Welcome to Fresh van Root newsletter #94!
This one is a bit shorter than usual, but not less interesting š
And the One More Link category should make you smile.
Regards from heat-wave-plagued Vienna, and stay fresh,
Rolf
Hello to 23 new subscribers. 👋 Iām Rolf from Fresh van Root. This newsletter features content and apps at the intersection of AI, marketing, productivity, tech, content creation, and social media – for curious minds.
🧠 Hand-Picked Content
AI Content Detection: Many False-Positives (Blog post, 5min)
An English text written by a non-native speaker is more likely to get flagged as probably written by AI than an AI-written text that is prompted in a way to bypass AI detectors. That means the currently available software to detect AI-created text should be used cautiously. More
Social Media: The Threads Hype And Why Marketers Jump At It (Mini Analysis)
Let me give you a quick reminder of what’s happening: Musk is driving Twitter into the ground, and Meta (Zuck!) is seeing an opportunity to establish a similar service called Threads that could appeal to Twitter users. The first initial growth was massive. One billion Instagram users can create an account on Threads with a few swipes, and over 100 million Instagram users did so.
Big brands (and their social media teams) are jumping on the Threads train. Fed up with Twitter, they are desperately looking for a new toy and audience. And they are already on Instagram; why not turn up another channel? Twitter users who are not on Instagram or have a completely different audience on the platforms are more challenging to win over. Let’s see if Meta can make the app stick.
Another reason people eagerly jump at it is that launching a new social app is the opportunity to build out a new channel with a new audience quickly. It is way harder to establish a new Instagram account today than in the app’s early days. Why? Because we already follow so many accounts and are not in the discovery mode.
It’s early days on Threads, and many want to seize this opportunity. Especially startups. A blog post on the topic. More
- Bonus: Bonus: We are leaving one platform (Twitter) for the other (Mastodon) until we get fed up and hop to the next one (Threads), and so on. “I am leaving” is a fun video about that vicious cycle. More
🛠️ Tools & Apps & Services
Productivity: Bookmark Manager For Pros
Raindrop is a sophisticated bookmark manager that allows you to organize your bookmarks across devices (desktop and mobile apps) and browsers (extensions). Key features are tags, collections, full-text search of bookmarked pages, and team collaboration. I’ve just started using the product and imported 7000 bookmarks from Pinboard, which I used for 10+ years. Pinboard still works, but there has been no active development of the service for years, and not having a great cross-device experience and modern features is slowing me down. More
AI: Chat For Your Web Content
SiteSpeakAI is a service you can integrate into your website by adding a little script. After that, you can index all your web pages and enable a chat widget that allows website visitors to gain information by chatting with your site instead of browsing it. We will see more and more of those services popping up, and hopefully, these will make the chat widgets on the web more pleasurable to use. More
- Bonus: Chatbase, featured in newsletter #85, is a similar service to create a custom ChatGPT for your existing content.
Web Analytics: Alternatives For Google Analytics
Fed up with Google Analytics, not eager to learn GA4, or simply not using its 1274 features? Thankfully, there are lots of privacy-friendly alternatives. The newest service I discovered is called Pirsch. It’s a privacy-friendly, cookie-free, and open-source solution. More
Other alternatives featured in previous issues of this newsletter:
📣 Fresh van Root
Fresh Blog: How Social Media Managers can use ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a perfect sparring partner for social media managers. Help your creativity jump, or ask for the right combination of emojis – everything is possible. Read up on a few obvious and not-so-obvious use cases. More
🏞️ Finally no unread emails š
🔗 One More Link
Browsing Passports From Around The World (Directory)
This site is a collection of all passports worldwide; you can browse them by cover and compare the mobility you get with each. Fascinating and a reminder of how privileged I am because I own an Austrian passport. More
Hacker Simulator (Fun Site)
Want to look like a busy hacker at the coffee shop? Open this website in fullscreen and get curious looks. More
Pardon My French
via Mastodon
