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Coming soon: new design, new name, new news
Since its inception, this blog has focused on the changing news industry and our vision of its future and potential. Behind the scenes, we have been busy building a new recommendation system - a system that can overcome the problems facing online news distribution through social media and news apps. We have been building and waiting and are now happy to announce that our public beta will launch on 11/1/11...with a twist! After a thorough alpha phase, we used the interactions and feedback from our dozens of alpha...
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Outpacing the Speed of Misinformation
Last week, there broke out one of those snafus and attendant meta-conversations for which the Internet was created. The question at hand was to what extent misinformation is a problem on Twitter. On July 28, a fake Twitter account reported that Piers Morgan had been suspend from his CNN program. Members of the media retweeted the news, leading to it briefly going viral. A joke by one became an error by many. However, the joke did not last long and was quickly discounted. Those hasty members of the media who had...
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Google+ and The Human News Channel
Google+ is in town and everybody is talking about it. However, the conversation is almost exclusively about the circles and not about the sparks or hangouts. Sparks and hangouts are nice features, but...
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Why MySpace Failed and Why Content Streams Matter
A few weeks ago, the discredited media mogul Rupert Murdoch practically gave away MySpace to American Internet advertisers Specific Media. According to The Wall Street Journal, Specific Media paid...
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The Webification of the App: Bringing Apps back from Isolation
Not long ago (actually, only since the touchscreen of the iPhone and then the iPad), apps emerged in the ecosystem of the web. Now, they are taking over. Recent research from Flurry shows that American...
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The FdForward User
Last week, we decided to better get to know our alpha users, so we sent out a survey. We found our users just as news-savvy and connected as we had hoped they would be. We have quite an educated group of alpha users. All users surveyed have a bachelor’s degree, with most holding a master’s degree or higher! With all this education, what are our users trying to get out of their news reading experience? Our users are pretty much evenly split between those who read news for professional reasons and those who do so...
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Is Twitter Evil?
On May 6, A. C. Goodall posted a column on NewStatesman.com titled “Twitter the enemy of self-expression?” in which he posited the titular question. To answer himself, Goodall concluded that yes, Twitter is the enemy. I beg to differ. Twitter supporters have long argued that its limitations were a boon to creativity, its 140 characters an encouragement of pith. Goodall begins his article questioning a less traditional argument for truncated language, the supposed “purity” of language reduced to its most basic...
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Likes are exhibitionist and not suitable for news personalization
Facebook’s Like buttons have taken over the World Wide Web. Only one year after the launch of the new feature, over two and a half million websites have implemented the Like button. Another ten thousand buttons are added on a daily basis. Using the Like button, not only can you recommend and share content with your friends, but can also consider yourself cool amongst them, because it was you who found that certain masterpiece of content. And content providers are happy to give you this opportunity to feel cool, since...
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It's the age of sharing: how to be relevant
We live in the age of sharing. People now produce almost more than they consume. We share what we eat, where we are, what we see and what we read. We add this information to the world. Where once there were only a few channels - the mass media, with millions of recipients - there are now millions of channels for the same number of recipients. The social network functions as a filter for information from all over the Internet, but it also represents a lot of noise that does not help us and obscures important information...
