“The broad consensus is that Google is an empty city where the masses go to set up a profile but then seldom return.” — Cotton Delo, Google a Ghost Town as Brands Decamp for Pinterest via Advertising Age
Arc90 — the people behind Readability — have launched a new service called Readlists. Users can create a collation of links — of whatever sort — and bundle into an e-book that can be read on a Kindle, iPad, or iPhone.
I created one using the links I pulled together yesterday on Social Operating Systems, here. They are featuring a number on the www.readlists.com landing page, too.
This is what it looks like on my iPad in iBooks:
Note that it doesn’t seem to handle the ‘related posts’ javascript, so dynamic pages might be problematic, but still: very cool.
Over at Work Talk Reports, I’ve written a short introduction to a big idea that I call Open Work. I use the term ‘work media’ to refer to the enterprise social networking tools that are being rapidly adopted in business these days, but I think the basic premises for those tools are too limiting and limited.
Stowe Boyd, A Model For Open Work Media
I am deep into a number of writing projects, including a report on the state of work media tools (aka enterprise social networking), but a set of ideas keep coming forward in my thinking, so I decided to take a moment to capture them.
The short form of these ideas is this: the work media tools we are using today cover only a small part of the ambit of activities that make up our work.
The longer version? Work media tools are designed to handle a small set of use cases that are oriented toward collaborative activities, such as sharing documents, assigning tasks, and core business functions, like sales and customer support. These tools take a great deal for granted, and have built-in fundamental premises about the closed nature of today’s work, so that a broad range of activities that we are actually involved in every day are either managed only in part, or managed outside of these tools altogether.
A simple example has to do with project work. Today’s tools are geared toward managing a project once it has been defined, and once the various team members have been identified. A work context is defined, people are invited, and work commences. But these leaves aside all the work that preceded the project, such as cost estimates, negotiations with freelancers, proposals to the client, and so on.
Yes, it is true that these other activities could have been managed as independent and earlier projects themselves, and that is, in a sense, my point. But in general, much of that earlier coordinative effort — especially negotiation — is unmanaged, or managed via email or other interactions.
And the largest gap in the orientation of today’s work media tools is that they are almost completely closed: they are organized so that only people that are invited to participate in well-defined projects can gain access at all. With very few exceptions, nothing created or managed within these tools can be shared with the outside world, or even between other users of the various systems.
Go read the complete article at Work Talk Reports.
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Michael DeGusta via Technology Review
[…] smart phones, after a relatively fast start, have also outpaced nearly any comparable technology in the leap to mainstream use. It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from 5 percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from 5 percent to 40 percent in about four years, despite a recession. In the comparison shown, the only technology that moved as quickly to the U.S. mainstream was television between 1950 and 1953.
Almost as fast as TV, which was artificially delayed by WWII.
(Source: underpaidgenius)
“It’s unlikely that journalism will morph from digital roadkill to the next big thing in Silicon Valley, but it’s nice to know that a guy at the keyboard can dream.” — David Carr, The Atavist Matures as a Publisher and a Platform via NYTimes.com
(via underpaidgenius)
For the sake of my pal Valdis Krebs, I am collating a list of posts I’ve made in recent years on the idea of a social operating system. The basic notion:
Stowe Boyd, Rockmelt: Why The Social Browser Won’t Matter
The next generation of operating systems will be social at the core.We won’t be fooling with files and folders. We will be connecting with others, reading streams from our friends, and tossing observations and hopes and insights into the wake we leave behind, spreading out to all that think we matter.
So here’s some links to pieces I’ve written mentioning the idea:
Please send along any references to other people writing on the subject.
“@jayrosen_nyu: Morning! New at my Tumblr: USA Today has a new boss. He thinks voicelessness is hurting the brand, and it has to end. http://t.co/dxvylbcW” — May 21, 2012 at 06:00AM via http://bit.ly/JgDRnj
“Headphones are the new wall.” — Ray Udeshi cited by John Tierney in From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz via NYTimes.com, discussing how office workers deal with the increasing noise in open space offices.
“There is no winning formula or established convention for measuring long-term innovation bets.” — Matt Kingdon, ‘Not Everything That Matters Can Be Measured’