Industry News

In March 2011, Matt Cutts of Google told us Google does indeed have exception lists or what you call whitelists, but a week or so before that...

There is no doubt in the vast majority of SEOs and Webmaster's mind that there was indeed a search algorithm change last week with Google. Google wouldn't confirm it but did tell us it was not related to Panda or Penguin...

Google’s Search Suggest is a wonderous feature. Not only does it save humans beings around the planet millions of key entries each day, it’s also a phenomenal keyword research tool for marketers. For reasons that likely center around its commercial intent bias, Google’s Keyword Planner Tool often doesn’t show large swaths of data around keywords, e.g.: If you take the AdWords Keyword Planner on faith, you’d believe that there are no keyword searches with any volume that contain the words...

Kevin Roose and Pendarvis Harshaw wrote a fascinating 3-part series for Fusion on technology in prisons. I was particularly drawn to the part about allowing inmates to use tablets: Can technology and prisons get along? —

He can’t just hand out iPads, of course. The tablets being used in the Napa jail are manufactured by a Chicago start-up called Jail Education Solutions, which runs them on a secure, proprietary software platform called Edovo. The tablets can’t be used to connect to...

I’m as fascinated with Slack‘s rise to prominence as most people, so I really enjoyed From 0 to $1B – Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy (no byline). It’s full of fantastic product strategy advice, including on the importance of user feedback:

As much information as Slack put out to customers, they learned even more themselves. Butterfield and his cofounders are voracious readers of user feedback, and they attribute much of the company’s rapid traction to this skill....

Photographer Tanja Hollander wanted to find out what online friendships are really about, so she set out to visit all 626 of her Facebook “friends” at their homes to take formal portraits of them. The first part of How Real Are Facebook Friendships? describes the project, and then it goes into some other research about social media and friendship:

In fact, the distinction between online and offline may be less relevant than it seems. Thinking about social media as a kind of place you...

Yesterday we covered that Google seems to have done a major update the other day and Google actually responded to us saying "as usual, we're continuing to make tweaks...

Twitter and Google have once again reached an agreement to provide Google with access to Twitter full stream of tweets.

Commonly called the Twitter “firehose,” the news was formally announced on today’s Twitter earnings call by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

Costolo was sparse on the details. He didn’t announce it during the formal presentations but rather as part of an answer to a question not even specifically about Google. He confirmed there was a deal, apparently to address reports...

Buzz Usborne’s “God is in the details” is a great reminder that spending just a little time thinking things through a bit more that usual can have a big impact on user experience:

But it’s those little things, the tiny minutia of detail, that ultimately make beautiful products, and beautiful houses.

Unfortunately, when I refer to the “details” in product design, I’m not talking about obvious design things; like colours, drop-shadows or placement. Instead I’m referring to...

It looks like there is an algorithm update taking place at Google search now - it is hard to say if it is Panda, Penguin or something unrelated - right now...