Overview: Social Web

Facebook says it’s not worried about the level of sharing from everyday users ... concerns that people are starting to use Facebook more like they use Twitter — passively consuming content instead of creating new material... a report from The Information said there has been a 20 percent decline in “original” content from users in the past year.

Study shows political discussions are ruining Facebook and friendships... users who try to talk about politics on Facebook are often surprised by the political opinions of their acquaintances... a diverse set of opinions among a user's friends makes everyone want to speak up less...Facebook has a low threshold for “friending” ... can bridge togeth…

As we learn about the ways people use the news, what features might invite their trust and loyalty?... 32 senior strategists, designers, and developers... created prototype tools to surface the Trust Project indicators of quality, a set of fundamental journalistic principles that align with today’s news users wants and needs.

But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences... although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine... you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.…

Facebook introduced new APIs for messaging through Facebook Messenger. ... bots are legitimately cool and promise to revolutionize how we interact with services. And it’s a piece of cake to get one up and running.

Very few ... are capable of regularly creating compelling videos ... as social platforms look to saturate their feeds with video... they’re essentially competing for the same limited set of good videos. So those who create the ​quality​ stuff can demand payment. In recent weeks, those payments have begun flowing. For Facebook... people are simpl…

gadget “blog,” Circuit Breaker, that will live primarily as a Facebook page, with posts appearing in the Instant Articles format... the best of old-school blogging together with a sophisticated, aggressive modern platform distribution strategy... It’s not (yet) possible to be an Instant Articles publisher if you don’t have a web source from which…

The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political division…

What Twitter has always been good at is allowing people to jump into any relevant conversation they want. Users can share thoughts and funny videos, but also have others engage with it in a public environment. This cocktail party aspect is where Twitter shines. Now it looks like the “cocktail party of the internet” might also be becoming the high …

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

Publications are hiring a point person to coordinate with new platforms like Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat Discover... product changes of platforms happen on a daily basis. Just to track those changes and newly emerging platforms is a full-time job in itself

Last spring, the Financial Times altered its former metered access model and introduced paid trials, letting users pay £1 ($1.42) for a month’s access to content. At the same time, the newspaper also changed its policies toward social platforms and began making more content free to people coming to its site from Google, Facebook and Twitter. It la…

At The Guardian’s Media Summit in London, those publishers and others discussed what’s working for them with their platform strategies, and how sustainable off-site publishing is likely to be for media companies in the long term... Cosmo’s Snapchat Discover editions get 76 percent completion rates... 56 percent ... coming back to us five days …

BART started talking back. The tweets weren't bland or automatically generated. They were super real, and sometimes super dark... a tactical move to both acknowledge the deplorable state of San Francisco's underfunded subway system and prove to residents that their government was aware of the issue and doing everything in its power to fix it.... T…

SOMETHING REALLY DRAMATIC is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism ... without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. news publishers have lost control over distribution... increase in power of social media companies... a far greater concentration of power ... Networks favor economies of scale,…

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

Snapchat on Thursday launched a new political campaign show on its “Discover” page... ‘Good Luck America’ is geared toward young viewers

Here are three ways to step your game up right now.

Email, for all the claims of it being dead, is critical for many publishers as a distribution (and marketing) channel they continue to control... Email newsletters have become an important part of publishers’ audience development strategies as a way to deepen their relationship with readers by providing an antidote to the endless stream of news in…

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…

the way Snapchat works is much closer to how we communicate face to face than any other social network... So now that you know everything there is to know about the history of the platform, let’s get down to the most important part: how the fuck do you use this thing? ... Below are some handy guides I have put together...

To get a better grip on the questions that bots raise... organized a workshop that brought together a diverse group of bot experts. This article is the output of the event, a tour of the bot and its semi-autonomy from three perspectives: that of the designer, the implementer, and the regulator... The last several years have seen a rise in bots …

BotOrNot checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.

sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook's policies. This paper explores the potential of community-driven counter-speech to play a critical role in challenging and diminishing these type of posts on social media. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content... F…

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

Democrats and Republicans sometimes seem to be living in two different Americas. We analyzed the past seven debates on each side to show which topics are most discussed within each party (nice, simple data visualisation here)

the fear is that the platform will change without warning, and teams will have ended up wasting precious time and effort before they get a chance to get it right or reap the benefits if they do.

we analyzed over 1 billion posts from 30m brand pages on Facebook.

if he tried to make ads that were beautiful and perfect, it wouldn’t work and his fans would know... his work routinely pulls in millions of views because he’s transparent with his audience... mostly teenage boys know when they’re being peddled a product.

Newswhip data suggests that Facebook’s live videos, which by their very nature are longer and encourage users to comment, drive higher engagement than traditional short Facebook videos. Facebook even recommends that live streams go for at least 5 minutes, if not longer. Both Fusion and Vox.com are aiming to do future live streams in the 20-minute …