P interest Spotlight, Open Effects and Social Trove
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there.
Why Pinterest Deserves The Spotlight
By Robert Safian from Fast Company
- “I’ve been personally fascinated by Pinterest for several years. It is part social network, like Facebook; part visual, like Instagram; there is a discovery component, like Google; and its business model involves both e-commerce and ad-supported media.”
- “Pinterest has also, in my judgment, often been underappreciated by the business press. Some of that has to do with the reticence of its founding CEO, Ben Silbermann, to act as a Jobsian showman. But I also think it’s because Pinterest’s core customers, initially, were stereotyped as middle-America moms, as opposed to Brooklyn hipsters or college students—a community that media watchers can be unfairly dismissive about.”
- “New companies arising, new tools proliferating, computing and connectivity costs plummeting—it can make you want to pause for a breath, just to absorb it all. But here’s what we believe: This wave of change is only beginning. And so as hard as it is for us to accept, we have to prepare ourselves for a whole lot more. By writing about Pinterest and its forays into visual search, we are sending an underlying message: That we all need to keep on our toes, that the consequences—intended and otherwise—of the transformation under way globally are only beginning to be felt.”
Facebook opens AR platform and “world effects” to all developers
By Josh Constine from Tech Crunch
- “Facebook is trying to close the augmented reality gap with Snapchat with the help of an army of third-party developers. Today, eight months after debuting its Augmented Reality Camera Effects platform and AR Studio tool at F8, Facebook is allowing all developers to start building AR experiences for its Facebook Camera.”
- “Facebook’s opportunity here is to take advantage of Snapchat’s anti-developer attitude.Snapchat has yet to fully embrace third-party AR content beyond some basic image frame submissions and work with a few fine artists like Jeff Koons. Meanwhile, Facebook has been operating a developer platform for more than a decade, and has fostered a huge community of coders looking to get their content in front of Facebook’s massive 2 billion user audience.”
- “The real world is too vast for a single company to spice up with augmented reality. But by crowdsourcing development, Facebook could eventually offer AR experiences connected to any location, real-world object, holiday or activity.”
Psychologists Want in on Social Media’s Big Data Trove
By Adam Rogers from Wired
- “Learning about human behavior from Facebook data is like learning about human behavior by watching people in a casino. You can definitely learn from watching people in a casino, but a casino is a highly engineered environment designed to encourage some behavior and discourage other behavior. Facebook is similar.”
- “The challenge for all of us is to figure out how this data that could be beneficial to scientists and society in general can be made available in ways that would be safe for the people providing the data and safe for the companies”
- “It’s getting easier for lots of people to interact with each other, either through a company’s platform or through distributed peer-to-peer systems. And to the extent all of these interactions are digitally mediated, they create records. Those records are all really exciting to researchers.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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