Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
At the heart of the media’s chattiest technology is a hollow sharing economy. A personal investigation into just how little traffic Twitter’s maelstrom actually contributes to websites. Dado Ruvic/Reuters In January, I deleted Twitter from my phone. The app was a charming distraction, I decided, and 2015 would be a year of productivity upgrades. Three…
The next time one of your friends starts raving about their FitBit, especially if it’s the kind of friend who can’t shut the fuck up about their latest “find” and effectively ruins happy hour for everyone else who just wants to lose their inhibitions at the end of a tough week, feel free to stop…
A security researcher recently made a seriously startling discovery. With just four lines of code, he says he could delete any photo album on Facebook. Zuck’s wedding photos? Zap. Your high school graduation album? Lost forever. Lucky for you, he decided to report the bug to Facebook, which promptly cut him a check. Let’s back…
Judging by trending social media #hashtags, the world is nearing an apocalyptic Battle Royale waiting for the Four Horsemen to post an Instagram selfie. Just today, I watched #GazaUnderAttack, #Ukraine, #EbolaOutbreak, #BorderCrisis and #BIEBERvsBLOOM. Ongoing global political crises sparked vigorous, international debates …sadly taking the form of incendiary tweets, dueling hashtags and Facebook grandstanding. Alongside…
Photo Credit Photo illustration by Andrew B. Myers. Prop stylist: Sonia Rentsch. close shareTools As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the…
$8,000 each month with another $3,000 for housing. Welcome to the life of a Silicon Valley intern. Six-figure salaries. Flexible hours. Luxury housing. Ah, the life of an intern. This past weekend, high school senior Tiffany Zhong, the chief product officer of the app Glimpse and one of the tech industry’s “55 Unknown Rock Stars”…
With 288 million active users sending around 500 million tweets each day, Twitter offers plenty of opportunities to grab attention. Sometimes that attention is positive, as it was when semi-employed comedian Justin Halpern started the account Shit My Dad Says and found himself on the receiving end of book deals, mentions on The Daily Show,…
It’s Kind of Cheesy Being Green Apple is petty sometimes A few months ago my friend Edd Dumbill shared a discovery. He pointed out that if you search Twitter for the words “green bubbles” you’ll find very consistent results. People hate green bubbles. Example: I’ve been performing that same Twitter search every few days and…
White Spaces In my ongoing quest to come up with a way to write more, I’ve been trying to think about the things stopping me. Sure, there are big things such as not having enough time. But there are also little things. In some cases, literally. Take, for example, the text entry box on various…
If you want to criticize Facebook on Facebook, good luck — and don’t be surprised if your grievances fail to go viral. Thanks to a little-known guideline that restricts references to its brand in boosted posts, Facebook Inc. may decline to give greater visibility to posts that reflect negatively on it. Call it Facebook’s own…