July 2012
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Twitter Reclaims 'Cashtags', formerly called...
No one should be surprised that Twitter has decided to colonize the microsyntactic space that stock tickers ($AAPL) have been playing on Twitter. Howard Lindzon may be expressing displeasure since it steps on the toes of Stocktwits, but it shouldn’t be surprising.
Twitter has at long last tried to make some money out of hashtags, which they basically ignored for years. And they reworked...
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“We need to create a new field of customer ethnography (or “corporate...”
– - Brian Gillespie, How Can Customers Better Target Their Companies? via Continuum
What I like about this is Brian’s sense that people want to lean forward into an active relationship with the companies that matter to them, whose products matter.
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Bob Johansen's 10 Leadership Skills For The...
I am downplaying ‘futures’ in favor of design thinking these days, but the old-school futurists still have a great deal to offer, like Bob Johansen:
Four Practical Ways for Leaders to Make the Future by Deepa Mehta via Institute For The Future
Bob Johansen recently published the second edition of Leaders Make the Future. In the book, Bob presents an expansive ten-year forecast about...
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“Focus groups are designers and leadership abdicating responsibility.”
– - Jonny Ive
(h/t @thulme)
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“Data can’t tell you where the world is headed.”
– Lara Lee, cited by Stephanie Clifford in Social Media Are Giving a Voice to Taste Buds via NY Times.com
In a piece about the fad flavors for corn chips and cosmetics colors is buried a bit of deep insight by Lara Lee, chief innovation and operating officer at the design consultancy Continuum, which...
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Critical mass vs network effects by Dalton... →
Dalton Caldwell
Social networking tech press reminds me of The Three Stooges. Pretty much every day we get to read about Moe, Larry, & Curly poking and slapping each other with growth & engagement metrics. It’s entertaining, but the entire discourse is centered on who among them can build the most profitable-seeming vanity metrics from the perspective of Wall Street and advertisers.
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Re: Tumblr Notes Design Ethos: How Threaded...
Gbattle throws down on my suggestions about fixing Tumblr notes (a la Notr), suggests how it might all fit in with Tumblr’s (or David Karp’s) prickly sense of nice communication, and then offers this up:
Gbattle via Leftover Takeout
For Stowe’s threaded replies to work and also adhere to the Tumblr Design Ethos, a few enforcements are necessary:
Authentication for involvement in...
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Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After... →
Ok, ok. Jonah Lehrer, the writer that I said was the person I most wanted to have dinner with, has completely self-immolated. He has admitted to making up Dylan quotes in Imagine, his best seller, on top of the self-plagiarism in articles for many leading magazines, and now has resigned from the New Yorker in disgrace.
Not to take advantage, but if anyone is looking for a speaker who can talk...
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Is Twitter a Media or Technology Company? - Nick... →
Nick Bilton wonders if Twitter is crossing some line that once upon a time divided media and technology landscape. For a long time I have been making the claim that all future successful media companies will act and look like tech companies.
Huffington Post is an example, or Forbes post-Dvorkin, where the user experience of media is being mediated by technology — social architecture, or...
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“We understand that there’s great value associated with Twitter’s follow graph...”
– Twitter’s official word on shutting off Instagram (Facebook) access to the ‘find Twitter friends’ functionality.
Is this something Twitter will shut down for everybody, or just Facebook?
(via Brad McCarthy)
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In Texas, You're On Your Own
I continue to be amazed at the repressive nature of a great deal of discourse online about the ‘obvious’ and ‘inherent’ need for individuals to self-censor online unless they are willing to lose their jobs.
The newest example is the following piece by Jon Hyman, who has a lot of badges on his site proclaiming his status as a top 25 this and a top 100 that. And - surprise -...
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A Speculative Design: How Tumblr Notes Should Work
In the hopes of getting someone to fix Tumblr’s notes — either inside Tumblr or an outside developer — I am offering the following proposal for a how I’d like Tumblr notes to work. (By the way, anyone who is interested in implementing, give me a call.)
Today’s notes work like this:
A user, say gbattle, reads something of mine, let’s say in his Tumblr stream....
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Dear Tumblr: Better Tools For Curation
Dear Tumblr -
I spend a great deal of time looking at my Tumblr stream, and I often discover — without any automated help by Tumblr, mind — that two or three of the folks I follow have posted something about the same news story. It would be great if Tumblr could provide a view that would consolidate these posts, and then allow me a way to create a post that referenced a/ the original...
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Gabe Newell Of Valve
Gabe Newell, the force behind the gaming company Valve, has a head bursting with ideas that he doesn’t express very well, at all. But think about the vision behind these fragments.
Tricia Duryee, Valve’s Gabe Newell on the Future of Games, Wearable Computers, Windows 8 and More
Here are excerpts from the conversation that took place in a packed and noisy room with an under-powered speaker...
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Apple Should Buy Twitter
Rumors are flying around about Apple investing strategically in Twitter.
Apple Is Said to Discuss an Investment in Twitter - Evelyn Rusli and Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com
Apple doesn’t have to own a social network,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said at a recent technology conference. “But does Apple need to be social? Yes.”
Twitter and Apple have already been working together....
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How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and... →
Kurt Eichenwald, Microsoft’s Lost Decade
Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc. Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the...
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Vizify: A Beautifully Designed 'Graphical Bio'
I am completely in awe of the new Vizify app, which is a really well-designed ‘graphical bio’ app, drawing upon information in LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook, and additional information from the user.
Vizifydoesn’t introduce any brand-new user experience trick. Instead, the designers brought together some of the best design thinking to what might otherwise be a...
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“Every extension is also an amputation.”
– Marshall McLuhan
deltaomega-deactivated20120803 asked: ha! To me it's on a level with moist, it was funny sure but I think they royally messed up with it
deltaomega-deactivated20120803 asked: aside from how cloying that path announcement is, I'm amazed any company can seriously use the word "smeared" in a press release
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Path Is Overdoing It
Buzz Andersen made me aware of the cloyingly sweet prose that Path employs on its blog to introduce new features:
Path 2.0.5: Introducing Depth
To each new moment, each relationship, each challenge and beginning, you bring a painter’s palette of experience. It’s dotted and smeared with every song you’ve heard, every landscape you’ve discovered and every person you’ve loved. Your moments on Path...
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Daily Report: Worries for Facebook in Zynga's... →
As goes Zynga, so goes Facebook?
NY Times
Weak second-quarter financial results for Zynga — and worse expectations for the rest of the year — sent its already faltering stock down in after-hours trading Wednesday by more than a third, David Streitfeld and Jenna Wortham report in Thursday’s New York Times.
The unexpected news was seen as boding ill for Facebook, which is closely tied to Zynga...
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“We are moving from a world of problems, which demand speed, analysis, and...”
– Denise Caron
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Post-Normal Weather: The Need For New Leadership
As the weather spins into the post-normal — more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) — our aging infrastructure is failing, and we are going to see much more serious disruptions in the future because our governments a/ don’t want to talk about the climate (too scary) and b/ are laying off the workers that we should be using to fix the power lines, train tracks, roadways and...
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“@stoweboyd: other hyperlocal apps: blockboard (klout) everyblock uniiverse...”
– July 25, 2012 at 07:21AM via http://bit.ly/PIlgFO
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“@stoweboyd: Nextdoor, yet another run at hyperlocal social networks, raises...”
– July 25, 2012 at 04:48AM via http://bit.ly/Q1qVUd
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“@justinpickard: New pronoun: ‘I/hivemind’”
– July 24, 2012 at 11:08AM via http://bit.ly/PUUVBc
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Where Is Marshall McLuhan When We Need Him?
I recently stumbled upon an October 17 2011 jeremiad by Nathan Jurgenson calling for public intellectuals to regain the lost ground in technology writing that has been yielded to business-oriented writers:
Nathan Jurgenson, The Rise of the Internet (Anti)-Intellectual?
My goal in this short piece is to encourage the reader to take a look at these two essays in tandem to suggest a further...
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“TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of...”
– - Mike Bulajewsli, cited by Nathan Jurgenson, Against TED via The New Inquiry
Jurgenson excoriates TED, making me finally feel like I wasn’t the only one:
The way TED talks fuse sales-pitch slickness with evangelical intensity leads to perhaps the most damming argument against the TED...
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Facebook must buck trend to stay on top - SFGate →
Benny Evangelista interviews me, Jamais Cascio, and Om Malik about Facebook’s future.
“There’s no reason to imagine that Facebook can’t get sideswiped,” said Boyd, who added an even bolder prediction: “They’re going to be a has-been in three years. I believe in three years, Facebook will seem like riding a buggy.”
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Syria: Separatist States Or One Syria?
[originally published on underpaidgenius.com 22 July 2012]
The very important people are beginning to discuss the possibility of the Syrian civil war turning into a possible separation of the Alawite region along the northeastern corner of Syria, and the formation of an Alawite nation state there.
Of course, the immediate reaction is dismissive. However, this ignores both the local history of...
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Qantas offers free iPads for all passengers, saves... →
Matthrew Humphries via Geek.com
Qantas is one of the first airlines to offer all passengers a free iPad for use during domestic flights aboard its fleet of B767 aircraft. Each iPad will allow access to the QStreaming service, which has over 200 hours of entertainment to watch. There’s also going to be in-flight Wi-Fi for those who want to surf the web and check their email.
The main reason for...
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“@Postbox: The Sparrow Team is moving to Google and they will no longer be...”
– July 20, 2012 at 01:45PM via http://bit.ly/SMNH5q
Who can blame Postbox from trying to pick up former Sparrow customers now that Sparrow’s team have been hired to improve Gmail?
Personally, I tried Sparrow for several weeks (I was suckered by their claim to be ‘social email’),...
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Brain Shift Radio Controls Mood with Music – Is It... →
Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey via Evolver.fm
In Philip K. Dick’s book Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? (a.k.a. Blade Runner), the lead character Rick Deckard and his wife alter their mental states with devices called Mood Organs. Rising in the morning, Deckard dials in a “businesslike professional attitude,” while his vengeful wife selects no fewer than six hours of “self-accusatory...
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“In an airy studio on a high floor of the London College of Fashion, featuring a...”
– - Tom Vanderbilt, Pantone color forecasts: Are they accurate? - Slate Magazine
Vanderbilt describes a hush-hush meeting of color mavens, convened every summer by Pantone, to decide what will be the colors of the following season.
The paragraph about David Shah’s stream-of-consciousness...
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Re: The Future Impact Of Big Data In 2020 and The... →
In reading through the Pew/Elon University Big Data survey analysis, I come away with the sense that I diverge with many others on a basic notion around big data. I don’t believe that big data technology and techniques will end the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of the post-normal world. Those factors are growing faster than our data exhaust, and our capacity to mine it.
...
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The Future Impact Of Big Data In 2020?
I am once again a Pew Expert, featured in a big data survey:
Imagining the Internet, Elon University, The 2012 Survey: What is the potential future influence of Big Data by 2020?
A number of respondents articulated a view that could be summarized as: Humans seem to think they know more than they actually know. Still, despite all of our flaws, this new way of looking at the big picture could...
