StumbleUpon
Is social bookmarking and link filtering service StumbleUpon finally gaining traction? http://eicker.at/StumbleUpon
Tagged: Browsers Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Tablets and News
The tablet revolution: 11% of U.S. adults own a tablet, 53% get news on their tablet every day; http://eicker.at/TabletsNews
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Gerrit Eicker
PEJ: “The Tablet Revolution – How people use tablets and what it means for the future of news – Eighteen months after the introduction of the iPad, 11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half (53%) get news on their tablet every day, and they read long articles as well as get headlines. But a majority says they would not be willing to pay for news content on these devices, according to the most detailed study to date of tablet users and how they interact with this new technology. … The survey also finds that three-in-ten tablet news users (defined for this study as the 77% of all tablet users who get news at least weekly) say they now spend more time getting news than they did before they had their tablet. Just 4% say they spend less time while two-thirds (65%) spend about the same amount of time. … Whether people will pay for content, though, still appears to be a challenge, even on the tablet. Just 14% of these tablet news users have paid directly for news content on their tablets. Another 23%, though, have a subscription to a print newspaper or magazine that they say includes digital access. … The study also finds that these early users turn to the internet as their main source for news much more frequently than the public overall, and they have a strong preference for reading and listening to news rather than watching it-again much more than the population overall. Fully 71% of tablet users prefer reading and listening versus 45% of all U.S. adults. … Among the other major findings: The revenue potential for news on the tablet may be limited. Brand is important on the tablet. Substitution is already occurring to large degrees. Incidental news reading is prevalent on the tablet. Those who rely mainly on apps for news, 21% of all tablet news users, represent a kind of power news consumer. Word of mouth is a key component of tablet news sharing. When it comes to ownership, many see the tablet computer as more of a household device to share than as a strictly personal one.”
- Who Tablet Users Are
- Tablet News Users Have Strong News Habits on their Devices
- More Positive than Negative Assessments Overall
- News is Valued but Willingness to Pay is Low
- Apps vs. Browsers
- The Power User
- The Influence of Brand
- Sources for News
- Who Pays for News on the Tablet
- The Social component – Still Emerging
- Book Reading – Popular both in Print and on the Tablet
RWW: “Interestingly enough, 40% of respondents said they used the Web browser to access to news, compared to 21% who exclusively used apps. Many bigger publishers have made developing native apps a priority, believing that they will be easier to monetize than browser-based content. Indeed, some publications have seen an increase in readership after launching HTML5 Web apps than native applications could deliver. – How the native vs. Web app debate will shake out for brands generally is yet to be determined. For the time being, those that can afford should probably invest in building both. According to Pew’s research, 31% of tablet owners use both native and Web apps to consume news.”
pC: “Either way, there is still the overall problem: only 14 percent of tablet users surveyed have paid for news on their tablets. Companies that combine app or online subscriptions with print subscriptions have been able to attract another 23 percent of tablet users to their products, but there is obviously a long way to go.”
VB: “When it comes specifically to news consumption, the results are a mixed bag for media outlets. Yes, tablet owners love consuming news and they gobble it up on the browser and news applications. But, much like the hordes of regular Internet users, tablet owners don’t want to pay for the news they consume on their iPads and Android tablets. A disappointing 14 percent of tablet owners surveyed have paid for news specifically for the tablet. Among those who haven’t already put money down, 21 percent said they would consider paying $5 a month for news while 10% said they would pay $10 a month for news on the tablet.“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Infinite Digital Bookcase
Google: We designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix; http://eicker.at/Google3DBookcase
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books? – A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online – many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books. – The books are organized into 28 subjects. To choose a subject, click the subject button near the top of your screen when viewing the bookcase. The camera then flies to that subject. Clicking on a book pulls it off the shelf and brings it to the front and center of the screen. Click on the high-resolution cover and the book will open to a page with title and author information as well as a short synopsis, provided by the Google Books API. All of the visuals are rendered with WebGL, a technology in Google Chrome and other modern browsers that enables fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics right in the browser, without the need for a plug-in.”
TC: “I wrote a while back about the eventual necessity for the internet to become beautiful. The trouble is that the things in the world we consider beautiful in an informational context – magazine and book layouts, typography, etc. – are necessarily limited in the information they have to present. It’s this limitation, the known quantity aspect, that lets designers work effectively. – How should you design something, then, that presents effectively limitless information (say, all the world’s books) through a fairly limited medium (say, a web browser)? Google has one idea. Put them on a gigantic helix. … But is this really something people will want to navigate? Probably not. People like analogs in their digital catalogs, and this one seems a little bit too off the wall. … Anyway, it’s a fun little experiment you can try out here. Note to Mac Laptop users: be careful how you swipe or you may accidentally navigate off the page or invoke some arcane gesture.”
VB: “With tablets and eReaders offering a number of new ways to experience books, the browser has been relatively ignored. However, not a lot of people consider getting into a bubble bath with their nice glass of wine and a laptop book to wind down the day, but you never know. To that end, the virtual bookcase may not be a competitor to the Kindle, but rather to the book discovery service overall. It could also simply be a way to funnel people toward purchasing Google Books, but it’s still pretty cool.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Cookies
Cubilovic: Logging out of Facebook is not enough; maybe fixed. – Arrington: brutal dishonesty; http://eicker.at/FacebookCookies
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Gerrit Eicker
Arrington: “‘Facebook does not track users across the web,‘ – A Facebook spokesperson on September 25, 2011 and ‘Generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people.‘ – Facebook employee on September 25, 2011 v. ‘A method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain.‘ – Facebook Patent application dated September 22, 2011 – Whoops”
Cubrilovic: “[L]ogging out of Facebook only de-authorizes your browser from the web application, a number of cookies [including your account number] are still sent along to all requests to facebook.com. Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page [that integrate facebook] you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions. … To clarify, I first emailed this issue to Facebook on the 14th of November 2010. I also copied the email to their press address to get an official response on it. I never got any response. … I have been sitting on this for almost a year now. The renewed discussion about Facebook and privacy this weekend prompted me to write this post.”
Cubrilovic: “My goal was to both identify bugs in the logout process and see that they are fixed, and to communicate with Facebook in getting some of the unanswered questions answered so that the Facebook using public can be informed of how cookies are used on the site – especially with regard to third-party requests. – In summary, Facebook has made changes to the logout process and they have explained each part of the process and the cookies that the site uses in detail. … Facebook has changed as much as they can change with the logout issue. They want to retain the ability to track browsers after logout for safety and spam purposes, and they want to be able to log page requests for performance reasons etc. I would still recommend that users clear cookies or use a separate browser, though. I believe Facebook when they describe what these cookies are used for, but that is not a reason to be complacent on privacy issues and to take initiative in remaining safe. – I discovered a lot of other issues and interesting areas ripe for further investigation while researching the cookie logout issue – and I will be taking each one of them up on the blog here in the near future.”
BBC: “Facebook has said that it has ‘fixed’ cookies that could have tracked users after they logged out of the site. … In a statement, the firm told the BBC that it had done nothing wrong. ‘There was no security or privacy breach-Facebook did not store or use any information it should not have. Like every site on the internet that personalises content and tries to provide a secure experience for users, we place cookies on the computer of the user.’ … Most cookies perform basic tasks like storing your login details or personal preferences. – But some track the sites users visit, which means that they may be presented with adverts for products or services they researched on the web once they visit other unrelated sites. Consumer concerns over this type of cookie led to a new EU directive, with online firms across Europe currently working out how they can allow users to opt out of these bits of code.”
SEW: “It was recently discovered that some Facebook cookies were left in-tact after logout. While the issue has since been resolved, select data is still tracked and recent Facebook patent information indicates that all logged-out tracking may be intentional. … Facebook reports that the remaining cookies exclude personal identifiers and are completely benign in nature; they serve functions such as generating timestamps, contributing to Facebook’s page reporting, and helping to keep public computers secure. … Facebook isn’t the only one facing privacy and tracking issues, either. Marketers should give note to a couple other stories, including The Wall Street Journal’s recently revised privacy policy (which permits WSJ to track personally identifiable behavior without user consent) and the FTC probe into undeletable ‘supercookies‘ used by Hulu and MSN.com.”
SMH: “On Friday, 10 public interest groups asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook’s tracking of internet users after they log off. They urged the commission to examine whether Facebook’s new ticker and timeline features increased privacy risks for users by combining biographical information in an easily accessible format. … The lawsuit – filed by Perrin Aikens Davis, of Illinois – seeks class status on behalf of other Facebook users in the US. Davis seeks unspecified damages and a court order blocking the tracking based on violations of federal laws, including restrictions on wiretapping, as well as computer fraud and abuse statutes. – ‘We believe this complaint is without merit and we will fight it vigorously,’ Andrew Noyes, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Like Button(s)
Facebook Like gets sharing granularity: hypersharing becomes (scarily) automatic; http://eicker.at/FacebookLikeButtons
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Gerrit Eicker
Forbes: “Facebook released a broad new set of social features Thursday that makes it easier for people to share a wide range of information about themselves. The new changes could boost the quantity of sharing and change the quality of information that people push through the social network. … [P]eople can now automatically share what music they’re listening to, what television or movies they’re watching, what news they’re reading and even what food they’re eating or what exercise they’re doing. It’s ‘frictionless’ to share in Mark Zuckerberg’s words. … The upshot of this is that Facebook is going way beyond enabling people to simply share their interests, to enabling people to share virtually anything they’re doing both online and offline. … The connection between sharing and actual purchases is one that Facebook is careful about, particularly after Beacon. But with all the sharing about products that people will inevitably do through the new changes, more traffic will be driven to companies’ sites where people can make purchases.”
AF: “Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference promised a lot of things today, but one cool subset of them takes the most popular interaction on the site and spins off variations. – We’re talking about the like button here. – Today, we click like when really a more specific action is involved but the thumbs-up is only option that exists. – So, get ready for buttons that could include: Want, Buy, Own, Listen to, Read, Eat, Watch, Work out… the open graph will also make people’s news feeds more customized than ever, requiring a more complex algorithm than the one that currently determines what people see on their home pages.- The algorithm that Facebook today calls EdgeRank becomes GraphEdge tomorrow.”
Mashable: “You can’t deny the success of Facebook’s Like button. Its popularity quickly skyrocketed; it took less than a month for the button to appear on more than 100,000 websites. Now it is a standard method for endorsing something on the social web. – But that’s exactly the problem – the Like button is an endorsement. … Facebook’s bet is that more people will click a button that says they’ve ‘Listened’ to a song or ‘Watched’ a video, rather than simply liking it. … It’s Facebook’s partners that will take this capability and turn it into applications that populate Facebook and their websites with these Gestures, though. That’s Facebook’s plan – to become the social layer on which the web is built. … The new Open Graph will change Facebook drastically.”
Forrester: “If there’s one thing Facebook is not afraid of, it’s change. … Facebook is laying claim to your life. Through its new Timeline feature that recaps in one fell swoop everything you’ve ever posted and lets you feature the highlights, along with its new apps that let you discover and share real-time experiences like watching movies and listening to music, Facebook is changing the social networking game. Of course you could argue that it was already acting as the online identity for many people, but this takes it to a whole new level.”
TC: “Unlike the Like button which gives you a way to explicitly share individual pieces of content, this Read plug-in (and presumably, Watch, Listen, etc, plugins) would allow third-parties to add a single button to their site to enable some of the automatic actions Facebook unveiled today. … To be clear, this button will be totally opt-in for users. And the button will also have ‘pause’ and ‘undo’ capabilities if a user decides they actually don’t want to share their activity automatically, Taylor said. – And the regular old Like button will continue to exist for users who still want to share specific pieces of content to Facebook.”
RWW: “While the focus of today’s Facebook announcements was the newTimeline profile, the Read, Watch, Listen media sharing apps have generated a lot of interest too. These so-called ‘social apps‘ haven’t been widely launched yet, but you can get a sense of what they will do by adding a couple of brand new newspaper social apps to your Facebook profile: The Guardian’s app and one from Washington Post. – Be forewarned though, with these apps you’re automatically sending anything you read into your Facebook news feed. No ‘read’ button. No clicking a ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button. As soon as you click through to an article you are deemed to have ‘read’ it and all of your Facebook friends and subscribers will hear about it. That could potentially cause you embarrassment and it will certainly add greatly to the noise of your Facebook experience.”
Winer: “Facebook is scaring me – Yesterday I wrote that Twitter should be scared of Facebook. Today it’s worse. I, as a mere user of Facebook, am seriously scared of them. … This time, however, they’re doing something that I think is really scary, and virus-like. The kind of behavior deserves a bad name, like phishing, or spam, or cyber-stalking. … Now, I’m not technically naive. I understood before that the Like buttons were extensions of Facebook. They were surely keeping track of all the places I went. … People joke that privacy is over, but I don’t think they imagined that the disclosures would be so proactive. They are seeking out information to report about you. That’s different from showing people a picture that you posted yourself. If this were the government we’d be talking about the Fourth Amendment. … One more thing. Facebook doesn’t have a web browser, yet, but Google does. It may not be possible to opt-out of Google’s identity system and all the information gathering it does, if you’re a Chrome user. – PS: There’s a Hacker News thread on this piece. It’s safe to click on that link (as far as I know).“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Video Chat
Arrington: Facebook will launch a new video chat product, powered by Skype, that works in browser; http://eicker.at/FacebookVideoChat
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “The new chat design includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most. Now it’s easier to find your friends and start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts with the size of your browser window, and it automatically appears when the window is wide enough. … We’re also launching multi-person chat, which is one of our most requested features. Now when your friends can’t figure out what movie to see, you can just add them to a chat and decide together. To include more friends in your conversation, simply select Add Friends to Chat. … Video chat has been around for years now, but it’s still not an everyday activity for most people. Sometimes it’s too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services. – So a few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook. We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window.”
Gerrit Eicker
Passive Experience
GlobalWebIndex: Open web turns to packaged internet, passive experience to rise; http://eicker.at/PassiveExperience (via @rww)
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Gerrit Eicker
GlobalWebIndex: “Social media has reached mass maturity. Today it’s no longer about massive growth but a shift of already active social consumers to ‘real-time’ technologies, such as status updates or tweets. The old view of text-based social media, defined by blogs and forums, is being surpassed, moving the impact of social media, from creating content and publishing to sharing other people’s content and ‘live’ opinions about real-world events. In short ‘real-time’ is re-orientating consumer from creator to distributor and moving the focus to traditional media and professional content. – The open browser-based web is losing out to packaged internet platforms such as mobile apps, internet connected TVs, tablets, e-readers, pc apps, gaming and video platforms. These packaged platforms are re-engineering the internet and destroying the notion of the internet being a singular entity. Crucially for the entertainment revolution, they provide professional media with the means to create sustainable internet business models, something the economics of the browser-based web totally failed to enable. – Professional ‘traditional style’ content is now a core part of the consumer online experience. Internet platforms, for hundreds of millions of consumers, are increasingly the entertainment platform of choice. This is due to continual growth of professional content in video sites (legal and illegal), the rise of ‘real-time’, and the growth of packaged platforms.”
RWW: “The report states that in the new era of social entertainment, traditional media holds the power – a change from the ‘web 2.0’ era, when the user ruled. The report argues that this will lead to a return to passive experiences by consumers. … ‘Professionals are back in the driving seat when it comes to content,’ states the report. This, it says, will lead to the Internet eventually becoming the primary mass entertainment and content delivery platform. – While that is undoubtedly true, it’s difficult to see how the author comes to this conclusion: ‘We as consumers are going back to traditional needs and demands and seeking a more passive experience.’ – The report explains that social entertainment is far more about content sharing, than creation. It goes on to suggest that this ‘light nature of interaction’ is moving the consumer back to the passive state they were in before the Internet came along. Further, that services like Facebook and Twitter turn consumers into ‘distributors.’“
Gerrit Eicker
Time: “The dream of Web 2.0 may be over. If a new report on internet usage is to be believed, social media has turned the internet into more of a passive experience again. … The change, the report suggests, is that social media is more about content sharing than content creation, turning users into passive consumers – or, worse, distributors – of others’ work. … Instead of a shift back towards professional/audience mode, this feels more like a blip as the landscape gets used to its new tools than anything else to me, but what do you think?”
Gerrit Eicker
Metaverse and Augmented Reality
Augmented reality will become the next big thing: popular, mainstream, mass culture, ubiquitous in 2011; http://eicker.at/1w
Gerrit Eicker
Kindle Goes Web
Amazon launches Kindle for the Web soon: eBooks within browsers, books samples, sharing, embedding; http://eicker.at/KindleWeb
Gerrit Eicker
Canvas
Tipodean Technologies announces preview launch of Canvas, web-based viewer for Second Life and OpenSim; http://eicker.at/Canvas
Gerrit Eicker 09:01 on 13. November 2011 Permalink |
In October 2011 StumbleUpon crossed the 20 million users‘ mark: “We are excited to announce that StumbleUpon has just reached 20 million members! We’ve come a long way over the last few years, and I wanted to thank all of our Stumblers for helping us get to this point. What started as a Firefox extension has now become available on any browser, as well as iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Our userbase – which has more than doubled since last year – now stumbles more than 1,000 times per second at peak times of the day. When I recently came across a magazine clipping from 2003, it struck me that we now serve as many stumbles in a single hour as we did in our first year of existence! So it’s very exciting for us to reach such a milestone, all from the simple idea of ‘click a button, find cool stuff.’”
StumbleUpon claims it’s driving over 50 percent of social media traffic in the USA: “You may have heard the stat that StumbleUpon drives more traffic referrals than any other social media site. We wanted to shed some light on this by describing the lifecycle of a web page in StumbleUpon, especially how long you could expect the average web page to keep getting visitors. … You might be wondering why the time-on-site data for StumbleUpon traffic that we’ve shared in this graphic may differ from what you’re used to seeing in your web tracking platforms, such as Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo! Web Analytics, CoreMetrics, etc. It’s because these platforms assign a ‘zero’ time-on-site to all single-page visits, regardless of how long those visitors spend on that one page.”
So what is StumbleUpon? “StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of over [20] million other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend. … StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine. … Using search engines to locate relevant content typically means hunting through pages of results. Rather than searching for quality web sites, StumbleUpon members are taken directly to web sites matching their personal interests and preferences. … Using a combination of human opinions and machine learning to immediately deliver relevant content, StumbleUpon presents only web sites that have been suggested by other like-minded Stumblers.”
StumbleUpon’s Recommendation Technology: “StumbleUpon integrates peer-to-peer and social networking principles with one-click blogging to create an emergent content referral system. Our patent-pending toolbar system automates the collection, distribution and review of web content within an intuitive social framework, providing users with a browsing experience which resembles ‘channel-surfing’ the web. This architecture has easily scaled to millions of users. … StumbleUpon combines collaborative human opinions with machine learning of personal preference to create virtual communities of like-minded websurfers. Rating websites updates a personal profile (weblog) and generates peer networks of websurfers linked by common interest. These social networks coordinate the distribution of web content, such that users ‘stumble upon’ pages explicitly recommended by friends and peers. This social content discovery approach automates the ‘word-of-mouth’ referral of peer-approved websites and simplifies web navigation.”
How does StumbleUpon’s business model work? “Users stumble the best of the web, finding sites that reflect their interests and friends by simply hitting a button in their browsers or on their mobile devices. With Paid Discovery, your URL becomes part of that stream. The user is eager to engage with new and exciting content, making your product’s discovery a welcome experience in the eyes of a Stumbler. … Pay only for engaged unique visitors, on a budget that you control. No minimum spend and no bidding required.”
Wikipedia: “StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (a form of web search engine) that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles. – Toolbar versions exist for Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, but StumbleUpon also works with some independent Mozilla-based browsers… StumbleUpon uses collaborative filtering (an automated process combining human opinions with machine learning of personal preference) to create virtual communities of like-minded Web surfers. Rating Web sites update a personal profile (a blog-style record of rated sites) and generate peer networks of Web surfers linked by common interest. These social networks coordinate the distribution of Web content, so that users ‘stumble upon’ pages explicitly recommended by friends and peers. Giving a site a thumbs up results in the site being placed under the user’s ‘favorites’. Furthermore, users have the ability to stumble their personal interests like ‘History’ or ‘Games’.”