Industry News

Megan Garber takes on Instagram Direct1 in Behold, Facetwitterest: The Standardized Future of Social, and makes this observation:

So one of the biggest challenges facing the major (and the trying-to-be-major) social networks is a structural one: How do you build yourself up and out in ways that balance users’ desire for intimacy with their desire for publicity? How do you merge the web’s ability to create communities with its ability to create universalities? 

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Small human beings learn by mimicking and so they learn patience by mimicking patience. Perhaps this means that a larger human being somewhere many thousands of generations back took a long and patient breath as the smaller human being in his or her arms squirmed. Perhaps the smaller human being saw this long and patient breath and internalized it and began to understand. Perhaps all of the patience in the world is a copy of one sigh.

— Paul Ford, What I’ve learned from fatherhood...

We know Google doesn't like it when you submit a new reconsideration request a day or two after you get a rejection response from your reconsideration request. They want to see you put effort in after you get that response...

It’s always worth reading Eugene Wei’s thoughts on Amazon’s strategy, and Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy is no exception. Wei discusses how most analysts don’t understand Amazon’s business at all. In particular, he tears into the idea that at some point, Amazon will just “flip the switch” — increase the prices on all their products and instantly become profitable:

But “flipping a switch” is the wrong analogy because Amazon’s core business model does generate a profit...

Sean Madden makes some interesting points in American-Centric UI Is Leveling Tech Culture — and Design Diversity:

Just as user-centered design transformed technology in the 1990s and early 2000s, cultural fluency needs to transform it today: user experience (UX) design that’s familiar enough with a user’s cultural background to meet him or her halfway.

Cultural fluency demands abandoning the idea that functionality is a universal language, and that “good UX” is culturally...

When we talk about how web sites are related, it’s not unusual for us to talk about links between sites and pages. Google pays a lot of attention between such links, and they are at the heart of one of its most well known ranking signal – PageRank....

Happy 2014 everyone, wishing you a happy, healthy and successful New Year 2014! I deeply hope all of you have much success, happiness and good health...

Today is New Year's Eve 2013 and some of the search engines are getting ready for the party by posting special logos, Doodles, themes and creatives for the special day...

Craig Mod’s newsletter is one of the few emails I always look forward to reading. In the most recent one Craig gives some advice for people in their 20s:



To the younger folks reading now: If you’re willing to live in that small apartment, forgo that fancy food and expensive clothing, and uphold a semblance of disciplined and focused work ethic, you can probably hack more experience into your life than you’d imagine. [...]



The emotional textural quality of my memory of life...