Posts tagged read
How To Get People To Pay To Read Tweets: Make It For A Cause
Dec 20th
A Swedish charity is claiming a first after setting up a paywall on Twitter in which people pay to read Tweets from some of the country’s celebrities.
Author Susanna Alakoski, pop singer Niklas Strömstedt, music journalist Fredrik Strage, director and actor Felix Tobias Herngren and television host Gry Forssell are among 15 noted Swedes who have spent the past week Tweeting for Stockholms Stadsmission, a charity that focuses on homelessness in the Swedish capital. More than 500 people have forked over the equivalent of $4 U.S. to follow the celebrities in the fundraiser, which ends Wednesday.
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In return for their contributions, viewers have had access to more than 3,000 tweets, with many touching on the issue of homelessness. Participating celebrities started tweeting to @betalvaggen on Dec. 14 and will continue tweet there through Dec. 21. The account is protected and readers are only granted access after making a SMS-message donation.
The group behind the campaign notes such Paywalls could solve push-button activism, a common complaint about social media awareness efforts. “People who are homeless can’t fill their stomachs with Facebook likes. Retweets will not keep them warm at night,” the group said in marketing statements on its Web site.
“The tweets behind the wall are on all sorts of topics,” the group said in a release. “Famous Swedish writer Susanna Alakoski tweets about politics and how Sweden has failed to provide for those in need. Journalist Sofia Mirjamsdotter tweets excerpts from her alcoholic, now deceased, father’s diary. Another journalist, Niklas Orrenius tweets about the situation for the homeless in the town of Malmö.”
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SEJ eBook: Most Popular Articles Read on SEJ in 2011
Dec 16th
Search Engine Journal appreciates all of the writers that contribute to our site and we want to thank them for all of their hard work. We also appreciate all of our readers. We know how hard it is to keep up with so many articles around the web and we want to help you keep [...]
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Summly: New App Helps You Read All Your Bookmarked Links in Minutes
Dec 14th
If you had a button that you could press to pause time, make flying birds freeze in mid air, etc. what would you do with that opportunity? Some of us would catch up on all the links we’ve bookmarked as “to read” or favorited on Twitter. I don’t have a button like that, but a new iPhone app that launched today comes pretty close.
Summly (iTunes) is a machine learning app that uses semantic analysis of text and a variety of algorithms to cut long-form text down into just a few hundred characters; it summarizes articles online by capturing just a few of the most important sentences. It does a good job and is available for free in the iTunes store. It’s a powerful tool that I’ve been anxiously waiting for ever since its founder, 16 year old UK dweller Nick D’Aloisio, announced that he had raised venture capital and was shutting down his first iteration of the app, called Trimit. Summly is the new version of the app, it’s free and it’s really easy to use.
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Founder D’Aloisio today launches the iPhone app and API, he says a web version and new features like automatic import of Twitter favorites will come soon. The app includes a bookmarklet you can install into mobile Safari and click on any webpage to launch Summly’s automated summarization app.
I like it quite a bit and am very glad to see the app relaunched. D’Aloisio has raised money from Horizon Ventures, the investment arm of Chinese multi-billionaire Li Ka-shing.
Robot, Please Read For Me
D’Aloisio won’t go into great detail about his patent-pending summarization technology but says that Summly first identifies the general category an article is in. He’s got one set of rules for summarizing articles about politics and another for summarizing articles about sports, for example. The technology takes into account keyword frequency, many other factors and learns over time.
Machine Learning expert, data scientist and summarization technology lover Hilary Mason says that there have been simple technologies to do things like this for some time, but that very few compelling products have been made out of them for end users. Mason was particularly pleased with Summly’s search capabilities, which D’Aloisio says are based on a number of 3rd party search APIs, some of which are piped directly into the summarization technology and some of which aren’t.
D’Aloisio says his technology is far from simple; Mason says that’s just how she would go about it. Time will tell whether simplicity or complexity is most effective, but either strategy will go on within the context of a mobile user experience that in the case of Summly seems pretty good.
The end result is really easy to use and is a big time saver.
It goes without saying that there is more good information available online today than people can manageably absorb. Automated summarization algorithms are a great way to catch some highlights and get a sense if you want to dive all the way in to read a full article. In many cases, though, I’m satisfied with Summly’s short summaries. Some summaries are better than others and I’d love to know more about other peoples’ experiences with the app and thoughts on the quality of its results. There are some little changes to the analysis and the user experience that I think would make a big difference.
On balance I’m really happy to have access to the app though. It could be better and hopefully it will be in the future – but I don’t have anything else like this in my life. And I have a whole lot of things I want to read. I bet you do, too.
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Comunitee Wants To Simplify How You Read Your Socially Curated News
Dec 13th
Comunitee is a new social network with the news-obsessed reader in mind. It purports to deliver news based on the your reading patterns, cutting away the clutter that you see on social networks that were not built with news as the main type of content. Its name is a mashup of the words “community” and “committee,” which is the driving concept behind this combination social network and news site.
In its attempt to be as simple as possible, Comunitee employs a combination of social network functions, including Lists (Twitter and Facebook), Circles (Google+), socially relevant news (Digg), personalized news apps (Zite, Flipboard, News360), news based on your social graph (Facebook), frictionless sharing (Facebook), discovery (StumbleUpon) and news based on your interest graph (Twitter).
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When you log-in to Comunitee, you first tell it what categories and subsequent keywords you are interested in. For example, under Technology I selected Apple, Apps, Gadgets, Google and Hacking; in the Entertainment category, I narrowed it down to Books and Hip Hop. Now Comunitee knows a few of my interests. In the Comunitee section, I can choose to invite friends from Facebook and LinkedIn, and via email. Employing a similar logic as Facebook Lists, the friends that do filter in from those networks can be organized into comunitees of friends, co-workers, and custom.
Comunitees are organized a lot like Google+ Circles. For example, “Tech Entrepreneurs” might be its own comunitee, much like it could be its own circle on Google+. This comunitee will curate all the news that falls under this topic based on other users’ reading patterns. You can also switch it up by allowing one of your “comunities” to curate a section of the site. For example, if you choose Tech and then select your “Tech Entrepreneurs” comunitee, your Tech section is curated by the that comunitee. As you build a presence on Comunitee, you will earn Foursquare-like badges.
Comunitee also employs the idea of frictionless sharing. Unlike Facebook, which sprang seamless sharing on its users, Comunitee users sign up for the site already knowing that every article clicked will automatically show up in their My News section, which is created organically. By tracking a user’s reading patterns, it surfaces content that matches your interests. All other news is categorized into “All News,” “Interest Feed,” which is just based on the interests you select. “Comunitee Feed” is a feed of news from your curated comunitees.
“Our goal with Comunitee is to make consuming personalized/social news as simple as possible,” Comunitee CEO Don Daszkowski tells me. “Every time we think about incorporating a new feature we ask ourselves if it fits our model which is ‘users are expected to read news and invite friends.’ We want to make the user experience is as easy as possible.”
Social news site Digg does over a personalization section, but Comunitee takes that a step further by bringing in friends from Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also invite friends via email. Unlike Digg, Comunitee isn’t interested in asking users to vote articles up or down. The site does all of that for you. In that sense, Comunitee is similar to discovery engine StumbleUpon, which organizes content based on your taste graph.
Comunitee is an interesting concept, but the site itself employs so many different aspects of the social web that it might actually be making itself more complicated despite its attempt to be simple.
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People Who Own Tablets Are Glued to Them, Read More News
Oct 25th
The so-called tablet revolution in computing may still be young, but early research into how the devices are being used can tell us a lot.
About 11% of American adults now own a tablet, according to recent data from Pew’s Project For Excellence in Journalism. A large majority (77%) of those tablet owners use them every day and more than half consume news content from the devices.
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The study has a number of interesting details for those who are interested in the news and publishing industries. Reading news is a huge part of what people use their tablets for, and as Pew’s report points out, those users are more engaged and often consume more news content than they did before. Tablets are beginning to supplant PCs and, to a lesser extent, print media as a source of news and long-form content.
Lessons Beyond the Media Industry
Even though Pew’s research is geared toward the media industry, it has instructive lessons for others as well.
First and foremost, tablet owners are clearly more engaged when using the devices. Whereas the desktop has myriad distractions popping up left and right, tablets tend to be best for doing one or two tasks at a time. This is good for publishers, who struggle to keep the fractured attention of readers, but it’s also good for other brands.
As tablets appear poised to outsell PCs at some point in the next few years, people’s attention with be focused more on these devices than on desktop computers. Even in these early days of the tablet explosion, we’ve seen substantial growth in tablet-based e-commerce. This trend can be expected to accelerate when Amazon’s $200 tablet, the Kindle Fire, begins shipping in a few weeks. That device, which is more or less designed to encourage consumers to buy things, will also likely have the effect of helping to bring down the price of competing tablets. Most notably, Apple’s dominant iPad will likely see its price drop, even if it’s not necessarily a direct competitor to the Kindle Fire.
Native Apps vs. Web Apps
One noteworthy tidbit from the Pew survey, which may or may not have an impact on other industries, is the break-down of users who get their news from native apps as opposed to browsing to content on the Web.
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.
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Feel Secure Using Gmail Or Other Cloud Services? Read This. by @cjsherman
Oct 13th
Google, Microsoft and scores of other companies are pushing us all into the “cloud”—where all of our information is stored online and is instantly accessible from any internet-connected device. This instant, universal access is a phenomenal benefit for most people. And since many of these…
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Kindle Fire vs. Hugh Jackman: Bit.ly Knows What You Read vs. What You Share
Oct 6th
Matt LeMay, platform manager at Bit.ly, says that social data can tell us who we are – and who we want to be. Speaking at the Monktoberfest today in Portland, Maine, talked about some of the insights that Bit.ly gets from looking at sharing and click data for Bit.ly links. LeMay has learned that what people share isn’t what they click on – and if you want followers, be a cat, not a chicken.
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To kick off the talk, LeMay started by reading from his high school diary. In high school, LeMay says he was “a self-centered jerk” but he was able to escape from his past. With the Internet and social media, “you’re not going to be able to get away from what’s horrible about” yourself.
Except that social media users have learned the dangers of oversharing. It’s performance art, and users (most, anyway) are now savvy enough to present a picture of themselves that they want others to see.
But that’s not always effective. LeMay is in a position to see a lot of information about the links that people share and the links they actually click. Just because a link is shared widely, it doesn’t mean that it’s clicked on, and vice-versa. Links that are clicked a lot may not be that widely shared.
LeMay says that we’ve moved past the stage where “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” We’ve now entered the cat/chicken phase. “The cat is who you are, the chicken is how you want to be seen.”
Kindle Fire vs. Hugh Jackman
To emphasize the point, LeMay scanned data from September 29, the same day that Amazon released the Kindle Fire.
Not surprisingly, information about the Kindle Fire topped the list of shared links. Another popular link was an article on “six ways to become likable” was widely shared. Each had thousands of shares, but but each share only had a few clicks (if any). The Kindle links averaged 17 clicks per link shared.
What was clicked on the most? It wasn’t about the Kindle Fire, it was a link to a trailer for Hugh Jackman’s latest film Real Steel. LeMay said it had few shares, but a lot of clicks per link shared. Thousands, in fact. The same is true of “a blog with pictures of people with tattoos of guns” (now sadly 404′ed, says LeMay). LeMay says that users were also going crazy for a Kelly Clarkson video premier and something about Kim Kardashian.
The Justin Bieber Problem
Bit.ly has also worked with the federal government in the U.S. on link shortening. NASA, says LeMay, almost always “wins” when it comes to shares and clicks. “Except one day, when the FDA warned Diamond Nuts that its marketing was about to get them classified as a drug, not a food.” That document, apparently, was quite popular.
Another key to examining data, says LeMay, is looking below the most popular results. Looking “just below” the very top results gave much more interesting. For instance, LeMay mentioned Twitter’s “Justin Bieber problem” – if they didn’t filter out the Justin Bieber tweets, it would always be a trending topic. Similarly, Bit.ly looks at the data “just below” the top shared and clicked links to see trends in data that might be missed.
The saddest trend that LeMay has seen? One of the fastest shares and clicked links that LeMay says that he’s seen was when Charlie Sheen published his call for a social media intern. “That was a sad day for all of us.”
Social Advice
In other words, people may want to be seen reading an article on being likable (or maybe they think their friends need it), they don’t want to be seen reading up on Kardashian. But they do.
That’s too bad, says LeMay. “Who you are is probably more interesting than who you think you ought to be… being a person is smarter than building your personal brand. We follow people. Kitteh beats chikin.”
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“Read” in Facebook – It’s Not a Button, So Be Careful What You Click!
Sep 22nd
While the focus of today’s Facebook announcements was the new Timeline 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 will hear about it. That could potentially cause you embarrassment and it will certainly add greatly to the noise of your Facebook experience.
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The Washington Post Social Reader allows you to read news from the Washington Post, plus various other sources.
The app’s homepage states that "once you’re using the app, the stories you read will be instantly shared with your friends, and your friends’ reads will be shared with you." The emphasis is ours, because you should be aware that everything you read is sent straight to your Facebook news feed.
When you add the app, you have to give permission for it to "Add to Timeline" every time you land on a story.
If you do actually read the article, it’s done inside of Facebook and you see a sidebar showing what others are reading.
The Guardian app, which you can add to Facebook by clicking here, is slicker. The design of the app feels very much like The Guardian’s actual website. As a publisher, I guess that does scare me a little. Because, that’s right, there are no ads from the publisher within Facebook. Although, it’s not much different from making your content available as an RSS feed and to apps like Flipboard.
As a user, whether I want to use Facebook as my daily news reading platform is another matter. Time will tell.
So to reiterate: anytime you read something from an app like The Guardian and Washington Post, it gets put into your timeline.
That has the potential to make your Facebook news feed very noisy, although it also explains why Facebook is attempting to create a newspaper-like experience on your Facebook homepage. I had misgivings about that, just as I have concerns over how much information this adds to my Facebook News Feed. Is it really necessary to share everything I read, or just as likely click on and end up not fully reading? If "read" in Facebook was a button, I would be much more selective.
Perhaps this is just the way Facebook is heading: everything automatically flows through your timeline. That’s scary, although it also means that more is automated – which means less manual updating.
How automated "read" updates pan out will depend on how Facebook’s users react to this. It’s going to be controversial. Because think about it: how long before one of your friends reads something in a Facebook social news app that they would’ve preferred not to display in their News Feed?
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Read, Watch, Listen: What to Expect from Facebook’s f8 Developers’ Conference
Sep 20th
There is a reason that Facebook delayed its developers’ conference until the fall this year, after having done it in the spring or early summer previously. Simply, Facebook has been busy. It will have been nearly a year-and-a-half since Facebook last held a major event (Skype calls do not really count) and that is a long time for the platform to decide and then implement where it is going next. We will learn exactly what the path is at f8 on Thursday.
So, what are we looking for? Facebook’s release strategy recently provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook’s new features have been to counter Google’s push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week.
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See Also:
How To Use The New Facebook Lists (And Why You Should)
Facebook’s Subscribe Button & Public Social Networking
Facebook Releases Smart Friend Lists to Counter Google+ Circles
Does Facebook’s Subscribe Button Betray What the Company Was Built On?
Read, Watch, Listen: 3 Major Implications of Facebook’s Media Sharing Platform
Facebook’s “Needs Review” Prompts Users to Strengthen the Social Graph
The Billion Dollar Boxing Match
There has been a trend recently where the major tech companies, while innovating at breakneck speed, are also taking their time with their major updates. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are in a billion dollar boxing match. As any big puncher will tell you, there are only so many opportunities during a bout where you can attempt to land a stunning blow. The rest of the time is duck, dive, dodge, duck. Land a few jabs and wait your turn.
These jabs are what keep the tech media busy during the year. In Facebook’s case, they have spent the summer catching up with some of the features in Google Plus (jab, jab, jab) and are now ready to deliver a the Web a left hook to the jaw.
Facebook has been readying content partnerships all year to get ready for the announcements coming Thursday. The theme of f8 is “Read, Watch, Listen.” Facebook is readying itself to become the hub for content sharing across the Web. TechCrunch reported that there will be buttons specifically for read, watch and listen on the platform and perhaps as buttons across the entire Web Let’s take a look at what to expect.
Read
The “Read” portion of Facebook’s announcement is perhaps the most mysterious. Yet, it has the most precedent in what Facebook has rolled out in previous years and may be tied closely with the platform’s social graph. We imagine that “Read” buttons will somehow be tied to content partnerships with major news purveyors like Yahoo and AOL or e-books from Amazon.
Part of Facebook’s rollout of the concept of the social graph was the “Like” button and sharing across the Web. It would not be a surprise if Facebook is copying services like ReadItLater (or just partnering with it, perhaps). The idea would be to make it easy to share what you are reading and have articles and books shared through a “Read” button that gets sent to a vertical section within Facebook itself.
Watch
Think of it this way: is it a coincidence that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on the Facebook board of directors? Or that Hulu and Facebook started a major content sharing platform earlier this year?
Facebook is already one of the top destinations for video on the Web. Most of that is shared content from the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and local news. This is going to be rolled out even further and it will likely to two-pronged – content sharing from outside of Facebook and consumption from within.
Facebook’s relationship with Hulu and Netflix could be a sign of things to come. With Hulu, Facebook users can share links to what they are watching and Hulu generates clips (that can be commented on) from the shows that get embedded into Facebook. For instance, if you are watching the Two And A Half Men season premier on Hulu the next day and think that Ashton Kutcher’s line at the 10:30 mark of the show is (stupid, hilarious, intriguing), you tag that spot and share it with Facebook. We could see similar sharing capabilities with Netflix.
There is also the notion that you will be able to rent shows and movies within Facebook itself, a la iTunes. Think of a content store tied to your social graph. That has big implications if Facebook could pull it off with its partners.
Listen
While we do not know the specific details of the “Listen” products, we do have major clues. The primary indicators are MOG, Rdio and Spotify, all of which have been tied to Facebook over the summer. “Facebook Music” will likely be a conglomeration with MOG, Rdio and Spotify that will allow users to use Facebook as an iTunes-like streaming platform. In this way it becomes a conduit of content without having to go into the messy business of actually licensing music through the major music labels.
Profile Redesign
What does this all point to? Well, a major profile redesign could possibly be in the works to feature all of this new content. Mashable is reporting that Facebook will announce a redesign at f8 and the idea is to become “stickier.” There are scant details on what the design will look like, but imagine that content will be featured prominently on your Facebook landing page, embedded into the news feed and contained within different silos (for Read, Watch and Listen). Facebook could be the functional consumption hub of media on the Web along with the primary sharing tool and message board.
What do you want to see come out of f8? What are your thoughts of Facebook as the center of your media universe? Let us know in the comments.
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Googlebot Learns to Read AJAX/JavaScript Comments
Nov 2nd
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