S napchat’s Redesign, Women Built The Internet and The Cost of Instagram
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.
Snapchat’s redesign puts publishers in one feed and friends in another. That’s exactly what Facebook says doesn’t work.
By Kurt Wagner from Recode
- Facebook has decided that completely separating posts from your friends and family from posts shared by brands and publishers is a bad idea.
- Those findings aren’t just interesting for Facebook. That idea of separating friend stuff from publisher stuff? That was Snapchat’s entire argument for why it rolled out a massive redesign late last year. The new-look Snapchat keeps your friend content on one page and content from brands and celebrities on another.
How women helped build the internet, and why it matters
By Adi Robertson from The Verge
- There are a couple of omnipresent narratives for the history of women in tech. One is simplistic and linear: men built computers and the internet, and now women are struggling to break in. A more nuanced version includes pioneers like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, who helped invent programming as we know it, or NASA’s “human computers,” highlighted in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.
- Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, a new book from journalist and musician Claire L. Evans, offers a rougher and more complicated version of the past. Broad Band profiles some familiar figures, including Lovelace and Hopper, but it quickly jumps into fascinating lesser-known projects.
- Some of these women’s projects look like dead-end paths in retrospect; Hall’s hypermedia system Microcosm, for instance, was steamrolled by the web. But Broad Band illustrates how they prefigured our modern internet — and, just as importantly, which ideas were lost along the way.
What Does It Cost To Be Big On Instagram?
By Jarry Lee from BuzzFeed News
- Gui is one of a rapidly growing number of striving Instagram “influencers” who populate their social media feeds with curated photos of themselves in impeccably styled outfits and the latest designer handbags.
- “… in the midst of each carefully edited picture of an influencer just “hanging out,” brands have found a new method of direct yet subtle marketing to young, impressionable consumers. Instagram has become flooded with posts sporting the ubiquitous #ad or #sponsored captions — language that is required by US Federal Trade Commission endorsement laws — underneath photos of a new jewelry line or eye cream. And these sponsored posts have made maintaining an Instagram feed a very lucrative job, with some high-profile influencers being paid in the range of $150,000 per post.”
- “But as the field grows more and more crowded with would-be social media stars, the margins of the business have become tighter, and it takes more than luck or good clothes to build a sustainable career as an influencer.”
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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