Digital Things of Interest Overview:
Read these Digital Things of Interest for 04 August 2017, which includes:
- Google Play ranking factors;
- Google offering $30 billion for Snap;
- CommBank’s Albert leaving blind people struggling;
- Academia yarns about hypertext, semantics and knowledge graphs.
#GooglePlay #Google #UserExperience #SemanticWeb #SocialMedia #KnowledgeGraph
Digital Things of Interest 04 August 2017:
- Bugs Become Google Play Ranking Factor
- If you have a poorly performing app from a tech perspective, it will start to drop down the Google Play app store. Good, and frankly, it’s a bit of surprise it’s taken Google this long. Now let’s see about poor UX and Fake Reviews which plague both Google Play and the Apple’s app store.
- Google wants to buy Snap for $30 billion
- According to this story, Google wanted to buy Snap for $30 billion in 2016, and the offer is still apparently on the table after Snap’s IPO. Google’s issue is that following the rise of Messaging aps, it really doesn’t have a strong product in this field – whereas Facebook has both Messenger and WhatsApp, and Apple has iMessage. Google stands to get locked out of the messaging generation. On a side note, it also doesn’t have a photo sharing app, unlike Insta. Snap is coming in for a bit of a shellacking from the Silicon Valley crowd and tech investors. I’m not sure the hard time is justified, unless they’re annoyed that they thought it would be a unicorn, and it’s actually a donkey.
- CommBank’s Albert Tricky for Blind People to Navigate
- Albert is CommBank’s nifty touchscreen EFTPOS terminal which is all rather swish to use, unless you’re blind and want to enter your PIN. In which case, it’s a bit of a failure as the system chosen to make it accessible is poor. This is a bit of surprise, as the big banks are generally pretty good at working with accessibility guidelines and accessibility advocates. Haptic feedback, maybe in Braille equivalent could be an interesting solution to this challenge, rather than making blind people divulge their PIN to sales staff.
- Hypertext, Social Media and the Semantic Web
- This is a bit of a nifty entry into some dense academic discussions around the development of the web over time from the development of hypertext to keep us connected, the semantic web to (try and) give it some structure in the forms of Knowledge Graphs, and the limiting effect of Social Media outlets on our discovery journey. I’ve said it before: Facebook, Google, et al, would like us all to stay completely in their ecosystems and not venture out to the world wide web at all. This has a chilling effect on knowledge and discovery and the world would be poorer if it eventuated.
That’s it for today. If you find anything of interest in the digital space that you think is worth sharing, please get in touch with me.
Mobile First is NOT Mobile Friendly
TL;DR
- Bugs will bug your Google Play app ranking.
- Google wants / needs to buy Snap.
- CommBank makes life difficult for blind people.
- Interesting academic stuff about the web
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
- Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these digital things of interest might mean for your web property, or you have found something of interest and would like to share it, please feel free to contact me.
