To Earn Trust, Facebook Could Declare News Feed Changes Like Google PageRank

facebook-transparentToo much bad press and too many confused users. That’s what Facebook got from silently tinkering with the news feed. BiltonGate was the last straw. Signs now point to Facebook beginning to announce news feed algorithm changes the way Google does for PageRank. Combined with education, Facebook could use transparency to try to convince people it tweaks the feed to help users, not sell more ads.

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Facebook Gives Examples To Jumpstart Usage Of Graph Search, Which It May Have Spent Too Long Building

Graph SearchPhotos and the news feed are where people spend their time on Facebook. Yet its last two big products were relatively niche features, Timeline and the new Graph Search. Facebook today published examples of how to use Graph Search, which merely highlight that it’s not part of day-to-day life. Yes, Facebook needed to fix search, but it may have prioritized an intellectual wank over user experience.

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Flickr’s iOS App Is Still Playing Catch-Up

flickr-iosA blog post from Flickr about new updates to its iOS application went relatively unnoticed yesterday. The post announced a series of incremental improvements to an app which has so far barely managed to catch up to the competition after months of abandonment, but has yet to really impress. The latest build brings a few now-standard features like the ability to save photos to your Camera Roll, communicate with @ replies, and more.

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The Science Behind Why The Harlem Shake Is So Popular

Harlem Shake Cat MemeA five-minute video? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Not to watch one, or to make one. But the Harlem Shake dance videos are capped at 30 seconds. That’s why we’re so willing to watch just one more incarnation, and why it’s easy to recruit friends to make them. The result is one of the most pervasive gags in history. A “Symbiotic Meme”, the Harlem Shake has a lesson to teach all content creators.

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Facebook’s Never Had A Big User Data Breach, But May Never Recover When It Does

Facebook HackedIt’s not if, but when. Between crooks, hackers, and foreign governments, Facebook probably can’t avoid a serious user data breach forever. When it happens, Facebook may never be able to quiet fears that “personal data isn’t safe there”. That could cause a chilling effect on sharing, jeopardize its future in commerce, and cut its lifetime short.

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How Do You Scale Social Innovation Startups?

NYHQ2004-0650Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of UNICEF’s Innovation unit. Her team started UNICEF’s open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class ”Design for Unicef” in NYU’s ITP Program, is a global partner of Stanford’s New Product Design Innovation course, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University on leveraging technology and design to improve international development. She previously wrote on TechCrunch about how the future of mobile lies in the developing world. All views are her own. You can follow her on Twitter. You’re a social entrepreneur wanting to change the world, but are having a hard time scaling your promising idea and achieving lasting impact. In my job as UNICEF Innovation co-lead, I come across hundreds of promising and not so promising technology and social innovation startups every year.  While this is an emerging space, many social innovation startups face similar challenges. In this piece I want to provide some practical advice for how social innovation startups can increase their chances of success. To frame this advice, let’s first take a look at what the terms scale and impact mean. Scale implies that your idea is reaching a large percentage of your target audience. For example, the mobile money transfer and microfinance service M-Pesa serves over 26 million people across East Africa who could not otherwise easily transfer money to relatives and pay businesses. Another example would be that during the 2011 drought across the Horn of Africa, UNICEF and partners provided access to safe drinking water for 3 million people. Impact implies that your product or service has a positive and transformative effect or prevents a negative effect on even the poorest parts of society. An example of this is Tostan’s work, which has led to over 6,000 communities in eight countries to abandon the harmful practice of female genital cutting. Another example is the effort by a multitude of partners to eliminate measles throughout the world. This effort has led to a 74 percent reduction of measles deaths in the past 10 years. The true skill of a social innovation startup is not just in choosing the right idea, but in using finding and working with the right partners, aligning with priorities and funding, and continuously delivering and communicating impact along the way. 1. Work with the right partners In the social space, there are

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If A Social Network Falls In A Forest…

gplus-tree1Google Plus experienced an outage this morning, and almost no one noticed. Gizmodo poked fun. Engadget wrote a few sentences. Someone posted it to Hacker News. Where it gained zero comments. Google+, reportedly the fastest-growing social network in history (or fastest-growing “thingy” ever), and reportedly the second-biggest social network worldwide, experiences an outage, and nothing hits Techmeme. Google+, where the President of the United States just hungout, goes down, but Twitter users (and TechCrunch reporters) only have jokes, not frantic questions and concerns.

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“In The Studio,” Twist’s Bill Lee Talks Shop About Mobile Apps And Angel Investing

Twist“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a successful founder, entrepreneur, and angel investor, who happened to amass a truly eclectic set of experiences in the Valley, from running a venture-backed company to an acquisition, from investing in some of the most iconic and bold consumer-technology companies in the past decade, and going back to the well again to run his current startup focused on mobile location and messaging.

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