Images are languageless.
With its masonry layout Pinterest turns images into stories. The layout of the board is just as important as the images in it.
Pinterest will expand outside the US faster than Instagram mainly because it’s less focused on original content and more focused on curation and sharing. The “Pin it” button also feels like a piece the web browsing experience, as does Twitter on mobile.
Pinterest still needs some mobile work. Right now an image pinned on the mobile browser redirects you to its app where it’s difficult to pin and credit the source. All editing occurs on the desktop.
The Internet is a pinnable copy-paste machine. And the world could be Pinterest oyster.
Sit back and watch it grow.
An app that revolves around the sun. Now I just got to get out for more walks.
Chris Dixon writes that Facebook is mostly a place to socialize with friends.
You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.
People don’t use Facebook with the intention to shop but most people don’t watch TV with shopping intention either. Yet, one commercial can get us to buy just as one Facebook ad in the corner of our eye may grab our attention and make us reach for our wallets.
Facebook’s DNA is purely social. Still, Zuckerberg had no choice to monetize it through advertising. For the most part Facebook does a decent job in making the ads non-invasive. There’s no pop-ups, no pre-rolls, just display ads.
Nevertheless, keeping Facebook clean without disrupting the conversation and making advertisers happy (see General Motors pull out) is its greatest challenge because Facebook can’t do both. The users are the priority.
Wall Street expects Facebook to maximize revenue on desktop and mobile. Whether that’s through smarter advertising, Facebook app’s store, coupons or Facebook credits remains to be seen. Are you bullish?
Word on the street says that mobile threatens Facebook’s future. The mobile screen is way smaller and difficult to insert ads without disrupting the whole user experience.
The Facebook app is janky as it stands with bugs and slow response. That needs to get fixed first. One thing that Instagram taught all app developers is that speed is key to growth. No one wants to wait to see content. Instagram starts uploading user images even before the filter gets selected.
But have no fear, Facebook will figure it out. Zuckerberg feels the heat and is fiercely persistent. He’ll keep adding companies to his portfolio until he figures out how to create the ultimate mobile experience that keeps advertisers on board.
Every time we doubt Facebook it proves itself again. It could disappear one day like MySpace but we should remember that it still has Instagram just like Microsoft has the Xbox. It also knows more about us than our parents.
Facebook has enough manpower to come up with innovative solutions for its users and advertisers. There’s no quit.
People love to hate Facebook and use it at the same time. That part won’t change.
What do you when both ways are right?
When we look back at Facebook we’ll have to congratulate it for opening up interest based networks that were reserved for early adopters and niche interests.
Now the only way for startups to scale quickly is to enable sharing activity to Facebook. But not everyone likes this strategy, especially the users.
As soon as Instagram sold out its most passionate users went nuts. How could something so cool, creative, and expressive sell to a behemoth? The same thing almost happened to Foursquare in 2010 and most likely will happen to Pinterest if it keeps it’s pace.
But the main reason people dislike Facebook absorption is mass. Networks like Instagram and Quora were public networks without feeling public. One could post content ‘anonymously’ and grow a tribe outside his or her friends.
As soon as Facebook intervenes users get disturbed. Don’t users want to grow their follower base with the inclusion of Facebook friends? Not really.
As a network, scale is the priority. As a user, niche expression and the feeling of uniqueness are priorities.
The user friction between mass and special interest networks is still overhyped. The best products get recognized and swallowed. And the users keep using.
I grew up near this old school but never took the time to explore it.
When we go away and come back to childhood we see things in a different light.
There’s an expectation today that artists must produce faster and release more content to stay relevant.
If you’re an author, you need to write 2 books a year instead of one and maybe a manifesto or novella on top of that. If you’re a musician, you’re expected to make an album, an EP, and drop a couple Internet singles in a year. The relentless demand for productivity goes on.
Daily communication via Twitter is another demand on artists. Fans want to interact and get the inside scoop. Some writers like Seth Godin maintain a daily blog to keep fans entertained.
Today fear drives an artist’s work. If an artist stays silent too long the risk is irrelevancy. There’s always new authors and endless forms of Internet entertainment that will make people forget. Artists are also competing with amafessionals that release stuff for free. And some of the content is pretty good.
Art is judged on productivity. There’s simply too much noise to be the old fashioned reclusive artist that ships once every decade. There will always be respect for scarcity and quality for masterpieces but artists must have some type of other presence whether it’s blogging or on Tweets. It comes down to this: Hyper-productivity keeps an artist relevant so fans and new followers will buy more stuff.
Vidal Sassoon turned ordinary hair into a hairstyle.
Influenced by Bauhausby architecture, Vidal went on to put design and architecture into hair, giving it shape and volume.
Reading through the obituary is a soft reminder of the way Steve Jobs came up with his ideas, “creativity is just connecting things.”
Vidal had the same perfectionist style as Jobs with the objective to personalize his products for the customer.
To me hair meant geometry, angles. Cutting uneven shapes, as long as it suited that face and that bone structure. (link)
The fashion and design world will miss him.
Creation emerges from need. Find a hole in the marketplace and fill it. You do the work instead waiting for others to make it for you.
That’s the story of Abe Burmeister and why he co-founded Outlier.
The Internet enables niche products to find any audience across the world. With a direct to consumer website, an awesome product, and some marketing to build awareness, one can make it happen.
We can’t always depend on big companies to tailor fit products for us.
If you can’t find something, take a stab at making it yourself and building an audience on the Internet that will buy your stuff.
You don’t need salespeople, just a product designer, a website, and someone to tell the world about it and field emails and calls.
Stand still at your own frustration or come up with a solution that solves a problem for you and many others. You just might end up building a company.
outlier.cc/
