Ritual Coffee beans courtesy of Kyle, my houseguest for the next few days.
Pinterest Accidentally Built A Better Search Engine Than Google
Several years ago, and shortly after she joined the service, my wife looked up from her screen with a virtual light bulb above her head and said: Pinterest is my Google.
Now, I wouldn’t call Pinterest a general purpose search engine yet, but if we need a recipe or an image or ideas for a project around the house or new product recommendations, our family generally turns to Pinterest. And the results are far superior to Google.
In reality, I’m finding my own usage of Google as a search engine is pretty much for finding things on Wikipedia and Youtube (or on my own site- c’mon Tumblr!).
And I’m finding that across most of the things I search for these days. If I want a new restaurant, I search Foursquare. If I want new music, I head over to Hype Machine or see what my friends are listening to on Rdio. If I want up to date news, I search Twitter. And the list goes on.
Perhaps we’ve seen the end of general purpose search. Or, perhaps we’re just seeing more evidence that the best way to compete with incumbents is by not competing with them at all- until you do.
I’ve been saying this for years - socially curated systems will beat algorithms in categories where relevancy changes quickly (< 3 months). Read my post from Nov 2010 on the fact that Tumblr is a human relevancy filter and how e-commerce would be huge for them. Fast forwards 2.5 years and you can see how Pinterest figured this out whereas Tumblr never did.
The reality is that (1) instruction and interaction are critical to successful student outcomes and (2) the cost of instruction and interaction is not what makes higher education unaffordable. With regard to the former, while EdX’s CS50 Introduction to Computer Science attracted 150,000 students, less than 1% completed the course despite the fact that 45% of students had prior experience with computer science and 93% said at the outset that they intended to complete the course. Almost all students need support and structure – even the 58% of CS50 students with bachelors degrees or the 20% with masters or doctoral credentials. A great deal of research demonstrates that the caring attitude of faculty and staff is the most powerful retention tool. As the 2011 National Satisfaction and Priorities Report attests, “the majority of students surveyed do not feel schools are doing all they can to help them reach their educational goals; colleges do not show concern for students as individuals, and students are not notified early if they are doing poorly in class.
Tumblr was recently purchased for $1.1 billion by Yahoo and as far as anyone can tell this is a sincere purchase - meaning Yahoo genuinely wants to improve the tumblr product, not shut it down. And immediately after that Tumblr rolled out a sponsorship program with campaigns starting at $200,000. And immediately after that, AT&T apparently paid $200,000 to create one of the worst Tumblrs anyone has ever seen. I wanna talk about all this.
I remember when YouTube first rolled out “partner” channels, which also had a starting price at $200,000. I was pretty close to YouTube at the time (as in Google was paying to have me flown out to California from my North Carolina dorm room to talk to the ad people at YouTube) and I was one of the first ever non-corporate partner channels on YouTube. And one of the things I remember about that big $200,000 number was that it was more of an infrastructural limitation than anything else. Their ad department was still figuring things out so they didn’t want tons of clients, but they needed some clients that were paying real money and expecting to get a real return. Baby steps.
Tumblr seems to be in that exact same position now, just swap Google for Yahoo and videos of laughing babies for gifs of laughing Zachary Quintos.
I remember a lot of early branded channels on YouTube not “getting it” but I don’t remember seeing anyone ever not “get” YouTube as badly as a AT&T is not “getting” Tumblr right now. First they make a marketing term that is a pun on the word homophobia (1, 2) then they pay money to promote posts that are nonsensical stock photo animations and screenshots from their commercials that don’t actually communicate anything.
If you scroll through the notes, you’ll find a lot of reblogs from young people who are either furious at AT&T or calling the company stupid, annoying or insensitive. This is obviously not the outcome that was desired by either Tumblr or AT&T. So I want to propose an actual solution to this actual problem. (The solution isn’t “get companies off Tumblr” because websites run on servers and people and both of those things require money to exist.)
I think the best solution is doing what YouTube did: Hire people from your community and assign them to work with individual brands on a one-on-one basis to make sure they stay on message and aware of the site’s culture and best practices. When YouTube acquired Next New Networks in 2011 one of the smartest things they did was assign YouTube veterans (that is, people who had been creating popular viral content for Next New Networks for the past three years) to handhold branded channels and ensure they got the most out of the money and effort they invested in their YouTube ad campaign.
I don’t think this would even be that difficult for Tumblr, as it is much easier to “master” Tumblr than it is to master YouTube (partially because it is a much simpler website and it’s community is much more homogenized) which means there are probably hundreds of people already in the NYC area that could be hired for this position. Heck, there are hundreds of kids in the NYC area that could qualify for the position and be unpaid interns. (Just to be clear, I’m not fishing for a job, but I could definitely make some referrals.)
I don’t think it would be wise to do this with existing staff: as I’ve seen on both YouTube and Tumblr (and almost every start up I’ve worked for) the people who work on a website use it very differently than the people who use the website. There’s often an implied Chinese wall at tech companies that discourages employees on the site from striving to become popular on the site, as they have insider information. And while most employees have accounts that they do in fact use, they don’t necessarily have the same experience as someone who has used the service with the intent on becoming popular. (For example, I made this post an image post instead of a text post so it wouldn’t get mangled in reblogs - that’s one of a handful of things only an actual user of the site would know to do.)
There are a lot of existing non-sponsored corporate Tumblrs that are way more “with it” and way less insipid than AT&T’s Tumblr. A good example would be the Doctor Who Tumblr run by BBC, which happens to employ the exact model I suggested above. Another good example is the Adventure Time Tumblr. I know for a fact that both of these Tumblrs are only solid because the companies behind them knew to hire people who were tumblr experts and they happened to know where to look.
But when you’re paying $200,000 to get popular on Tumblr, you shouldn’t have to know where to look to find a Tumblr expert. You should be provided one by Tumblr. It should be part of the packaged deal. If Tumblr implemented something like this it would create much more fruitful deals for Tumblr’s partners and a much more pleasant environment for Tumblr’s users.
There’s so much good here.
Making my first batch of cold brew because it’s supposed to be 87 degrees today.
Google reports that 77 percent of searches from mobile devices take place at home or work, only 17 percent on the move.
We talk constantly about making choices that will allow us to keep our options open. But if our options remain open, then we have not made any choice.
— (via soxiam)
Sometimes (often?) it’s critical to commit.
Hey, that looks like a nice spread Dave…why was I not invited? (via kingdumplr)
Epic Chinese lunch part 2: pork soup dumplings, shrimp dumplings, scallion pancake. @revolvingdork and I ate it all. by Dave Lifson.
Oh man, that was a long time ago!
I just have to share because this is the coolest of all the websites. You type in a book that you liked and it brings up a list of at least 10 books that you would probably enjoy as well.
So if you’re looking for a good read, check it out.
www.whatshouldireadnext.comWhere have you been my whole life Pandora for books?
Why isn’t this called Amazon recommendations circa 10 years ago? What’s the big deal?
(Source: nicolrene)
Tropes vs Women in Video Games — A Damsel in Distress: Part 2
This is awesome. Just awesome.
It’s 25 minutes long, but there isn’t anything in there that’s padding. Instead it’s an intelligent look at the storylines of most of the games out there. This is actually important viewing if you work with or live with serious gamers.
Also if you are female.
