— “Amazon seems serious about changing the way smartphones work,” Walt Mossberg writes at Re/code. Two big features of the new Amazon Fire Phone: hands-free navigation and “Firefly” software that identifies objects with the camera and links users to product pages on Amazon.
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- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up the new Amazon Fire Phone at the launch event Wednesda in Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
— Facebook had a worldwide outage for about 30 minutes early this morning. No word yet on the cause, Mark Scott and David Jolly report at the New York Times Bits Blog, but everything seems to be OK now.
— How far into the future are media company CTOs looking? Hearst is looking further than BuzzFeed, according to Justin Hendrix’s series of interviews at Medium, which Liam Andrew aggregated at Nieman Lab.
— Twitter now supports in-line animated GIFs on the Web and in its iPhone and Android apps. According to Mashable’s Kurt Wagner, “it does not appear as though Twitter GIF support extends to Tweetdeck or tablets.”
— Slate is a master of Facebook sharing, but that comes at a cost: vocal commenters decrying the site’s use of clickbait. American Journalism Review’s Cory Blair gathers some examples and asks Slate’s Jeremy Stahl if the complaints are legitimate.
— PureWow, a women’s lifestyle site, gets 10 percent of its traffic from Pinterest, so it has created a “custom ad product to help monetize readers’ Pinterest activity,” Digiday’s Ricardo Bilton reports.
— Over at PBS MediaShift, Susan Currie Sivek looks at how analytics are being used at Reader’s Digest and digital publishing platform Mag+. At Readers Digest, the numbers said to scale back interactivity on mobile phones and the Kindle Fire, but to keep it on the iPad.
