Today the community behind open source blogging platform, WordPress, released its latest version: 3.2. It features a design refresh and speed improvements. That's all par for the course for a software update these days. What actually caught my attention was a slightly gimmicky thing called Distraction Free Writing (or DFW). As the name suggests, what this does is remove all distractions from your computer screen... so all you see is the words that you are typing. The WordPress community has nicknamed this a "zen mode."
Over the past week, we at ReadWriteWeb have been obsessed with a new social networking toy called Google Plus. Some of our team think it may even be better than Twitter and Facebook. Personally, I haven't caught the Plus bug yet, and in many ways I'm resisting precisely because I want less social media distractions, not more. Indeed, I think we need more zen on the Web and less plus!
Twitter just announced this morning that it has acquired innovative social media data analytics service BackType. The BackType team will provide data for publishing partners of Twitter about how much traction their Tweets are getting, how they are converting to other key performance indicators and other information.
Some Twitter ecosystem partners will likely call this a betrayal of Twitter's public calls to build analytics services on its platforms, instead of Twitter clients, after Twitter acquired favored client software providers. Personally, I see this as another failure of the social media economy to sustain providers of more than crude self-interested promotion and broadcast.
Above, Irish designer John McDermott displays GPS data exported from the bicycling community MapMyRide in a very different way. The change of perspective confers a new feeling to the data. This wasn't just a long bike ride, this was an epic trek that deserves to be commemorated.
McDermott, who heads design at Irish interactive agency AB Brown, has removed all other map data to focus on the route itself and puts the starting and ending point in the distant background to help communicate the great distance traveled. In the bottom corner are details like the date, duration, distance, speed and a graphic representation of the weather during the ride. It's a great example of how a strong design can evoke new communicative value from the data we produce though our everyday activities.
MySpace's fall from glory is now complete; Kara Swisher reports that it has been sold off to an advertising network for $35 million, an incredible decline in value from the $580 million that Newscorp paid for the social network in 2005.
Why did MySpace fail? Why have Facebook and Twitter stolen its thunder? That will be a question for the ages, but one contributing factor may be the incredible hostility that MySpace had for outside application developers. MySpace thought, and said publicly, that all the rest of Web 2.0 was a leach, a monkey on MySpace's back. Below, an excerpt from a TechCrunch post I wrote about this five years ago. It looks pretty amazing now in retrospect and is a good reminder that today's leading companies should remember their humility.
I thought I'd type up some notes after an evening of using Google's new social network, Google Plus. This is a really big deal, a super ambitious effort involving scores of engineers over months of near total secrecy. (Though some helpful sources and I scooped the core Circles part of all this three months ago.) The service is really, really well done. Will it be good enough? I have no idea, but I have felt drawn to keep using it all night long.
The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it's the opposite of Facebook and Twitter's universal broadcast paradigm. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else. It's really easy to use and a great feature - but even if you're communicating out in public, the rest of the service is very well designed, too. This is a smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google. Below are some notes after a few hours of use.
Twitter's hundreds of millions of members include casual and professional users with a wide range of interests. There's no better way to dive deep into real-time discussion on a particular topic than by building or subscribing to a Twitter List made of people focused on a particular field.
This super-powerful feature of Twitter has been available for more than 18 months but remains severely limited and underdeveloped. Users aren't allowed to create more than 20 lists per account and each list is limited to 500 members. Those are just the limitations - there's a world of other possibilities that could be developed if Twitter HQ was really as excited about Lists as it ought to be. Unfortunately, as you can see from the infographic above, Twitter's hundreds of employees don't include any power users of Lists. Earlier this month Twitter's own List of staff members hit the 500 person limit, though! Might that be an impetus for the company to change things for everyone?
Google's quest to organize the world's information will no longer include one of society's most important and sensitive sources of data: our health records. The company announced this afternoon that Google Health will be closed forever and deleted in 18 months, along with a thematically similar and also formerly ambitious project, Google Power Meter.
Google says it's shutting down the projects because they got very little traction but health industry tech innovators say that Google Health may have been ahead of its time, did a poor job reaching out to a now growing ecosystem of developers and ought to be put on slow life support or open sourced instead of being shut down. When it comes to patient-centric cloud-based electronic health records, the opportunity remains large, the need severe but the challenges are substantial.
This is Part Two of a two-part series. Part One: Study: Kids are the Road to Tech Innovation
Latitude recently completed a multi-phase innovation study, Children's Future Requests for Computers and the Internet, which asked kids across the world, ages 12 and under, to draw the answer to this question: "What would you like your computer or the Internet to do that it can't do right now?" In our last post, we highlighted three themes that recurred across kids' ideas for new technologies.
We also pinpointed three key recommendations for creators of new content and technology experiences (for both kids and adults):
Download the study summary (PDF) for Children's Future Requests for Computers and the Internet.
This morning, another new startup launched a mobile social networking application where location is the primary feature and friends comes second. Banjo, which shows you all the people nearby upon first launch, is one of many similar services now arriving to fill a void in the social networking space. These services are identifying the disposable, the elastic and the ephemeral social networking that occurs - or could occur, given the right technology - when tied to a particular location at a particular point in time.
But does Banjo have the winning formula? What about the others? And will anyone really use these services?
Location based social network Foursquare celebrated 10 million registered users yesterday but how are businesses and organizations using the platform? I wrote a year ago next month about the incredible potential offered by Foursquare accounts for organizations: following a Foursquare page as a user is like opting-in to view the world through the lens of that organization's geo-annotations. It can be awesome. (My favorites? History Channel and Eater.)
Are businesses getting into it? For one perspective on that question, I extracted some data from the 128 most recent Foursquare Pages that have been created. The 128 most recent Foursquare Page holders have added 728 tips in 311 cities so far. They've amassed a total of over 8,000 Foursquare followers and they came in with some social media experience as well: those organizations already had an aggregate of over 800,000 Twitter followers. Above, a map of all the metro areas around the world that new Page holders have added tips in. Below, more stats.
