Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

• Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps – Dan Grover. “Everyone in Silicon Valley is talking about chatbots. I’ve written about them a bunch. But, here’s a great counterpoint– an amazing, long post on the history of mobile and desktop apps, in which Dan Grover argues that the chat bubble is ephemeral, and if we look at WeChat and others, we’ll see that they’ve already realized conversational UIs aren’t optimal. Definitely a chewy, essential read.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Worth a thousand words? The power (and the limitations) of data visualization – Martin Wilcox – LinkedIn. “I was in Hamburg this week, and one of my hosts, Martin Willcox, pointed me at this. It’s a teardown of one of the most famous infographics of all time, showing Napoleon’s march on (and retreat from) Russia. Martin observes, with good evidence, that there’s as much omitted as there is revealed, and that the author almost certainly had an agenda when creating it.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Pillaging of America’s State Universities – The Atlantic. “How’s this for a damning factoid: ‘Between 2008 and 2013 states reduced financial support to top public research universities by close to 30 percent. At the same time, these states increased support of prisons by more than 130 percent.'” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Postcards From Google Earth. “A collection of Google Earth glitches, or how AI sees the world?” (Hugh for Mitch). 
• Nothing Twitter Is Doing Is Working – The Verge. “I still love Twitter. It’s sharp, quick and fits in my nomadic, travelling, infovore-soaked lifestyle. It’s also easy. 140 characters. Boom. Done. Still, they’re a public company. They made $590 million instead of Wall Street’s dream of $610 million this quarter. They added 5 million new users this quarter (when most people thought it would be flat), but Wall Street still wants more, more, more. Twitter’s stock is tumbling, and many are now saying that it has lost its course. Now, many think that Twitter needs video to save them. They’re going to shift from words to video? We live in a crazy world, don’t we?” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Why click-bait will be the death of journalism – PBS Newshour. “I have a love and passion for journalism, newspapers and publishing. I don’t mind the click and link bait articles of the world. For every high brow magazine about global economics that I like to read, I am well-aware of the headline-powered journalism that makes people stop and pick up magazines while in line at the checkout counter of their local grocery store. The problem – as this article defines it – is that they are both not the same form of media. We have to be very careful about what we call journalism moving forward… especially, if we really want to hold politicians and public officials accountable for their actions.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.