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游戏已经进入到内测阶段，但是，始终不能达到公司的满意。宝开有个不成文的规定，游戏正式上线前，首先，由内部至少30名员工进行内测，如果通不过，就取消上线。詹姆斯“胡子的应许”之后，上海开发团队陆续有20个人也开始不刮胡子了。
虽然进度比较缓慢，但是，詹姆斯认为，游戏的社交化是必然的，“游戏从诞生之日起就是社会化的东西，纸牌、麻将都是如此。”因此，与人人网的合作宝开依然非常重视。
目前，宝开最大的市场是美国和英国，中国是亚洲市场中最大的。针对中国市场，宝开开发了很多本土化的产品。例如，针对联想公司的乐Pad，它的屏幕与 iPad的4：3不同，使用了16：9的设计，因此，游戏的设计、研发和制作都做出了相应的调整。
“我们已经习惯了一种慢的模式：集中力量，花几年时间，开发一款高质量游戏，推向市场，任务完成。”詹姆斯说，对比推出了愤怒的小鸟游戏的芬兰公司，宝开在游戏周边衍生品开发上是相对落后的。
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Sequoia-Backed Milanoo Appears To Be Gaming Search Results With Link Spam
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Basically, Milanoo appears to be doing the same thing as J.C. Penney. The ecommerce site has been buying spammy links to both its homepage as well as to individual product pages, and these sites have linked, thus boosting Milanoo’s ranking above other, more well-known retailers in Google search.
Using the Open Site Explorer tool from SEOMoz, Hobart and Pierce say they couldn’t find a single inbound link that points to the page that isn’t spam or paid for. We too took a look at Open Site Explorer, searched for Milanoo’s link to “Evening Gown,” and found incoming links from NicePromOnline. Ok, so these aren’t as far fetches as J.C. Penney, but spammy sites nonetheless.
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Archive for April, 2011
My daily readings 04/30/2011
April 30, 2011My daily readings 04/29/2011
April 29, 2011-
Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation – Marco.org
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How We Used a Python Script to Find Our Domain Name Yipit | Vinicius Vacanti
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A VC: Finding And Buying A Domain Name
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A number of our portfolio companies have acquired their domain names in connection with or shortly after our investment. Del.icio.us purchased Delicious.com with some of the proceeds of our investment. Foursquare purchased Foursquare.com with some of the proceeds of our investment (they launched with playfoursquare.com). We’ve advised and assisted a number of our portfolio companies in this effort.
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As a marketing person once told me “find a name that means nothing and inject your meaning and brand into it.” All you need to do is a google search on Etsy to see that is what they’ve done with that word.
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I said “you own the .com of your dog’s name?” He said “of course I do.” I told him I liked the idea of naming the company after his dog and it had the added benefit of being a short and catchy name. He agreed it was a good idea. A few weeks later, after thinking about it some more, running it by a bunch more people, that was the name Mark chose. It is a fantastic name and brand.
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- Don’t obsess about getting a name that is descriptive. It’s great to be Kickstarter if you are buidling a funding platform for creative ideas but it is not required. Do focus on a word that is short, catchy, and memorable.
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If you find a great domain that you can’t afford but you absolutely love, you can often rent it for a few years with an option to buy it at any time. Let’s say you are launching a website to buy boats online and the person who owns boats.com wants $100k for it. There’s no way you can afford it right now. But the owner is willing to charge you $5k per year for it and will let you buy it anytime over the next three years for $100k. You do it because you figure that in three years, you’ll be selling 10s of millions of dollars of boats and your business will be worth 10s of millions and $100k will be easy to raise for not a lot of dilution. And if you don’t sell any boats online then you don’t need the domain and it didn’t cost you much.
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毕胜讲述乐淘创业三年：李彦宏和王朔教我的事_互联网_科技时代_新浪网
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2008年6月，乐淘成立了。电子商务这事挺亢奋的，但我没有冒进。这个行业，很多人咔嚓投一笔钱，我没有。因为我不懂这事，所以我得先看看。看了半年之后，发现完全不靠谱。
那会儿全是二把刀，我们团队里都没有做零售的。我发现玩具这东西不适合。你想，做电子商务肯定是占传统零售的一个百分比，首先这个行业基数够大你的百分比才能够大。玩具的基数很小，一点点。
玩具的方向不对，整个团队就开始研究。2008年底，我们有30多个人，从头到脚地分析，发现从头到脚，身上的都被凡客做了，脚上穿的还没做，那就做鞋。做玩具的时候拍脑袋居多，做鞋的时候还真想起来要做个市场调查，专门去广东看了牛仔裤厂家。后来觉得，人不是天天穿牛仔裤，但是一定得天天穿鞋，于是开始转型做鞋。
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鞋子一做就有感觉。2009年8月18号，我35岁生日那天正式上线，上线第三天就宕机了，因为访问量大。那种气场有点像百度在2002年的时候，我自己能感觉得到，要上来了，小宇宙要爆发了。
乐淘的第二个转型是坚决不采购货。当时乐淘内部也吵得很厉害，但我一直咬着牙，我就不采购货。
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商务是买货或者不买货，电子是互联网，是你的发展速度。乐淘这个团队，互联网很强，所以我们用不买货的方式解决了零售。零售是不是能成，取决于你的速度，就是你互联网的操控能力，这就是我们的优势。
基于这几点的分析，供应链的战略方向就是不买货。像奥康这些比较大的企业，乐淘他们没听说过，光是知道你毕胜，但是乐淘靠不靠谱就不知道了。看在朋友面子上，他们尝试性地放了8000双鞋到我们库房里，两天没了，卖光了。奥康老总震惊了，现在要多少给多少，他们有专门人给我们补货的，一个星期几千双上万双往里补，根本不要钱。
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乐淘的前五个供应商都是我亲自谈的，装孙子嘛。一个一个都是土老板，说你有几个钱。我曾经碰到一个老板，坐在茶馆里谈。他说，你把乐淘的股份给我40%，我就跟你玩，要不就不给你供货，怎么着吧。他在鄙视你，等于在说，你不就是个要饭的。到最后，这种话都出来了，说，以你的实力，全中国没人给你供鞋。
这个世界很现实，我确实受到很多人的质疑。当时我们办公楼的隔壁就有一个非常大的供应商的老总，那会儿我们整整谈了7个月没下文儿。后来他说，毕胜我看你挺诚心，先拿几百万的货合作一下。现在，我们搬到王府井澳门中心来了，我一开窗户就能看见他办公室。再打个电话，说你探出头来，他就探出头来。他说干啥，我说请我吃饭，他说好，下来吧。最后我们成为哥们了，要多少吧，几个亿，放过去，没问题，就这种关系了。一切都取决于你的发展速度。
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我在百度也算创业，但我是个辅助者，我体会不到老李的全部痛苦。我以前做了错误决定，天塌下来老李扛着，没我事儿。现在天塌下来我扛着了，所以全是我的事儿，在这点上就不太一样。老李以前也痛苦过，也纠结过，但他所谓的痛苦纠结就是尽量避免错误的决定。
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乐淘做了几年，到现在为止，一直没咋呼。现在电商的同学们，一个是打广告，一个是无休止的论坛、演讲和聚会。我没走这条路，乐淘2011年之前也不会打广告。为什么？这跟我百度的出身有关系。百度人的做事风格就是这样，一定要把自己内功做好再出去。这个互联网江湖，我见得多了。1999年、2000年那会儿，Donews极其盛大、极其热闹，我参加过那时候的会，浮躁得一塌糊涂。都在讲商业模式、融资理念、未来市场发展，每个人都上去喷，后来证明在上面喷得越厉害的人后来死得越惨。起码这种东西不是一个创业型公司的事。我们公司内部有一个共识，除非乐淘变成老百姓的一个生活方式，否则在此之前，你首要的工作就是怎么给用户创造价值，其他的都是次要的。
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这两年，这帮兄弟被我折磨，当然市场也在折磨我们，真的已经非常非常痛苦。有人说创业就是快乐的，我觉得是假话。如果你明天账上的钱不够给员工开工资了，你的方向还没找到，上百人渴望的眼神看着你，就认为老毕你能够做到，我们下半辈子全指望你的时候，那会儿你能找到快乐才怪呢。反正我找不到快乐，我找到的只有痛苦。所谓痛苦不是难受，而是压力，你有责任。你是衣食无忧了，你到任何一个阶段轻松甩手都无所谓，但是这帮兄弟没有啊。我现在有接近400个员工，到年底估计会超过1000人，这帮兄弟还没有财务自由。高深的梦想不要谈，现在我这几百号人财务自由了才是最重要的。人家不财务自由，凭什么跟着你干？
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独家对话暴雪CEO：下一代MMO将成社交网络_互联网_科技时代_新浪网
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1991年，来自UCLA(加州大学洛杉矶分校)的三个毕业生决定创建一家游戏公司，并将之命名为：硅与神经键。二十年后，这家公司最终以暴雪之名享誉天下。
在Mike Morhaime的回忆中，最艰难的时刻既不是起步之时，也不是金融危机的影响。而是2004年，网络游戏《魔兽世界》推出之后。“当时我们没有准备好，没预料到会有那么多人来玩”，Morhaime说暴雪花了一整年的时间在软硬件方面进行提升。
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Frank Pierce(暴雪执行副总裁，联合创始人)：在我们总部楼下的铜像脚下，刻着暴雪的八个核心价值观：精益求精(commit to quality)、趣味第一(gameplay first)、集思广意(every voice matters)、诚信为本(play nice play fair)、立足全球(think globally)、王者风范(lead Responsibly)、学无止境(learn and grow)、拥抱真我(Embrace Your Inner Geek)。
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新浪科技：刚才恰巧说到社交的话题。我们看到，Zynga在短短几年的时间里，其估值就已经超过EA、在游戏公司中仅次于动视暴雪。反观这种休闲游戏可能是动视暴雪的短板。您怎么看社交和休闲游戏的快速发展，尤其在Facebook风头不减的背景下？
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总体来讲，暴雪在这个趋势上更集中于娱乐性这头，而Facebook和Zynga更偏重于社交性。他们会在自身基础上加入更多的娱乐性内容，而暴雪则会多注入社交性的元素。
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My daily readings 04/28/2011
April 28, 2011-
Hacker News | YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo
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It’s funny, I started to write a reply explaining my love of Delicious. But the more I articulated the reasons, the more I realized I loved what it was, and don’t really use it anymore.
1. Before browsers could sync my bookmarks across multiple computers, posting them to delicious was the best way to have access to them anywhere.
2. Before instapaper let me save articles to read later, Delicious was a great way to have a tagged backlog of things to explore whenever I have freetime.
3. Before Twitter, the best way to know what your favorite developers or designers were thinking about was to follow what they were bookmarking on Delicious.
4. Before HN, looking at the usage of tags and stories per tag helped me figure out what technologies or topics were growing in popularity and find out what to read first about them.
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I find this post really interesting. I’ve been thinking about this space and those 4 particular use cases for some time now and my co-founders and I started a company – The Shared Web – to make a product to tackle the last 2 cases in particular. We built a service where you subscribe to the topics you care about and get content shared from the people you trust. We show you content that is popular from the whole community but emphasize content from the people that you “follow”. Would love to have you try it out at www.thesharedweb.com and let me know what you think.
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I think he’s saying that the ‘focusing on one thing’ part is important. Regardless of how well you do a task, if you offer many services, you might not come to be associated as strongly with a particular task in the consumer’s mind. Thus, when they come to think of that function, specialists come to mind rather than the you, the generalist.
That’s how the theory goes, anyway.
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That is exactly how I used it. I’ve since moved on to Pinboard in the great Yahoo! scare of ’10 and am very happy there. One of my favorite features is emailing myself URLs from my iDevice.
I’ve never really cared what others are bookmarking, as I’ve found Google has traditionally been just as good as a big group of anonymous people at telling me what to look at.
Cross-link that with people I follow on Twitter and it might get interesting, though…
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Exactly! As much I have tried to switch back to browser bookmarks, syncing and other social tools, nothing seems to do the job as well as Delicious. The browser integrations are very fast and the overall implementation is extremely simple.
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I think I only use 20% of Delicious, but it is the 20% I love it for.
To me, Delicious is like a really organized attic or “backlog” of interesting stuff I found online and want to remember for later. It allows me to find things back because of the tags, but it doesn’t take as much time as writing blog posts and I don’t have to think about burdening my followers the way I have to with Twitter. I actually wrote about it a while back: https://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/614 (see comments)
I don’t use the social features at all and I am really curious what direction Delicious will take under new management.
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My take is this: searching delicious for tags of my interests always turned up cool results I would never find in Google.
Example: I write software for, and have a strong interest in, professional photographers and I keep bookmarks of my favorite photographers for inspiration. Many of them were found via delicious.
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I used to use del.icio.us as a sort of online magazine. I would read the feed for posts tagged “python” and see all the blog posts about Python that people were reading that day. My usage was very similar to the way people use Twitter and Hacker News today.
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Now there’s an idea for an iPad app, along the lines of Flipboard and News.me but using delicious bookmarks.
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An example usage is following popular feeds;
http://delicious.com/popular/biologyhttp://delicious.com/popular/lisphttp://delicious.com/popular/finance
To me, Delicious is more valuable than Facebook and Twitter. Social bookmarking lets us to extract information from the chaos.
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(I’ve been running social bookmarking site, Faves.com, since 2005).
I still think there is a largely unmet need that fits into the “Social Bookmarking” niche. But I don’t think “Social” is the best way to think about it.
As an avid user (of Faves.com, in my case) – I use it for (in order of importance):
1. Pack Rat - I don't ever want to loose a link I found interesting enough to want to recall later. 2. Personal Search - I need a great search interface to quickly find anything I've saved (search across tags, and comment text).The unmet need – NOT “Social” in the sense that I want to share links with my “friends” – but, rather, topic-based “Communities”. Help me interact with people who share the same interests. This is more in the vein of Hacker News or Reddit. But I don’t have any one service (Faves, included) that do this “right” yet.
I think I want a well integrated system that spans:
- Personal Bookmarking - Personal Knowledge Base w/ Search - Topic Forums - Commenting system - Micro-blogging/publishing -
I agree. Back in the days before HN, I would often use Delicious as my aggregator of choice. I would follow specific tags (webdev, informatics, etc.) in my RSS reader and I would find amazing resources all the time. In retrospect, each tag could be similar to a subreddit, but with much higher quality links. These topic-based communities as you put it are much more interesting than, say, seeing what links my cousin shared on FB.
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The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.
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My daily readings 04/27/2011
April 27, 2011-
Fun Photo App Treehouse Has The Simple Sharing Mechanic That Facebook Needs
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When we last wrote about Treehouse back in June, I noted that it was perhaps the perfect app for sharing Bros Icing Bros pictures. Sadly, that meme died at the hands of Smirnoff Ice. But luckily, Treehouse has become even more useful since then. Notably, the iPhone photo-sharing app has a revamped interface that allows you to comment directly from photo pages, swipe left and right to quickly browse photos, and swipe down to see comments, likes, and location. There are also some nice new overlays that show all this information. And you can now leave photo comments.
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PicPlz Adds Speed, Polish As The Mobile Photo Wars Rage On
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- New navigation structure to allow fast switching between browsing and photo posting screens
- Simplified photo posting flow
- Live thumbnail preview. Quickly see what you’re photo looks like with different filters.
- Camera now supports “tap to focus”
- New users can test out the app without creating an account or logging in
The new key features include:
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From Now On We Will Only Be Using The Word ‘Pivot’ In Mockery
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A Mobile Photo Sharing Casualty, Treehouse Hits The Deadpool; Founder Off To Google
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It can be easy to forget that despite the early success stories (or irrational hype, depending on how you perceive it), there are many more startups out there that aren’t taking off for one reason or another. And one of the earlier players in this latest wave, Treehouse, is sadly no more. The service has entered the Deadpool.
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Treehouse was technically a part of Fliggo, a Y Combinator-backed startup that had originally set out to be one of the “Twitter for video” plays. They had also been known as Vidly. But Bader correctly predicted that mobile photo sharing was poised to take off, and thus we got Treehouse. The service was well executed, and had an interesting sharing model that was sort of a hybrid of Path and Instagram. But again, for whatever reason, it just didn’t catch on in the same way.
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We were indeed the first to really identify the market for mobile photo sharing. It all started when we asked the question “What if you could see your friends’ camera rolls?” So many people take pictures on their iPhones that never see the light of day, so by being able to see your friends’ camera rolls, then you can see what your friends are up to.
At first, we decided to focus on privacy and creating a comfortable environment for people to share photos without worrying who sees them. Initially we had great traction in small groups, but quickly reached the realization that private sharing is difficult in groups of friends that do not all have iPhones. This is a problem that Path is facing right now. Hyper-privacy does not work and moves against the natural motion of social products now, which is to be more open.
I’m happy to see Instagram’s success because it will bring forward the possibility of mobile photo sharing in people’s minds which will pave the way for new apps to have a chance to blow the lid off of the space. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential of the mobile photo space, and I’m excited to see Instagram lock-down a long-term vision and watch Path slowly become more open.
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(8) What explains the explosion in social photosharing entrepreneurial activity? – Quora
My daily readings 04/26/2011
April 26, 2011-
Facebook Launches ‘Send’ Button For More Selective Sharing, Announces 50 Million ‘Groups’
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In addition to the new Send button, Facebook is adding a handful of features to its existing Groups product, which was overhauled last October. First is the introduction of photo albums for Groups. Before now it’s been possible to upload a single photo to a group, and now you’ll be able to upload a whole set. These photo albums are unusual because they’re walled within the Group — only other group members will be able to see them (even tagged photos aren’t visible to people on the outside).
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Finally, and most important, is a new setting that will require Group administrators to approve any new members who have been invited to join the group. Up until now anyone within a Facebook Group was able to invite any of their friends (the idea was that you’d be violating the ‘social contract’ if you started inviting people who didn’t belong). But now Facebook recognizes that there are some groups that should be more private, so you can require admin approval.
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Microsoft, Yahoo Vet Starts Clipboard: “Social Media With A Purpose”
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Hacker News | SurveyMonkey to buy Wufoo (YC W06) for $35m
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That’s awesome news. Congratulations to the Wufoo team — it is well deserved. (Their product is awesome.)
It is also great news for SaaS startup generally, since Wufoo is a little of column A and a little of column B on the typical grow via revenues VS get investment and grow massively dichotomy. That’s a data point in the favor of at least some investors making investments in companies which have a projected trajectory where massive success results in a company on the scale of 37Signals/FogCreek/Wufoo rather than resulting in a company on the scale of Zynga/Groupon. $35 million won’t exactly have VCs salivating but, oh well, if they don’t invest they don’t get a vote — the angels and employees of Wufoo have to be happy like clams at this outcome.
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If you consider a 10x multiple, revenues would have been in $3-4 MM range. Wufoo sets a great example for exits where VCs are not involved but are awesome for founders + employees.
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Yeah, survey monkey does $40M/year in revenue. The company took $100M in debt financing to pay the founders, and put cash in the company coffers. The $100 million was more of a tax-arbitrage deal than anything else. (In the US equity payments are double taxed, but debt service isn’t)
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My daily readings 04/25/2011
April 25, 2011-
John Resig’s CSS optimization for F7U12 SubReddit (more than 6x improvement)
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Hacker News | Startups Open Sourced: Stories to inspire and educate
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Data-Driven Decisions Can Aid Companies’ Productivity – NYTimes.com
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Mr. Brynjolfsson and his colleagues, Lorin Hitt, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Heekyung Kim, a graduate student at M.I.T., studied 179 large companies. Those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology, the researchers said.
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Since 2004, productivity has slowed again. Historically, Mr. Gordon notes, productivity wanes when innovation based on fundamental new technologies runs out. The steam engine and railroads fueled the first industrial revolution, he says; the second was powered by electricity and the internal combustion engine. The Internet, according to Mr. Gordon, qualifies as the third industrial revolution — but one that will prove far more short-lived than the previous two.
“I think we’re seeing hints that we’re running through inventions of the Internet revolution,” he says.
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I don’t view this as whining. There is nothing to whine about. Investors are making money hand over fist. Why would I whine about that? But I do think it is important to point out the inevitability of the market cycles. There will come a time when the environment we are in will be in the rear view mirror. And entrepreneurs should be crystal clear about that. This is a time to raise money and sock it away for a rainy day. Because it will rain.
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My daily readings 04/24/2011
April 24, 2011-
Evolution of the Consumer Web and the Rise of Gamification | IActionable
Good point from a content generate point view. We often get the “How users get info” view. Static content ==> User generated content ==>?
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We really feel like this is a natural path for the internet to be taking. Better yet, technology has reached a point where we can better recognize and reward people regardless of the types of systems they interact with. Here at IActionable we believe this is the next big trend that, down the road, we will look back on and see as obvious. Technology and information availability has our attention more and more divided every day – whether it’s at work or during play. It makes sense to introduce systems to help us develop goals and objectives in order to focus. It makes sense to use more nurturing and expressive ways to develop loyalty in a rapidly changing world.
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A Whole Lotta Nothing: Ev’s assholishness is greatly exaggerated
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Again, Ev is great at ideas, making prototypes and letting ideas blossom into things over time. He doesn’t seem like a CEO type to me, and that’s not a dig on him — I’m a CEO myself, even though I’m not a CEO type of guy either. Running a day-to-day corporation with tons of employees is a lot different than being an ideas guy, and it requires different skills.
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Pleasure and Pain » You’re not a user experience designer if…
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Hacker News | Questions you’ll (probably) get asked at your YC interview
Good questions to ask myself
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These are all things we care about, but they are probably not the most common questions we ask. E.g. we already know about the equity split because we ask about it on the application form, so we only bring it up during the interview if we noticed something odd about it.
The thing we care most about in interviews (at least of things one can change) is how engaged the founders are with users. How do they know people actually want what they’re building? Have they talked to real, live users? What have they learned from them?
We don’t care super much how big the initial market is, so long as the startup is making something that (a) some subset of people want a lot, and (b) if that market is not itself huge, there is an easy path into bigger neighboring ones. Basically, we’re looking for startups building Altair Basic.
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A good corollary question to “How do you know that people actually want this?” is “How are people solving this problem now?”
If founders respond that there aren’t really any current solutions, then it usually means that either a) They aren’t making something that people really want, or b) They haven’t talked to enough users.
If it’s a problem people actually have, then they must be coming up with crazy hacks or solutions that are much more tedious/inaccurate/expensive/generally more painful than the one you’re coming up with. Very rarely is there simply not some kind of existing solution.
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nhashem, great point. i think its important to get users as fast as possible, and what investors really care about is what you LEARNED from those users (what they like, don’t like, data that supports your hypotheses). better a poor product + hundreds of early users than a polished product that hasn’t been launched, imo
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Hacker News | Dropbox as a CMS – DropPages
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Awesome. We built a POC that did the same thing a little over a year ago. We got our moms to use it and they loved it for updating their own sites. There’s definitely a good business model there.
Back then we did it the hard way basically making our own Dropbox API. We had a Windows server running with the Dropbox client installed. You would share a folder with our Dropbox username and our script would auto accept it, and then we ran rsync to sync up the Windows folders with our web servers. Back then getting the Linux client to run was a bit of a pain which is why we went the windows route for that part of the site.
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(8) Which is better: “Follow” or “Connect / Add as a Friend”? – Quora
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Following implies simply listening, without the intention to build a relationship or establish a dialogue.
Connecting implies an ongoing, dynamic relationship with an exchange of ideas and perhaps even value.
Friending implies a connection of a more personal type. For example, it seems more appropriate to connect with someone you don’t know (if you have a mutual interest) than it would be to friend a stranger.
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Hacker News | Ask PG: How has voting habit/volume changed since being hidden?
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Joel Liu (joel_liu) on Keepstream
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My daily readings 04/23/2011
April 23, 2011-
The Initial AngelPad Startups Get Their Wings
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Using a browser extension, a user or a group of users can select tweets with a click to bundle them together. These bundles can then be viewed on Curated.by’s website or embedded on any other site.
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blog.reddit — what’s new on reddit: Your Gold Dollars at Work
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In other words, you don’t have to worry about us turning into some crappy paywall site. We’re not shooting to have all our of active members turn into paying subscribers. We’re not even trying to get half that. In fact, what we’d absolutely love is for about 2% of our eight million active users to subscribe to reddit gold. That would be an annual income stream of almost $5 million, which would solve all of our problems many times over.
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The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators — Scobleizer
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So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. Or I can order my links in a particular order. That’s curation. Or I can add my thoughts to those links, just like Techcrunch or VentureBeat do. That’s curation. Or I can do a video like Leo Laporte does and talk about those links. That’s curation. Or I can forward those links to you via email. That’s curation. The editor who sits in a big building at New York Times or your local newspaper that chooses what content you’ll see in your newspaper is a curator. So is the page designer who decides what story is at the top of the page.
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A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.
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Gravity Regroups For Round Two: The Personalization War
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The company isn’t really saying yet what that means, although I saw a few of the upcoming applications and services today that they’ll roll out over the next several weeks. At a high level they will look at social stream data for individuals – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other services – to create an incredibly accurate Interest Graph for a person. That interest graph data can then be used, with the user’s permission, by third parties for content and ad personalization.
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I saw my own Interest Graph based only on my Facebook and Twitter streams over the last several months and it’s scary-accurate. And one thing is clear – the conversational data from my Twitter stream shows much more accurate interest data. Facebook’s data is still more of “what I want the world to see.”
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The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it.
Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload.
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Quora’s newsfeed is an interesting showcase of what happens when you mix an Interest Graph with a Social Graph – and the result is the mysterious addictiveness so many have experienced, but found difficult to explain. An item pops up in your newsfeed not because you were following a user, but because you were following a related topic.
This often leads to Personalized Serendipity – or Unexpected Relevance – which is why Quora gets many people hooked.
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TheStartup.eu » Blog Archive » Is curation the next big thing?
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A lot of people were saying we needed curation. Not just in the sense of filtering : curating is not only about selecting, it’s also about highlighting and sharing content with analysis or comments that give it a specific – and most of the time subjective – meaning. Blogs had been focusing people’s energy on becoming writers or journalists. That’s good. But we felt we now needed to bring people’s energy on collectively creating this meaning out of all that produced content.
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The idea behind Scoop.It is simple but more and more necessary in a world of digital abundance: with lots of content available out there, you’re probably better off giving your own twist, your witty comment or your smart sarcasm to an article or a video made by someone else rather than duplicate content or write yet-another-blog-post on something already covered a dozen times. And if the platform is designed to help you find the right content, it’s much easier.
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Nothing is more addictive than being heard.
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Social Media Content Curators Are Not “Just Filters” | Jamie Beckland
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In fact, Pete at Newcurator got quite horked by all of these new self-proclaimed curators. He declares that if you need to ask yourself if you are a curator, then “you are (just) a filter.” Because, I guess, when you are a curator, you just know. How do you know? Pete says that you know because you have had many, many years of experience and you have deep expertise in the subject that you are curating. You are creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
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(8) How is social curation different from collaborative filtering? – Quora
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The main difference to me is that curation is more than filtering (whichever form you give it): curation is about giving context.
A filter will select content. A collaborative filter, content based on what others and you did.
A curator will not only do that but add context: comment, analysis, format, pictures, … Why they felt it was relevant, why they agree or disagree with that content.
Look at how the same piece of news is titled differently by say CNN and Fox and Al Jazeera: it’s the same news but the context can be way different because each time, a human being – not an algorithm – gave his own twist to it.
Interesting article here explaining the difference between curation and filtering in greater details:
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Collaborative filtering tends to be limited to reducing the noise in a channel / filtering out less relevant content rather than organizing it in a meaningful way.
As an illustration of the distinction between these two different facets of information organization one might look at a twitter list that is further filtered by hash tags as an example of collaborative filtering while a Pearltree such as this one: http://pear.ly/Crvf that consists of 25 people curating the news and releases related to Wikileaks show off social curation.
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(8) What’s the difference between social bookmarking and content curation? – Quora
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“Bookmarking” is the most casual action, it implies only the potential for interest. Curating requires both peristent and deep interest in the content
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Social bookmarking is something you do primarily for yourself.
Curation is something you do primarily for others (which means being extra careful about what you include, adding context, comments, etc…).
Application design usually reflects a bias towards one of these perspectives
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I would add that another primary difference between social bookmarking and content curation is that curation tools are designed to allow the curator(s) to organize the content in ways that tell a story whereas social bookmarking tools have not historically provided this capability.
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Bookmarking is, initially, something you do for yourself: collect what’s useful, so you can retrieve it. Social bookmarking came along when people thought “what can be useful to me can also be to others”. Makes sense but still, me-centric content.
Curation is also an act of collection. But, by definition (“museum curator”), it’s done primarily to show. It’s a way of expression. Curation tools therefore offer functions to select and store, but also to edit, personalize and share.
The difference is the same as bewteen my music play list and the work of a DJ.
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(8) How many bookmarks do you have on delicious, and how do you use them? – Quora
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One interesting use I’ve made of the curation possibilities was in the context of an online course I’m giving. I’ve used tags to make collections of links that are relevant to the course and assignments. For instance, http://www.diigo.com/user/Websoc… lists a number of social tools from which students pick one to analyze in the course
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- I started in 2003 and have 4446 bookmarks and 758 tags on delicious. I don’t use them much anymore.
- I realized my onboard memory was usually bad enough that I wouldn’t actually recall the precise tags or bookmarked text I used for links, but good enough for me to recall words to input into Google to find stuff again. The key advantages of Google for retrieval are that it capitalizes on other people’s words, and indexes the whole pages.
- In the ongoing battle to stay relevant, my experience online has become much more immediate, much more about flow and breadth than stocks and depth. I increasingly seek – and am able, amazingly – to connect to living, dynamic social objects (such as you people!), rather than static pages.
- I now pick up links with a just-in-time rather than just-in-case stance. If a link has no immediate value to me, I don’t even bother keeping it. It will surface again if such is its destiny. If it does have value, I either tweet it if I feel my contacts will be interested (social caching), or come up with a relevant question on Quora and dump the link there.
I’ve seriously curtailed my social bookmarking in the past few years, mostly because:
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(8) Delicious (website): Why did Delicious fail? – Quora
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The answer is that the concepts behind Delicious have given birth to an entire next generation of services and platforms – the early adopter crowd and soon a much broader general audience will eventually use – we have moved from the somewhat geeky and difficult to grasp concept of tags/bookmarks to a more accessible system of content curation.
Tags were always the weak link of Delicious whereas curation services that let people give their own context and meaning to links are both much more nuanced and much more easily understood.
Systems like Pearltrees which allow users to do this alone or with others are the heirs to the idea that Delicious created.
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While its pretty easy to blame Yahoo for Delicious’ fading into obscurity, I wonder what the future was for any bookmarking service when the world is moving to a point where its almost easier to google for the link you vaguely remember. Delicious could have evolved but the evolution would have had to be towards some website that looked very little like Delicious today
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(8) Digg: Why did “collective intelligence” sites like Digg fail while Twitter succeeded? – Quora
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While Digg may be in decline, Reddit, a very similar site, is not — it just had 1 billion page views this month.
Occasionally, there is some more value in Twitter. I follow almost entirely people in tech, but 90 percent of their tweets are about what they ate for lunch. Annoying. Or they are echoing something they found on Reddit. I think that a hybridization of the two could be really successful – upvote/tag tweets you like, and they all get featured on some global frontpage and categorized by their tags.
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Computerworld wrote an article about this topic today http://www.computerworld.com/s/a… and it endorses what Andrew Chen says above — by giving participants a custom home page, Facebook and Twitter have avoided the clique mentality at Digg and its clones. When my Diggs didn’t make front page, I simply gave up trying. At FB and Twitters, my only readers are my followers and friends, so I get better feedback and encouragement.
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The New Social Web Won’t Be Limited To Search
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The reality is that we don’t always share the same interests as the people in our immediate social circle. Sometimes I develop a specific interest I want to learn more about, like heli-skiing or Ethiopian cuisine. If I suddenly develop a desire to drop 15,000 feet from a helicopter down a mountain of snow, I know my current social network won’t be able to offer much advice. But somewhere in the two billion users on the Internet today, it’s likely that I can learn about my new-found passion and find content related to that interest.
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4 Promising Curation Tools That Help Make Sense of the Web
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“Enliven the world with your passions,” invites the curation and sharing platform Pearltrees. If all of the above curation tools create lists, then Pearltrees attempts do something rather different.
Pearltrees begins with a captivating Flash-based graphical interface. But Pearltrees’s branch-and-tree structure gives users a drill-down option that has them experiencing the material on their own unique journey. Mashable‘s Ben Parr explained Pearltrees this way: “Pearltrees is nothing less than a reinvention of how we organize the web. The service provides a completely unique and visual experience to saving your favorite websites, organizing what you find interesting, and even seeing what others are saying about specific web destinations.”Using a group function called Pearltrees teams, others in your group can create a Pearltree in a collaborative manner in real time. You can also share your team curation easily via Facebook and Twitter.
Pearltrees allows you to embed your ‘pearl’ in a site, but the unique nature of the results suggests that this team is working to create a new visual language for creating and sharing themes and collections. It’s a bold step and worth your exploration.
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these four offerings merit your exploration as early and thoughtful attempts to solve the data overload problem.
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Content Curation: It’s Going to Be HUGE | Fast Company
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Among her key bullets in the presentation:
-Exhibit your collection’s greatest assets
-Position users as publishers in the workflow
- Use analytics to drive content production
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The Three C’s of Information Commerce: Consumption, Curation, Creation Brian Solis
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As sociologist Robin Dunbar once theorized, we are limited to the number of meaningful relationships we can manage as human beings. That number is estimated between 130 – 150. The average number of friends maintained on Facebook today is 130. Coincidence? I don’t think so. The numbers are consistent across other social networks. Today, MySpace users connect with an average number of 107 individuals and on Twitter, the number is 77 (today). I believe these numbers are only going to grow.
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Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King
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Then, the web came along and blew that up. Kaboom! Now content has gone from being scarce to being ubiquitous. Bloggers make content. Flickr photographers make content. Facebook posts are content. Tumblr publishers make content. Content isn’t King because it isn’t scarce. It’s everywhere, it’s overwhelming, and it’s gone from quality to noise
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Devices: Everything makes media now. Cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, iPads, web cams, as well as location aware software like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and a zillion others. The combination of where we are, what we like, what we’re doing and what we’re saying all creates micro-media. Content is being exuded out of our digital pores.
Bandwidth: 3G is here, 4G is around the corner. Wifi is slowly but surely being pushed out and shared, though it’s currently strangled by passwords and firewalls. But just watching the ‘check in’ phenomena of Foursquare is a clue about how quickly content creation is becoming an everyday part of what we do.
Sociology: People like sharing. They like sharing bite size info about what they’re doing, where they are, who they’re with, what they’re buying. They massive influx of consumer created crowd content shifts content from scarcity to abundance, and then to an overwhelming fire-hose of undifferentiated data.
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Advertising: We’re standing at the end of an era. “Mass Media”, the ability to reach large segments of the population with a single message is essentially over. For advertisers, the need to find content in context, and to have that context be appropriate for their message and their brand is critical. So, Curation replaces Creation as the coin of the realm for advertiser-safe environments. No longer can advertisers simply default to big destination sites. The audience is too diffuse and the need to filter and organize quality crowd-created content is too critical.
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A VC: In Defense Of Note Taking On Twitter
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Seth Godin wrote a post on The Domino Project about tweeting in class. He references my talk at HBS where the professor asked his students to tweet out their class notes. Seth says:
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Curation is a Means to an End, Not the Objective | Eqentia
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1) Curating for yourself. You’re curating content about a topic in order to showcase your authority and express what you like. You publish the curated content daily or continuously via Twitter or on the web. Some news media professionals have taken to curating social media in real-time in order to enhance their story telling or as a part of it.
2) Curating for others. You’re curating for a team (internal or external) who is mostly consuming the content. You’re saving them a lot of time. They are not lazy, but they may not have the time to configure news radars themselves. They prefer to consume the news, rather than be consumed by it. A few years ago, Robin Good rightfully called this process Newsmastering.
3) Crowdsourced curation. All on-board. Everybody curates the same topic. A number of users can add or remove content, as well as suggest new sources and keywords for that content. The challenge for this method is that content trickles-in lightly if there aren’t enough users that are actively curating, and you end-up with a partial view of the topic, unless a single user ends-up pulling more weight than others.
4) Social curation. Twitter! Facebook! When your friends are sharing content in their stream and you’re consuming that stream, you’re in essence the recipient of their content curation. This can be taken a step further if you only follow their Twitter Favorites or Google Reader starred items, as this content represents the cream of the content crop. This is a bit like the next evolution of bookmarking systems.
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Digital curation is sitting at the intersection of two larger topics: Content Marketing and the Future of News. We resisted creating a portal on Curation only, because curation has to be part of something else. You can find a lot of curated articles on the curation topic both in the Future of News portal, and the Content Marketing portal.
And if you’re solely interested in that topic, just pick-up the two Connections and add them to your Personal News Page, and they’ll be mashed-up as a single topic that you can consume via email or on the web. Curation + Personalization.
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It’s Official: Curation is Overhyped. 4 Reasons Why. | Eqentia
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2) Several companies offering social readers that rank your social content by popularity of sharing and liking are calling themselves Curation services. Sharing and Liking is not curation. Sharing and Liking allows us to see the signal from the noise, but its loose interpretation of what curation is about.
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How a Tweetdeck, UberMedia deal could cut down Twitter’s bird
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Remember, keep in the back of your mind that research about those 20,000 elite users who tend to use higher end client apps – the apps Bill Gross has been busily acquiring. (All the monitoring is done on other platforms – these are less valuable).
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You see, Twitter’s assumption was that no owner of a client app would stand up to them. Most of the client owners were young guys, just product guys, not commercial people. It’s one thing to deal with those guys, another to say to a company backed by Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, “no more client apps”.
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Mike – Your analysis here seems flawed. While TweetDeck might certainly have a high percentage of power users/content creators, the overwhelming majority of the content consumers are not using TweetDeck. If Twitter shut off access to the TweetDeck client, do you seriously think that the Twitterati would continue publishing to an audience that is a fraction of what is available at Twitter? The masses of content consumers are not going to leave Twitter for TweetDeck/UberMedia, especially since they do not have the infrastructure in place to handle such a large community.
If Twitter shuts down TweetDeck and/or UberMedia’s access, they will have a serious PR issue on their hands, but that would blow over albeit with some longterm vocal whining by influential people. That’s the only reason that Twitter will buy TweetDeck. If Twitter weren’t so flush with capital right now, they wouldn’t even be considering this acquisition. $50 million to avoid a PR problem might make sense, but believing that TweetDeck holds as much power as you imply is a fairy tale.
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NO, they don’t need to buy Tweetdeck. Its easier for Twitter to create an exact replica of Tweetdeck, our team can do it in 30 days (Tweetdeck is a simple Adobe AIR application). Then after Twitter creates its Tweetdeck replica it shuts off the hose to Tweetdeck. Now those 20% of users can wait for Tweetdeck/Uber to build a new Twitter or hook up to some other service and hope and pray that all those power users can get there followers to move over as well. Good luck on that Uber.
Good try TC on trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.
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We largely invest in consumer web services with a large number of engaged users where the users create the content. Services like this can become messy and hard to navigate. There is always a signal to noise issue.
I’m a big fan of curation in these services. Twitter has lists. Etsy has favorites. Tumblr has tag pages. These are all variations of curation in services that have a lot of noise in them.
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What are the existing solutions for signal to noise issue? 1) Search (Users has right intent)2) Vertical crowd source. Hacker news3) Q&A Quora, stackoverflow 4) Organize: List in twitter , favorite in Etsy. List in diigo.
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If you are interested in curating a page on Kickstarter, this feature will be made available to everyone soon.
If you are building a marketplace or a social platform, make sure to build curation into your model. It will make the service easier for everyone to navigate, particularly new users.
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Art stored randomly in a room is a warehouse. That same art curated and distilled becomes a gallery.
That’s the power of curation. It make things more digestible. You spend your time appreciating the art instead of combing through it. You may miss a few pieces as a result, but the overall experience is much less time consuming and far more enjoyable.
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TECHNOLOGY = TOOLS, MATERIALS.
DESIGN = USE THEM TO BUILD USEFUL THING.
JUST LIKE CURATION BUILD DATA INTO USEFUL THING.
BOTH MAKE RAW THINGS HUMAN USABLE.
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I was speaking to the relationship between curation and data, being comparable to design and technology. Just a passing thought. Terms with many meanings lead to confusion, what is useful is to apply to context to solidify the concepts and terminology.
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As I explained at the time (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/0… what we’re looking for here is a solution to the Context, Audience and Information Overload problems which arose as the consumers of media also became its producers (hat tip: Clay Shirky).
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What that means is that we’ll have to embrace a new world where, what matters most finds you, and you simply won’t be able to ‘keep up’ with everything in your neighborhood, workplace, field of expertise, or hobbies.
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How to get info1) Email, IM, RSS. 2) Search with intent 3) Discover in social network. Vertical community.What matters most finds you?
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What’s exciting about Curation – and why I stand by embryonic – is that we haven’t even come close to solving the content question. And even as we poke around at it -the number of devices that tweet, blog, post, check in, instagram, and video are just going to explode.
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How can we enable to generate information on our platform in a meaningful way？
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FB is “somewhat curated” where Google is generation behind.
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Completely agree. My take is that because of the content explosion, in at least some corners of the web we’ll see a resurgence of the “middle-men” who’ll do this curation – travel agents for trip planning, headhunters for finding jobs, etc – in a new avatar.
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The middle man issue.1) Information is very limited and web is not advanced. People who control information has power. Chained middle man.2) The world become flat with web. Remove middle man3) Information overload. Do we need middle man again?
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They’ll have tools to smartly aggregate content / deals from around the web but provide the incredibly important layer of human judgment on top to personalize this for your specific need.
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My sense is we’re entering a new age of the professional curator on the web
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Trust?
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Professional curator? Middle man again?
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Or, for each of your interests, have ‘automatic curation’ software be able to work effectively with the ‘meaning’ of both your interest and all the content on the Internet and, then, direct focused content to each of your focused, personal interests. In this way, make the “message” conform again to the “medium”, this time the medium of the Internet, and, thus, take a big bite out of the “message” of old ‘one size fits millions’ of the “medium” of old media.
The challenge is how to do that. But I can 100% absolutely assure you that no one anywhere in US venture capital, north, south, east, or west, gives even as much as a weak little hollow hoot about either doing it or how to do it. Instead, they first want to play with the UI/UX and second look at ComScore numbers. The ‘how to do that’ is ignored. This fact, however, is close to inevitable: If many VCs could evaluate the “how to do that”, then too many entrepreneurs would already know “how to do that” and the opportunity would be gone.
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Curate items in my library automatically? Building meaningful list automatically for me? Like Read it later do?
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Curation implies some level of expertise by the curator. The problem is that, if everybody is becoming a “curator” suddenly, regardless of their expertise level, you end-up with an abundance of poorly curated services. The Wikipedia curation works because there’s a rigorous process for that. If everybody is now a “curator”, we’ll lose the real benefits of curation.
I’m for controlled curation by experts, not curation by the masses. Then it’s user-generated content, and it should be called as such.
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i don’t totally agree. curated pages that are highly liked or favorited are
often better than those created by so called experts -
Conversation and Curation are uniquely human expressions – so i’m not sure that seeing good curation’s best result is being ‘picked up’ by paid media.
It may be that lots of new curators get paid with an economic unit i call (for lack of a better word) joy. It feels good to share what you know – and payback is a ‘thank you’ or a comment.
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Expert barge/Thanks as reward.
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I was about to comment something similar, but you explained it so well. In a time where there is entirely too much valuable relevant information to digest, individuals must rely on various trusted sources (publications, bloggers, friends, industry leaders). It would indeed be silly to assume that my trusted sources will be the same as almost anyone else’s.
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I think of UGC as content created by a user…curation is content picked by a user (not generated)…and aggregation is just a system for collecting a bunch of content (so to me good curation involves simple tools for aggregation and then filtering, picking, and sharing the best from that aggregation).
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I agree that curation is all of the above Steve, not just filtering. I didn’t imply just filtering.
Curation is a before, a during and an after task. The maintenance is as important as the creation, organization, selection and filtering. And you might add promotion and user-engagement. As a curator, I want users to be engaged with the content I’m curating in order to improve on it or on my methods. -
I think it only feels hyped because you are connected to the world that cares so deeply about it…i would bet the average person on the street doesn’t know what it is…and if explained to them, I bet they would think it sounds great! (classic example in this realm I think is delicious – and there are still millions of Facebook users that have no idea something like delicious exists)
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yup. the curating for your mom is a great example
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INTERNET LIKE NAPOLEON DYNAMITE.
ADD “YOUR MOM” TO EVERYTHING.
IF IT STILL MAKE SENSE, YOU HAVE WINNER.
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to Steven – Pandora does better curation of new music for my tastes than my human buddies and band mates can do.
Curation is really the perfect word for the service they’re doing – I haven’t thought of it before today when this discussion sparked attention to the concept, but it feels like an exact match. And here you go – curation with no human bottleneck. -
Does Pandora curation or recommendations?
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Here we’re talking ‘curation’ as essentially collecting together. Even humans don’t do this very well, that is, very ‘meaningfully’: Last time I was at the National Gallery of Art on the Mall (thank you Mr. Mellon), I saw ‘curation’ moslty just by date, within that by geographical region, within that by artist. Gee, maybe a computer could do such ‘curation’!
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Next, a direct attack on ‘curation’ as humans would do it is both not promising (just as you said, “write a song, or paint a picture, or carve a sculpture”) and not necessary for good results. Instead, it’s enough to be able to have software that can work effectively with ‘meaning’ as humans mean it. And even there it is not necessary to take a direct attack, i.e., achieve ‘real artificial intelligence’.
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Awesome thread. My friend Charlie Crystle shared the link. I currently run what used to be www.ofoto.com for Kodak (now KodakGallery.com). We have 12 petabytes of highly personalized images in cloud and the problem of curation is one I have thought about at length as it relates to the overwhelming volume of photos being taken (by you and others). I have some some random contributions to this thinking:
How I think about curation (some definitions which have some important nuance):
* You have a really big set of thing (Y).
* You have a person (X).
* The subset of Y that delivers optimal happiness/joy/etc. for X (call is C) is the curated set.What that simple frame, here are some adds:
* Finding C small sets is easy. Finding C against volume is the challenge.
* C must be indidivdalized to the X.
* C changes for X based on time, intent, location, etc. It’s not absolute.
* The distributions of C’s tends to be very flat for large sets. So you get a lot of room to deliver something that will be perceived to be ‘wow’, even if it’s not the true global maxima.
* What X thinks is the optimal C might not actually deliver the optimal happiness. Algorithms that can figure this out feel like ‘magic’.Victor Cho
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Asking people to curate is worthwhile, but accept that most people will have a limited amount of time available to do so. Recognize that the actions people are *already* taking are meaningful to them, and so should be meaningful to you as well.
Maybe you can’t always make recommendations, but you can expose connections as a way to supplement and enhance the manual curation. Make use of the data exhaust.
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That said, I think Kickstarter can retain its focus on individual projects while adding a little more of the Wikipedia-esque “wow, I don’t remember how I got here, but I’m glad I did” feeling to browsing.
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“curated by your actions on Twitter — you don’t know that you’re “curating” when you @reply, but that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
Call that ‘passive curation’? You’re actively curating through actions intended for something else. You took that as a signal and can apply it with curation in mind.
Active curation is a problem if you want participation; many people simply won’t click the button, or some other explicit way of curating. But the superusers will (god bless ‘em), which will raise the quality of their own curated content, at least.
So passive curation can be a useful way to effectively curate, albeit not as effectively as explicit curative actions. The key is to understand the available signals and how to apply them in a meaningful way.
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My favorite example of social curation to date is Quora. I think that they have really cracked the code on how to implement a curation model that scales.
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You Don’t Know It Yet, But You Want It | jake levine
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Since inception, the web has seen three major waves in the evolution of relevance: portal, search, and social. These waves manifest typically by the examples of Yahoo, Google, and Facebook/Twitter, and otherwise known as Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and the real-time/social/next/3.0/whatever web.
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- Time (real-time = conversational)
- Social group (work or friends or school, etc.)
- Social proximity (1st, 2nd, 3rd degrees)
The Social Web – Facebook/Twitter – In the emergent social web, discovery has taken on passive characteristics, resulting in a model of consumption that occurs without search, and often without intent.
Consider the patterns of content discovery and consumption prevalent on Facebook or Twitter. Discovery is based on the stream paradigm, where relevance is determined implicitly along three dimensions:
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Networks will expand along these dimensions, as users tend to follow or focus more of their attention to those streams that present the greatest relevance (think Twitter and Facebook lists). The social web enables users to iterate through a group of curators who provide relevant content by way of social proximity and temporality. It has replaced intent with context, and so while wading through the stream, we are left with a feeling of serendipitous discovery, as we stumble blindly into content that we don’t even know that we want.
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Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay
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The technology to facilitate easier curation has come a long way recently. Taking aggregated content and adding an active, ongoing editorial component to arrive at a curated nirvana of sorts has been happening on the web for over a decade.
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Most importantly, they both require a strategy. Why is this content being put together? Who will use it? How will they use it? Are they getting it somewhere else right now? What are the staffing impacts? What are the potential outcomes?
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(8) What are the best content curation tools for daily use? – Quora
My daily readings 04/22/2011
April 22, 2011-
Twilio’s APIs and service were not impacted by the AWS issues today. As we’ve grown and scaled Twilio on Amazon AWS, we’ve followed a set of architectural design principles to minimize the impact of occasional, but inevitable issues in underlying infrastructure.If you don’t fail fast and retry, distributed systems, especially those that are process or thread-based, can lock up as resources are consumed waiting on slow or dead services.
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My daily readings 04/21/2011
April 21, 2011-
Socialcam 2.0 Lands on The iPhone
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Since launching in March (just in time for SXSW), the app has racked up over 250,000 downloads in its first month, 75% of which were on iOS devices.
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(8) Why did Flickr miss the mobile photo opportunity that Instagram and picplz are pursuing? – Quora
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Lastly, Marco Boerries was without a doubt one of the most viciously political, and disliked Yahoo! execs and he reigned for 4 years over the Yahoo “Connected Life” team which had universal control over all native mobile experiences within Yahoo. Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly. The Flickr iPhone app that eventually shipped was built by CL.
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