Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic:

There are plenty of adults who use the social photo-sharing platform, but deleting photos that aren’t well-liked enough is a distinct behavior among teens who use the site, according to researchers at Penn State University.

“Teens want to be very popular so they’re very conscious of the likes they’re getting,” says Dongwon Lee, an associate professor in the school’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. He and his colleagues have published several papers about how social media behaviors vary by age, and his research focuses more broadly on like-mediated interactions in social environments.

Stephen Fry:

But Stephen, these foul people are a minority! Indeed they are. But I would contend that just one turd in a reservoir is enough to persuade one not to drink from it. 99.9% of the water may be excrement free, but that doesn’t help. With Twitter, for me at least, the tipping point has been reached and the pollution of the service is now just too much.

That Twitter, the company, over so many years did not manage to implement efficient tools to fight harassment (and weigh positive behavior heavier than bad behavior) is not just an embarrassment and an affront to all abused users but might just be the biggest nail in Twitter’s coffin.

Neil Cybart at Above Avalon:

If Apple is successful in terms of gaining control of the music industry for the second time in 15 years, there are quite a few significant implications. Apple would be able to pivot from legacy technology (paid music downloads) and win at a new business model (music streaming), despite being a few years late to the game.

Apple would utilize its user platform to establish a beachhead in a new technology and then leverage its balance sheet to find a more competitive position by grabbing revenue share. This strategy provides a framework for how Apple will look at its next content realm: video. While one can argue the music industry has certain qualities that make it much more friendly for a company like Apple to control compared to video, there are qualities both music and video share that Apple will look to exploit.

Motherboard:

To be precise, Microsoft, which acquired Minecraft’s developer Mojang in 2014 for $2.5 billion, today revealed that since launch in 2009 Minecraft has sold 106,859,714 copies. (…)

Here’s an impressive number: Over 40 million people play the game every month. At its peak, World of Warcraft had 12 million monthly players. Games like League of Legends (67 million monthly players) and Candy Crush Saga (550 million monthly players) are way bigger, but they’re free.

Alex Steffen:

Poor people being stranded in the places cheap gas built is the next great social crisis. (…)

And one of the worst consequences of urban NIMBYism which limits/blocks new housing development is that it’s driving the urban poor out into these suburbs.

Nuzzel Blog – A New Kind Of Newsletter:

One reason that email marketing is so powerful is that 95% of a celebrity’s Facebook fans and Twitter followers won’t see what they post on Facebook or Twitter. McKinsey reported in 2014 that email is actually 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter for reaching people. And Harvard Business Review just reported that email is the best way to reach Millennials. (…)

Nuzzel newsletters are automatically generated social newsletters based on your Nuzzel feed. Newsletter subscribers receive a daily email containing the top 5 stories from an influencer’s Nuzzel feed. No install, setup, or account is required to subscribe, just an email address.

Subscribing to other people’s Nuzzel feeds has been an option for a while now. It is a great way to become aware of trends in a wide array of topics. (Browse their directory with keywords that matter to you.)

Now this has been made more obvious and they added tools into the mix for managing a link-heavy newsletter in a semi-manual fashion.

MarketingLand:

The new newsletter hub, founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams told me, offers a rapid newsletter-building tool through which authors can select recommended content from your or your friends’ Nuzzel news feeds, plus they can add stories from other sources and some commentary.

But the tool is not really intended for the creation of free-form content, Abrams said, where newsletters are entirely composed by their authors. There are no templates, but lots of content, he said, the opposite of Constant Contact’s or MailChimp’s tool.

Newsletter creators can sign up to this curated newsletter platform with their Twitter login, with support for Facebook on the drawing board. To build a subscription list, creators can import contacts from such sources as a Gmail or LinkedIn account, or from an Excel CSV file, after which invitations are sent out.

Nuzzel still amazes me. It is such a useful tool. (In fact it is the only information management tool that ever truly rivaled the RSS reader for me. In combination with Inoreader, my current feedreader choice, it is simply perfect. (Very complementary, in fact.))

Ben Thompson in “Peter Thiel, Comic Book Hero“:

The most obvious second-order effect is that, as Felix Salmon writes, Thiel is providing a blueprint for the suppression of the press by the wealthy. But what concerns me — and what ought to concern Thiel, and all of the Silicon Valley elites celebrating his actions — are the third order effects. Specifically, Thiel’s actions are bringing into stark relief the fundamental weakness of old analog businesses like journalism relative to the incredible power and strength of the technology sector, and if companies follow Thiel’s example, the freedom that makes the emergence of said companies possible could quickly come under threat — and deservedly so.

Consider Facebook: I have argued strenuously that the idea of Facebook consciously abusing its unprecedented power over what people see is absolutely a problem in theory, but one that is contained by Facebook’s own incentives and the fact that the alternative — government regulation of speech — is even more undesirable. At the same time, I am troubled by the societal impact broadly of Facebook’s efforts to be neutral via algorithm and the potentially destructive impact that has on our politics in particular. What is truly alarming, though, is the prospect of a company specifically and an industry broadly that is convinced of its own righteousness, unconscious of its own power, and blind to what it doesn’t know making decisions with unintended consequences — like outing LGBTQ people at scale.

And Felix Salmon:

Gawker could continue to fight the Hogan case; it could even win that case outright, on appeal. But even if Hogan went away, Thiel would not. Thiel’s lawsuits would not end, and Thiel’s pockets are deeper than Denton’s. Gawker’s future is indeed grim: it can’t afford to fight an indefinite number of lawsuits, since fighting even frivolous suits is an expensive game.

The result is that investing in Gawker right now is a very unattractive proposition, since any investor knows that they will be fighting a years-long battle with a single-minded billionaire who doesn’t care about how much money he spends on the fight. And if Gawker can’t raise any new money to continue to fight the Hogan case, then its corporate end might be closer than anybody thinks.

Scary. And this is going to backfire in a big way.

GeekWire:

Apple, Microsoft and Google are the top three cash-rich U.S. companies across all sectors of business, not including banks and other financial institutions — holding a combined $391 billion in cash as of the end of 2015, or more than 23 percent of the entire $1.68 trillion held by the nation’s non-financial corporations.

Apple leads the pack with $215.7 billion in cash, followed by Microsoft at $102.6 billion, and Google at $73.1 billion.

None of these companies is going to go away anytime soon.

Tech.eu:

Location-wise, France continues to lead the continent in terms of investments, with 97 deals in just two months and a +593% increase compared to the same period a year ago. The UK (86), Germany (69), Sweden (60) and Israel (46) rounded the top 5.