Proximity

Vero Is Bad Design–Except For The One Way It’s Brilliant

Feb 28, 2018 | ,

Vero has been around since 2015, but within the last week, the app has suddenly exploded as the Instagram-Facebook-Snapchat-alternative of 2018. Currently topping the iOS App Store, Vero’s servers are being crushed under the weight of new users–though it’s unclear exactly how many. Worth noting: The company’s own message of freedom and transparency might be hypocritical at best.

So what’s driving Vero’s apparent growth? For one thing, the company is brilliantly playing on the anger many people feel at social media companies by making promises aimed at many of the public’s biggest qualms with giants like Facebook. For instance, Vero says it will never have ads. It won’t sell your data to advertisers, either. And it will never reorder your timeline via an algorithm optimized for engagement. Instead, it plans to charge you a subscription–eventually. Facebook makes about $6/quarter off its users from advertising. Vero’s premise seems to be that you pay it directly, instead.

Source: Vero Is Bad Design–Except For The One Way It’s Brilliant

How e-commerce video advertising will strike yet another blow to commercial TV

Feb 28, 2018 | ,

E-commerce videos are a precision advertising tool which could put the nail in the coffin of traditional television adverts.

Source: How e-commerce video advertising will strike yet another blow to commercial TV

The Music Industry’s Playlist Culture And Our Attention Spans

Feb 25, 2018 |

In addition to delivering big profits to labels and publishers, playlists are helping new and unknown artists succeed in some profound ways. From popular independent playlists curated in dorm rooms to Spotify’s insanely successful Discover Weekly feature, playlists are becoming a major way for listeners to learn about new music. The music industry has a lot to gain from this new trend, but is there a downside to our ever-increasing penchant for playlists?

Source: The Music Industry’s Playlist Culture And Our Attention Spans | ReverbNation Blog

What Miranda Sings’ Short-Lived Netflix Series means for YouTube’s future 

Feb 18, 2018 | ,

In recent years, YouTube’s identity has shifted from a video sharing platform and streaming to a cultivator of subcultures. For fans of any YouTuber or YouTube community, this is not news; but for anyone on the outside, the idea of watching a single creator day in and day out for years is still a strange and foreign concept.

YouTube content creators and their audiences share a far more intimate relationship than television audiences share with even the most iconic characters from some of the longest running shows. The medium itself is far more personal—vloggers sit down and talk directly to the camera, while the viewer takes in the video at eye-level, watching on a laptop screen or, quite literally, from the palm of their hand.

Source: What Miranda Sings’ Short-Lived Netflix Series means for YouTube’s future – Ampersand

The tech bias: why Silicon Valley needs social theory

Feb 18, 2018 |

In the summer of 2017, a now infamous memo came to light. Written by James Damore, then an engineer at Google, it claimed that the under-representation of women in tech was partly caused by inherent biological differences between men and women. The memo didn’t offer any new evidence – on the contrary, it drew on longstanding sexist stereotypes that have been disproven time and again, and it included only the vaguest mention of decades of research in relevant domains such as gender studies. Given the expansive resources at Google, his omissions didn’t stem from a lack of access to knowledge. Instead, they pointed to an unwillingness to accept that social theory is actually valid knowledge in the first place.

Source: The tech bias: why Silicon Valley needs social theory | Aeon Ideas