The idea of letting employees use software designed for consumers might seem foolish and risky to some CIOs. But Hanapole and Kudman don’t see it that way. “It’s about trust, it’s about letting go from a traditional IT point of view,” Hanapole said.
CIOs “Hangout” With Google - The CIO Report - WSJ
A third of all divorce filings in 2011 contained the word “Facebook,” according to Divorce Online. And more than 80 percent of U.S. divorce attorneys say social networking in divorce proceedings is on the rise, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Divorce lawyer Marian Rosen, who practices in Houston, said she’s increasingly seen social media cited in divorce proceedings and child custody battles. “We’ve had instances where they pull up Facebook in the course of a deposition,” Rosen told ABC News, adding that in addition to proving infidelity, she’s seen cases in which children’s profiles are cited as evidence to suggest bad parenting. “Once it’s out there for the world, it’s very difficult … to erase from the past. There are going to be trails that can be followed.” Mark Zuckerberg Ties the Knot Watch Video Facebook Launches on the NASDAQ Watch Video Facebook IPO: Little Gain After Hype Watch Video Three years ago, 20 percent of divorce filings contained the word “Facebook.” By 2011, it had risen to 33 percent, according to AAML. Despite the increase, the top Facebook mentions were the same: inappropriate messages to “friends” of the opposite sex, and cruel posts or comments between separated spouses. Sometimes, Facebook friends would tattle to one partner in a relationship about bad behavior by the other.
What is Facebook Doing to Your Relationship Status? - ABC News
[Jobs] is an extremely complicated guy, that I know that for sure. Mark Zuckerberg is an extremely complicated guy as well. As little as I know about the Steve Jobs movie, I know this for sure: I can’t judge the character. He has to, for me, be a hero. I have to find the parts of him that are like me. I have to be able to defend this character. With someone like Steve Jobs, to put it as simply as possible, you want to write the character as if they are making the case to God why they should be allowed into heaven.
Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs film: ‘A minefield of disappointment’ - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech
Like, when I see business models disrupted from the outside, I am delighted. I see progress—progress! As an investor, I can be helpful there.
How I Did It: Alexis Ohanian, Reddit | Inc.com
Android Versus iOS The basic experience of Evernote Hello is the same, but today’s new Android version brings in a bunch of new features that iPhone users don’t yet have. It looks at your calendar, call and SMS history and suggests encounters from there. So you don’t have to hand your phone to someone or even meet them in person. (If there’s someone you meet with regularly, you can filter them out in the app.) It also connects with LinkedIn, which can make saving encounters even faster in professional situations. You can just type in the person’s email address, and Hello will pull their information from LinkedIn. It will even grab their photo, but Evernote recommends you take a pic anyway, so you can remember the face from the moment you actually met. “It’s a pretty different experience” from the iPhone version, Libin says. So why didn’t these features come out in the iPhone version at the same time? It’s deliberate. Evernote has two different teams building each version of the app, playing to the strengths of the two platforms, and learning from each other’s performance. “It’s two independent teams that are really trying to talk to each other while learning from [each other’s] best designs,” Libin says. “It’s a cooperative and friendly kind of competition. This way, [our teams] aren’t doing lowest-common-denominator stuff. They’re actually building full, native apps that learn from each other.” Different Strokes Due to the differences between iOS and Android, the two versions are bound to be slightly different. iOS doesn’t currently offer a way for Hello to hook into the phone’s call and message history like Android does. “In terms of the actual features, I think it will be like the platforms themselves,” says Libin. “Android has more stuff. There’s more hooks that make it more powerful for people. iPhone is more beautiful; it has better animation and a smoother experience.” By iterating one at a time on different platforms, Evernote gets to see which kinds of features work and which don’t for two different user bases. Each team can adapt the other’s findings. But it also lets them play to the strengths of each platform, rather than compromising. As a result, Evernote makes its whole app better, but it also serves its users in a smarter way. After all, these differences in platform are not just for developers to think about. As Libin points out, “That’s how people decide which phones to get, too.
Why Evernote’s Hello App Is Different on iPhone and Android
Meanwhile, back then, holding a Blackberry was like holding a 60” sword in the 15th century. It meant power! It meant importance! It meant that people back in the office just could. not. deal. without YOU. Like, Eliot Spitzer must have had a Blackberry. (Actually: his team of prosecutors did.) JFK would have finagled a way out of the Cuban missile crisis on a Blackberry. Hell, the President of the United States *still* has a Blackberry, though that’s probably because it’s the only device that White House IT will approve. But whatever: The 1.3 million Blackberry subscribers of 2004 were power players. They were ballers. They answered emails with simple replies: “Fire the missiles!” or “Sell! Sell! Sell!” or “Coffee’s for closers.” They were not mere mortals tethered to desktop computers and lame keyboards. They could send emails from steakhouses.
Technology - Alexis Madrigal - Oh Hey, Motorola and RIM Called: They Want to Go Back to 2004 and Try Again - The Atlantic
Twitter is where news breaks; Facebook is where news goes. This is something that members of the media, who live on Twitter and regard Facebook with removed interest, take for granted. The coverage of and discussion about Facebook’s IPO may have been the clearest demonstration yet of one of the few things the service can’t seem to do: Lead the conversation.
How Twitter Beat Facebook At Its Own Story
The only two times during this media frenzy that everyone’s eyes were on Facebook, the site, were when the NASDAQ button auto-posted to Mark Zuckerberg’s profile and when he posted an image from his (unrelated) surprise wedding. The first was a winking joke more than a positive statement about the power of Facebook — it’s funny because the story feels too big for a “status update,” ha ha — whereas the second felt right at home in the News Feed. Of course, I found out about both on Twitter.
When a huge news story breaks, it gets swarmed by a self-appointed group, sometimes small, sometimes vast, of Twitter editors which invariably becomes the source for new information. These ad-hoc expert panels practically race to move a story forward. You usually don’t know these people, but you come to trust them very quickly. You probably even leave them in your feed after it’s all over. This happens, I think, because of the nature of tweets: They have value even without context, and come to feel like a part of the stories they accompany, not just links to them.
In contrast, the modes of interaction of Facebook don’t encourage story advancement, and carry a whiff of aggregation. The site, as is, is great at building after-the-fact, heavily filtered digests; while Tweets are like free-roaming units of information, Facebook posts live in the context of each users’ friend bubble. It’s not immediately clear, from my News Feed, where to go to hitch up to an unfolding new story. It can still feel like the real story is happening somewhere else, at least for the first few hours.
For what it’s worth, what Facebook does with news is almost certainly more valuable overall — Facebook referrals to this site, and to most, massively outnumber visitors from Twitter. Breaking news isn’t hugely important to most people, and Facebook is for most people. And in any case, Facebook is about much, much more than news.
There is a reasonable critique to be made of the internet economy, to which Mr Douthat glancingly refers in mentioning Tyler Cowen’s book “The Great Stagnation”. Mr Cowen makes the point that the highly educated rich are better able to capture both the producer and consumer surplus associated with the internet economy. The web, in increasing the extent of the market, amplifies the superstar effect; the difference in earnings between great producers and the best producers, who dominate the global market, is enormous. As supply chains break up, it may become easier for knowledge workers to capture much of the value-added in a product or service; designers and inventers with original ideas can capture monopoly returns to those ideas while sourcing production to workers in a highly competitive manufacturing sector. Apple employees get rich; manufacturing employees earn their marginal product. And educated workers may benefit most from the flow of cheap information over the web. The problem with the internet economy isn’t that it is unimportant or jobless, but that its benefits are highly unequal in their distribution. Perhaps. It is a little early yet to say. It would not be surprising, however, if something as transformative as the internet economy provoked a demand for institutional change to mitigate distributional consequences. That is precisely what occurred during the industrial revolution, after all, when the rise of the urban manufacturing economy prompted the corresponding development of the labour movement, the social welfare state, and the environmental movement. Similarly, the internet economy may encourage a rethinking of the nature of the welfare state and the importance of progressivity in taxation. If the knock-on employment effects of high-tech are the most important way in which the gains from the internet economy are transmitted to low-skilled workers, then suddenly the scope and expense of metropolitan areas become a critical factor. Just as important as the economic impact of the internet economy will be the social and political response it provokes. Social change is a measure, in many ways, of economic importance. And of course, one has to remember that the web is still in its infancy. It wasn’t very long ago that most Americans lacked an email address. A majority of Americans have yet to purchase a smartphone or order broadband internet. I suspect people will underestimate the importance of the internet economy right up to the point at which they simply start referring to it as “the economy”.
American growth: The Facebook economy | The Economist
You can’t hide. I was talking to somebody in the record business recently who pointed out, rather mournfully, that it was no longer possible to hype people. What he meant was that it was no longer possible to convince them that something was more popular or widely adopted than it actually was. You no longer went into Radio 2 and told them that they should be playing a record because it was going to be popular among this or that demographic. You simply sent them a link to the You Tube page where they could see how many people had streamed the video. Digital is its own audit. This is something magazines are going to have to get used to.
Off The Page - David Hepworth on magazines and beyond: InPublishing
Advertising on Facebook has always been subtle. But GM wanted to do something bigger. To GM, Facebook’s audience was interesting; its ad formats were not. Rather than run sponsored stories, which look like Facebook posts, or smaller units on the right side of the pages, GM asked if it could take over a page. It was told no. The rebuff says a lot not just about why the country’s third-largest advertiser yanked its ads from the social network, but also underscores the continuing tension between Facebook and some of the country’s deepest-pocketed marketers. As Facebook looks to tap bigger budgets and integrate brands and a commercial model into its platform, an impasse is forming between the platform folks, who are as concerned as ever about user experience, and major marketers used to getting their way.
Big Spenders Push Ad Line, But Facebook Holds Ground | Digital - Advertising Age
Technology and our expectations of what’s possible also seem to play a game of cat and mouse. No matter what we dream up, it seems that it becomes reality in the blink of an eye. In fact, I suspect that technology now regularly outpaces our wildest dreams. Almost anything is possible, at least in theory. If it doesn’t exist, it’s probably just that it’s not practical. Nobody has bothered to put in the effort to make it happen.
MediaPost Publications Living Beyond Our Expectations 05/24/2012
Employees of Facebook and several engineers who have been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on Facebook’s plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. These people spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their employment or relationships with Facebook. The company has already hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, the employees and those briefed on the plans said. This would be Facebook’s third effort at building a smartphone, said one person briefed on the plans and one who was recruited. In 2010, the blog TechCrunch reported that Facebook was working on a smartphone. The project crumbled after the company realized the difficulties involved, according to people who had worked on it. The Web site AllThingsD reported last year that Facebook and HTC had entered a partnership to create a smartphone, code-named “Buffy,” which is still in the works. Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press
Facebook Might Have a Smartphone in Its Future - NYTimes.com
Now, the company has been going deeper into the process, by expanding the group working on Buffy, and exploring other smartphone projects too, creating a team of seasoned hardware engineers who have built the devices before.
My Disrupted Life: How We Will Read: Kevin Kelly
Why do you think people are afraid of the future?
That’s a really good question. I think it’s because we have become unable to articulate a plausible future that we actually desire. Most of the visions of the future are very dystopian, very fundamentally broken in some way. There’s no place…
(Source: fndgs)
If you are a founder trying to create a new mobile app or an investor trying decide whether an app has enduring value, it is helpful to separate the ways that people use apps into four categories.
Four types of mobile apps - Chris Dixon
1. Time wasters: Apps that can be used for short bursts when you are waiting in line, etc. The most popular time wasters are games. Some apps are used sometimes as time wasters and sometimes as utilities – e.g. Facebook is both a time waster (checking status updates few minutes) and a utility (sending Facebook messages). Time wasters tend to be faddish. It is easy to get hooked on new games and also easy to tire of them. If you want to build a big company that builds time wasters, you need to build a machine that builds, markets and monetizes apps, as Zynga has done.
2. Core utilities: As a rule of thumb, core utilities are the apps on your home screen: camera, phone, contacts, texting, calendar, etc. Core utilities map to deeply engrained use patterns that usually existed before modern smart phones. In the past people might have carried around a paper calendar, a standalone camera, etc. Core utilities tend to be very sticky – if you gain widespread adoption for a core utility you can build long-lasting value. One entry strategy for a startup is to replace a core utility. This is what Instagram did to the built-in camera app. It is unclear whether the “Instagram for video” companies are core utilities (video app replacements) or time wasters. Creating a new core utility that doesn’t replace an existing core utility is very hard. Foursquare seems to have done this for the users who regularly check-in.
3. Episodic utilities: Episodic utilities are apps that typically aren’t on the home screen but are extremely useful in certain situations. Some examples: Hipmunk when buying plane tickets, Uber when you need a car, and OpenTable for making restaurant reservations. Successful episodic utilities target a well-defined situation and then become deeply associated with that situation. Making an app that is too broad or has multiple use situations can hurt you. Because many of these situations involve purchasing, these apps tend to be monetizable.
4. Notification-driven apps: This is an emerging category. Android has had a good notification system for a while, but the iPhone only made notifications useful in IOS 5. People tend to enable notifications for communication apps like email, texting etc. Thus far, notifications for other apps haven’t gotten widespread adoption because, among other things: it is easy to annoy users by over-notifying them, and running non-communications apps in the background tends to drain battery life. Expect this category to grow as apps get smarter about when to notify, and battery life improves dramatically over the next year or two.
