Mood Swings and Pretty Things

July 22, 2010 | Written by Lucie Zhang

Bad news, guys. A study released this week by ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index found that American consumers gave as low of a customer satisfaction score to social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and YouTube as they did to cable providers, airlines, and the I.R.S. And while I personally still find my Facebook newsfeed lightyears more entertaining than watching my flight get delayed, recent controversies over privacy issues and promotional content on these sites are arguably the cause of this general dissatisfaction.

“Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website],” Larry Freed, ForeSee Results’ chief executive, said in an interview by TechCrunch. “The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

So how are we going to get people to keep using these sites as frequently as they did pre-annoyance?

By making it look pretty and giving away free stuff, of course:

Flipboard

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare — if you’re into social media (which I hope you are if you’re reading this blog), you more likely than not have more than one social media account. And after so many, it can get complicated keeping up with all those newsfeeds/updates.

That’s where Flipboard comes in.

Flipboard, an iPad application, is “the first social-media magazine.” It aims to put all of your friends’ information into one, easy reading experience by pulling information, links, and multimedia from your friends’ updates and compiling it into, well, a “flippable” magazine.

Pulse of the Nation

 

Researchers at Northeastern and Harvard universities have collaborated to gage the mood of the nation during a typical day, as collected and inferred through tweets. To accomplish this ambitious task, the scholars created a word list to help them analyze over 300 million tweets sent out over three years. The result is an in-depth infographic and a video (above) showing the progression of moods throughout the day.

Along with being visually captivating, an interesting pattern these academics noticed was that that West Coast tweets are generally happier than East Coast tweets, even when accounting for the time difference, and that West Coasters’ moods didn’t drop as low as East Coasters’ by a significant amount.

Having to live amongst crabby people — guess that’s just one more thing to complain about now.

Free Stuff

Allure magazine has announced that for its annual Free Stuff issue this August, it will partner with Microsoft Tag (Microsoft’s version of a QR code) to give away $725,000 worth of beauty products to the first person who enters each contest. Starting on Aug. 2, readers who type in gettag.mobi into their smartphone’s browser will be able to download the Microsoft Tag Reader, scan the Tag on the magazine or on Allure‘s Free Stuff page to register, and scan the Tag to enter. An option to receive text alerts 15 minutes before each event occurs will also be available.

Extra Bits

• Google has updated Google Images to include a dense tiled layout, continuous scrolling between pages, larger thumbnail previews, a hover pane for an even bigger preview, a new landing page, and optimized keyboard navigation.
• The company has also signed a deal to power some of its data centers with wind energy for the next 20 years.
• Foursquare now has over 100 million check-ins and the company has also announced a new partnership with New York Magazine. Those who check into locations listed on the magazine will earn points and gain access to deals and discounts at that local business.
• Android phones now have an Auto-Tune application, MicDroid. Because everything is more entertaining when done like T-Pain.