Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did an interview with The Verge outlining the company’s plans for AI, augmented reality, and wearables. Unlike Meta’s previous metaverse pivot, it seems like the company is much more confident this time that they’re building the future. Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Alex Heath that Meta’s new Orion glasses, which…
Sales are way up and ROAS is through the roof across search, social and ecommerce. At least, that’s what the ad platforms claim. But dig into the CRM, a brand’s primary source of actual sales data, and site traffic and engagement coming from search and social aren’t jumping. This is a relatively normal occurrence for…
Nine digital publishing execs that spoke with Digiday said they are investing in other social platforms like Instagram and TikTok to grow their reach. But the question remains if alternative platforms can actually make up the social referral deficit. As Digiday reported last year, those platforms do more for publishers trying to build up their…
Update (11/16/23): IBM released a statement to the Financial Times saying that it has “suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation.” Media Matters will update if the other major companies in this report take any similar actions. Update (11/17/23): Axios reported that “Apple is pausing all advertising on X, the Elon Musk-owned…
A year ago Elon Musk took over Twitter. Too much has happened in the 365 days that followed to even begin to chronicle it all here, but the short version is that he quickly fired 80% of the staff, broke a bunch of things, paid racists, misogynists, and homophobes to set up shop, picked (sometimes…
“Anonymised” data lies at the core of everything from modern medical research to personalised recommendations and modern AI techniques. Unfortunately, according to a paper, successfully anonymising data is practically impossible for any complex dataset. An anonymised dataset is supposed to have had all personally identifiable information removed from it, while retaining a core of useful…
In early July, Meta introduced Threads, a text-posting social-media application that was clearly designed to steal market share from Twitter, which continues to struggle under the leadership of Elon Musk. Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of Threads, recently explained that the goal of the service is “to create a public square for communities on…
The Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world, has died after being abandoned by the business world. It was three years old. The capital-M Metaverse, a descendant of the 1982 movie “Tron” and the 2003 video game “Second Life,” was born in 2021 when…
The media bet its future on Facebook. Did it learn from that mistake? Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images BuzzFeed, the archetypal new media company of the 2010s, announced last week that it was shutting down its news division. In 2012, the small “web buzz” start-up started hiring reporters. The newsroom…
Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our brains. Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. April 18, 2023 Listen to This Article Audio Recording by Audm The trouble began, as it usually does, when I saw…