Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Working at Facebook, even as a contractor, was supposed to be the opportunity of a lifetime. It was, instead, the most toxic work experience of my life. As a curator, my job was to choose what links would appear on the Facebook “trending” box on the right side of a user’s newsfeed. Every day, I…
Facebook might be hosting upwards of 8 billion views per day on its platform, but a wide majority of that viewership is happening in silence. As much as 85 percent of video views happen with the sound off, according to multiple publishers. Take, for instance, feel-good site LittleThings, which is averaging 150 million monthly views on…
Twitter: latest update shows the service is more than just words Posting a photo or URL, even when Twitter shortens the link, currently takes up 23 characters, meaning users only have 117 characters to play with. Combined with emoji or hashtags, this doesn’t leave much room for words. Observers say the tweak is a minor…
In the fall of 2007, a new social network named Friendfeed launched in semi-private beta. Founded by four ex-Google employees—Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh—it had a simple mission: “to glue together the web,” as Buchheit put it. Using site-specific RSS feed scrapers, FriendFeed would pull data from other networks—there were 23…
Two competing narratives emerged last week after an article in tech blog Gizmodo accused Facebook of suppressing conservative news in its “trending topics” feature. Both are distractions from what I believe is the real issue. The first narrative is based on the allegations in the Gizmodo article: that Facebook’s news curators, who select the trending-topics items,…
On the night of May 1, the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava Church in Manhattan caught fire — and Celeste Katz, a reporter based in New York, was on it. She went straight to the scene and started recording footage live, for Facebook. This would have all made perfect sense if Katz was a metro reporter…
So I have access to Facebook’s dashboard for Journalists: “Signal”. Facebook needs to approve access for Signal and it seems you need to work at a media organization to use it. With all the discussion around Facebook’s Trending I thought it would be interesting to talk about what is visible inside of Signal for Trending….
It isn’t unusual for Facebook’s advertising and content policies to change week-to-week as the social network looks for more ways to bring in revenue while carefully managing the user experience. But the constant evolution, particularly with video, may be starting to rile publishers who are looking for their own ways to make money from the…
We knew Snapchat was a hot commodity — publishers often build entire teams to create content for Snapchat and have likened competition inside the section to “The Hunger Games.” But a new report from The Information found that publishers, including Vox Media (which owns this website), are actually forking over money to Snapchat in order…
I got my start writing for the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin. What is interesting about that statement is that the appropriate follow-up question is “Which student newspaper?” For many years Wisconsin was unique in being the only university with two daily newspapers, both with five-digit print circulations. The older paper, The Daily…