stephen.nyc

Tag: Technology

  • Twitter and The Transparency Center

    Twitter and The Transparency Center

    Marty Swant of Adweek:

    In the next few weeks, the company will begin showing its users more information about who is advertising on Twitter and what those ads entail. The additional disclosures will include all ads running on Twitter, how long they’ve been running, the creative for a campaign and information about why a user is targeted with an ad.

    The tool will be called the Transparency Center. According to the report, certain information will be made public such as: the organizations that buy political ads, the target demographical data, ad spending for a candidate per advertiser and more.

    This tool, has likely been under construction for a while now but the announcement timing was pretty coincidental. The Honest Ads Act was introduced to The House only 6 days ago.

    Personally I’m glad to see Twitter doing this. Glad to see it setting an example for others to follow. While, Facebook on the other hand has been pretty lukewarm to the problem (and solution).

  • WeWork has Bought Flatiron School

    WeWork has Bought Flatiron School

    From FastCo:

    “WeWork’s culture is one in which we are always ready to do more, to learn more, and we are proud to expand our offering with this new platform for learning,” said WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. “In Flatiron, we have found a partner who shares our vision of connecting people–through space, design, technology, and community–and understands that those connections are what humanizes the way we work and live. We are all students for life.”

    Seems like everyone is digging a moat around their business these days. WeWork will start rolling out Flatiron School bootcamps at select offices in the future. Very interesting move. Bootcamps are pretty contentious. While most American graduates are seeing a employment decline in the post-grad life — many see these “code schools” are seen as a panacea.

    Many of these schools have post-grad salary claims that are obviously inflated. Flatiron ,was among them as well — the company apparently paid a tiny out-of-court settlement. Then again, what schools don’t make unsubstantiated claims about their students and alumni?

    WeWork is building a colossal network. Connecting the tenants of education and craft won’t be easy, but you have to start somewhere.

  • Lyft Prepares for IPO

    Lyft Prepares for IPO

    From Reuters:

    On Thursday, Reuters reported that San Francisco-based Lyft is close to hiring an IPO advisory firm as a first concrete step toward becoming publicly listed.

    Lyft would establish a public valuation for ride services startups that has been elusive. Lyft was valued at $7.5 billion in its latest fundraising, while larger rival Uber is valued at $68 billion. Some question whether that is fair, given the range of scandals at Uber this year. In August, Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi set a new tentative timeline for Uber’s IPO of between 18 and 36 months.

    Interesting news. It appears that Lyft is attempting to get to the IPO stage before Uber. I’m curious what Wall Street will do when they file. I’m rooting for Lyft, and personally rooting for Logan Green — the CEO. Green is smart, methodical and runs a tight ship. The LA Times has a great write-up about him and the future of Lyft, here.

    Uber is hemorrhaging cash in R&D, has continuous workplace problems, and isn’t even profitable. Ride-sharing (and hailing) is a difficult game, but both Lyft and Uber seem to be investing in AI which is a wise choice. It’s good to see Lyft is courting investors this early on in autonomous ride tech, and has even struck deals with Ford and GM. Uber is notably not into collaborations or any deals for that matter.

    Green knows what he’s doing. Nothing creative happens in a vacuum. I’m thinking Lyft is a buy. Uber is definitely in the hard pass column.

  • How Tiny Might Make The Web A Better Place

    How Tiny Might Make The Web A Better Place

    It’s the year 2000 and The Dot-com Bubble has just arrived. I was 11 years old at the time. I don’t remember it. What I do remember is playing Chess on Yahoo! Games or chatting with friends on AIM. Those were the good ol days.

    However, researching The Dot-com Bubble has been eye-opening. Two major factors catalyzed the conflagration of sell-offs, bankruptcy and failure of so many e-companies (as they were called then). Those startups (as we call them now), were plagued with:

    1. A crazy amount of over-spending. [1]
    2. The stock market crash that followed the 9/11 attacks.

    9/11 was unavoidable for those businesses. But overspending, or burning cash was a very serious problem then — and remains a serious problem now. Snapchat lost almost half a billion dollars in 2016. Uber spent $2.6 billion in 2016 alone. Apple, the prodigal son spent $10 billion on R&D in 2016. The tide is pulling back for some of these VC-backed companies, and there may be a tsunami looming around the corner.

    Enter, the holding company.

    Holding companies reduce the risk for owners. If a financial hardship comes for one of the holdings, it’s unlikely the business will disappear as the corporate group as a whole owns a stake. This is a healthy relationship, and strengthens the bonds between business and consumers.

    Tiny's Homepage

    Recently I came across Tiny. Tiny invests in internet startups, but it also buys businesses into their holdings. If you’re a bootstrapped company, struggling to grow under your own weight, or can scale to level that your VC’s want — Tiny will make you an offer (within 7 days no less).

    Their portfolio is very impressive.

    Dribbble, Crew, Designer News, Need/Want, and Buffer are just a few of their holdings. Tiny won’t flip the business, and they won’t come in and micro-manage team culture. These internet businesses are thriving — each one isn’t an Uber-sized goliath, but they come together in harmony. Each one working as hard as the next, producing a quality cluster of nodes for the web. Each one producing jobs, solving problems and existing through lean years and fat years. Even The Walt Disney Company has an immense amount of holdings and assets, which to say the least… is smart.

    If another (VC catalyzed) bubble is coming, and it most certainly will… I believe most of the businesses (if not all) within Tiny will survive. As overspending becomes more and more entrenched, it’s going to get rough out there. Minimizing the next bubble fallout means taking action.

    Holding companies can make the web a healthier place. Less link rot. Less bullshitery like what happened to Vine. No more dead projects like FFFFOUND, RIP.

    Maybe I’m paranoid, buy if you’re not standing underneath the umbrella of a holding company, I’d be worried about survival.

  • Ikea Has Bought TaskRabbit

    Ikea Has Bought TaskRabbit

    According to Recode, Ikea has bought TaskRabbit:

    TaskRabbit is one of the best-known startups in the so-called “gig” economy that links freelance workers with jobs, from handymen to movers to assistants. It has about 60 employees, but over 60,000 independent workers use its platform.

    The total price of the sale is unknown, but previously Ikea’s acquisitions ranged from $20 million to $50 million.

    The total number of Taskers as of 2015, was just over 15,000. [1] That’s some interesting growth over over the course of 3 years. Nothing wild. But an interesting move by Ikea nonetheless.

    It looks like Ikea is doing two things here. First, they’re signaling to the market that they’re still here and making moves. Notably, moves into the tech space. I mean they recently were one of the first companies to bring AR into their app. Secondly, they’re building a moat around their business model. If a size-able chunk of users go to TaskRabbit for assembly, why not own a piece of the pie?

    I for-see a bright future with Ikea as the IOT continues to encroach into our lives.

  • What Does the iPhone X Mean for Web Browsing?

    What Does the iPhone X Mean for Web Browsing?

    This is fine right?

    iPhone X renders webpages with literal white bars on the sides pic.twitter.com/ztcWetrLPo

    — Thomas Fuchs (@thomasfuchs) September 13, 2017

    Uhmmm…

    "The notch was a good idea" —Apple fanboys, 2017

    I present to you Exhibit A pic.twitter.com/HzQLwBrbDC

    — @jedmund (@jedmund) September 12, 2017

    I mean as hilarious as these hot-takes are, just how serious is Apple taking this heat? Well, in their documentation they have clearly defined safe-areas to lock-in content in our familiar-yet-safe rectangle we're fond of.

    A safe-area example and Auto Layout grid columns.

    I think designers are going to have to get creative to deal with this. Thankfully app designers can look to web design for inspiration. Lots of wonderful solutions are just waiting to be discovered.

    Apple apparently has some yet-to-be-released Safari documentation about how to handle full-width designs as their Apple TV 4K seems to take advantage of this. Check it out:

    Apparently there is a way to set the background color, e.g. the Apple TV 4K page does it. pic.twitter.com/Am3xn6wjRp

    — Thomas Fuchs (@thomasfuchs) September 13, 2017

    I have a feeling that it's just the background-color of the document body, but we'll find out sooner than later. I think this is a real challenge, but in the beginning it's going to be a bit rough out there. I'm going to do a deep-dive into the Human Interface Guidelines and documentation next.

  • There’s More Daily Active Users on Giphy than Snapchat

    There’s More Daily Active Users on Giphy than Snapchat

    From Scott Galloway, founder of L2 Inc:

    The 4-year old Gif Search Engine has 200m daily active users who watch over 4 million hours of GIFs every day. To put that in perspective, Snapchat has 173 million daily active users. [Giphy] has raised $150 million and is valued at $600 million but it is not yet profitable although they are trying to change that by rolling out sponsored GIFs. Giphy seems to be doing a lot right — not just creating a huge repository of content, but also executing an effective search strategy, forging impressive partnerships and engaging a massive network of users.

  • Sketch Will Buy Figma

    Sketch Will Buy Figma

    Chaker Bejaoui, writing for Prototypr:

    The ecosystem that Sketch has built around it is impressive. If you put Sketch together with Craft, InVision and Zeplin, the package suddenly becomes very competitive and attractive. You can go from designing, prototyping, to testing and shipping the ideas. And if on top of that you add simultaneous collaboration, a better shared revision history and a browser app allowing Windows users to play with Sketch, you are still ahead of Adobe.

    Currently there are 3 tools facing each other to win the love of designers: Sketch, Adobe XD & Figma.

    There is not enough space for 3 big players. Only 2 at the end will remain to hold most of the market share (e.g. Windows/Mac, Android/iOS, Uber/Lyft). Other smaller competitors will share what is left behind.

    For sure XD will be one of the two.

    If Sketch wants to remain one of the biggest player, it has to buy Figma.

    He’s completely in the right. There’s just simply too many players on the field. If Figma and Sketch knows what’s good for them, this sale will happen sooner rather than later.

  • How to Embed Your Unsplash Photos in WordPress

    How to Embed Your Unsplash Photos in WordPress

    Wouldn’t it be neat to embed your Unsplash photography on your WordPress site?  Unfortunately, there’s no WordPress plugin available. If you’re not familiar, Unsplash is a huge library of photographs for commercial and noncommercial purposes. It’s an awesome resource for designers, prototypers, and developers alike. 

    If you have a profile with Unsplash, you should check out their API docs. The devs provide some wrappers too. There’s a PHP, Ruby and JS wrapper. Which all-in-all, are pretty fucking dope.

    So yeah, I figured it would be cool to add a showcase of my Unsplash photos on my website. Upon closer inspection of the Composer wrapper, it looked like it was overkill for my use. But if you’re gonna make a WordPress plugin using Unsplash, you’ll want to use it.

    So I began here — first I made a quick blueprint on how I wanted this to go down:

    Just a simple page, and a two column grid layout of my photos.

    Next, I took a looked through the Unsplash API docs again. Created an application, and received my Application ID. Very important step. The docs even had an example for listing a user’s photos. Hell yeah ????

    From Unsplash’s Documention

    Seems easy yeah? Next, I went to check out what kind of HTTP Response I get from the API with hurl.it and everything is looking hunky-dory so far.

    So at this point I realized a few things:

    1. I need to make a simple HTTP request
    2. Decode the JSON
    3. Loop through the array and echo the goodies

    I decided on making a simple snippet below:

    If you leave line 19 uncommented, you can see the full array and figure out what you want to use from the HTTP request. You can copy/paste that snippet in any template or PHP file and it should work. NOTE: make sure to replace my username and swap YOUR_APPLICATION_ID for your actual App ID from Unsplash.

    After a few layers of paint my Photography page now looks like this:

    It’s quick and dirty, but at least I won’t have to upload my Unsplash photos to my website manually anymore. It’s all programmatic baby! I’m really happy how this turned out. I tried to make this as simple as possible and under 15 lines of code I think this rocks. But I hope someone else finds this useful!

    Let me know how if you have any feedback, improvement or philosophy on this implementation in the comments below. 🙂

  • E-mail is the Biggest Social Network

    E-mail is the Biggest Social Network

    E-mail is making a come-back apparently. Inside, claims that their e-mail newsletter network is growing at a break-neck rate. With open-rates just above 40%, and click-through-rates at 10% — it's something to ponder.

    There will be 4.1 billion e-mail users by 2020. For scale, compare that to Facebook's active users count: 2 billion.

    I believe newsletter networks will see huge growth in the coming years. It's going to be the next big thing. This is potential huge signal for other companies to bootstrap together a newsletter product.

    We've already seen companies trying to get some skin in the news aggregation game. Two notable players are Twitter and Google. They already have your e-mail. They know what you read. Why not deliver a curated newsletter of news/moments you may have missed?

    Thought Experiment #1:

    If I'm a non-Twitter user and visit Twitter Moments….

    1. Instead of convincing me to be a user here, offer a newsletter to follow Moments
    2. Show me news I may have missed
    3. E-mail is forward-able, and thus shareable
    4. Try to convert me into a Twitter user later

    Thought Experiment #2:

    If I'm a Yahoo! e-mail user, and visit Google News…

    1. Instead of convincing me to be a user here, offer a newsletter to follow Google News headlines
    2. Show me news I may have missed
    3. E-mail is forward-able, and thus shareable
    4. Try to convince me into a Google user later

    Thought Experiment #3:

    If I'm already a user at *Twitter or Google*…

    1. Send me newsletters to catch news I may have missed today
    2. Periodically send me posts from users I follow
    3. Recommend me to engage on a story my followers engaged with
    4. Remind me to check in on Moments or Google News as breaking news comes in

    Newsletters are very powerful tools plainly because they're a direct line between me and a service I chose to join. I wish Twitter would take advantage of e-mail more. It's highly underutilized, and it's one strategy Twitter has never taken. If they ever did, it could grow their user base and could be very rewarding long-term with user-growth.

  • iOS 11 Strips AMP Cruft from URLs Via the Sharesheet

    iOS 11 Strips AMP Cruft from URLs Via the Sharesheet

    Good news everybody!

    Yeah, this is going to be awesome. May the web enjoy healthy browsing again.

    While I may be in “AMP is bullshit” camp, I can still respect the solution it is trying to solve. I totally agree with others that it is the web developer’s responsibility to load pages fast. As John Gruber points out, it is in the interest of publishers to use AMP as Google features AMP-ready cards in search queries.

    Which… is dumb. But oh well. However, when a user shares a webpage from the Safari sharesheet it will save me the headache of thinking about AMP.

  • On Snapchat

    On Snapchat

    I have always hated Snapchat.

    https://twitter.com/petrey/status/827276634608717830

    That much is certain. I decided to pen some thoughts about Snapchat after reading a post by Scott Galloway. Mostly, this is about the users. Not so much about Snap Inc.

    However, back in 2013 I thought it was a pretty addicting, innovative, neat social network. It’s obvious that there is nothing special about Snapchat in comparison to Facebook and Instagram. Apart from catalyzing college students to partake in the sending of nudes, Snapchat doesn’t really bring much to the table.

    The format, Stories as they are now colloquially known as — are the real the magic — magic might not create revenue. But magic creates addiction. And addiction keeps people tapping into news, and sorts of content that generates Snap some coin.

    I won’t go into a lot of detail on why Snapchat is failing, but I’ll drop a couple below. What I really want to talk about are the addicted.

    Where will users go when they see the fabled “We regret to inform you Snapchat is shutting down. Thank you for all the snaps.”?

    What will become of the Story Format? How will it evolve under the guidance of the Facebook overlords?

    Permanence > ephemeral

    I know many Generation Z users that fully understand Snapchat is on its way out. Many of them do not care. Many are also users of other Social Networks, hedging their personal brand. Dipping their toes into the tepid waters of a new social arena. Where permanence, data, analytics, likes, and numbers win — every fucking day. Collectively, Gen Z really doesn’t give a fuck about Snapchat — now.

    The Generation Z migration is currently underway. Snapchat continues to burn cash to keep users on a sinking ship. Snapchat never even got to the stage where you’re parents signed up. To make matters worse, it’s almost as if shareholders knew this would happen. You can’t even buy a voting share of $SNAP. Non of the Series B shares you can buy on stock exchanges carry ANY voting power. Fucking. Insane.

    Nostalgia

    I remember fond times in college Tinder’ing, roadtrips, befriending people at parties, and debating politics with me college colleagues. Ahhh nostalgia. Fun place, right?

    There will come a time that Snapchat enters the nostalgic realm and become immortal too, not unlike Vine.

    We learned a lot from Vine. Turns out, people really liked it. Even though the product sucked at making money, it was cool. Snapchat is a different animal though. The entire product is ephemeral. There will be no archiving apart from snaps saved to camera roll on your iPhone.

    When Snapchat closes its doors and literally sets ablaze the $22 billion — it will go the way of the BetaMax and the DVD.

    Good riddance too. Who the fuck buys DVD’s anymore? Nostalgia is a huge part of the product exit. Hopefully Snap will end this gracefully. Maybe a severely undervalued sale to Facebook? Maybe a pivot? A PornHub or Tinder acquisition? Wouldn’t that be something… Who knows.

    All that I do know, is that it is FAST approaching. I predict the fall/sale/pivot of Snapchat to happen before the end of 2019.

    It’s a damn shame this is all happening so fast, but then again — maybe they shouldn’t have burned so much cash in the first place. I may not like Snapchat, but I can respect the Story Format it created. I can appreciate the hustle. I can appreciate a company forming out of an idea the size of a peanut. I can appreciate the users that really like this platform.

    But does Snap Inc. care? Can’t say that they do.

  • The Most Effective Way to Avoid the FOUC

    The Most Effective Way to Avoid the FOUC

    This post was previously updated on November 01, 2018.

    We all have to deal with it at some point.

    The Flash Of Unstyled Content. Yuck. What a name. According to TechRepublic it has its origins documented as far back as 2001. There are a wide range of fixes. This fix however is super duper easy to implement and it’s a vanilla solution.

    First, add a class to your html document

    <html class="no-js">...

    Then put this little guy at the very-bottom of your scripts file:

    (function(H){H.className=H.className.replace(/\bno-js\b/,'js')})(document.documentElement)

    And finally add this to your CSS, render content invisible until it loads:

    visibility: hidden;
 opacity: 0;
}

.js {
 visibility: visible;
 opacity: 1;
}

    The obvious downside to this is pretty awful. If a user comes along that doesn’t have JS enabled, your page loads but it isn’t visible. It really comes down to a pros and cons list for your users. If you’re Facebook or Google, you probably have this baked into every single product because every single product uses JS in some small or large way.

    I’m not saying this is the best solution ever — I’m just saying it’s the most effective solution we have right now. This method is a Frankenstein version of Paul Irish’s approach. Which if you’re going to use this FOUC solution you better be using Irish’s DOM Based JS Routing. Then you can really iron down when and where you want JS to fire.

    UPDATE: Thanks to Bert, who reminded me that I haven’t written about FOUC solutions in some time, and happy to revisit the subject.

    I do have a newly updated solution. It’s not much different than above but it’s more performant.

    We continue to re-use Paul Irish’s famous markup from 2009, with only marginal updates. Such as, the no-js class on the document, and script in the <head> (not in the body, nor in the footer, this needs to be parsed right-away):

    <html class="no-js">
<head>
  <script>(function(H){H.className=H.className.replace(/\bno-js\b/,'js')})(document.documentElement)</script>
...

    Next, we write CSS for the no-js state:

    .no-js {
 visibility: hidden;
 opacity: 0;
}

.js {
 visibility: visible;
 opacity: 1;
}

    And Bob’s your uncle! Same as before, but only slightly revised for performance. Enjoy!

    UPDATE: There’s more than one way to skin a cat as they say. Many thanks to elektrotype, who came up with this brilliant solution, which works great for no-js users. In-short, they won’t see a white-screen if they don’t have JS enabled:

  • Apple’s Strategy to Remove the Keyboard

    Apple’s Strategy to Remove the Keyboard

    Last Updated: September 17, 2018

    1. MacBook with a mechanical Keyboard and a multi touch Trackpad
    2. MacBook with Touch Bar and mechanical Keyboard, and a multi-touch Trackpad 
    3. MacBook with Touch Bar and solid state Keyboard Keys (not unlike the iPhone 7 home button), and a multi-touch Trackpad
    4. MacBook with a full-screen transmutable touchscreen Keyboard (you heard me), and multi-touch Trackpad
    5. And, finally a MacBook that spiritually resembles the Nintendo DS with no mechanical buttons whatsoever.

  • Freelancers Make Up 35% of the Workforce

    Have you read this? Wow that is amazing. I’m shocked to see such a large percentage, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. Because, simply put jobs can be boring.

    Are we seeing the dead-cat bounce of America job satisfaction? As the last tenured career prospectors of yore begin to retire or die, are more and more jobs moving into the freelance domain?

    Why do people even freelance in the first place? Well first, you can satisfy your creativity. You can make your own schedule, and work only as hard as you need to. Most can even “be their own boss.” There is something so thrilling about not having to be tied down to the 9–5 grind.

    Secondly, the study suggests that technology enables more and more creatives to freelance.

    And Finally, it’s not like Corporate America is giving many young Americans a choice. We have more and more graduates leaving college each year, and that saturation of opportunity will cost us. Not everyone can squeeze into the cookie-cutter jobs so many graduates will likely MacGyver the shit out of their resumé and attempt to freelance something until something stable comes around.

    All of that sounds pretty morose and bleak — and it could be. But really, it’s not all bad. I freelance when I’m available. It’s fun, and it helps pay the bills. I can’t say no to helping small businesses I believe in. Honestly, if more and more graduates are moving to freelance it could be a sign of responsible career adaptability. And if technology permits a more free-lifestyle, it could make the American labor force a bit more happy! 🙂

    Besides who can say no to inflating their portfolio. I sure can’t!

  • A Familiar Face Returns to Twitter

    A Familiar Face Returns to Twitter

    When Standard Oil began vertically and horizontally integrating sections of industry into its’ grasp, people got pretty upset. Ultimately, it led to The Department of Justice suing the company in 1911 under federal law and allegations of anti-trust. The Rockefeller’s vision for the planet, was bleak and self-serving. Apparently, vertically and horizontally integrating businesses can get you into a big heap of trouble. Is there an exception? What about Google and Apple’s integrations into production and telecoms?

    If Twitter integrates micro-payments via a new Square API, is that integration or is it really just a small innovation? Is it incestuous if Dorsey decides the next big feature at Twitter is one that hinges on his other company, Square? Sending payments with a Tweet doesn’t sound all that bad. Maybe this is less about self-serving his two companies, and more about making things work together. I think we’ve graduated into a new era. Silicon Valley moves fast—like really fast. In comparison to the early 1900’s, it’s unbelievably fast. Business decisions happen at light speed now. Mistakes can be mended and resolved with an email. Customer services and user documentation are moving to public sectors like Twitter and Facebook. Look at how Elon Musk, manages Tesla and SpaceX while simultaneously serving on the board at SolarCity; he’s also the a former co-founder of PayPal.

    All of his companies have come into founding in the last 15 years, with his leadership help and direction at some point. Absolutely incredible, and insanely fast. Elon wants a more effective, smarter planet. Howard Schultz transformed Starbucks when he returned in 2008. He slashed budgets, and projects and closed a ton of stores. Moved cash to projects that mattered, and reinvigorated culture, invested in coffee plantations, and breathed new life into new products and fresher foods. Schultz has a vision of variety, culture and coffee for a greater, smarter world. I think Dorsey is a fine leader at Square, and it will be good to see him back at the helm at Twitter. He said he is focusing on three things at Twitter: simplifying the product, discipline, and communicating value to the current user base. If Musk can tango with two companies, and Schultz fixed Starbucks—I have an inclination Dorsey can transform Twitter into what it needs.