Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The problem with Twitter, and especially the reason why it has so many dormant users, is that using Twitter for long periods of time is a fundamentally unpleasant experience. The product is not a joy to use. When users have an unpleasant time with a product, they don’t always complain loudly, they just sort of stop… using… it… The…
The Facebook “like”—a cornerstone of the service—is evolving into a cadre of six emotions. The social networking giant—which just reported that it has 1.59 billion users worldwide—is rolling out Facebook Reactions. Soon, American users will be able to choose between angry, sad, “wow,” “haha,” “yay” and love emojis to express how they feel about a…
Famed atheist and of-late-anti-PC crusader Richard Dawkins is again in hot water after retweeting images of a parody book called “The Social Justice Delusion” (a spoof of his best-seller, “The God Delusion”), which was meant to criticize the supposed double-standards of political correctness. Though ostensibly par-for-the-course for Dawkins’ Twitter ethos, the jacket (go figure) featured…
On Friday, Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart News’s chief video-game and gender-issues columnist, lost his “verified badge” — the blue check mark Twitter provides to prominent Twitter users like celebrities, journalists, and venture capitalists to confirm that their bad tweets are actually coming from their terrible fingers and not those of parodists or imitators. “I’ve been sat on the naughty table!” he…
When Daniel Joseph, a York University doctoral student studying labor and technology, found out about Coca-Cola’s GIF the Feeling promotion, he knew exactly what he wanted to make with it: a Coke-branded critique of capitalism. An accessory for Coke’s newly launched “Taste the Feeling” global ad campaign, GIF the Feeling is a website that allows…
What I Give Twitter I am Twitter user #615,723, and have been a member for nine years as of January 8th. In that time I have given Twitter 34,421 tweets. I have received 9,693 followers. I follow 918 people as a broad indicator of my interests. I am on 559 lists. I read Twitter as…
Online comments as we know them are dead. Or such, anyway, is the view of Andrew Losowsky – a journalist who, as project lead on the Coral Project, is helping to shape the future of reader interaction. Losowsky – whose venture is a collaboration between the Washington Post, the New York Times and Mozilla –…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Snapchat is ready to colonize the web with profile URLs that deeplink into its app and let you instantly follow someone. That makes it simple to add friends and celebrities so you fill your feed with content that keeps you coming back. By swiping down from the Snapchat camera to the…
This is one of the weirdest blog posts I will have to write and I am incredibly bemused and unhappy to have to do it. The short version: There was a ridiculous and unholy Twitter spat going on two years ago. The result of that spat was that an absurd number of allegations about who…
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,…