Part of the problem. (Photo: Pinterest)

So, there's a very real illness that's destroying the lives of mothers everywhere. It’s called “Pinterest stress,” and it reportedly affects 42 percent of mothers. A crippling condition that is yielding a lot of sad BBs in the world, "Pinterest stress" leads people to worry that their pins are not crafty or creative enough (also known as the Brit Industrial Complex?).

Touted as an exclusive survey by Today, a once-popular morning show that nursing homes use to override the bleak silence of near-death, the results show that nearly half of the 7,000 mothers they talked to claim they stay up until the wee hours of the morning clicking, repinning and saving pins in a mad attempt to recreate intricately crafted centerpieces from Michael’s.

Moms told Today that the seemingly endless river of professionally shot photos that crop up on the site gives them unrealistic and impractical representations of what they’re trying to create. One mother depressingly called it a “site of unrealized dreams.”

Here's a real quote from sad mom Jenna Anderson:

“We have a hard time enjoying our own experiences because we feel it’s not worthy of this invisible judge,” Andersen said. “It’s so easy to get depressed. You start to feel like your entire life has to be like a magazine all the time.”

Apparently none of these moms have seen the millions of "Keep Calm and Carry On" pins. Formerly sad mom Dena Fleno said she started feeling “slightly inadequate” and realized that a social networking site should probably not affect her parenting skills.

“As I poured over oodles of pins one night, feeling slightly inadequate, I started to realize that, while I may think of myself as Martha Stewart on occasion, my kids don’t want or need her. They just want me to be their mom.”

You do you, girlfriend. Just don't do Pinterest.

(Photo: flickr.com/86979666@N00)

This week Pinterest introduced a web analytics platform, while Twitter stepped up its ad insights game with more details for marketers. Really looking forward to seeing even more wedding dress ads. [Ad Week]

Twitter has also reportedly acquired the music delivery service We Are Hunted and plans to build a standalone music app. Can we get some Vine soundtracks going, here? [CNET]

To face Ellen Pao's gender discrimination claims, Kleiner Perkins has hired the same guy who represented Facebook against the Winklevoss twins. [Wall Street Journal]

Blame Google+ for the fact that you are losing your Google Reader, effective July 1. [The Next Web]

A startup called DeveloperAuction has raised $2.7 million to build a site where talent can literally auction themselves off to the highest bidder. sign up and if they're picked as one of the site's top 150 job seekers in a particular month, be deluged with interview offers from companies. That'll do wonders for the Valley's skyrocketing salaries, sure. [VentureBeat]

Chrome honcho Sundar Pichai is now going to lead Google's Android team, as well. Former Android boss Andy Rubin is going to stay at Google and do something that maybe involves moonshots. [Google]

Lean in to the CHAOS

A newly betrothed Business Insider writer has a bone to pick with Facebook: Getting engaged ruined the social network for her. "Just like that, everything changed," she reports. "Facebook knew I was betrothed. And it didn't waste any time clogging up my news feed with ads" related to weddings, weddings and also weddings.

A few relatively-relevant ads are hardly going to make my Newsfeed any junkier than it already is. (Spotify! So-and-so shared a link! So-and-so likes Sprint!) As a newly-engaged woman, however, I've found the deluge of Facebook ads is only part of the story. The Internet and its advertisers, it seems, are all conspiring to make me a cuckoo-crazy-crackers bridezilla.

Here's a brief guide to what happens once you make it official:

First you change your Facebook status, and even as the congratulations roll in, so do the Facebook ads for places like the wedding dress brand Pronovias. (Also, the occasional gym ad? Let's not even go there, Facebook.) You're not ready to buy anything yet, but those ads are an insistent reminder that you've got about a year to plan this thing so you better get cracking, missy.

So you hop over to Pinterest, which suddenly becomes approximately one thousand times more interesting. There's an entire browsing category devoted to weddings, and if you thought the community's home decor pins were aspirational, you ain't seen nothing yet. Spend a few hours on the platform and you'll become convinced that an indie D.I.Y. wedding in a mossy forest glade where your bridesmaids carry baskets of apples and all the guests receive hand-painted umbrellas as party favors is a GREAT idea. And just think! Now brands can track all this.

You spend a lot of time on Etsy, running the numbers on hand-made invitations and wondering whether those cute lacy headbands would make you look like a doofus.

Then it's time to start really planning in earnest, which is when you graduate to The Knot, which looks a lot like Pinterest but contains real information about potential vendors. You begin calling venues and caterers and florists and perhaps keeping track of your options in a Google Doc (which is probably the only piece of technology you actually need during this process; everything else is an opportunity for up-selling).

You begin to receive near-constant email offers from The Knot's many, many, oh so very many sponsors.

You realize most of the vendors on The Knot cost a small fortune, and so you disappear into the rabbit hole of boards like Weddingbee and Wedding Wire, searching variations on "affordable nice wedding." You begin scouring Yelp. You spend a lot of time Google Image searching venues that sound suspicious affordable, on the lookout for decorations that look a little too Goodfellas. 

In the meantime, there's years worth of wedding shows you can mainline on Netflix. Possibly centuries. Say Yes to the Dress, Wedded to Perfection, Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta, Whose Wedding Is It Anyway, Say Yes to the Dress: Randy Knows Best. (Oh and of course now people can see what you're watching on Netflix, so yeah, your groom-to-be is going to know about this new addiction.)

"Do we need a wedding website?" you ask yourself. "Wait, do we need a wedding app? At the very least we need an Instagram hashtag for day-of photos." Obviously.

Let's see what kind of targeted ads Googling "elope to Las Vegas cheap plane tickets" gets me.

(Photo: NJ Governor's Office/Tim Larsen)

Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest were hacked this week, after a security breach at customer-service provider Zendesk allowed a hacker to access user email addresses at the three social media companies. [Wired]

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's book marketing plans include "Lean in Circles," in which women study Ms. Sandberg's curriculum for career success. [NYT]

Twitter cofounder Ev Williams talks about when—and when not—to sell your company. [Medium]

Nevada became the first state to legalize online gambling. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may sign a law legalizing Internet gambling in his state as early as next week. [The Washington Post]

If you're a "startup junky," what are you really addicted to? [PandoDaily]

IBM is making a push into mobile, and plans to provide customers with software, data and security services on mobile devices. [NYT]

Calling all youth correspondents: the social network Pheed is said to be gaining in popularity, especially with teens. [Forbes]

Facebook isn't the only tech company to catch heat for using stock option deductions to avoid paying corporate taxes. The Center for Tax Justice says LinkedIn has used the deduction to avoid paying federal taxes for the last three years. [New York Post]

Eduardo Saverin talked about life after the Facebook, the challenges faces the social media company he helped found, and his decision to move to Singapore. "No, I did not rescind my citizenship for tax purposes," is what he says. [WSJ]

But if you've been paying attention to shifting demographics, the results shouldn't surprise you.

Pew surveyed 1,802 Internet users, between November 14 and December 9, 2012. (There weren't enough Asian American respondents to draw statistically reliable conclusions.)

Twenty-six percent of black Internet users reported using Twitter, higher than Hispanics (19 percent) and whites (14 percent). The results are similar to Pew's report from 2011, expect the number of white users has grown.

But Pew also reported a similar breakdown for Instagram: among the Internet users surveyed, 23 percent of blacks, 18 percent of Hispanics,and 11 percent of whites reported succumbing to the new narcissism.

There was less of a racial discrepancy with Tumblr: 8 percent of Hispanic, 6 percent of white, and 5 percent of black Internet users reported microblogging. In terms of Pinterest: 18 percent of white respondents, 10 percent of Hispanic and 8 percent of black respondents use the service, although the most notable breakdown continues to be female Internet users (25 percent) versus males (5 percent).

A subtle hint to "new Internet" startups like the Svtle, Medium, and App.net's of the world: if this is how social networks adoption evolves over time, you might want to diversify your "alpha geeks."

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Pinterest deal hasn't been finalized, and the Journal doesn't name potential investors. No billion-dollar club newbie, the San Francisco company raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion last May, in a round led by Japanese ecommerce site Rakuten and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and FirstMark Capital.

Whether Pinterest's new valuation is a mark of the company's large potential, a still-hot market for the social media companies that rise above the fray or all around silliness, it's probably worth underlying what Sequoia Capital's Jim Goetz told the Times about the future ranks of billion-dollar startups: “A year from now that might be 100,” he said.

Few social networks are as adroit at triggering man's aspirational impulse as Pinterest. Of course, different people covet different things. In the case of police departments in fourteen cities--including Pottstown, Penn., Kansas City, Mo. and now Philadelphia--Buzzfeed reports that cops are using Pinterest to advertise what want to catch: criminals.

Their methods have been effective. Commenters are responding with times and dates of last sightings and Pottstown reports that its Pinterest page led to a 57 percent increase in arrests.

Philadelphia Police Department corporal Frank Domizio told Buzzfeed:

“It’s a marketing thing,” said Domizio, who runs the department's social media channels. "People are doing this to sell shampoo, so my question is, 'How do I use it to arrest people?'”

Of course, some of those marketing efforts also benefit the police department's brand, so to speak. Sarah Boyd, a spokesperson for Kansas City, Missouri's police department told Buzzfeed:

“The success is not just in solving specific crimes,” says Boyd. “It makes them trust us more, which makes them more likely to cooperate we us.” In other words, it’s classic community outreach.

That's Pinterest, always try to sell you something.

]]>

Few social networks are as adroit at triggering man's aspirational impulse as Pinterest. Of course, different people covet different things. In the case of police departments in fourteen cities--including Pottstown, Penn., Kansas City, Mo. and now Philadelphia--Buzzfeed reports that cops are using Pinterest to advertise what want to catch: criminals.

Their methods have been effective. Commenters are responding with times and dates of last sightings and Pottstown reports that its Pinterest page led to a 57 percent increase in arrests.

Philadelphia Police Department corporal Frank Domizio told Buzzfeed:

“It’s a marketing thing,” said Domizio, who runs the department's social media channels. "People are doing this to sell shampoo, so my question is, 'How do I use it to arrest people?'”

Of course, some of those marketing efforts also benefit the police department's brand, so to speak. Sarah Boyd, a spokesperson for Kansas City, Missouri's police department told Buzzfeed:

“The success is not just in solving specific crimes,” says Boyd. “It makes them trust us more, which makes them more likely to cooperate we us.” In other words, it’s classic community outreach.

That's Pinterest, always try to sell you something.

]]> http://betabeat.com/2013/01/cops-now-pinning-mugshots-to-pinterest-because-the-police-can-be-aspirational-too/feed/ 0 ntikuobserver Screen Shot 2013-01-11 at 3.17.25 PM http://betabeat.com/2012/12/instagram-reportedly-loses-25-of-active-users-but-we-doubt-its-due-to-rules-backlash/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:25:50 -0400 http://betabeat.com/2012/12/instagram-reportedly-loses-25-of-active-users-but-we-doubt-its-due-to-rules-backlash/ Jessica Roy http://betabeat.com/?p=75169

(Photo: Instagram)

"Rage Against Rules," declares a bolded headline in The New York Post today, which collected stats from App Data to paint a portrait of a flailing Instagram. The Post claims that following the terms of service debacle, which supposedly had both normals and celebrities fleeing the app, Instagram's total active users has plunged 25 percent.

The app reportedly peaked at 16.4 million daily active users the week of Dec. 17, but has decreased to 12.4 million as of Dec. 27.

“[We are] pretty sure the decline in Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement," a spokesperson for AppData told the Post.

However, as Quartz reminds everyone, AppData only collects information on a subset of Instagram users: those who have connected their Facebook account. Thus, "The claim that Instagram has lost a quarter of its users isn’t supported by this data." What's more despite the well-documented outrage, it seems unlikely that a dip in daily active users, even those who connect through Facebook, is due to Instagram's terms of service fumble. The TOS change was on the 17th and the decline shown by AppData doesn't happen until Christmas.

Couldn't it be that, due to the holidays, people are actually spending time with their families, disconnecting from their devices and trying to, like, enjoy relaxing without documenting every single moment? From the looks of our own Instagram feed, it certainly is moving at a slower pace than usual, barring the occasional snap of smiling families and freshly unwrapped presents.

In fact, Instagram isn't alone in bleeding daily active users this week. The Next Web reports that many Facebook-connected apps have seen drops in users this week, including Spotify (9.9 percent down), Farmville (15.5 percent down) and Pinterest (27.5 percent down).

Perhaps we all need to take another sip of that spiked eggnog and be thankful people are still capable of disconnecting from the Facebook apps that dominate our lives every other week of the year.

But other than a few twee over-achievers, no one is actually going to try these. You will be too busy drinking eggnog until you fall over and combing Kmart for last-minute gifts.

Here are 50 of the crafts that you are almost certainly too lazy and/or otherwise occupied to actually do this holiday season.