I hate using email. I get an average of 60 to 70 emails every day, and only one precent of them are from people I actually care about. Using email today is all about sifting through the clutter. Dextr is an app that helps you accomplish that by filtering your inbox to only include emails from your friends and family.

Dextr is an email client for Android that functions a lot like Priority Inbox for Gmail, only it’s a standalone app. Once you’ve downloaded the app to your phone and signed into your email account, it presents you with a list of your contacts. Here you select your closest friends, family, or associates – basically, the people you’d actually want to receive email from. Once you’ve done that, Dextr only shows you emails from this list of persons who are important to you.

So while Dextr won’t (and probably shouldn’t) be replacing Gmail as your primary email client on your Android phone, having your inbox stripped down to nothing more but your own personal interactions is strangely refreshing. I abhor all the crap that ends up in my inbox, and being presented with one made up only of emails that I would actually care to read just felt nice. This is what email used to be before it became a firehose.

And yet, the fact that Dextr functions less like an email client and more like a messaging app says a lot of about how we use email today. The moment I opened up Dextr, I was struck with this sudden urge to start emailing my friends and having epic threaded conversations again. That’s where Dextr succeeds, but it falls short once I realize that this is in fact, email. I rarely if ever communicate with my friends via email anymore. Messaging apps, Twitter, and Facebook have pretty much taken over that space. And although Dextr has one of the prettiest interfaces I’ve ever seen in an Android app, email at the end of the day is still email.

Dextr is a little strange. It’s too bare bones just yet to function as a fully realized email client. You can’t send attachments (only view and download the ones that are sent to you), and threaded conversations are still a no-go. On the other hand, it’s a beautiful app, and perfectly performs the function of filtering your inbox down to the people you care about.

For me, that feature alone is enough to keep it on my phone. At least I won’t get any crap from my friends for accidentally grouping an email they sent to me along with my spam. Dextr is a $0.99 download at the Google Play Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Picture-messaging sensation Snapchat seems to experiencing some growing pains. CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel said today that over 150 million pictures a day flow through the auto-destructing photo-sharing service, but as the service gets bigger and gains more attention, the worst parts of the Internet are sure to follow.

According to a post on the company blog, some Snapchatters experienced a bit of a spam attack this morning from someone who appears to have created multiple accounts and spam to Snapchatters with accounts marked as public. According to Twitter, that spam seems to be nude-flavored.

Snapchat offers users two security options. You can receive Snaps from “only friends,” which means you’ve accepted them as a friend or added them yourself, or you can accept snaps from everyone.

Snapchat suggests using the private mode for now while the team comes up with a long-term fix for the issue, which is common among social services with quickly growing audiences.

When Snapchat first heard about the spam, the company turned off account creation entirely so that no new users could join the service or create accounts, spam or otherwise. They also shut down snaps sent between public accounts until the problem accounts were terminated.

Obviously, this is a short-term solution to a long-time problem, but Spiegel owns up to that in the blog post.

Spam is a problem on many services with large audiences. We know spammers totally suck and we’re working on a long term solution to prevent spam from entering your feed. In the meantime, please adjust your settings to determine who can send you snaps. For a spam-free experience we recommend “Only My Friends”

A few months after Snapchat started to gain traction, many labeled the app as a “sexting” service, since the notion of sharing images that don’t last is relatively new. That general concern has died down though, as common sense seems to prove that all 150 million messages sent through the service each day (most of which are sent during the day time) can’t possibly be nudies.

This latest nude spammer, however, does bring up the issue of unwanted sexts as opposed to wanted sexts. And that’s just the latest in a line of distractions for the company, including incredibly rapid growth, potential revenue streams, and a lawsuit from a former Stanford classmate who claims to have come up with the idea.

But distractions aside, it’s hard to argue with a service that has users sending 150 million snaps per day. Consider this: Instagram users post an average of 40 million pictures a day.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve had a number requests for a “clean” – expletive-free / management-friendly version of the Top Twitter #Fails infographic that we published on Friday.

So here it is.

A higher resolution of the original is also available here. And we’ve also made the editable version (Apple Keynote) available to you for downloading repurposing to your own ends.

For us, the list below shows the reputational risk involved with using Twitter for engagement-marketing, AKA ‘social SPAM’.

As you’d guess we advocate a ‘social-as-a-service’ approach to deploying social technology, which means actually helping people (including buying) rather than seeking to ‘engage’ them with social SPAM.

Engagement marketing is the bum-fluff of business; and it carries reputational risk.

Download here and enjoy.

Here’s an original fresh infographic of top Twitter #fails from consumer brands that we put together yesterday for a course on reputation management in social media.

Our point was simple; there’s reputational risk in using social media for so-called ‘brand engagement’ (aka social spam); it’s far safer – and smarter – to use social technology to offer useful services to people, including making it easier to buy.

Social-as-Service beats Social-as-SPAM every time.

Enjoy and share.

(Click to enlarge, and let us know what we’ve missed and we’ll add them to the infographic).

Facebook today released a new version its iOS app to include a way for users to change their cover photo and a number of updates related to group messaging. A subtle but significant change not mentioned in the app’s release notes is that the option to hide a post or ad and mark it as spam is now a different color, making it much harder to see.

The images below show what the button looks like on organic posts and suggested posts. Users can still hide a story by clicking the V shape in the top corner, but they might not be able to see the option from their mobile feed. The icon is practically invisible on ads, which could reduce the amount of negative feedback they receive. This could lead Facebook to believe that users are more pleased with their feed than they actually are.

Compare the color of the icon above with how it looked on ads and organic stories in the previous version of Facebook for iOS.

At the same time that Facebook is testing a less noticeable icon on iOS, it has made the option to hide News Feed ads even more prominent in the latest version of the desktop feed.

Other changes in today’s iOS release, include the ability for users to change their Timeline cover photo and group message features that were brought to the standalone Messenger app recently. A new prompt encourages users to name their conversations with multiple friends — a feature that was previously buried. The app also supports search for existing group conversations, whereas before users could only search for friends and other users to message.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Google today updated its Inside Search site, its homepage for all things search, with a handful of educational and interactive features that explain in layman’s terms how Google’s Search works. Did you know the web had over 30 trillion pages, by the way? Or that Google supports over 100 billion searches every month? Or that Google’s index is over 100 million gigabytes? If you find factoids like that interesting, you’ll probably enjoying a scroll through the new “How Search Works” live infographic, which also contains a few clickable links to charts and graphs showing things like the rise of spam, and milestones in Google’s spam-fighting techniques, among other things.

The update is something of a follow-up to last year’s detailed look into how Gmail works called The Story of Send. For the most part, it’s really high-level stuff here, designed to make the details of technology approachable and understandable to a more mainstream audience looking to gain a better understanding of what happens after they type into the search box.

The new sections of the site include not only the graphical explanation of Google Search’s inner workings, but also details about Google’s major algorithms and features, a list of Google policies, plus a 43-page document that explains how Google evaluates its results. (OK, that part might be a little more in-depth, I’ll admit.)

But the best part? The live spam slideshow. Here, you can see screenshots of spam Google has removed from its search results only minutes ago. Dozens upon dozens of them, in fact. It’s almost like getting a real-time view into Google itself, which is actually pretty fascinating.

Now if only we could see what people were googling for in real-time, we would really….wait…

Nah, that might be terrifying.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today released an update for its main iOS application, which includes voice messaging and video recording, as well as a more efficient way to hide ads and mark posts as spam directly from News Feed.

Voice messages are a new feature of Facebook’s standalone Messenger app that has been brought to the main app now, as it did on Android  little over a week ago. This allows users to send asynchronous voice messages up to 60-seconds long. The free voice calling feature, which is still limited to only certain regions, has not been added to the main app. It is only available via Messenger for iOS.

Users can now shoot video directly from their Facebook app by selecting “Photo” atop their News Feed or “Share Photo” from Timeline and then swiping from camera mode to video mode, as we’ve circled below. Though taking video from Facebook is now possible, it is fairly cumbersome to do. Video sharing is more fluid in Facebook’s Poke app and could provide some guidance for how the company might implement a better experience in the main app. Another limitation of the main app, as well as Messenger, is that users cannot shoot video or share videos they’ve already recorded through Facebook messages.

A key improvement of the latest iOS app is the option to hide or mark a News Feed story as spam with only two taps. Previously, users had to know to first tap the post, wait to be taken to a new screen, then tap an icon in the corner, followed by the action they wished to take. Now they can simply tap the icon with three dots in the top right corner of a post, and then tap the appropriate action. We recently called for Facebook to give users more options to provide negative feedback on the ads and stories they see on their mobile devices, and today’s update is a start. However Facebook still doesn’t offer a way to hide ads within its “Pages You Might Like” module.

The company also says it has made improvements to the Nearby tab, which allows users to conduct local searches and rate places they’ve been to.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Last week, Pinterest began curtailing the number of spammers and fake accounts on its system, in an effort to clear its platform off unwanted elements. At the time, the company noted that this latest big sweep would mainly affect those with larger follower counts, or those who had purchased fake followers. The majority (99 percent) of users would lose fewer than 10 followers, Pinterest said. Today, we have some figures on what those drops looked like, at least in terms of their affect on top Pinterest accounts.

According to Lyle Dennis, co-creator of Pinterest user directory Top Pinterest Users, the top 10 most followed Pinterest users saw around a 20 percent decline in follower numbers immediately after the Pinterest purge. For example, the top Pinterest user (Joy Cho / Oh Joy!) had 12 million-plus followers before the clean out, and dropped to under 10 million afterwards. She has since gained again, and as of today sits at 10,124,648 followers.

Dennis says he didn’t keep historical data on-hand for the larger Pinterest user base – he just happened to have noticed the changes thanks to a screencap of the Pinterest top 10 which was posted to a social media news blog just before the spam crackdown.

Looking at the numbers again today, which have climbed again for some users since the purge, you can see that the event impacted the rankings, and even booted one user out of the top 10 entirely. Here’s how the numbers have changed for those users before and after the clean out:

Before:

1. Joy Cho/ Oh Joy!: 12,733,689
2. Bekka Palmer: 8,465,927
3. Maryann Rizzo: 8,073,270
4. Bonnie Tsang: 7,889,295
5. Jane Wang:  7,514,671
6. pejper:  6,826,436
7. molly pickering:  6,786,757
8. Jan of Poppytalk: 6,703,051
9. HonestlyWTF: 5,483,892
10. Olya Bastet: 5,162,212

After (as of today):

1. Joy Cho/ Oh Joy!: 10,124,648
2. Jane Wang:  6,876,464
3. Bekka Palmer: 6,785,853
4. Maryann Rizzo: 6,742,899
5. Bonnie Tsang: 5,911,135
6. molly pickering: 5,435,822
7. Jan of Poppytalk:  5,410,144
8. pejper:  5,057,767
9. HonestlyWTF:  4,392,324
10. Christine Martinez: 4,255,261

Important, please note!  These “after” numbers are current as of today – at the time when Dennis reported the immediate effects to us, some of the after numbers were even lower, with declines falling into a 20-25 percent range, depending on the user, he says.

Although the purge likely did only impact these larger user accounts to this extent, it’s a notable sweep, as the website itself only has around 40 million users globally, according to November numbers from comScore.

For those unfamiliar, the Top Pinterest Users website, also built by Hugo Gameiro, continually checks the top users and boards on Pinterest to ensure its numbers are accurate. However, it does so without using an official API, as Pinterest has not yet released an API publicly at this time. The site also organizes users into various categories, like WeFellow did back in Twitter’s earlier days.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

According to a report by The Next Web, there’s a hack making its way through some prominent Tumblr blogs, including The Verge and CNet.

Along with the spam on the pages itself, users are getting a popup message that would scare anyone’s mom. Trust me, we get these calls all of the time: “Should I click this?” In a word…NO.

Here’s a statement issued to us by a Tumblr spokesperson on the matter:

There is a viral post circulating on Tumblr which begins “Dearest ‘Tumblr’ users”. If you have viewed this post, please log out of all browsers that may be using Tumblr immediately. Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as swiftly as possible. Thank you.

Among the victims are The Verge‘s and CNET‘s Tumblrs, which include a message about a ‘GNAA video’ post. It’s advisable for users to avoid visiting Tumblr blogs directly until the issue is resolved, and definitely not to click on any GNAA posts with a video inside nor accompanying links.

The attack itself appears to come from a group of Internet trolls, posting this message to prominent Tumblr sites:

We have taken the liberty of upgrading your (rather tasteless, we must say) blog to our premier GNAA Deluxe Gary Niger (pictured to the left) Signed Edition! This is in response to the seemingly pandemic growth and world-wide propagation of the most FUCKING WORTHLESS, CONTRIVED, BOURGEOISIE, SELF-CONGRATULATING AND DECADENT BULLSHIT THE INTERNET EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF FACILITATING. However, we do not believe you are beyond redemption! All you have to do is DRINK BLEACH AND DIE
YOU EMO, SELF-INSISTING, SELF-DEPRECATING, SELF-INDULGENT EMPTY HUSKS OF HUMAN BEINGS. REPEAT AFTER ME: I WISH I WAS PROFOUND, BUT I’M NOT! I WISH I WAS ORIGINAL, BUT I’M NOT! I WISH MY IMPENDING DEATH WAS OF ANY CONSEQUENCE, BUT IT IS MOST CERTAINLY NOT! Your last chance for redemption hinges upon your death; your death which was most fortunately prescribed by your most unfortunate birth. Fret not, dear emo, your death will be regarded as a sacrifice to humanity; to die a martyr is a glorious death, and will likely be your highest contribution to society.

SHOUTZ: LITERALKA – DOLPHIN/DZL – BERRY/BRR – RORY – INFID3L – INCOG

P.S. Attempting to delete these posts will delete your tumblr account ;] But, by all means, go ahead!

[PSA] Tumblrs to avoid at the moment: CNET, The Verge, The Daily Dot.

—
Matthew Keys (@TheMatthewKeys) December 03, 2012

We’ve checked our Crumblr, and it looks like we’re ok…but we’ll remain vigilant. So should you.

This is developing.

[Photo credit: Flickr, The Next Web]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

People have been screaming bloody murder, claiming Facebook purposefully reduced how many users see Page posts in the news feed to get Pages to pay to reach their fans. But that’s just not true, and I have the data to prove it, plus Facebook on the record saying the rumor is false. Facebook did make spammy Pages less visible in the feed, but that was to make the news feed better, not to more money.

I’m going to dive into exactly what’s going on here, but for those who want the quick takeaway to help them bust myths, here’s the short version:

Facebook Pages have always only reached a small percentage of their fans with each post. The launch of Promoted Posts had no impact on the news feed reach of the average Page. What actually happened was that Facebook made it easier to report Pages for being spammy. It also changed how it picks what shows up in the news feed so that Pages that get frequently reported for spam show up less often. Most Pages weren’t affected by these changes, but spammy Pages got penalized and they’re the ones complaining. The moral of the story is don’t spam your fans, and everything will be fine.

The Rumor

Alright, so what’s the big deal? A website named Dangerous Minds made a stink because news feed posts published by its Facebook Page supposedly weren’t driving as much traffic as they used to be. Around the same time, Facebook rolled out its Promoted Posts product that makes it easy for Pages to pay to reach a higher percentage of their fans with each post. That led Dangerous Minds to jump to the incorrect conclusion that Facebook was trying to extort Page owners — decreasing unpaid reach to force them to pay to get in front of fans they used to reach for free.

Sadly, news outlets like Ars Technica that are typically level-headed covered the Dangerous Minds rant as true despite its lack of hard data to back up its anecdotal claim. Lots of people now mistakenly think Facebook decreased Page reach to increase ad sales.

The Facts

So why is this untrue? Let’s start by debunking some major flaws in the logic of Dangerous Minds. First, it implies that Facebook Pages previously reach 100% of their fans with every post. That’s never been true. Facebook’s news feed ranking algorithm (widely known as EdgeRank) chooses between hundreds or thousands of pieces of content each day to show the few dozen most relevant stories in each person’s news feed.

Facebook told me in February that the average Page reaches 16% of its fans with each post. That’s because some fans aren’t online when the post is published, a specific post hasn’t gotten much engagement from the people Facebook already showed it to, and because if you don’t interact with that Page when you do see its posts, Facebook will only show you them every once and awhile.

You don’t reach all your followers on Twitter with each tweet either. You could, except most people follow so many people that they only read parts of their stream. If Facebook did show all Pages posts in everyone’s news feed, it would be horrible. The feed would be full of lame marketing messages that would drown out your friends.

What Actually Happened

So why did Dangerous Minds’ Page and some other Pages start getting less news feed views and clicks to their posts? There are two reasons.

One is that these Pages appeal to newer Facebook users who don’t Like that many Pages or have many friends. So originally they might have been seeing more of these Pages that later saw their reach drop. But over time these fans added more friends and Liked more Pages. That meant there was more competitions for space in their news feeds, and all their friends and Liked Pages started showing up less frequently. Just to be clear, all the Pages that saw a drop weren’t necessarily doing anything wrong.

The alternative, but more common reason is that people thought those Pages’ posts were spammy. That’s because they were posting too frequently, people found their content irrelevant or misleading, or their messages seemed like intrusive marketing. Facebook doesn’t want to show its users spam so it limits the reach of spammy pages.

Facebook Made Changes To Fight Spam

Each news feed post has a drop-down arrow next to it that lets users hide it from their news feed or mark it as spam. Facebook made these controls more visible and easy to use in September. That let people who thought a Page was spammy report it to Facebook or remove it from their feed.

At the same time, Facebook updated EdgeRank to more aggressively punish spammy Pages, the way Google updates PageRank occasionally to push down the search result rank of spammy sites. Will Cathcart, Facebook’s product manager for news feed tells me:

“We made a relatively large ranking change in September that was designed to reduce spam complaints from users. We used [spam] reports at an aggregate level to find Pages or apps generating a lot of reports [and decrease their reach]. We’ve also added personalized attempts to reduce presence of posts you’re likely to complain about.”

Basically if you never click, Like, comment, or share posts by a Page, Facebook made that Page less likely to show up in your feed. Cathcart says “That’s a relatively large change. It resulted in a large decrease in spam reports”, meaning it succesfully made the Facebook news feed better. You can in this data from Facebook Page analytics company PageLever how more people began reporting Pages for spam in September thanks to the change.

The decrease in reach for spammy Pages had nothing to do with Promoted Posts, which launched in May but coincidentally started rolling out to more Pages in September. Promoted Posts is actually just an easier way to buy Sponsored Stories right from the news feed, rather than the more complicated separate ad buying tool. Sponsored Stories have been around for years and Facebook began allowing Pages to buy more reach in the news feed with them in March.

If Facebook was manipulating reach to drive sales, it would have happened long ago, not in September. But it wasn’t. In fact, Philip Zigoris, an engineer on the Facebook ads team tells me that “The feedback [from Page owners to Promoted Posts] has been remarkably positive.” If Pages don’t want to pay for extra reach, that’s fine. Things will be exactly the same as before. Publish great content and your posts will reach more people, get re-shared, and go viral. Facebook isn’t forcing people to pay, it’s an added option.

As of March 2012 there were 42 million Pages on Facebook. Only 300,000 have ever tried Promoted Posts. Even combined with those that buy Sponsored Stories, the percentage of Pages paying for news feed reach is very small. The total percentage of all Facebook posts from friends and Pages that are paid for is tiny, so some Pages paying for reach is unlikely to be significantly reducing feed reach for those who aren’t paying.

Just to put an official nail in the coffin of this rumor, I asked news feed manager Cathcart straight-up “Did Facebook decrease organic Page reach to boost sales of Promoted Posts?” His flat-out answer was “NO”. Cathcart says that for Pages, “the median reach is still above 16% as of a month ago” just like it was in February.

The Data To Back It Up

I didn’t want to just take Facebook’s word for it, though. So I asked the popular Facebook Page analytics provider PageLever to run the numbers of over 700 Pages. PageLever helps businesses track the performance of their Facebook posts in real-time and advises them the best strategies to get more reach and clicks.

The data confirmed Facebook’s statement. The amount of fans Pages were reaching has stayed relatively stable since July.However, the standard deviation of reach did shoot up. That’s because the few especially spammy Pages and those affected by an increase in news feed competition had their reach drop significantly, while the reach of Pages that almost never get spam reports got a boost. That’s the impact of Facebook’s changes to the spam reporting UI and the EdgeRank algorithm.

Note that PageLever’s data is only a sample. Facebook constantly pushes updates to EdgeRank and there are seasonal change that can influence Page reach. This article isn’t meant to say Page reach absolutely isn’t decreasing, but that Facebook didn’t purposefully reduce reach to sell more ads. Other factors influence the total traffic Facebook sends to links posted by Pages. For example, traffic could decrease because Facebook started showing re-shares of Page posts by fans to fewer of their fans.

So Now What?

The beauty of the web is that its scale can crush rumors started by flukes and anecdotes. Dangerous Minds misunderstood how Facebook works, and could only go on its data and the claims of a few random Pages that commented on its story. That led it to make a wrong, but sensational assumption that spread like wildfire.

But Facebook sees what’s happening to all Pages, and independent auditors like PageLever can look at huge data sets to determine what’s actually going on. When people make big claims like this, don’t just assume they’re right. Demand to see scientific evidence.

What should Pages do now they know what happened? Focus on publishing high quality content. Don’t post too often and don’t cram your marketing down people’s throats. Be entertaining and informative. Then follow your analytics closely, consider hiring experts that can help, and refine your strategy. If your Page’s reach decreased, I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad Page, business, or admin. You just need to work on finding relevant content to post and delivering it with a natural non-spammy tone.

And Facebook users? You have control over what you see in the news feed. If you see a great post and want to see more like it, just click, Like, comment, or share. See something stupid or annoying? Hit the drop-down arrow next to it and hide the update or report it as spam. That teaches Facebook, and will make your news feed live up to its potential as source for what you truly care about.

[Image Credit: Jeff Chiu/AP]

Thanks for reading, here’s some of my other most popular posts:

Why Zynga Failed

Zuck’s Advice To Startups

Facebook’s Billion-Strong Human Shield Against Disruption

Don’t Let Privacy Fear Defeat Innovation

Facebook Removed Your Real Email Address From Your Profile, Here’s How To Get It Back

The Day Zuckerberg Showed He’s The Right Man For The Job

Article courtesy of TechCrunch