The Vanishing Newspaper (e Facebook)

Mar 072013
 

“What we’re trying to do is give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper we can,” Zuckerberg said. “The best personalized newspaper should be intricate, rich, and engaging.”

L’ha detto oggi Mark Zuckerberg parlando della nuova veste grafica di Facebook. Qui le considerazioni  di Jeff Sonderman (Poynter) che continua a pensare che per distribuire le notizie sia meglio Twitter.

By the sheer volume of users and time spent there, it  [cioè Facebook, ndr] does drive significant referrals to many news sites. But on the whole, the Facebook user experience is one of personal status updates and photos from people you know, mixed with a little bit of entertainment from celebrities, journalists, tastemakers or brands. Oh, and a lot of advertising. Twitter remains the far more optimized network for delivering news and other real-time information in an unfiltered stream. Facebook is better at capturing the interpersonal discussions and emotions that ripple out later.

CNet, Poynter

 

Zuckerberg e le quattro foto da 250 milioni di dollari

Apr 112012
 

Nick Bilton ci informa che Mark Zuckerberg ha postato ben 4 foto su Instagram dall’ottobre del 2010. Ma chiaramente quello che gli interessa sono i dati degli utenti. I quali, però, non l’hanno presa benissimo, come nota Bilton e come dice Mashable: solo il 12% dei commenti sono positivi.

Some Instagram users embraced Mr. Zuckerberg, congratulating him on the acquisition and welcoming him back to the service after he had not shared a photo in 43 weeks. Others took the opportunity to voice their dismay about the deal and share fears that Instagram will be destroyed by the social media giant.

Intanto CNet si chiede se lo scarso entusiasmo per l’acquisizione sia dovuto alla differenza d’età tra gli utilizzatori di Instagram (più giovani) e quelli di Facebook (più vecchi). Quello che è certo è che per gli sviluppatori di app che mescolano smartphone e fotografia è una bonanza: la prossima preda sarà Path?

New York Times, Mashable. CNet, New York Times


The Hacker Way

Feb 022012
 

La lettera di Mark Zuckerberg  che accompagna i documenti inviati alla SEC per l’IPO di Facebook è piena di buoni propositi – e Nicholas Carr fa un po’ di sarcasmo sulla natura filantropica dello zuckerberg-pensiero -, ma è anche (a mia conoscenza) il primo documento in cui una big corporation  (anche se atipica) da 75 miliardi di dollari di capitalizzazione (a stare stretti) abbraccia la cultura hacker come politica aziendale. (ecco la lettera commentata da Tim Carmody su Wired USA)

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo. Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping. Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.” Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people. To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

Rought Type, Epicenter (Wired USA)

«Today’s creepy is tomorrow’s necessity»

Oct 182011
 

Sean Parker, intervistato da John Battelle,  parla con la consueta ruvidezza della politica riguardo alla privacy di Facebook. Secondo lui, comunque, il problema è che la gente che usa veramente i social media sta lasciando FB per Twitter e – udite, udite! – Google Plus.

“The threat to Facebook is that power users have gone to Twitter or Google+,” Parker told the Web 2.0 Summit — because, he says, Facebook isn’t giving them enough ways to manage a glut of information. [...] Battelle continued on the Facebook line, asking Parker what he thinks of the argument that Facebook is perceived as being a “little creepy.” After attempting to dodge the question — and pointing out that he is a major Facebook shareholder — Parker offered this immortal answer. “Look: there’s good creepy and there’s bad creepy,” he said. “Today’s creepy is tomorrow’s necessity.”

Mashable


Wall Street Journal’s Facebook edition

Sep 202011
 

Il WSJ ha deciso – scrive Jeff Bercovici – di distribuire il suo contenuto tramite un’app su Facebook. A partire da oggi.

“The fundamental idea of it is super simple,” says Alisa Bowen, general manager of the WSJ Digital Network. “It’s about making [WSJ content] available where people are.” But it’s also about reimagining newspaper reading as an inherently social experience. Users choose whose streams they want to follow — the official ones produced by the paper’s, and each other’s — and that determines what stories they see. The most-followed users can compare their rankings on a leaderboard and earn prizes — possibly including their own WSJ-style stipple portraits. “It’s really about the users being elevated to editors,” says Maya Baratz, the Journal’s head of new products.

L’app del WSJ potrebbe essere la prima di una serie di app di testate giornalistiche lanciate in occasione del restyling del sito atteso per questa settimana.

At its conference for developers this week, called F8, Facebook is expected to unveil a new media-sharing platform built for that purpose. Meanwhile, as I reported in July, Facebook has invited a dozen or so news outlets (including CNN, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post) to produce so-called Facebook editions.

Forbes

Winklevii, ultimo atto

Jun 232011
 

Tyler e Cameron Winklevoss non si rivolgeranno alla Corte Suprema per cercare di rovesciare sentenza che ha bloccato le loro ulteriori pretese su Facebook.

Apparently the twins and their lawyer finally realized that the continued appeal was going nowhere, and that the Supreme Court—which typically grants less than 1% of the petitions sent to it every year—were not going to waste their time dealing with the details of securities law that the twins kept harping on. The twins’ lawyer declined to comment to the NYT on their decision. In a statement, Facebook told paidContent: “We’ve considered this case closed for a long time, and we’re pleased to see the other party now agrees.”

paidContent

update: pare che sia il penultimo atto, visto che i Winklevii hanno fatto di nuovo causa a Facebook, questa volta nella corte distrettuale del Massachusetts (WSJ)

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