Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It didn’t take long for Google to fire back at Facebook’s Instant Articles. While the two company strategies differ, they both impact the future of news content distribution on mobile platforms. Five months: that’s all it took for Google to respond to Facebook’s mobile offensive. In Mountain View, where the response has been brewing, the…
Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that’s obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit,…
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative has gotten the stamp of approval from major publishers, including The Washington Post, Vox Media and The New York Times. But lingering questions about the initiative’s inner workings, and some latent paranoia about Google’s real motivations, have others feeling skeptical. AMP’s stated mission is to speed up the mobile Web, which…
Google unveiled its new plan to speed up the mobile web today — Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP — and it’s the latest attempt by a technology company to deal with the problem of the slow mobile web. Facebook has its Instant Articles to make certain news stories load more quickly in an app; Apple…
This morning Google revealed it’s working on an open source initiative for mobile web that would deliver articles to readers instantly. The Accelerated Mobile Pages Projects is designed to avoid slow browser load times, so stories can be accessed quickly from within mobile web browsers. Rumors started percolating about the project last month. The project’s Github page…
Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker In June 2013, less than a year after he sold his photo-sharing startup to Facebook for $1 billion, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom stood onstage at a press event at company headquarters, his 6-foot-5 frame partially obstructing the oversized screen behind him. He paced slowly as he spoke, stealing the occasional…
Controversial people-rating app Peeple took a new path today and now it seems like it’s going to be available sooner than we expected and in the form of a more pleasant app than previously reported. Originally, the cut-throat app was due to be released officially in November and let you review everyone you know. However,…
The evolution of the mobile ad ecosystem is ushering in some new disguises. I spoke recently with several practitioners about where mobile ads are heading. “The customer experience [of mobile ads] is totally broken,” Joe Prusz, ad tech firm Rubicon Project’s head of mobile, told me, referring to both web and in-app ads. He pointed…
As a kid, whenever I’d get some BMX or car magazine in the mail, I’d always dive in first to the letters to the editor. The interplay between readers sharing their opinion on stories and editors responding in italics always made the rest of the mag feel more real—as if real, normal people actually produced…
Exactly one year ago*, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox publicly apologized for the company’s discriminatory “real names” policy. I should know: not only was I personally mentioned in Cox’s note, but I was one of the drag queens — along with a broader coalition of artists and activists representing queer and transgender people, survivors of domestic…