vjsm.buranosky Social Media: March 2013

Monday, March 25, 2013

A New Hope

By: Roberto Baldwin
Wired Magazine

The new Z10 could save BlackBerry.

It won’t dethrone Android or put a major dent in Apple’s iPhone dominance. But it will make current BlackBerry users happy enough to lay down some cash. They’ve been waiting for a good shot in the arm for too long, and with its modern operating system and rich app platform, this is a very capable device that will exceed their expectations. It’s a phone that’s meant to do much more than just send secure e-mail. For the beleaguered Canadian company that’s catching up to the rest of the smartphone market, that’s the good news. But even with a whole new operating system running on some great hardware, the Z10 will not inspire a grand exodus from the two leading mobile ecosystems. No matter how much it looks like an iPhone 5, as soon as you pick it up, you know it’s a BlackBerry. The user interface is totally redesigned, but there’s nothing groundbreaking about it, even if the higher-ups BlackBerry would have you believe the opposite is true — since the device was first unveiled, the marketing suits have been eagerly showing off the awesomeness of the new software as they repeatedly mention the fact that 100,000 apps will be avaialble by the time the phone goes on sale in the United States this weekend.

Public Shaming Via Twitter

By:Kashmir Hill

Forbes

Over the weekend, a female “developer evangelist,” Adria Richards, overheard two male developers making what she thought were sexist jokes during a tech conference. Uncomfortable with confronting them in person, she instead tweeted a photo of the two to shame them publicly, writing that “jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and big ‘dongles’” are “not cool.” One of the dongle-joking dudes was wearing a visible nametag in the photo. Richards’s tweet was immediately spotted by an organizer for the tech conference who pulled the two men aside to confront them about the comments. According to a post on the conference’s website, the men agreed the comments were in poor taste and apologized.

Richards explained in a blog post why she needed to call out the behavior via twitter

That could have been the end of the story but instead, like a sexist snowball rolling down a hyper-sensitive mountain, the situation has escalated considerably. Richards wrote a blog post about the encounter, in which it’s not entirely clear that the comments were sexist (in my reading).

Monday, March 18, 2013

Graph Search Hates Facebook

By: Arun Sundararajan
Wired.com

Facebook announced a series of incremental updates to Graph Search yesterday — as revealed by a peek under the hood — and I think it’s a good thing they’re doing the feature and user release so gradually.

It might be for technology scalability and resource reasons, but it’s also good psychology. A slow and steady rollout gives Facebook time to preserve its feel of a digital living room (or neighborhood bar), a place where we can safely hang out with our friends. It also gives users time to figure out and get comfortable with where their information ends up as it is indexed and made searchable.

Because a steady supply of current preferences and intent is absolutely critical to the success of Graph Search. Yet this supply of social information on Facebook could slow as the very demand for it grows.

5 Ways Journalists can reuse old stories

By: Meena Thiruvengadem
1.22.2013

Journalists are finding that social media gives them ample opportunities to breathe new life into archived content. Recently, they’ve used social networking sites — while covering deaths, anniversaries, birthdays and ongoing stories — to resurface old content that their audiences may otherwise never see.

The Wall Street Journal used Facebook to create a timeline of its coverage of the Facebook IPO Instead of inundating its main Facebook page with IPO coverage, the Journal created a separate timeline that would become a social landing page for its coverage of the deal.

The timeline recounts Facebook’s journey since 2004, when it was launched from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room as thefacebook.com, and includes links to related articles on wsj.com.