Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch.
Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology.
Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master’s degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interaction. He researched the impact of privacy controls on the socialization of children, meme popularity cycles, and what influences the click through rate of links posted to Twitter.
Constine also received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Stanford University in 2007, with a concentration in Social Psychology & Interpersonal Processes. He became fascinated with social networking theory after joining Facebook as a freshman a month after the service first launched.
Josh Constine has spoken at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, and has been quoted by TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Atlantic, MSNBC, ReadWriteWeb, and more.
Digg’s January saw an increase in page views by 35% and was its highest traffic month since October 2010. When it dug into why, it found we’re proud to look smart, hip, or funny by sharing tech news and offbeat content, but we keep our guilty pleasure entertainment and divisive political reading to ourselves.
Specifically, Digg analyzed what people read vs what they shared to their Facebook Timeline in part through the new Digg Social Reader Open Graph which has helped boost Facebook referral traffic by 67%. It discovered telling psychological trends in how people want to portray idealized versions of themselves. → Read More
Facebook is complicated, but most users don’t have the patience to dig through the Help Center to find answers. But thanks to a brilliant new update Facebook is testing, they won’t have to.
I just discovered that for some users, clicking “Help” in the Account drop-down atop any Facebook page now shows Help topics relevant to the page you’re viewing. Instead of directing you to the Help Center, answers open right in the drop-down. Facebook can expect fewer users bouncing out of frustration, and you can expect fewer customer service calls from your parents. → Read More
Today Facebook rolled out a limited redesign of Groups, featuring a big new Timeline-style cover image, and a prompt for users to prominently label “What should people post in this group?” See, if you’re not careful, your intimate Facebook Groups can balloon in population and stray off topic generating annoying notifications for everyone.
This redesign makes Groups feel more close knit, and will encourage them not to devolve into a chaotic array of kitten photos, political diatribes, and self-serving announcements. After all, that’s what the news feed is for. → Read More
Mozilla took a moment this morning to remind everyone that it invented Do Not Track in February 2011, was the first to implement it with Firefox, and that 18 percent of mobile and 7 percent of desktop Firefox users currently have it activated. Now the President and competitor Google Chrome are joining the bandwagon, but Firefox offered Do Not Track since before it was cool.
Enforcement procedures for Do Not Track and the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights are still in the works, but Mozilla expects DNT to be voluntary and the Federal Trade Commission to act against companies that commit but then stab users in the back.
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Cheap international calls, mobile gaming with simultaneous voice chat, distributed call centers. Developers can create these and more with Twilio’s voice client iOS SDK that launches publicly today. The software development kit allows any iOS app to send and receive voice calls over 3G or Wi-Fi for a fraction of the price of traditional calling.
I was actually briefed by Twilio over an iOS conference call app powered by the SDK (very cool), but the real fun begins when developers start surprising us with VoIP apps too crazy or disruptive to predict. → Read More
Tonight, Silicon Valley’s heroes gave competition a rest and joined together to celebrate the spirit of innovation. An all-star committee of tech moguls carefully considered your nominations of visionaries in the fields Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation. They chose 5 leaders per category and awarded them each a $100,000 grant to invest in a startup of their choice.
Here are the winners of this year’s TechFellow Awards: → Read More
Every time a dating site succeeds in making a match, it loses two users. To offset churn, Zoosk tells me that tomorrow it’s announcing a new business model that complements subscriptions with date discounts, expert relationship advice, gift ideas, holiday reminders and online scrapbooks.
The products could convince users to pay even after they’ve found their sweethearts. If users fall in love with the new revenue streams, the whole dating industry could start courting happy couples. → Read More
Referral traffic is spilling out of both Pinterest and Facebook’s Open Graph frictionless sharing. With Sociable Lab’s licensable EverShare you can snatch their functionality without any serious development work and soak up some page views. EverShare lets you host your own Pinterest-style product or content boards to give your users their social curation fix. It also instantly roots your site into Facebook’s confusing APIs so purchases, comments, reviews, and pins are automatically blasted at friends of your visitors.
Great websites steal, they don’t borrow.
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Are you ready for a revolution? Today, after 3 years of machine learning development in stealth, BloomReach reveals its big data solution for website relevance optimization. BloomReach is capable of boosting organic search traffic by a whopping 80%, and will flip the search engine optimization and marketing industries upside down.
With a huge problem, a team of industry rockstars backed by $16 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and the patented technology capable of executing, BloomReach could become the first $10 billion enterprise marketing company, joining other core solutions like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. SEO is dead, long live big data SEO. → Read More
Last week, a Mountain Lion roared “Mac is the next big gaming platform.” Apple is bringing Game Center to Mac, it will support cross-platform iPhone vs. Mac play, and the Mac App Store will likely become more prominent. It’s time for mobile developers to decide if they’ll bring their games to Mac OS, and how they’ll port their controls and levels. Otherwise they risk having to claw their way up much more competitive charts.
Tomorrow, after 100 million downloads across platforms, ZeptoLab will release its hit Cut The Rope for Mac OS. After hooking me up with a pre-release download, the Moscow-based founders gave me the low down on the biggest challenges of porting to Mac OS, and why they think it’s critical that mobile developers don’t get left behind on the small screen. → Read More
There’s a feature war brewing in the synchronous listening space. Turntable.FM-competitor LetsListen today added video chat to its music locker web app so you can listen to a song at the same time as a friend, but also chat with them via text, audio, or video.
It’s a more intimate shared experience than just watching avatars dance around, but will video chat convince you to spend all day staring at your music player? → Read More
Zynga’s Global Director of Brand Advertising Manny Anekal who led the company to a 233% increase in ad revenue this year is leaving to become COO of Kiip, which lets brands reward gamers with real world prizes. Anekal is a monetization rockstar who pioneered social game brand integrations, helping companies like McDonald’s offer FarmVille players in-game powerups.
But now he’s moving to Kiip’s greener pastures seeking a bigger impact with a startup that’s aiding developers and redefining brand advertising for the next big opportunity: mobile → Read More
Does Address-gate have you terrified that your mobile apps are secretly slurping up your address book? AdiOS is a free new Mac program that in seconds detects which of your iOS apps have the ability to access your phone numbers and email contacts. AdiOS doesn’t indicate if or how the apps are transmitting your address book, but you should still delete any that access it.
No. That was a joke. This has all gotten ridiculous. → Read More
Independent game studio LittleTextPeople made waves at GDC with its eponymous interactive fiction game. Now it’s been acquired by virtual world pioneer Linden Lab, who will use its team and tech to create standalone products outside of its sole game Second Life. LittleTextPeople says it brings a “simulator able to model social practices and individual personalities”. That means the new Linden Lab games could be have the “rich emotional dialogue of a novel, rather than a fight scene in an action movie”. → Read More
There’s a referral traffic goldmine on Facebook, and today 13 more news outlets are staking their claim. The Daily Show, MSNBC, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post are launching Facebook Open Graph reader and video watching apps today or soon, Facebook just announced.
By automatically publishing stories back to the Facebook Ticker, Timeline, and News Feed, these apps will hope to score the same traffic boosts attained by The Washington Post, Yahoo, and Digg. However, if they should also provide “mark as unread / unwatched” options to let users curate what they share. → Read More
more, More, MORE. STOP! Rather than cram more features into Bump 3.0, the team behind the 75 million-installs mobile app combed the data and brushed off all the features no one used. Now, instead of letting you wirelessly share apps, music, and calendar events with nearby devices, it only allows contacts and photo sharing. That’s a better user experience, and examples other developers should follow.
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Facebook, a service built on real names and real identities, will tomorrow start allowing prominent public figures to verify their accounts and then opt to display a preferred nickname instead of their birth name. Those with verified accounts will gain more prominent placement in Facebook’s “People To Subscribe To” suggestions.
Verified accounts are not a departure from Facebook’s policy that users sign up with their real name, as birth names will still be shown on a user’s profile About page. Instead it’s a way to ensure people don’t subscribe to the public updates of impostors. It will also arm Facebook for its battle with Twitter to control the interest graph. → Read More
What if political candidates could see the public’s reaction to their debate answers in real-time while they’re on stage? That’s the future laid out today at Stanford University during the Future Of Media Conference by Twitter’s Director of Content and Programming Chloe Sladden. If candidates saw tweets that they were dodging a question, they might suddenly become more forthcoming. Twitter is working to make this a reality as soon as this year’s Presidential debates. → Read More
Interest targeting? Sponsored Stories? Advertisers need a whole new skill set to succeed in social, and Facebook must dispense this education to keep revenue growing. To smooth the learning curve, Facebook currently offers two introduction programs for first-time advertisers.
FastTrack sets up brands and medium-sized business with an ads rep consultation and best practice-filled resources, while Start To Success gives small businesses expert phone support and a $50 ad credit to experiment with. Understanding breeds confidences breeds big spending. → Read More
Guess who knows what’s best for the future of Facebook? It’s certainly not public investors looking to cash in on “social” 8 years after Facebook started. That’s why those same investors should actually be happy about a warning from Institutional Shareholder Services noting that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg will own roughly 57% of the company after the IPO. He’s a lot more likely to steer the company to long-term mega-profitability than they are.
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