With Pulse, LinkedIn Is Becoming The Newspaper Of The Future
LinkedIn, the professional network people use to maintain an online resume, find jobs and job candidates, and network, is sending a clear message with its acquisition of news-reader Pulse: It’s a media company, and it’s not ashamed of that.
Pulse makes an app that allows readers to browse articles from a variety of online sources, including social networks. In that, it’s similar to Flipboard and Zite, though it has particularly nice features for saving items to read later. LinkedIn is paying $90 million, mostly in stock, to buy the company, which has 30 million users and serves up material from 750 publishers. Pulse was started in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, who met as students at Stanford.
All The Business News That Fits, We Print
Where does that fit with LinkedIn? Increasingly, LinkedIn wants to broaden how users think of it beyond job-hunting. Already, LinkedIn publishes articles by high-profile business figures like Virgin chief Richard Branson and Buddy Media founder Michael Lazerow.
“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform,” LinkedIn product chief Deep Nishar wrote in a company blog post announcing the deal.
That means bringing in a wide variety of sources — a layer of original, exclusive, high-end articles on top; links to relevant business items from around the Web in LinkedIn Today; and user contributions in LinkedIn Groups and profile updates. The only problem LinkedIn has on its current website is that its tools for reading, saving, and sharing content leave something to be desired. That’s where Pulse comes in.
Read the full article: ReadWrite
- Published in Blog, Social Media
7 Responsive Design Tips to Revamp Your Workflow
Responsive design is rapidly becoming the new standard in our industry, along with its evolving carousel of best practices, platforms and tools. The movement has caused a shift in thinking, especially as we adapt our workflows for a more efficient project process.
Dissecting the responsive design workflow, though, can be difficult — it’s highly individual and iterative. However, you can apply general tips and techniques to almost every responsive project.
From content structure to scalable images, we’ll cover seven techniques to consider in your next responsive design.
If you are a designer or developer, what are some of your strategies for responsive web design? Please share your recommendations with readers in the comments below.
1. Mobile First
Starting with a mobile first approach and designing with progressive enhancement covers all bases, helps you focus and prioritize the constraints of mobile design, while you build new innovative experiences and capabilities.
It means the default presentation and base content is mobile, optimized for the simplest devices first. Devices with small screens and media query support is then served an advanced layout. Finally, the content and layout are then enhanced for the “desktop.” It’s an approach even Google has adopted, as the number of people perusing the web on mobile devices continues to grow at an incredible rate.
Designing for the mobile experience should now be our starting point, not the end. It forces us to focus on the essential content, to build optimized, fast-loading mobile experiences that are progressively enhanced, with the user at the forefront.
As ZURB, the team behind the popular responsive CSS framework, Foundation, noted, “A mobile first approach doesn’t just concentrate on developing for mobile phones; it is also used to develop better usability of sites, develop better use of web real estate and better reduce the amount of unnecessary elements from web pages.”
While the mobile first responsive design technique is still in its infancy, and presents a variety of technical challenges, embracing it means you are building on an adaptive, focused, lean, uncluttered future-friendly foundation.
Read the full article: Mashable
Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine That Will Soon Power Chrome And Chrome OS
Google just announced that it is forking WebKitand launching this fork as Blink. As Googledescribes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.
THE “COLLABORATION HAS BEEN FANTASTIC”
As Google’s VP of Engineering Linus Upson and Alex Komoroske, Google Product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told me yesterday, the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem. Komoroske noted that when it comes to working with the other companies involved in the WebKit project, the “collaboration has been fantastic.”
This decision clearly wasn’t made lightly. Indeed, as Upson stressed when I talked to him yesterday, “management asked a lot of hard questions” about this move, but in the end, the decision was made in order to reduce the technical complexity of evolving Google’s rendering engine in the direction the team wanted to go in.
BLINK: SPEED AND SIMPLICITY
Specifically, Komoroske noted, Chromium’s multi-process architecture is very different from the rest of WebKit (Chromium is the open-source project behind Chrome and Chrome OS). Having to integrate Google’s way of doing things with WebKit and what the rest of the WebKit partners were doing was “slowing everybody down,” Komoroske said.
As an open-source project, both Chromium and Blink are open to outside committers, though as is typical for these kinds of projects, they’ll have to be nominated to become project members.
For now, WebKit and Blink pretty much look the same, but Google expects that they will evolve in very different directions over time. Komoroske, for example, would like to run iframes in different processes, but that’s something that’s very difficult to do with WebKit right now.
For now, though, developers won’t notice too much of a difference as most of the work will focus on internal architectural improvements. Google says, for example, that it will be able to “remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat.” Over time, Google says, this will results in a “healthier codebase” and lead “to more stability and fewer bugs.”
The WebKit project was started by Apple after it forked the KDE project’s open-source KHTML engine for its Safari browser. In an unusual move – and after a lot of back and forth between the KHTML team and Apple – Apple announced in 2005 that it would open source WebKit, and Google then adapted it for its Chrome browser. Interestingly, Google actually used a forked version of WebKit in the early days of Chromium but later reconciled its fork with the rest of the project.
In this context, it’s worth remembering that all of the different vendors who currenly build WebKit-based browsers already implement it very differently (and often use their own JavaScript engine, too).
Read the full article: TechCrunch
Google Gives Developers More Ways to Incorporate Google+
Late last month, Google gave developers the ability to add Google+ sign-ins to their sites, and the company expanded that feature on Tuesday, giving developers more options to go along with it.
Google+ sign-ins are similar to their Facebook and Twitter counterparts, allowing users to sign in to a website that isn’t Google-owned using their Google credentials, bringing along information from their Google+ profile such as their name and friends.
Google has now announced support for social infrastructure platforms Janrain and Gigya, which many developers are already using in their sign-in systems. The new support brings with it a number of new features for Janrain and Gigya customers, including the ability to:
- Add trusted authentication to apps and sites
- Allow web users to automatically download their Android app
- Customize their app experience using Google+ profile info
- Enable users to share interactive posts with friends
- Write app activities that only appear when they’re relevant
Developers who are interested in checking out the new features can get started by reading Janrain’s or Gigya’s getting started guides.
Source: Mashable
- Published in Blog, Social Media
Fool Us Once: 2013 April Fools’ Day Roundup
Find some buried treasure, fly in a glass-bottomed jet or mock the Caped Crusader… these are among the many ways you can be fooled thus far on this April Fools’ Day, 2013.
The media and technology sectors have been busy already this morning, coming up with some new and clever ways to pull the wool over our eyes on the one day of the year when all the stops are pulled out to deliver the laughs. Of course, some gags are funnier than others, but we’ll let you decide in this morning roundup of the funny and the lame.
Google: Class Clown Or Else
If you’re judging on sheer number of pranks, then hands down the Mountain View search engine company takes the prize in 2013.
Apparently, when Marissa Mayer took her stop-screwing-around-and-get-some-work-done attitude with her when she went to Yahoo, her former co-workers took that as a sign to cut loose and let their funny flags fly, launching no less than nine goofs.
Gee, if only they could put this much effort into Google Reader.
- YouTube Closing. Millions of videos later, YouTube reveals that the whole thing was actually one big contest for finding the world’s best video. Now that the contest is over, Best Video nominees will be previewed in a 12-hour cycle for the next two years.
- ‘Dem Naughty Gmail Blues. In a feat of massive re-engineering, the team at Gmail has provided users with an all-blue interface. Watch thestirring marketing video and hey, just remember, Gmail itself wasonce thought to be an April Fool’s joke. If it ever goes the way of Google Reader, it still could be.
- Avast Ye, Scurvy Dogs! The Google Maps team has discovered the lost treasure maps of Captain William Kidd, and is asking users to help decode the symbology from the find. No word if this will actually reward patient humorologists with booty.
- Make Your House Look Fabulous! If you’re tired of the way your home looks on Google Street View, the Google Australia team is happy to help. Their new Simple Complete House Makeover Internet Conversion Kit (SCHMICK) will let you redecorate your home on Street View at no charge.
- Smelling Is Believing. Those Street View cars were apparently hoovering more than just stray wi-fi data… they were also recording the smells of the world for Google’s new Google Nose service (in Beta, natch). The new service appears all day on the Google nav bars, in case you want to sniff it out. (Yeah, I went there.)
- Analyze This. Google Analytics, long the authoritative source for finding out who’s coming to your site, has upped its game with accuracy, enabling real-time tracking from visitors from the International Space Station.
- Emotions Are Logical. Google + gets a real plus in the new +Emotion service that lets you tag photos with unambiguous emoticons. You know, in case the actual expressions on people’s faces weren’t clear enough.
- Google Fiber Everywhere. Yeah, I’ll come clean: I want this one to be oh, so, true. Because moving to Kansas is not optimal.
- The Source Of The Funny. Ah, now we get to the source of Google’s overabundance of the funny this year: the Google Levity Algorithm, a new feature for Google Apps that enhances documents and interactive communications based on 50 years of comedy material from Second City.
Read the full article: readwrite