Back in August of last year, we wrote about Summify, a fantastic tool for getting to and sharing the highlights of your social streams and feeds. I’ve used this tool religiously for the past several months and have found it to be incredibly useful, especially with Twitter. Just last week, however, I received an email from the Vancouver-based start-up and discovered that they had become yet another in a long line of services to be snatched up and absorbed by a tech giant — in this case, Twitter. Great for them, but sad for you and me.
The Summify team will be moving to San Francisco, where they will become a part of Twitter’s growth team. Summify the service will be stripped down for the time being, and will eventually shutdown altogether as a standalone product.
Here’s the main list of changes from their announcement:
New account registrations have been disabled.
Email summaries remain, but only for a few weeks, and then they are gone as well.
Users will still receive their summaries via the web app (and the iPhone app, as well, I believe), but will no longer be able to make them public.
Profile and influence pages are gone, as is auto-publish.
I’ve also noticed that sharing posts to Twitter from Summify no longer adds credits to the end of the tweet. Previously, the tweet would add in an @mention to a few of those in your network that shared the information with you in the first place, but this is no longer the case, at least from the mobile app.
There is no word yet as to when Summify will shut down completely, or what cool newness might arise in Twitter as a result. Either way, while I’m happy for the people behind the great service, I will really miss Summify as a standalone tool. Hopefully, something truly great comes out of this. In the meantime, we can only hope that Zite — and maybe Flipboard — will pick up the slack by improving how they filter our streams.
So, Pinterest… It’s received a lot of coverage in the past year — it’s even received in the realm of 37 million in funding — but I had trouble seeing the appeal. I wasn’t sure the world needed another social bookmarking site. I wasn’t sure the world needed another way to share, well… anything. I admit, most of this feeling had nothing to do with Pinterest, per se, it was really more about social media overwhelm. I’ve seen a ton of social sharing services go up and down over the past few years, and, as much as I love Google+, I think it maxed me out. Besides, you can do things similar to Pinterest using tools like Evernote and Springpad, right? Right?
Then my lovely wife — a person who has no real interest in tech, barely any interest in social networking, and who only got a smartphone because it was free and I “was bugging her about it” — was somehow inspired to try it out. No prompting from me, or anyone else — she came to it entirely on her own. Now… she’s obsessed. Seriously. For example, I see her awake at 3AM and think that she’s feeding the baby, or something — but no. What’s she’s doing is maniacally pinning and re-pinning things to her boards, and often giggling like mad as she does it. There is apparently a lot of funny on Pinterest…
Recently, she’s taken to sharing some of that funny with me, and I’ve discovered that a good portion of it is Star Wars based. This confused the hell out of me (though I still shared some of it with you here and here). My wife has no interest in Star Wars. She’s one of the few people who has never even seen the films, and (horrifyingly) will actually say things like “What’s a hansolo?” I still love her, though. She’s that awesome. She’s beginning to make me see value in Pinterest, too. Anything that could inspire my wife to share seriously awesome Star Wars stuffs with me has got to be pretty powerful.
I checked it out a little more thoroughly. I wanted to know what the deal was. Was there a secret sauce? How did it hook her? What I discovered was four things:
Pinterest is incredibly simple.
Pinterest is to sharing fun and useful images what Evernote is to easy, accessible note-taking. It focuses on that one thing, and makes sure that it is the absolute best at it. It doesn’t overwhelm the user.
Pinterest is visual — and good at it.
Everyone loves a good picture and everyone loves a good photo gallery. Funny and beautiful pics have been making the rounds since the internet was able to support them. People like to look at the images they like again and again. And share them, re-share them, and re-share them again, as well. Pinterest makes this easy, but it also makes it beautiful. The designers have done a fantastic job of taking something that could be overwhelming, both in general and visually, and making it joy to experience.
Like crafty things? This is your home.
There are a ton of cool things to discover on Pinterest, but it really seems to have taken off with the crafty and DIY crowd. This is what ultimately hooked my wife. She loves to see things that people have made, especially if it involves baking or making something cool out of something else. She knows I like that sort of thing as well, and has not only shared some cool Star Wars crafts with me, but also a lot of DIY upcycling and repurposing projects. It’s how I came across Homestyler, actually, which was the topic of my previous post. There is some very cool stuff on Pinterest, and more is pinned every day.
Some of My Wife’s Pins
It connects to the real world. It useful.
Pinterest is more than just a place to store and share images. The images link back to the site you found them on — and if we follow the crafty and DIY point from above, you end up with well-organized, very visual bookmarks back to sites that contain information that you might actually use in your real-world life. This makes Pinterest more than just a random bookmarking service, and more than just an image-sharing service. It makes it a tool that is useful to you both on and offline. It helps you to find, share, save and use things that are of interest to you.
We’ve all heard that “<insert service> makes it easy to collect and organize what interests you on the web.” Pinterest actually does it. My wife is living proof. Anything tech-based that can make her go gaga is definitely worth taking a look at. It’s still in beta, but getting an account happens pretty quickly. I recommend giving Pinterest a try. You’ll probably love it.
What do you think of Pinterest? How do you use it?
People have been talking about the death of email for a while now. Every time there’s a new, communications-focused technology, most notably Google Wave — and we all know how that went — email eulogies pop up all over the internet. It seems likely to me that email is here to stay, at least for a while longer, but if other companies follow the example of Atos, a 74,000 employee French tech company spanning 42 countries, email may actually begin its prophesied decline.
Atos has banned email. At least, they’ve banned it internally. That’s right, those 74,000 employees can no longer send each other minutiae-filled email chains that may or may not ever get fully read. They will no longer be able to forward jokes and silly messages throughout the company or the office. They will no longer be able to send on-line emails to avoid the potential perspiration of actually getting up from their desk and walking over to their friend and asking in person. I say good riddance.
Atos announced the no-email policy in February of 2011, but have now officially implemented it. CEO Thierry Breton, who was also the French finance minister from 2005-2007, said that employee emails are only 10 percent useful, and are 18 percent spam — which seems about right to me, considering the emails I’ve received in companies I’ve worked for. All to often, the emails would be useless time-wasters — especially the ones that involved questions from co-workers that didn’t actually read the email in the first place.
Atos isn’t leaving their employees without a digital option for communication, though. They are using tools such as the Atos Wiki and their Office Communicator chat program to allow employees to collaborate on documents and projects, as well as chat, video conference, and share applications and files.
I think the Atos approach is the only way for a company to successfully achieve adoption of internal social media tools and, so far, the only possible negative fallout I can see would be dependent on the tools they use and how user-friendly they are. They seem to be doing okay in that department, however, as Atos has reported to ABC News that employee response “has been positive with strong take up of alternative tools.”
What do you think of the Atos no-email policy? Is it the beginning of a massive “kill email” movement? Will it lead to better outside-company communications as well? Discuss in the comments.
We’re big fans of Google+ here at 40Tech. In fact, if you follow the Twitter accounts of either 40Tech or Bobby Travis, you’ll see that we’re not posting there quite as much as we did in the past. Are we alone in the way Google+ has detracted from our ability to be as active on Twitter? Let us know how your social media usage has changed since Google+ has arrived.
Today, 40Tech is pleased to present a guest post by Lisa from USDirect.Com.
Facebook started with a few simple ideas, mainly serving as a way to stay connected with friends. In the early stages, it was a used solely by Harvard students and then gradually became available to other college students throughout the country, eventually going worldwide. When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he didn’t realize the billion dollar force it would create. Let’s take a look at the differences in Facebook then and now.
The Beginning of Facebook
In the beginning of Facebook, there were very few features. There were no status updates, messages, photo albums, or even the platform to create a News Feed. At that time, everyone could provide and access only basic information. It was only a simple tool to be used by some people for some virtual social interaction. However, Zuckerberg achieved instant success when he launched thefacebook.com, with over 600 students instantly joining the first day and almost 1,000 joined the following day.
Original Facebook accounts had to be from a Harvard.edu email address and user names were verified.
What it did have:
Friends and Friend Request options, something that increased the underlying value of Facebook.
The Invitations feature was also available but the user had to input the email addresses as there was no Import Contact option.
A basic profile option, which only permitted uploading a single photo.
User data lists, including gender, birthdate, favorite music and books, about me, dorm info, phone numbers, and course information.
Search option – find users by name, courses, class year, etc.
Privacy restrictions
A friend graph, which was later removed
Facebook as we Know it Now
Facebook went viral, as net folks like to say. It spread like wildfire. Facebook became a public forum and social media communication tool, no longer used only by college students. Facebook became a platform for sharing an array of content for millions of people.
Because of the rising popularity in the News Feed function, people became concerned with controlling who sees their content. In 2009, Zuckerberg worked to build a better privacy model that applied to news feeds, photos and videos, and all aspects of a profile. Facebook’s settings have made it easier for users to hide information and now require users to gain permission before allowing a connection. They are also able to moderate and punish spammers.
The popularity of Facebook and relevance it has in our culture inspired the 2010 film, “The Social Network,” starring Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake.
The User is in Control
In 2010, Facebook launched community pages. It also started various other ways to provide users social and personalized experiences on foreign sites they used. The rest is in your hands. You can now chat with your friends, group your conversations, and communication via Facebook is easier.They say the only thing that is constant is change and this is truly applicable to Facebook.
About the Author: Lisa is an avid yoga enthusiast who enjoys writing in her spare time for USdirect.com – home of Direct TV.
