Teens embracing new services say they’d rather use aliases than their real names. […] On Twitter or Tumblr, they say, they can also be more selective about what they share and with whom, and feel less social pressure to “friend” everyone in their school or friends of friends. Twitter, they say, just feels more private and intimate. They can use pseudonyms or private locked accounts so their tweets stay between friends. […] “Teens need a place to socialize and express themselves without grown-ups staring at them.”
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The two studies clearly showed that East Asian Facebook users are more likely to deemphasize their faces compared to Americans. Specifically, East Asians living in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan exhibited a predilection for context inclusiveness in their profile photographs, whereas Americans tended to prioritize their focal face at the expense of the background.
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A mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers …
A high DAU to MAU ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits[…]
Discovering non-obvious user needs and creating accompanying habits is accomplished through deep observation grounded in solid behavioral theory, followed by methodical trial and error.
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The user growth team works very closely with the data science team to ask the right questions about what drives growth, instrument logging to collect data that may answer that question, analyze the data when it comes in, define a test that is aimed at improving/manipulating some data set, measuring the results of that test, and then doing it all over again.
— What is Facebook’s User Growth team responsible for and what have they launched?
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Early on in the company’s history, Facebook engineers added many features on the premise that if they thought the feature would be cool or useful, so too would the users. The company is slowly moving away from this mindset, Chilana said. New features, such as a photo upload button, must be equally intuitive to a 90-year-old Mongolian grandmother as to a 14-year-old Brazilian soccer player, one engineer told Chilana.
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when you’re captioning a photo for upload, Instagram will already be pulling potential stores and restaurants that match your GPS location for checking in, and they’ll have been uploading the photo itself (though not sharing it) since you selected a filter. This cuts down, or even eliminates, all possible lag time on the next few screens that the user visits.
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In most of the communities we’ve worked in, teens will “friend” virtually everyone they recognize from school, making Facebook less like a collection of friends and more like a town hall meeting. It’s where young people learn the latest gossip, catch up with their peers, publicly reinforce relationships, and turn acquaintances into friends.
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Mei-Xing, an 18-year-old high-school senior, leaves Facebook open while she studies late into the night because she likes seeing the names of friends pop up in chat windows. Even without talking to them, she feels less lonely knowing they are out there.
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One could argue that seeing the future through a developer lens and not one of digital anthropology, sociology or ethnography is why Google has wrestled with opportunities to socialize new and existing products. While Facebook builds and ships it must also continue to explore the intersection of technology and liberal arts to build and ship in ways that continue to define or redefine how people discover, connect, and share.
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None of these social sharing systems do a very good job of rewarding the initial curator. Who was the first of my friends to watch the video that later went viral? Which person I follow was first to tweet out the link to that amazing blog post? Who listened to that cool band before they went big time?
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One of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of Twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or a specific message. So, this syntax, the “@username” was completely invented by users, and we didn’t build it into the system until it already became popular and then we made it easier. This is one of the many ways that users have shaped the system.
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A few months ago when there was a gas shortage in Atlanta. Some users figured out that they would Twitter when they found gas — where it was, and how much it cost — and then appended the keyword “#atlgas” so that other people search for that and find gas themselves. -
Mr. Zuckerberg takes a decidedly deliberate approach to product development.
That’s evident in how the 28-year-old CEO led the creation of Timeline […] The new feature was a culmination of an 18-month process that included dozens of test versions and multiple focus groups.
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The group created at least 100 versions of the product, according to employees on the team.
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Flickr was an early site that let you identify relationships with fine grained controls—a person could be marked as family but not a friend, for example—instead of a binary friend/not friend relationship. You can mark your photos “private” and allow no one else to see them at all, or identify just one or two trusted friends who may view them. Or you can just share with friends, or family. Those granular controls encouraged sharing, and commenting, and interaction. What we are describing here, of course, is social networking.
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What does Mixpanel do that Google Analytics is incapable of doing?
• Retention (true cohort analysis)
• Very sophisticated querying / segmentation
• Retroactive funnel analysis (not just from time of setup)
• You can integrate in any language
• Real-time (every part of Mixpanel, not just one dashboard): Everything in Mixpanel is to-the-second real-time instead of 12 hour delays you will often get with GA
…— What does Mixpanel do that Google Analytics is incapable of doing?
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
— William James, The Principles of Psychology
