Ted @ UBC

This is one of the crazy facts that Monika and I learned on our field trip to check out the TED Talks 2014 live webcast event at IKE Barber on March 17-21st, 2014. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and the theme of the conference can basically be summed up by the slogan, “ideas worth spreading.”

All the talks are limited to 18 minutes and cover a diverse range of topics from science to culture and are presented by everyone from Nobel Prize winners to performance artists.  We were lucky enough to see two presentations by women who are leaders in the world of social networking. 

The first was by Margaret Gould Stewart who currently works as the director of product design for Facebook.  It was really interesting to hear about how complex the process is to come up with one tiny button for the worlds most used social media site.  Basically, we don’t give much thought to little things we use every day such as the “like” button on Facebook, but when you consider it could be the most viewed design element EVER, it takes on a much more interesting  context.

After our introduction to the complexities of Facebook design we learned how a photo of a cat could contribute to your death.  Ok, so that turned out to be a bit of a dramatic introduction to the talk by Del Harvey, the head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, but her explanation was still fascinating.

Based on the concept of “one in a million” there are potentially 500 dangerous posts on Twitter every day.  For those of you who are now trying to work out the math, that means there are about 500 million twitter posts daily and each is scrutinized using the worst case scenario model.

So, when considering the most extreme situations, if you happen to be a cat lover who is also the target of a group of international assassins, posting a simple photo of a cat could help the assassins track you down by using the geodata saved in the image.  The good news is that Del and her team have your back.  Twitter strips geodata out of all images so even if you do live the James Bond lifestyle you can go to town with your cat photos.

All in all, Monika and I had a great time and we learned a lot on our first field trip.  I have to admit that for a non-“techy” like myself, it was comforting to know that cats are still the hottest topic on the internet.