StumbleUpon is one of those sites we've had on our radar for quite some time. We covered the company's redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.
The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user's direct stumbling experience.
On the same day that Facebook announced its IPO, the FoodSpotting app dished up a few new offerings. Now it creates a personalized picture menu for you, the FoodSpotting user, delivering "smart dish recommendations" based on what you like. The "filter wheel" categorizes food into dishes that you want to try and have already tried, and those you hope to never eat again; you can also see how your friends feel about various dishes. FoodSpotting connects to your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and Instagram accounts so you can immediately share any food photo you've taken. You can also cruise through nearby locations.
If you've read this far, you've probably already downloaded the app for your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Windows phone, and are contemplating not reading the rest of this because you're too busy salivating over your next meal. Get ready for the complete food-pornification of Facebook, curated by you.
When StumbleUpon did its big rebranding, reorganizing and redesign late last year, we figured that the 20-million-plus discovering engine was done making big changes. At least, for a little while. Boy were we wrong.
The newest SU update removes all direct links. Previously, once you were inside StumbleUpon, you could "X" out the page and go straight to the original site. Now if you're logged in, you have to say in the iframed version of the site. There is one way to get out, but it's super clunky.
Facebook is about to jump into unfriendly waters. If founder Mark Zuckerberg thought the company faced fierce competitors in Silicon Valley, he is about to find that the denizens of Wall Street are not nearly so forgiving. There are risks to going public. How does the world perceive your company? Can the platform grow and maintain its edge? The trick for Facebook will be to balance the concerns of its shareholders with the need to push the boundaries of innovation. This is no easy task.
In its S-1 filing today, Facebook outlined a litany of risks for the company going forward. Monetizing the mobile user base in a system dominated by its competitors will be a major challenge going forward. Diversifying its portfolio away from its reliance on advertising will be a big task, one that Google has never quite figured out. We take a deep dive into Facebook's risk factors below.
Admit it. You're an amateur food porn photographer. But don't worry, you're certainly not alone.
Last week, my esteemed Internet ReadWriteWeb-y colleagues Jon Mitchell and Curt Hopkins cooked up this insanely hilarious story about the grossness of amateur food porn. Amazingly, every single photograph in his story was shot by an amateur. And every single time, the food looked totally disgusting. The amateur food photographer is not trying to make their food look gross. In fact, quite the opposite, this person is just trying to share the food that they think is delicious and beautiful. But no matter what, the food photos just don't communicate that sentiment.
"You need a light source from the side," says Stephen Hamilton, a Chicago-based professional food photographer. "You need to bring up the detail of the food, which you can't do with a single light source."
Goodreads, the social network for reading and reviewing books, had to make a change this month. It moved away from its main source of book data, the Amazon Product Advertising API, citing its "many restrictions." It completed the transition to Ingram Book Company's data today, and it also draws from other open data sources such as libraries. The transition went smoothly, but Goodreads did lose some data. "Fewer than 2% of our 7 million users have books currently affected," Goodreads says.
The problem most visible to users will be missing cover images. Goodreads is in the process of uploading replacements. One percent of Goodreads books will appear blank, listed as "Unknown Title" and "Unknown Author," while Goodreads looks for a new data source for them. There's a great lesson here about building a business on top of a competitor's API, but Goodreads has made the switch in the nick of time.
Pinterest is growing fast, and 80% of the site's users are women ages 25-44.
Laura Skelton, owner of Prix-Prix, told me about Pinterest months ago when we met up one chilly Chicago morning for brunch. "Have you tried Pinterest?" she asked me with a glint of excitement in her eyes. I shook my head no. "Try it out, but be careful, you'll get addicted." I am always wary of that caveat because I do end up getting addicted. I decided to stop by just to see what was up. I registered for an account and then left. Everything looked too pretty. Then, a few months later, I started receiving a slew of notifications: "So and so is following you on Pinterest." It was around then that Pinterest blew up.
AdAge's David Teicher wrote about how Pinterest is driving traffic to sites like design magazine RealSimple. But more importantly, he writes, "the true potential in Pinterest may be in its ability to impact purchases, which is why retailers like Etsy, Nordstrom, and Lands' End have taken to developing a presence on, and strategy for, this new platform."
If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook.
In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you're using has a great UX - and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.
Anyone who spends their day on the Internet inevitably wonders this question. Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning, to catch commuters while they're on the way to work? Or is everything completely random, driven by the off-chance that a post will end up on StumbleUpon and enjoy a slightly longer tail? Social sharing widget Shareaholic looked at its 2011 data, breaking it down to the top 100 days and times for sharing. See the results in Eastern Standard Time.
Mr. E.C. Mendenhall has built a robo-Tumblr called Meme Pool to experiment with the evolution of ideas. Just as a gene pool is the collection of all biological expressions (genes) in a population, a meme pool is the pool of memes, or transmittable ideas. Mendenhall's Meme Pool draws on Tumblr's vast reservoir of image memes, picks the two fittest every day, mates them and posts their offspring.
There's no relation to memepool, the once-great mini-blog of handpicked Internet goodies. That one hasn't evolved since 2008. But armed with a little bit of Python and the surging population of Tumblr, Mendenhall will try to give the primordial ooze of the Web a new life of its own.
