Forget the catwalk, the latest fashion trends are on an app

Fashion darlings, Net-a-Porter have launched a social shopping platform, encouraging women to create public shopping profiles and form friendships in the process. Net Set, which is launching as an app, allows women to curate and share collections of outfits, all of which are available to buy on netaporter.com.

Most interestingly, Net Set encourages users to interact with brands and even influence the design of a piece of clothing. Net-a-Porter is uniquely placed to achieve this; the brand is known for long-term relationships with designer fashion houses, often commissioning custom lines.

There’s a great opportunity for high-end fashion brands to communicate and ultimately collaborate with their customers, whose average spend is £13,000 a year on fashion and a further £1000 a year on beauty.

You can log out any time you want, but you can never leave…

Mark Zuckerberg has decided you’re just not hanging out on Facebook enough. Once the place to post blurry pics of last night’s party or snoop on your exes, old school friends and co-workers, Facebook is growing up and getting serious about quality time with you.

Instant Articles is a publishing platform that sits natively on Facebook and feeds you a steady stream of news and culture from around the web, starting with a handful of the most powerful and addictive content brands including the New York Times, The Guardian and Buzzfeed.

If it takes, Instant Articles will shape how users experience Facebook, not just how much time they spend onsite, but also the type and length of content they expect to see on Facebook. For brands, this presents an opportunity to share deeper, richer, long-form content, from op ed pieces to magazine-style articles and rich stories right alongside a stream of news and culture from the elite in publishing.

Return to sender

The humble postie is sexy again thanks to Royal Mail’s new mailmen.co.uk campaign. No, we’re not talking about the guy who delivers your gas bill donning a pair of short shorts, rather direct mail wanting a bite of your advertising spend. Yes, a DM provider is using ATL to convince us they are a relevant part of the integrated campaign in the digital age.

Referencing Mad Men but coming across a little New Tricks, the campaign features lines including Poke Founder, Nik Roope reminding us, ‘On your 100th birthday, you’d be disappointed if the Queen only sent you an email’. Personally, I’d be pretty happy if the Queen is doing anything in 2082.

40% of mail men are women.

40% of mail men are women.

Curating all the way to the bank

Livefyre, the content curation start-up that began life as a commenting platform, has raised another US $47 million in new funding, suggesting we’re all going to be putting content curation before creation for some time to come. Livefyre recently acquired Storify, the social content curation platform, which is further evidence that adding the suffix –ify to a word is the best way to brand your start-up.

Summon Hemingway in this app

If we’re to believe Charlie Brooker, the future may involve our digital content being swept up to create a facsimile of our personas in death. With this in mind succinct author and expert barfly, Ernest Hemingway can rest easy in his grave knowing that the Hemingway app is here to help writers produce text that is bold and clear. There’s also a desktop version, so get your copywriters on it and watch their faces closely as it churns their prose.

Emoticons in the workplace

Over three decades after they first appeared online, emoticons might just be acceptable to use in your work email, according to new studies reported on 99u.com, with positive emoticons in personal and professional emails making the recipient like the sender more.

Positive emoticons also appeared to soften the blow of negative feedback, something to remember when you next plan to write: sort out those bloody typos, okay? 😀