same in a messy, human way, while recognizing we are but vessels for God’s grace.

Today we celebrate the last service of morning prayers before the Christmas break. May God’s grace be with you, cheeses and mystics alike, through this season of Advent, and always.

January 5, 2014
Friday 5 — 1.3.2014
1. 73% of online adults now use social networking sites, per this year-end report from Pew. And more adults are diversifying their online social networking — 42% report using more than one service. Facebook and Instagram boast particularly strong daily engagement. 63% of Facebook users using the site daily, and 40% say they log in multiple times per day.
2. Facebook itself has released a comprehensive (and highly visual) report for partners with aggregated international and mobile data. After its early bad bet on HTML5, Facebook’s 2012 pivot to mobile has been effective: roughly a third of German, Spanish, French, and Italian mobile phone users using Facebook.
3. Reddit released its own 2013 year-end numbers — 56 billion pageviews is impressive, and nearly 16 minutes per visit is staggering. From the top ten threads it’s clear that laughter sells and that Reddit was, for good and for ill, a go-to source in the murkiness around the Boston bombings. One question: With 21% of Canadians on Reddit, why isn’t it a nicer place?
4. In the U.S. and frustrated with your internet service? It’s likely you’re paying more and that your internet speed is lagging behind the rest of the developed world. The impact of faster speeds on productivity, the article points out, is the “the difference between thriving and surviving.”
5. Wondering how to make sense of all this digital, social, and mobile activity? See this roundup of 2013 digital media scholarship from John Wihbey. One article examines gender and language use on Twitter, and finds that women use higher levels of first person plural and first person singular pronouns, intensifiers, and emoticons in their speech.
Weekend fun: Have 23 minutes to avoid your in-laws if you’re at home or avoid your work if you’re stuck in the office? Try this compilation of ridiculous/hilarious/profane Vine videos.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
January 3, 2014
Search interest: Arsenal vs. Manchester Utd

Highly unscientific, correlation is not causation, etc., but fun to see search interest in Arsenal FC rising and predicted to rise more as they finished 2013 at the top of the Premier League.

January 2, 2014
IFTTT for the future

Many people in the tech community rely on a canny service called IFTTT. Short for If This, Then That, the service automates conditional statements in our day-to-day lives. For example, if I go the the gym and check in on Foursquare via smartphone, then IFTTT records a workout on my Jawbone Up. These conditional statement “recipes”, a word I am familiar with only from binge-watching Breaking Bad, can be created and shared with others.

The looming New Year got me thinking, though. What great IFTTT recipes will we need in 2014? Everyone claims it’s the year of the internet of things and wearable tech, so shouldn’t we be automating our Glorious Future™ now? These seven recipe ideas would really put the internet to work for me …

Read the rest of 7 IFTTT recipes we desperately need for 2014 over at Medium.

Photo credit: Jeff Kubina

January 1, 2014
Where’s my stuff?

The trend of staying home and spending made for a strong online shopping season. Amazon recorded roughly 426 orders per second on Cyber Monday, and overall online sales were up 21% over 2012. Good news for some retailers, but the high volume combined with bad weather and a shorter than usual holiday shopping season to create a perfect storm for package shipping companies like Fedex and UPS.

Which firm is bearing the brunt of the blame? Google Search Trends topics view, which aggregates various search terms to gauge overall interest, suggests UPS may be fielding the most angry phone calls. You can see above where UPS and Fedex have had roughly the same search volume over the past 90 days. But UPS search volume rises sharply the first week of December with the largest differential right around Christmas. Welcome to the “Where’s my stuff?” debacle.

December 29, 2013
Friday 5 — 12.27.2013
The end of each year brings a slew of “best of” posts — here are five of my favorites:
1. Flowing Data selected data visualizations that told great stories and made meaningful, real-world observations through data. See visualizations of everything from poisoned names to pizza to porn.
2. Looking for a way to spend your gift card spoils from the holiday? ReadWriteWeb summarizes the best smartphones and tablets of 2013 (including the perennially underestimated HTC One).
3. We’ve come a long way from webpages populated by Arial and Georgia only. Here’s a solid roundup of the best web and mobile fonts of 2013. Be sure to drop the term “semi-serif” in your next design meeting or at a particularly dull New Year’s party.
4. Want to see some great typography in action? Line25 has rounded up 40 great examples from 2013. We’re definitely in the year of ubiquitous text-over-full-bleed-photo and endless scroll, but the type treatments are varied and interesting.
5. With the constant distraction and our ever-shortening attention spans, productivity hacks can be a lifesaver. This list of best Mac OSX utilities can help you stay on track — my personal favorites Evernote and RescueTime are on there.
Weekend fun: Before you put away the Christmas decorations, anyone who has ever sat through a ponderous brand presentation led by a creative director must watch the Santa Brand Book. And if people in 2013 have been more naughty than nice in reviewing your creative, consider implementing a Hater Translator.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
December 27, 2013
5 lessons from Justine Sacco
Too busy preparing for the holidays to have heard of l’Affaire Sacco? Buzzfeed has a useful summary of how one woman’s tweet took over the Twittersphere last weekend, and took down a career — at least temporarily. Five quick takeaways:
1. The interplay between social and traditional media has never been greater, so what happens on Twitter is quickly served up with breakfast on Good Morning, America. 68,000 tweets referenced Justine Sacco — and about 120,000 tweets referenced #hasJustineLandedYet hashtag. All this social content fed the traditonal media on a quiet weekend, and stoked the firestorm.
2. The reach of social media is more than matched by the speed of the spread. People are already correlating the speed of viral content with its accuracy — see, If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating. No one is claiming this was a hacked Twitter account, but people’s mean-spirited thoughts or attempts at sarcasm now quickly become their one sentence bio.
3. There’s increased murkiness between your public presence as an individual and your employer’s reputation. This is amplified if you are ostensibly a public relations professional or business leader. Clear hate speech likely violates most terms of employment, but personal views that hit the media will be fodder for interesting employment disputes in the future.
4. There’s a lot of pressure for brands to participate in realtime, but there’s also attendant risk. The opportunity is highlighted in this Altimeter report about Real-time Marketing: The Agility to Leverage ‘Now’. Brands can jump on — but need to have the right people at the helm to make thoughtful, quick decisions. I may be the only marketer who admits to having had a pang of terror at the famous (and brilliant!) dunk in the dark Oreo moment during the SuperBowl blackout. Tweets re Justine Sacco hashtag from sbarro (now deleted) and Gogo were a big miss, and brands need to re-evaluate who has the social media car keys on a Friday night.
5. There’s more you can do as an individual than participate in what The Nation called a meme for jeering global flagellation. Thanks to Nick Kristof and others who weighed in with reminders for people to support the cause rather than join the fray. People supported Aid for Africa (via an inspired domain redirect from justinesacco.com!), and donated to other AIDS related charities via the modest page that Nate Matias and I put together to shift the conversation from trial by social media.
  
  I like the effort by Aid to Africa etc to channel Justine rage to donations, eg http://t.co/QAqBY1HDGK and http://t.co/txraptq5Xk
  
  — Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) December 21, 2013
December 24, 2013
Friday 5 — 12.20.2013
1. Mandatory reading for web design geeks: Snow fail: Do readers really prefer parallax design? New research poses good questions about user orientation to parallax scrolling, which may be better suited for content heavier on video and other visualizations rather than text.
2. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay for the development of a new, presumably mobile-first platform to provide a personalized, location-based listening experience for content from NPR and affiliate stations.
3. Harvard’s Berkman Center published its annual compendium of essays in Internet Monitor 2013: Reflections on the Digital World. Sections include governments, companies, and citizens as actors in the digital world. Favorite excerpt: Potentially lost in the debates over privacy, security, and surveillance, is the fact that access to information plays a critical role in human development, governance, and economic growth across all sectors, including health, education, energy, agriculture, and transportation.
4. What’s App, a company of ~50 employees, is up to 400M users — and added 100M over the last four months alone. But how will all these social messaging apps make money? Some smart plays are emerging around e-commerce, with flash sales and sticker products driving revenue in Asia.
5. This terrific, long read outlines a step-by-step approach to digital marketing success. Written by digital marketing evangelist and bigtime analytics nerd Avinash Kaushik, the piece provides great guidance on how to focus your analytics efforts and avoid endless “data puke”.
Weekend fun: In case you’re suffering through an awkward office Christmas party or Yankee swap today, let me ratchet up your holiday envy: Bill Gates is an awesome Secret Santa.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
December 20, 2013