Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Just when you think things can’t get sadder and stranger at Twitter…. Last night, news leaked to the New York Times and Re/Code that four major Twitter execs are leaving: Alex Roetter, Kevin Weil, Skip Schipper, and Katie Stanton The original positioning was that the departures were part of a house cleaning. That suggestion, though,…
Twitter Inc. named Leslie Berland chief marketing officer as it undergoes a major overhaul of its top ranks in an effort to reboot growth. Berland, 37, was previously senior vice president of digital partnerships at American Express Co. where she spent the past four years on an ad campaign that included a heavy presence on…
Twitter is all over the news lately. Their servers were down for a while last week, putting me into a bit of a conundrum. (I always post on Twitter when a new articles comes out.) The stock price went south. Over the weekend, a few key execs took an exit. Those are all a pretty…
The idea of a “smartphone” that could connect to the Internet and run applications was around long before 2007; Apple, though, was the first to put the entire package together, including the device, user interface, and interaction paradigm, which is why the first iPhone is considered the start date of the mobile revolution. Similarly, the…
Twitter makes its money by showing ads to its users. But not all of its users: For the past few months, the social media company has stopped displaying ads, or has dramatically reduced the number of ads it displays, to a small group of some of its most prominent and active users. For those people, Twitter is an ad-free, or…
There’s this app called Wire, which I love. It’s the most beautiful messaging app I’ve ever tried: super-clean backgrounds, a heavy emphasis on user photos and clean design, and a great mix of calling, texting, and weirdly great GIF search. It works across all the platforms I use, and it works well. It’s my ideal…
end of ShanesHouse1 At my liberal arts college, the most popular sports activity was the ultimate frisbee pick-up game I organized every other day. It could get competitive, at least by hippie artist standards, but it never got too intense. Until Bro Seth came along. Bro Seth (name slightly altered), consistently misread the vibe of the…
On February 4, 2004, a handful of Harvard students logged onto a newly launched website called thefacebook.com. Just a dozen years later, some 2 billion people—nearly a third of the planet’s population—are social media users. So if companies are having trouble keeping up with that pace of adoption, it’s no surprise. Businesses have overcome their…
The Discovery Problem Is Solved I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old and music helps keep breakfast from turning into a food fight. So not long ago I fired up Spotify and did a quick search for “you are my sunshine.” Spotify did its thing, I picked one to play from the hundreds available and…
On Thursday afternoon, hackers accessed the Twitter and email accounts of infamous “playboy” Dan Bilzerian due to a flaw, the attackers say, in AOL customer service. A professional poker player, Bilzerian is “Instagram famous” for frequently posting pictures of himself with stacks of cash or half-naked women, sometimes both. The reason hackers chose to access his account,…