Instagram is updating its metrics to emphasize "Views" as the primary focus for all content formats, including reels, photos, and stories. Creators are encouraged to prioritize reach over follower count, aligning with changes in user behavior where people rely more on algorithmic recommendations than following profiles. The update includes counting repeat views and highlights "Sends per Reach" as a crucial metric, reflecting how content is shared via DMs.
Good formatting makes your writing easier to skim, quote, remember, and share with others. Start every section with a single-sentence opener, such as a vulnerable statement or a strong, declarative sentence. Always look for opportunities to turn long paragraphs into bulleted lists. Use subheads or bolded sentences to help the reader more easily follow your line of thinking. Employ the 1/3/1 writing rhythm to vary sentence length and make it easy for readers to fall into your writing.
Offering free tools and resources on your website, like financial calculators, infographic templates, icon sets, and interactive quizzes, can naturally attract backlinks, which helps SEO.
Treat the cover slide like a movie poster or YouTube thumbnail — it's the thing that makes your audience want to swipe and learn more. For the middle slides, don't jam pack each one with paragraphs or a lot of text. Make your carousel flow like a conversation would, using each slide in the same way you'd take a breath or break when talking. Text placement also matters, so write out your content first, and design it after. The final slide should summarize the key points into a clear takeaway.
Reddit's interactive “Ask Me Anything” posts have gotten several feature upgrades, including scheduling, user RSVPs and reminders, and co-host roles. The updates are designed to make it easier to promote an AMA and help users navigate the Q&As.
LinkedIn has introduced sponsored newsletters as a way to extend the reach of your existing long-form newsletter content. You can now sponsor any member's newsletter content (upon receiving approval) or any newsletter published on your Company Page as a single image ad. There are now over 184K newsletters on LinkedIn, and in the past year there's been a 47% increase in engagement with newsletters on the platform.
Shinesty is a men's underwear brand whose bold branding allowed it to take share from the incumbent industry giants. Its owned media – Instagram, TikTok, email, and website – feature a mix of memes, behind-the-scenes videos, and clever copy. The brand partnered with a college athlete for its paid media in their irreverent way: not signing a chiseled model, but instead using an offensive lineman to model its underwear. Shinesty has also taken a more chaotic (but on-brand) approach to earned media, gaining coverage for covering a customer's bail and offering free vasectomies.
Nathan Jun Poekert, former Head of Social at American Eagle, says that campaign assets often underperform due to rigid playbooks, misguided trend-chasing, and the misuse of content creators. Brands frequently fail by not adapting to the ever-evolving social media landscape and by neglecting audience-driven strategies. Poekert advises marketers to prioritize data-backed content that resonates with audiences over traditional campaign footage.
In a competitive market, customer delight surpasses traditional metrics like CSAT and NPS in driving loyalty and repeat business. The Customer Delight Index (CDI) integrates various sentiment measures to provide a holistic view of customer emotions, making it a crucial tool for businesses aiming to stand out. Focusing on delight, rather than mere satisfaction, can ensure stronger customer retention and long-term growth.
Instagram is rolling out the ability for users to add up to 20 photos/videos to their feed carousels.
Spoiler alert, Tom Orbach shares a (seemingly real) AI-generated UGC video he made with Captions.ai.
Community voting is now available for SXSW proposals that cover AI, tech, advertising, DEIB, and more.
This piece explores the history of railroad competition, Standard Oil's dominance in the 19th century, and the impact of antitrust laws like the Sherman Act. It then parallels these with the recent antitrust ruling against Google for maintaining its search engine monopoly through exclusionary contracts, arguing that preventing such monopolistic practices encourages competition and innovation.
The value of a roadmap is in the process, not just the document. While AI aids decision-making, human judgment is essential. Product managers must align their work with revenue and company strategy, fostering a culture of innovation through open idea challenges.
This article discusses how the product model, typically used in private sector companies, can be effectively applied to government technology efforts by focusing on creating value and achieving outcomes, despite challenges such as procurement processes, fraud risks, and complex stakeholder environments. Techniques for success include centering on users, securing leadership sponsorship, utilizing prototypes, forming small skilled teams, and continuously evangelizing insights and outcomes.
Customers and users are not the same, sales teams offer valuable customer insights, experimentation demands creativity due to smaller user bases, expect a slower pace, and always keep revenue as a top priority.
Companies focus on high UX quality for growth but struggle with monetization, activation, and acquisition, indicating a gap in understanding user behavior. Addressing this requires defining holistic user onboarding and applying behavioral principles.
Remote product management is a fundamental change in product development and team leadership. Success relies on clear communication, trust-based leadership, and innovative collaboration. To excel, evaluate current practices, experiment with new tools, and foster continuous learning.
This guide explains how to effectively transition from product-led growth to product-led sales by leveraging self-serve usage to identify sales opportunities, scale hand-raisers, and differentiate offerings to target ideal customer profiles and product-qualified accounts.
Here's a cheat sheet of key enterprise AI terms covering role-based access control, turnkey solutions, retrieval-augmented generation, and more.
Adding payments can significantly increase revenue and platform stickiness for vertical SaaS and SMBs, but success depends on factors such as control points, profitability, customer retention, and industry-specific economics.
If your relationship with your manager is strained, define your ideal relationship, discuss it, and outline your needs. Provide regular feedback and seek feedback in return. If issues persist and are ignored, escalate to higher management or consider new opportunities if trust is lost.
To validate a consumer idea, prioritize delivering the best possible experience through unscalable manual efforts initially, then gradually automate to determine if success persists, ensuring failure is not due to poor execution.
A UX audit includes analyzing the audience, defining goals, understanding user behavior, and recommending improvements based on data.
Twilio's success demonstrates the importance of prioritizing user needs, creating effective solutions, and embracing change to stay adaptable and innovative in the competitive communication technology industry.
This is a practical guide to refactoring a messy React component through gradual improvements. First, one should make sure that tests are written so that no functional changes occur during refactoring. Then, linting rules should be used to prevent future code duplication and dead code. The guide highlights several key areas for refactoring, including splitting components based on responsibilities and extracting utility functions to improve code organization and maintainability.
Figma successfully migrated its core services to Kubernetes within 12 months. Its team scoped the migration to focus on core system changes while maintaining abstraction for users. They implemented load testing, incremental rollout, and real-world workload testing, which led to better reliability with a three-cluster setup.
We should replace the word "goals" with "quests" when thinking about personal aspirations. Goals are often seen as things we'll do later, while quests are more exciting and transformative experiences. The quest mentality encourages us to embark on personal journeys of self-discovery and achievement, rather than just trying to reach a specific destination.
This executive, who works at a logistics company, is frustrated with the company's inadequate third-party software and considering building their own. They are concerned about the complexity of the transition and the difficulty of attracting tech talent to the non-glamorous logistics industry. Commenters suggest initially hiring a small team of experienced freelancers to test the waters and thoroughly documenting requirements before building a new system with a focus on capturing the company's domain knowledge.
Canonical S-Expressions (csexp) is a compact and efficient data format that stores data as lists of bytes. It's easy to parse and ideal for storing raw binary data. However, csexp lacks support for complex data structures like associative arrays, requiring custom serialization and deserialization logic.
Stack Auth is a managed user authentication solution. It is developer-friendly and fully open-source. It supports Next.js, has prebuilt auth components, and supports RBAC.
RoundtableJS is an open-source JavaScript library for building complex surveys, forms, and data annotation tasks. It's designed to be simple but completely customizable. It makes it easy to add complex logic (e.g. branching, skipping, looping), modify question types, and fully customize the design.
Bun v1.1.22 introduces performance enhancements, bug fixes, and Node.js compatibility improvements, including faster Express execution, ES module loading, and Bun.serve() POST requests, as well as reduced memory usage and improved stack traces.
Klarna aims to replace 2/3rds of customer support roles with its OpenAI-powered AI chatbot designed to handle basic customer support inquiries. While the chatbot is well-built and handles common questions effectively, it relies on human agents for more complex issues, effectively automating only "L1" support. Automating L1 support is not a revolutionary concept - companies have been doing so for years using various methods.
2024.08.09·blog.pragmaticengineer.com·13 min read·TLDR Web Dev James Park envisioned a fitness tracker that could encourage people to be active outside the home. Along with his friend Eric Friedman, he co-founded Fitbit, which initially focused on women. After many prototypes and overcoming hurdles in manufacturing and software development, the first Fitbit launched in 2009. The company was sold to Google in 2021 for $2.1B.
Intel's Q2 2024 results were disastrous, with revenue down a third compared to three years ago and a bleak outlook for the upcoming quarter. The company announced a 15% headcount reduction in an attempt to cut costs and turn around its fortunes. Despite receiving billions in government subsidies, Intel has struggled to keep up with competitors in the rapidly evolving semiconductor market, particularly in the mobile and AI chip segments.
2024.08.09·thechipletter.substack.com·9 min read·TLDR Web Dev The AI Act, which focuses on safe and ethical AI development by categorizing AI systems into risk levels from minimal to unacceptable, is the European Union's first comprehensive regulation on artificial intelligence.
Jim Nielsen describes his failed attempt to redesign his personal website, showcasing the iterations and the challenges he faced in trying to achieve a hand-drawn comic style.
Create radial interfaces using only CSS.
Build iOS apps with English.
The launch of GPT-4o sent ChatGPT's revenue soaring - it pulled in $28 million in net revenue from the App Store and Google Play in July. The app grossed $39.9 million before paying in-app purchase fees. ChatGPT saw an estimated 2 million new paying customers last month. Growth is expected to continue in the months to come.
2024.08.08·techcrunch.com·2 min read·TLDR Reddit's plans for making more money from the platform include showing ads in more places and possibly putting some content behind a paywall. The company, which has never been profitable, lost $10.1 million during Q2 2024, down from Q2 2023's $41.1 million loss. It recently blocked all search engines besides Google, OpenAI, and approved education/research instances from showing its content in search results. Reddit seems to be trying to capitalize on how people use its name as a filter for search results.
2024.08.08·arstechnica.com·3 min read·TLDR NASA has downplayed the problems experienced by Boeing's Starliner since it took two astronauts to the International Space Station in June. Officials finally admitted on Wednesday that the issues may be more serious than first thought and that the astronauts might not return on Starliner. The agency is exploring a backup option for the astronauts. The astronauts were meant to stay for around eight days, but that could be extended into next year.
2024.08.08·links.tldrnewsletter.com·6 min read·TLDR Nudge is building an ultrasound headset to enhance the human experience. It will allow users to push a button to shift their brain state. Research progress with ultrasound neuromodulation has accelerated in the last few years and has begun to produce promising results. The device will be able to benefit everyone, not just those with diagnosed conditions.
2024.08.08·twitter.com·1 min read·TLDR Sponsored
QA Wolf's [9] AI-native approach gets web and mobile apps to 80% automated test coverage in less than 4 months.
Pigsty is a free relational database service alternative. It features extensible Postgres, reliable infrastructure, observable graphics, a maintainable toolbox, and more. There are 280 unique extensions available for Pigsty.
2024.08.08·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR The AGPL license permits free use, modification, and distribution of software, provided that distributed, derivative works of the software are released under the same license. It ensures that modifications remain open and discourages proprietary forks. The license allows code to be open source without companies having to worry about other vendors reselling their projects without consent, giving them the confidence to monetize without fear of predatory competition.
2024.08.08·blog.paradedb.com·9 min read·TLDR Chip design used to be a high-profile role, with the most famous chip designers viewed similarly to how famous machine learning researchers are seen today. Many students flocked to the industry as the number of chip companies boomed and the field was in demand. However, as market dynamics changed, the supply of hardware engineers grew too high. The high capital costs for chip manufacturing drove the number of employers down to a handful of major chip makers. The field of AI research will likely play out the same way.
2024.08.08·maged.com·3 min read·TLDR Apple benefited greatly from Google's monopoly. While the Department of Justice has not yet said what it will seek for a remedy to the antitrust case, Apple will likely be deeply involved. Apple could be forced to accept a much less lucrative agreement with Microsoft or may be prevented from selling search defaults at all. Mozilla may also be heavily impacted by the decision - Google's 2021 payment to the company for the default position on its browser was about 80 percent of Mozilla's operating budget.
2024.08.08·arstechnica.com·7 min read·TLDR