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orbemnews · 3 years

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They Found a Way to Limit Big Tech’s Power: Using the Design of Bitcoin To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, publicly wrestled this month with the question of whether his social media service had exercised too much power by cutting off Donald J. Trump’s account. Mr. Dorsey wondered aloud if the solution to that power imbalance was new technology inspired by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. When YouTube and Facebook barred tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters and white supremacists this month, many flocked to alternative apps such as LBRY, Minds and Sessions. What those sites had in common was that they were also inspired by the design of Bitcoin. The twin developments were part of a growing movement by technologists, investors and everyday users to replace some of the internet’s fundamental building blocks in ways that would be harder for tech giants like Facebook and Google to control. To do so, they are increasingly focused on new technological ideas introduced by Bitcoin, which was built atop an online network designed, at the most basic level, to decentralize power. Unlike other types of digital money, Bitcoin are created and moved around not by a central bank or financial institution but by a broad and disparate network of computers. It’s similar to the way Wikipedia is edited by anyone who wants to help, rather than a single publishing house. That underlying technology is called the blockchain, a reference to the shared ledger on which all of Bitcoin’s records are kept. Companies are now finding ways to use blockchains, and similar technology inspired by it, to create social media networks, store online content and host websites without any central authority in charge. Doing so makes it much harder for any government or company to ban accounts or delete content. These experiments are newly relevant after the biggest tech companies recently exercised their clout in ways that have raised questions about their power. Facebook and Twitter prevented Mr. Trump from posting online after the Capitol rampage on Jan. 6, saying he had broken their rules against inciting violence. Amazon, Apple and Google stopped working with Parler, a social networking site that had become popular with the far right, saying the app had not done enough to limit violent content. While liberals and opponents of toxic content praised the companies’ actions, they were criticized by conservatives, First Amendment scholars and the American Civil Liberties Union for showing that private entities could decide who gets to stay online and who doesn’t. “Even if you agree with the specific decisions, I do not for a second trust the people who are making the decisions to make universally good decisions,” said Jeremy Kauffman, the founder of LBRY, which provides a decentralized service for streaming videos. That has prompted a scramble for other options. Dozens of start-ups now offer alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon’s web hosting services, all on top of decentralized networks and shared ledgers. Many have gained millions of new users over the past few weeks, according to the data company SimilarWeb. “This is the biggest wave I’ve ever seen,” said Emmi Bevensee, a data scientist and the author of “The Decentralized Web of Hate,” a publication about the move of right-wing groups to decentralized technology. “This has been discussed in niche communities, but now we are having a conversation with the broader world about how these emerging technologies may impact the world at quite large scales.” Bitcoin first emerged in 2009. Its creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said its central idea was to allow anyone to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate. Business & Economy Updated Jan. 25, 2021, 6:32 p.m. ET For several years, Bitcoin gained little traction beyond a small coterie of online admirers and people who wanted to pay for illegal drugs online. But as its price rose over time, more people in Silicon Valley took notice of the unusual technical qualities underlying the cryptocurrency. Some promised that the technology could be used to redesign everything from produce tracking to online games. The hype fell flat over the years as the underlying technology proved to be slow, prone to error and not easily accessible. But more investments and time have begun to result in software that people can actually use. Last year, Arweave, a blockchain-based project for permanently storing and displaying websites, created an archive of sites and documents from the protests in Hong Kong that angered the Chinese government. Minds, a blockchain-based replacement for Facebook founded in 2015, also became an online home to some of the right-wing personalities and neo-Nazis who were booted from mainstream social networks, along with fringe groups, in other countries, that have been targeted by their governments. Minds and other similar start-ups are funded by prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. One of the biggest proponents of the trend has been Mr. Dorsey, 44, who has talked about the promise of decentralized social networks through Twitter and has promoted Bitcoin through the other company he runs, Square, a financial technology provider. His public support for Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related designs dates to around 2017. In late 2019, Mr. Dorsey announced Blue Sky, a project to develop technology aimed at giving Twitter less influence over who could and could not use the service. After shutting down Mr. Trump’s account this month, Mr. Dorsey said he would hire a team for Blue Sky to address his discomfort with Twitter’s power by pursuing the vision set out by Bitcoin. On Thursday, Blue Sky published the findings of a task force that has been considering potential designs. Twitter declined to make Mr. Dorsey available for an interview but said it intended to “share more soon.” Blockchains are not the only solution for those in search of alternatives to Big Tech’s power. Many people have recently migrated to the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram, which have no need for a blockchain. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, has said decentralization made it hard to build good software. The experimentation with decentralized systems has nonetheless ramped up over the last month. Brave, a new browser, announced last week that it would begin integrating a blockchain-based system, known as IPFS, into its software to make web content more reliable in case big service providers went down or tried to ban sites. “The IPFS network gives access to content even if it has been censored by corporations and nation-states,” Brian Bondy, a co-founder of Brave, said. At LBRY, the blockchain-based alternative to YouTube, the number of people signing up daily has surged 250 percent from December, the company said. The newcomers appear to have largely been a motley crew of Trump fans, white supremacists and gun rights advocates who violated YouTube’s rules. When YouTube removed the latest videos from the white supremacist video blogger Way of the World last week, he tweeted: “Why do we waste our time on this globalist scum? Come to LBRY for all my videos in HD quality, censorship free!” Megan Squires, a professor at Elon University who studies new computer networks, said blockchain-based networks faced hurdles because the underlying technology made it hard to exercise any control over content. “As a technology it is very cool, but you can’t just sit there and be a Pollyanna and think that all information will be free,” she said. “There will be racists, and people will shoot each other. It’s going to be the total package.” Mr. Kauffman said LBRY had prepared for these situations. While anyone will be able to create an account and register content on the LBRY blockchain that the company cannot delete — similar to the way anyone can create an email address and send emails — most people will get access to videos through a site on top of it. That allows LBRY to enforce moderation policies, much as Google can filter out spam and illegal content in email, he said. Even so, Mr. Kauffman said, no one would lose basic access to online conversation. “I’d be proud of almost any kind of marginalized voice using it, no matter how much I disagreed with it,” he said. Source link Orbem News #Big #Bitcoin #Design #Limit #power #Techs

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neptunecreek · 4 years

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It’s been a joke for years now, from the days when Facebook was just a website where you said you were eating a sandwich and Instagram was just where you posted photos of said sandwich, but, right now, we really are living our everyday lives online. Teachers are trying to teach classes online, librarians are trying to host digital readings, and trainers are trying to offer home classes.

With more people entering the online world, more people are encountering the barriers created by copyright. Now is no time to make those barriers higher, but a new petition directed at tech companies does exactly that, and in the process tries to do for the US what Article 17 of last's year's European Copyright Directive is doing for Europe—create a rule requiring online service providers to send everything we post to the Internet to black-box machine learning filters that will block anything that the filters classify as "copyright infringement."

The petition from musical artists, calls on companies to “reduce copyright infringement by establishing ‘standard technical measures.’” The argument is that, because of COVID-19, music labels and musicians cannot tour and, therefore, are having a harder time making up for losses due to online copyright infringement. So the platforms must do more to prevent that infringement.

Musical artists are certainly facing grave financial harms due to COVID-19, so it’s understandable that they’d like to increase their revenue wherever they can. But there are at least three problems with this approach, and each creates a situation which would cause harm for Internet users and wouldn’t achieve the ends musicians are seeking.

First, the Big Tech companies targeted by the petition already employ a wide variety of technical measures in the name of blocking infringement, and long experience with these systems has proven them to be utterly toxic to lawful, online speech. YouTube even warned that this current crisis would prompt even more mistakes, since human review and appeals were going to be reduced or delayed. It has, at least, decided not to issue strikes except where it has "high confidence" that there was some violation of YouTube policy. In a situation where more people than before are relying on these platforms to share their legally protected expression, we should, if anything, be looking to lessen the burden on users, not increase it. We should be looking to make them fairer, more transparent, and appeals more accessible, not adding more technological barriers.

YouTube’s Content ID tool has flagged everything from someone speaking into a mic to check the audio to a synthesizer test. Scribd’s filter caught and removed a duplicate upload of the Mueller report, despite the fact that anything created by a federal government employee as part of their work can’t even be copyrighted. Facebook’s Rights Manager keeps flagging its users' performances of classical music composed hundreds of years ago. Filters can't distinguish lawful from unlawful content. Human beings need to review these matches.

But they don’t. Or if they do, they aren’t trained to distinguish lawful uses. Five rightsholders were happy to monetize ten hours of static because Content ID matched it. Sony refused the dispute by one Bach performer, who only got his video unblocked after leveraging public outrage. A video explaining how musicologists determine whether one song infringes on another was taken down by Content ID, and the system was so confusing that law professors who are experts in intellectual property couldn’t figure out the effect of the claim in their account if they disputed it. They only got the video restored because they were able to get in touch with YouTube via their connections. Private connections, public outrage, and press coverage often get these bad matches undone, but they are not a substitute for a fair system.

Second, adding more restrictions will raise make making and sharing our common culture harder at a time when, if anything, it needs to be easier. We should not require everyone online become experts in law and the specific labyrinthine policies of a company or industry just when whole new groups of people are transferring their lives, livelihoods, and communities to the Internet.

If there's one lesson recent history has taught us, it's that "temporary, emergency measures" have a way of sticking around after the crisis passes, becoming a new normal. For the same reason that we should be worried about contact tracing apps becoming a permanent means for governments to track and control whole populations, we should be alarmed at the thought that all our online lives (which, during the quarantine, are almost our whole lives) will be subjected to automated surveillance, judgment and censorship by a system of unaccountable algorithms operated by massive corporations where it's impossible to get anyone to answer an email.

Third, this petition appears to be a dangerous step toward the content industry’s Holy Grail: manufacturing an industry consensus on standard technical measures (STMs) to police copyright infringement. According to Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), service providers must accommodate STMs in order to receive the safe harbor protections from the risk of crippling copyright liability. To qualify as an STM, a measure must (1) have been developed pursuant to a broad consensus in an “open, fair, voluntary, multi-industry standards process”; (2) be available on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms; and (3) cannot impose substantial costs on service providers. Nothing has ever met all three requirements, not least because no “open, fair, voluntary, multi-industry standards process” exists.

Many in the content industries would like to change that, and some would like to see U.S. follow the EU in adopting mandatory copyright filtering. The EU’s Copyright Directive—also known as Article 17, the most controversial part —passed a year ago, but only one country has made progress towards implementing it [pdf]. Even before the current crisis, countries were having trouble reconciling the rights of users, the rights of copyright holders, and the obligations of platforms into workable law. The United Kingdom took Brexit as a chance not to implement it. And requiring automated filters in the EU runs into the problem that the EU has recognized the danger of algorithms by giving users the right not to be subject to decisions made by automated tools.

Put simply, the regime envisioned by Article 17 would end up being too complicated and expensive for most platforms to build and operate. YouTube's Content ID alone has cost $100,000,000 to date, and it just filters videos for one service. Musicians are 100 percent right to complain about the size and influence of YouTube and Facebook, but mandatory filtering creates a world in which only YouTube and Facebook can afford to operate. Cementing Big Tech’s dominance is not in the interests of musicians or users. Mandatory copyright filters aren't a way to control Big Tech: they're a way for Big Tech to buy Perpetual Internet Domination licenses that guarantee that they need never fear a competitor.

Musicians are under real financial stress due to COVID-19, and they are not incorrect to see something wrong with just how much of the world is in the hands of Big Tech. But things will not get better for them or for users by entrenching its position or making it harder to share work online.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2VN0RqL

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biofunmy · 5 years

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21 Things BuzzFeed News Tried And Loved In 2019

As the tech and business team at BuzzFeed News, we love stuff. Gizmos, gadgets, games, and gear. So here are some of the many things that we tried this year and wholeheartedly recommend.

1. Forest App — Free

Can you go half a minute without checking Twitter, or TikTok, or Facebook? I bet you didn’t make it through that sentence without gazing longingly at another tab. How does one get work done in such a distracting world? Some of us have given up. For the rest of us, there’s Forest. No, not the one with trees. Don’t get carried away. I’m talking about Forest, the app, and also a browser extension, that helps you concentrate. When you use Forest, you can choose to block certain websites, or stop using your phone, for 25 minutes intervals. When you start your countdown, Forest displays a small shrub, which grows until it’s a fully mature digital tree at the 25-minute mark. If you try to navigate to your forbidden websites — which you can whitelist or blacklist — you will kill your tree. And since you don’t want to be a tree murderer, you will concentrate and enrich your life, or your company, and live happily ever after.

—Alex Kantrowitz

2. Google Doodle Polls — Free

Toward the end of 2018, I attended my first meeting for what became the BuzzFeed News Union. When it was time to plan when we’d meet next, there came that inevitable murmur of everyone pulling up their calendars, throwing out a bunch of dates, and then someone else saying they weren’t free — but how about this day? Rather than let that agony go on any longer, I volunteered to just make a Doodle. “What’s a Doodle?” someone asked. “What’s a DOODLE?!” I probably shrieked back, stunned that so many people didn’t know about the productivity tool I’ve been loyally using for at least six years.

Doodle is pretty simple: It’s a scheduling tool that makes planning meetings ridiculously easy. You select a bunch of possible dates and send them to the attendees. They check off which dates they could do. At the end, you have a neat little tally showing which day most people are free.

But Doodle isn’t just for meetings! It’s also how I kept my book club a well-oiled machine this year. And there’s truly no better way to plan a dinner with that group of friends you’ve been meaning to catch up with. Maybe I sound like a square using a productivity tool to manage relationships, but it’s the simplest way to push past the “I’ve just been so busy!!” excuses and find time to see the people you love. I often find myself wondering what else I could be using Doodle for: A family reunion? A weekend trip with my college friends? And when will Doodle integrate with dating apps? Can it please be now?

Several months — and more than a dozen Doodle polls — later, we officially formed the BuzzFeed News Union. And while that was mostly thanks to the hard work of my colleagues, I like to think Doodle deserves a little bit of credit as well.

—Julia Reinstein

3. Apple EarPods — Free With an iPhone

At the end of 2017, I said that Apple’s AirPods were my favorite gadget of the year. At the end of 2019, I am retracting my opinion. AirPods are trash — after about two years, when the tiny battery in each one begins to die, and your $159 pair of earphones start sputtering out in minutes. Your only recourse is buying an expensive, out-of-warranty replacement or a brand-new pair from Apple.

So earlier this year, I abandoned my AirPods for something a lot less sexy: the simple white wired earbuds that came with my iPhone.

Sure, I can’t plug EarPods, which is what Apple officially calls them, into my MacBook, something that drives me nuts, and sure, I have wires dangling out of my ears like we all did not that long ago. But they also NEVER die on me in the middle of a podcast because the battery died, and I NEVER have to charge them, and if I ever lose them, new ones are $29 a pop, far less than what a single replacement AirPod costs. And they don’t sound any worse than AirPods.

When AirPods work, they are magical. But when they flake out, as AirPods inevitably will, they make the simple act of listening an experience fraught with anxiety — I could never predict when I’d hear the telltale chirp in my ears that meant the battery was depleted, sometimes just minutes after a full charge.

Now, I shove my trusty little EarPods into my ears and just go. Around me, millions of human beings swirl freely, unencumbered by wires, but hours later, my EarPods keeping playing and playing and playing. It’s magical — and it works every time.

—Pranav Dixit

4. Google Home Mini — $14.99 on Amazon

This year, for me, has been about investing some energy into making the devices and apps I regularly use fit into my life better. It’s weird that the technology’s default mode right now is changing human behavior rather than adapting to it. After moving to a new apartment, I realized the Google Home I’ve had for about two years really couldn’t cover multiple rooms, so on a lark I picked up a Google Home Mini and threw it in my bedroom. The two devices work seamlessly together. I bought a bunch of cheap Wi-Fi outlets and plugged some lamps into them in different rooms, which lets me turn lights on and off like I’m living on the starship Enterprise. I can move a song on Spotify around my apartment, from one Google Home to another. The Mini’s speaker is just the right size for a bedroom. In the morning, it tells me the weather and plays a few headlines. This all sounds extremely basic and it is, but it’s also exactly the right relationship I think we should have with smarthome technology — add a little bit at a time when you feel like it, see if you like it, casually adjust accordingly, have fun with it.

—Ryan Broderick

5. Feedly and Pocket Apps — $6/month and $4.99/month

Over the last four years, my personal internet had mostly shrunk down to just Twitter — which is by all accounts an irredeemably awful website full of the worst kind of content being created by the worst people on Earth. To fix this, I started paying for the RSS reader Feedly ($6 a month) and the read-it-later app Pocket ($4.99 a month). I mainly use Feedly for work. The paid version supports Google Alerts and works really well on mobile. Pocket, according to my phone’s screen time, is regularly in my top three most-used apps. I’ve used the free version for years, but the paid version has a really powerful search function, which means that whatever I put in there is easily findable, online and off. Pocket also has a Spotify-like algorithm that is always recommending me stuff to read based on what I’ve previously loaded in there (it used to be better, but sadly now it mostly just recommends Pocket originals which I’m kinda meh on). Both apps have helped me focus better, follow the news more easily, and actually enjoy the long-forgotten feeling of digging into something interesting on the internet. Read more websites in 2020!

—Ryan Broderick

6. Nintendo Switch — $298.99 on Amazon

I’ve technically had a Switch for about a year and a half, originally buying it for a European vacation with lots of train rides. In the last year, I really dove into its catalog of games. I’m by no means a Real Gamer — I’m 30 and the last system I owned was a Nintendo GameCube. That means I mainly just want to play a bunch of cartoony RPGs, remakes of old games, and a bunch of party games for when friends come over. I also travel a lot. All of these things make the Switch one of my favorite devices. Big games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Astral Chain, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and this month’s Pokémon Sword and Shield are genuine joys. And the Nintendo store has all kinds of cheap mid-sized games that you can just jump into whenever you want to kill some time, like Untitled Goose Game, Sonic Mania, and Hollow Knight. The console is also incredibly portable with a shockingly good battery life. Plus, Nintendo has for the most part avoided the toxic cultural wars that follow other video games. Instead, I can come home, lay around with my Switch, and spend a mindless couple hours trying to catch a shiny Galarian Rapidash in peace.

—Ryan Broderick

7. Instagram’s Close Friends Stories — Free

As someone whose private Instagram account is PG-13 at its absolute most risqué, I initially brushed off Instagram’s “close friends” stories feature as unnecessary. But Instagram has become my main means of sharing and communicating, my followers now include my boss, colleagues, aunts, married high school friends, acquaintances — as well as several dudes from Hinge who will apparently continue watching my stories until one of us dies. So the close friends feature has become my go-to. Whether I want to deliver an update while perhaps being a little drunker than advisable, share a meme without individually messaging it to seven different people, or just generally be a little sad/weird/vulnerable online, close friends has become both a micro version of a finsta and the realest version of myself I share anywhere on the internet. It’s some small comfort to take back a bit of privacy on social media — as much as privacy exists there at all, of course.

—Olivia Niland

8. Scam Goddess — Free

The summer of scam may be over, but scam springs eternal — and Laci Mosley keeps us informed on Earwolf’s Scam Goddess podcast. She’s tackled everything from Anna Delvey, aka the Soho Scammer, that nationwide Airbnb scam, and the absolutely bonkers Ukrainian orphan story since the podcast began in September. Mosley’s guests have included Paul F. Tompkins, Lauren Lapkus, and Nicole Byer, so while the show can’t help being hysterical, at least once per episode she delivers a line so strikingly, memorably, out-of-left-field funny that I find myself rewinding to listen over and over again. Scam Goddess is true crime without the ick factor, a bubblegum fun listen with a dose of education, and a breath of fresh air in my podcast feed.

—Olivia Niland

9. Silicone Case for Apple TV Remote — $7.45 on Amazon

This was the year I finally cut the cord on cable television, which meant I used the Apple TV remote a lot more than before. I have a fourth gen Apple TV (the 2015 release that was the first model with Siri), and my chief complaint is that the remote is incredibly slippery. Not only do I find it slippery in terms of trying to scroll with my thumb on the trackpad, but the damned thing flies out of my hand like a bar of soap in the tub. I literally marvel at it sometimes wondering how Apple sells something that is impossible to hold. Steve would never!

Here’s where the silicone sleeve comes in. It’s anti-slip, and it gives a tiny bit more girth and bulk to the remote to make it easier to hold. My only regret is buying it in black. I’d recommend getting a bright, easy-to-see color, because you know the Apple TV remote is always getting lost.

—Katie Notopoulos

10. Idagio Classical Music Streaming App — Free or $9.99/month

A few years ago, I wrote an article about the current state of the used CD market and discovered that one genre that still thrives on CD is classical. It isn’t just the better sound quality or that it’s for old people (OK, maybe that’s part of it), but rather that streaming apps like Spotify are terrible at organizing classical music. Unlike pop music, where Spotify’s algorithms and playlists can create amazing guesses on what you’d like to hear, classical is quite different.

The metadata is different — do you want to search by composer or conductor, orchestra or soloist? Also, many classical “albums” have several composers — a CD might be one orchestra’s concert of Mozart and Beethoven together, making an album search confusing. And there are dozens of versions of specific pieces recorded by different groups.

Idagio was recommended to me by a few people on Twitter after I tweeted complaining about the lack of good streaming for classical. The paid version (I signed up for a free week trial) was great — interesting curated playlists, good search, and recommendations — everything you’d want from a dedicated streaming app for classical. You can browse by composer, ensemble, conductor, soloist, genre, period, or even instrument. There are curated playlists from composers and soloists and even things like highlights from the London Symphony’s 2019–2020 season.

That said, I didn’t feel up to paying $9.99/month for yet another streaming service. I already pay for Spotify’s family plan, plus SiriusXM (which is soooo expensive, but I need my Howard Stern). So I canceled it after the free trial.

But this fall, Idagio released a free version. Not all the features of the paid version are available on the free version, crucially the ability to play a specific track. For example, you can’t play an exact Richard Strauss song, but you can play the Essential Richard Strauss radio playlist. Even so, it’s still the best free classical listening experience you can get.

––Katie Notopoulos

11. Curology — Subscriptions From $24.90/Month

Perhaps it was naive of me, but I assumed that once I got out of my teenage years, I wouldn’t have to worry about acne. And then I hit my late twenties, and BOOM — some sort of cursed second puberty, complete with painful cyst-like zits that I couldn’t remember having as a youth. I tried every “miracle” mask, face wash, toner, acne cream, oil, etc. Nothing helped.

In May, after years of extreme self-consciousness every time I had a flare-up, I stumbled across a thread on the /r/SkinCareAddiction subreddit about Curology, a subscription mail-order acne medication service. Since I had nothing to lose, I gave it a try. A week and a half later, I got a little white bottle in the mail that literally changed my life.

It’s been six months and the hormonal acne on my chin that I thought I’d be cursed with forever is all but nonexistent. The discoloration marks on my chin and around my nose have begun to fade and my skin tone is even in a way that it’s never been before. When I get a zit or two, they aren’t painful and they’re gone after a few days of my normal cleaning and Curology routine. My prescriber has answered every question I’ve had promptly and I have yet to have any problems with my shipment — and I still can’t believe I’m only paying $40 every other month for something that’s had such a profound change on my skin and day-to-day existence.

—Ellie Hall

12. SoFi Banking App — Free

Banks suck. I like money just fine, but I’ve always resented the institutions that hold onto the money for me. For years, I had a checking account at Wells Fargo, which, thanks to a massive scandal in which the company opened at least 3.5 million “potentially unauthorized” accounts, I now very much regret. Then I put my money in a local credit union, which somehow meant I was never able to access it unless I went to one specific office in San Francisco that never seemed to be open. So when I needed to open a new account earlier this year, you can imagine my trepidation — send my money to an evil empire with a UX from 1995 or to a rickety storefront in some basement, which also somehow had a UX from 1995?

Enter SoFi, the startup lending company which launched a mobile banking and investment app in February. I opened an account and now do all my finances from the free mobile app. It’s great. It’s a money market account, so I earn a small amount on my deposit and can easily pay bills, transfer money (similar to Venmo), and invest in the low-fee index funds dear to my heart. The UX looks like it was designed in this decade, and the investment side isn’t cluttered up with a bunch of unintelligible quant gibberish. (Looking directly at you, E-Trade.)

My eyes aren’t closed. SoFi seems to have previously been a terrible place to work. I sincerely hope the culture is better for employees under new CEO Anthony Noto, because I really like this app. Now if I could just convince my boomer psychotherapist to let me pay him on it instead of writing paper checks.

—Scott Lucas

13. Frogstagram — Free

Frogs: They’re usually small, sometimes green, and always delightful to follow on Instagram.

I stumbled upon Frogblr, the unofficial community of frog-owning Tumblr users, in early 2018. In the months following that, I realized many of my favorite frog blogs also had frog-themed Instagram accounts. So in 2019, I fully committed and now follow more than a dozen Instagram accounts operated by frog owners.

There’s @stickyfrogs, which features frogs named Gumby, Jeans, Voight, and Tiny. I also love @moonnight.17, which has wonderfully TINY frogs, as well as small snakes and geckos. I’m also a fan of @frog.wizard_, which has extremely earnest frog-themed memes. Also, @the_froggy_momma is great. She features dozens of different amphibians and reptiles, including frogs named Buttercup, Bertha (who has three legs), Norman, and Darla.

Of course, the frogs are incredibly cute. I love their big eyes and oddly shaped little bodies. But it’s equally joyful to watch their owners livestream the frogs, call them goofy names, and brag about everything they do (which is, in all honesty, not very much). It’s very sincere. I’d highly recommend going through the #frogsofinstagram tag and findings some accounts to follow.

—Caroline Haskins

14. Nuking All the Digital Evidence From Before My Haircut — Free

Bangs are not just my haircut. They are a crucial part of my personality. There are two stages of my life: before bangs and after. If you ever have the misfortune of glancing at my giant forehead, you will understand.

I got bangs in January 2017. Tragically, that is not very long ago. So I decided this year to delete and untag myself in any Instagram or Facebook photos before bangs. I also deleted all of my tweets in January 2018, which would have included any images of me from before I got my haircut.

This may sound dramatic. However, I promise it is not. If I’m honest, this isn’t just about liking my current haircut. It’s about having some control over the ways that I’m seen online. I keep the number of public pictures of me to an absolute minimum, and exercising some private control over my image feels like a natural extension of that instinct. Now with bangs.

—Caroline Haskins

15. TikTok — Free

It’s more than just funny, although it’s funnier than almost anything on television. TikTok is as much a portal into the everyday lives of other people as Chatroulette ever was, but without the expectation to engage with what you’re seeing. It’s the only social app on which I follow only delightful strangers, don’t consume content from anyone I know, nor feel pressure to post content myself. TikTok shows me a greater diversity of race, class, and, yes, age than any other platform I currently have access to. I’ve watched videos made by Mennonite teenagers, by hippie grandmas, by immigrant families. TikTok isn’t all jokes; I’ve watched girls do interpretive dances to the soundtrack of abusive boyfriends and screaming parents. I’ve watched videos expressing queer pride, native pride, ethnic pride. I’ve watched hours of TikToks; I’ve watched TikToks about being a 30-year-old woman addicted to TikTok. I conceal the extent of my TikTok watching from my partner.

I used to be addicted to Instagram, scrolling endlessly and closing the app only to immediately reopen it seconds later. But now, that pink and orange neon square doesn’t beckon the way it used to. I’d rather be watching TikToks, which pass no judgment on my baking, never make me wonder if I’m taking enough vacations, buying enough candles, or wearing fuzzy enough sweaters. What TikTok offers is comedic, absurd, and intimate. The only problem is now I need headphones in public, and I might be under surveillance by the Chinese state.

—Caroline O’Donovan

16. Send to Kindle for Google Chrome — Free

I’m trying to spend less time looking at my phone and have become obsessed with looking at my screen time stats (in the iPhone’s settings app). My most-used app, other than Instagram, is always Safari or Pocket, because that’s where I read long articles — actually, where I try to read long articles, but never finish in one sitting because some news alert or push notification has pulled me away from the story.

In an attempt to create a more distraction-free reading space, I’ve started to send any article of length to my Kindle, which has a black-and-white screen that’s more comfortable on the eyes. This Chrome extension makes it so easy. It grabs all the text on the page and zooms it right over to my e-ink reader in less than a minute. And it really works! I plowed through an entire ~3,800-word piece without reading one incoming WhatsApp and loved every minute of it!! (BTW, the fantastic, multithousand-word story is by my colleague Katherine Miller, and you will not regret spending 15 uninterrupted minutes on it.)

—Nicole Nguyen

17. Tile Pro — $35 and Tile Sticker — $40 2-pack

I’ve been yelling at people to get Tile’s Bluetooth-enabled thing finders, for years, but with the caveat that the device’s biggest flaw is the way it handles its battery, which is glued onto the device’s circuit board and can’t be replaced. Not great for the environment.

Well, the latest version of the Tile Pro finally has a replaceable battery!!! This is huge because the Tile really is a wonderful little doodad for helping you find keys, your kid’s fave toy, etc., and now you don’t have to throw away the entire device when it runs out of juice a year from now.

There’s another new Tile, called Sticker, which unfortunately doesn’t have a replaceable battery, but it lasts three years, which is very good for an always-on Bluetooth device. It’s also small enough to put on my AirPods case and stick discreetly on my bike. I haven’t lost either yet — but I am a huge fan of these tiny things.

—Nicole Nguyen

18. Streaming Co-Op — Free

It has been active for years, but in 2019 my streaming cooperative really began to shine. The idea is so obvious that you may be in one already: a group of friends — comrades, one might call them — who each subscribe to one streaming service and share the login details with all the others.

As it currently stands, I pay for Netflix, a friend in San Francisco pays for Hulu and another here in New York pays for HBO Now. We all pay for Amazon Prime, because Amazon. The co-op is currently onboarding a fourth member who will pay for Disney+. Scale!

Sharing passwords like this might go against the fine print of the average streaming user agreement, but it doesn’t seem to be against the spirit of them — most allow two and sometimes four seperate devices, in completely different locations, to be streaming simultaneously. Unless we’re talking about a situation where every member of the co-op is watching the same service at the same time (Does this really happen in a post-GoT world??), you should be just fine.

And given the trend, this might be the only workable model for watching stuff in the 2020s: Apple, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and Hulu will all have exclusive shows you can’t see anywhere else, while Disney and its fellow content mega-giants will be using their vast libraries to funnel people into their own platforms. In a world with 8 to 10 streaming services each demanding 12 bucks a month — and we’re not even including cable channels, for those who want live sports or CNN or whatever — a co-op is the only game in town. Viewers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your passwords.

—Tom Gara

19. Buy Nothing Project — Free

On Jan. 1, 2019, Netflix released Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, a reality series consisting of eight episodes of sweet lifestyle porn. The smiling, soft-spoken, petite host gently floats into people’s messy, cluttered homes, like an organizational Mary Poppins, and — from the shambles — helps them create a peaceful space to live and breathe and be joyful. Deep. There were moments during the show, however, when I wondered what exactly happened to all that perfectly usable stuff that Kondo helped them thank in a moment of ritual silence before tossing it into a trash bag in the driveway. Is it all headed to the landfill before ending up in crushed shards in some whale’s guts or up some turtle’s nostril?

One answer to this problem is the Buy Nothing Project, a network of local groups on Facebook started in 2013 “to quickly get rid of things that are cluttering their lives, or simply to save money by getting things for free.” The groups — which have popped up around the world — are organized by city, sometimes even by neighborhood. Some members post items they’re ready to “gift” to their neighbors, and others post things they need, in case anyone happens to be looking to expel that object from their house.

People gift clothes they no longer want or that don’t fit, furniture that doesn’t work in a new apartment (even a fireplace), storage and packing boxes, cosmetics and other beauty products that aren’t exactly the color or scent they were looking for, kitchen gadgets and spices they don’t use — the list goes on. One popular member regularly gives away extra bagels (local hero!). My most recent acquisition was a bunch of baby spider plants from an indoor gardening enthusiast who is propagating her plants and who — it turns out — lives across the street from me. It can be a nice way to meet neighbors with shared interests, which is part of the project’s ethos: “A gift economy’s real wealth is the people involved and the web of connections that forms to support them.”

I’ve found it to be an especially fabulous resource for new parents like me, since babies grow out of (or grow tired of) everything in just a few short months — onesies, shoes, toys, feeding gear — and a Buy Nothing group creates a pipeline to people in a similar life stage as you and who also live near you. It’s way easier than holding a yard sale and preferable to plopping a box of stuff on the sidewalk with a “FREE” sign and hoping for the best.

Life is fluid and ever-changing, but most of our stuff outlives its utility. I’ve really embraced the idea of letting things go when I no longer need them. My place isn’t Marie Kondo–level tidy — and probably never will be — but a Facebook group that facilitates free, no-landfill decluttering really can spark joy.

—Venessa Wong

20. #great-tweets — Free

This feels kind of like cheating because this isn’t a product that normies can access. Also it’s not new: I’ve been using it for the last two-and-a-half years at BuzzFeed News, when in my first week here someone showed me its greatness and my world perspective was forever changed. With this product — or more aptly place — the 473 people who can see it will on any given day find memes about Baby Yoda, a listing for a toddler’s (unused) Minion coffin, wedding photos from the holy matrimony between two water coolers, and screenshots of an influencer tanning their perineum, a.k.a. “buttchugging sunlight”. And that was all just on a random Monday in November.

This wonderful watering hole of content is known within BuzzFeed as #great-tweets, a Slack channel open to everyone at the company where folks pop in to just share really good tweets. There’s little conversation — save for the emoji reactions that fellow great-tweeters use to express their gratitude or disgust — and each day it’s a continuous stream of hits, 10 to 15 of the funniest, weirdest, nastiest things taken from the blue bird hellsite that most of us here spend too much time on. Maybe the tweets have been ripped from another platform (TikTok is a pretty popular source these days). Maybe the tweets have already gone superviral. But they are our great tweets, and we love them.

While I feel a little dirty sharing the existence of my colleague’s secret space with the public, #great-tweets is just that good. After spending some pretty terrible days online at work, I’ve spent many a night lying in bed laughing my ass off because someone shared a tweet with a hypothetical conversation between a cat and an octopus in a standoff, or a cow wearing a VR headset. It’s one of the few things that I know can consistently bring me joy on the web and I hope when I go, I too will be memorialized in the channel.

—Ryan Mac

21. Neato Botvac D7 — $599.99

One of the best things to happen to my family in 2019 was Kevin, the robotic vacuum cleaner. Kevin is a BOTVAC D7, and he is a cleaning monster in a household of 4 sloppy humans, 2 sloppier dogs, and a cat aghast at their collective sloppiness. When my home is dirty, I summon Kevin from my phone. Kevin is always ready to clean. He is very good with dust and dirt, and — crucially — his blade-and-bristle brush makes short work of dog hair, which is in issue in home with 200 lbs. of doggo, where things can go from relatively clean to dog park very quickly. When Kevin gets stuck or encounters an insurmountable obstacle, he messages me asking for help. It feels stupid to say it, but I find this adorable. Part of this is because that help typically involves picking Kevin up like a baby and relocating him to an easier navigate area. And part of it is because afterwards Kevin will message me again noting — like a dorky little grade school cartographer — that he has updated his map of my home. Two things here: 1. Kevin uses exclamation points! 2. I can use this map to create zones for targeted cleaning (kitchen, dog bowl area) and also out-of-bounds areas for Kevin to ignore (dog bed, dog). My home is a small one, so Kevin’s advertised battery life of 120 minutes has always been plenty. He automatically switches cleaning modes when running on wood, carpet, or tile. Typically, there is no (to little) visible dog hair on those surfaces when Kevin is in town. Kevin’s lone flaw, as best I can tell, is that his dirt bin can be easily overwhelmed during spring “blow,” but in a house with these two, who wouldn’t be.

—John Paczkowsi

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sheminecrafts · 5 years

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Facebook launches Portal TV, a $149 video chat set-top box

Facebook wants to take over your television with a clip-on camera for video calling, AR gaming, and content co-watching. If you can get past the creepiness, the new Portal TV lets you hang out with friends on your home’s biggest screen. It’s a fresh product category that could give the social network a unique foothold in the living room where unlike on phones where it’s beholden to Apple and Google, Facebook owns the hardware and operating system.

Today Facebook unveiled a new line of Portal devices that bring its auto-zooming AI camera, in-house voice assistant speaker, Alexa, apps like Spotify and newly added Amazon Prime Video, Messenger video chat, and now end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp video calls to smaller smart screen form factors.

youtube

The $149 Portal TV is the star of the show, turning most televisions with an HDMI connection into a video chat device. And if you video call between two Portal TVs, you can use the new Watch Together feature to co-view Facebook Watch videos simultaneously while chilling together over picture-in-picture. The Portal TV is genius way for Facebook to make its hardware both cheaper yet more immersive by co-opting a screen you already own and have given a space in your life, thereby leapfrogging smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

There’s also the new pint-size 8-inch Portal Mini for just $129, which makes counter-top video chat exceedingly cheap. The 10-inch Portal that launched a year ago now has a sleeker, minimal bezel look with a price drop for $199 to $179. Both look more like digital picture frames, which they are, and can be stood on their side or end for optimal full-screen chatting. Lastly, the giant 15.6-inch Portal+ swivel screen falls to $279 instead of $349, and you still get $50 off if you buy any two Portal devices.

“The TV has been a staple of living rooms around the world, but to date it’s been primarily about people who are physically interacting with the device” Facebook’s VP of consumer hardware Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth tells me at a press event inside a San Francisco victorian house. “We see the opportunity for people to use their TVs not just to do that but also to interact with other people.”

The new Portals all go on pre-sale today from Portal.facebook.com, Amazon, and Best Buy in the US and Canada plus new markets like the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, and France (though the Hey Portal assistant only works in English). Portal and Portal Mini ship October 15th and Portal TV ships November 5th.

The whole Portal gang lack essential video apps like Netflix and HBO, and Boz claims he’s not trying to compete directly with Roku, Fire TV etc. Instead, Facebook is trying to win where it’s strongest, on communication and video chat where rivals lack a scaled social network.

“You’re kind of more hanging out. It isn’t as transactional. It’s not as urgent as when you sacrifice your left arm to the cause” explains Boz. Like how Fortnite created a way for people to just chill together while gaming remotely, Portal TV could do the same for watching television together, apart.

Battling The Creepiness

The original Portal launched a year ago to favorable reviews except for one sticking point: journalists all thought it was too sketchy to bring Facebook surveillance tech inside their homes. Whether the mainstream consumer feels the same way is still a mystery as the company has refused to share sales numbers. Though Boz told me “The engagement, the retention numbers are all really positive”, we haven’t seen developers like Netflix rush to bring their apps to the Portal platform.

To that end, privacy on Portal no longer feels clipped on like the old plastic removable camera covers. “We have to always do more work to grow the number of people who have that level of comfort, and bring that technology into their home” says Boz. “We’ve done what we can in this latest generation of products, now with integrated camera covers that are hardware, indicator lights when the microphone is off, and form factors that are less obtrusive and blend more into the background of the home.”

One major change stems from a scandal that spread across the tech sector, with Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook all being criticized for quietly sending voice clips to human reviewers to improve speech recognition in what felt like a privacy violation. “Part of the Portal out-of-box experience is going to be a splash screen on data storage and it will literally walk through how . . . when we hear ‘Hey Portal’ a voice recording and transcription is sent, it may be reviewed by humans, and people have the ability to opt out.”

Facebook will let users disable storage of Portal voice snippets

But if Portal is battling the perception of creepiness, why make human reviews the default? Boz defended the move from the perspective of accessibility. “We say ‘oh they’re good enough’ but for a lot of people that might have a mild speech impediment, a subtle accent, who might use different words because they’re from a different region, these assistants aren’t inclusive.” He claims more voice data reviewed by humans means better products for everyone, though I bet better sales for Facebook wouldn’t hurt.

Instead, Facebook is leaning on the evolution of the smart screen market in general to help its camera blend in. “The more value we can create, not just any one player but as an entire industry, that allows consumers to feel – ‘yeah, I both am comfortable with how the data is being used and why’.”

One reason Facebook is forging forward despite all the criticism about launching a “surveillance” device amidst its scandals: this is its shot to control its destiny, unlike on phones. Facebook has always been vulnerable to Apple and Google since its app lives in their app stores on their devices. “You don’t have a huge amount of influence over what the phone itself is or what the operating system provides. You’re kind of at the mercy of what those manufactures or developers provide you” Boz notes. With Portal, Facebook can ensure communication tech like cameras stay part of the smart home, even if they’re creepy now.

Hands-On With The New Portals

The Portal and Portal Mini work just like last year’s models, but without the big speaker bezel, they can be flipped on their side and look much more like picture frames while running Portal’s Smart Frame showing your Facebook, Instagram, or camera roll photos.

Portal TV’s flexible form factor is a clever innovation, first spotted as “Codename: Ripley” by Jane Manchun Wong and reported by Alex Heath for Cheddar a year ago. It has an integrated stand for placing the gadget on your TV console, but that stand also squeezes onto a front wing to let it clip onto both wide and extremely thin new flatscreen televisions. With just an HDMI connection it brings a 12.5 megapixel, 120-degree camera and 8 mic array to any tube. It also ships with a stubby remote control for basic browsing without having to shout across the room.

Portal TV includes an integrated smart speaker that can be used even when the TV is off or on a different input, and offers HDMI CEC for control through other remotes. The built-in camera cover gives users peace of mind and a switch conjures a red light to signal that all sensors are disabled. Overall, control responsiveness felt a tad sluggish but passable.

Portal’s software is largely the same as before with a few key improvements, the addition of WhatsApp, and one big bonus feature for Portal TVs. The AI Smart Camera is the best part, automatically tracking multiple people to keep everyone in frame as zoomed-in as possible. Improved adaptive background modeling and human pose estimation lets it keep faces in view without facial recognition, and all video processing is done locally on the device. A sharper Spotlight feature lets you select one person, like a child running around the room, so you don’t miss the gymnastics routines.

The Portal app platform that features Spotify and Pandora is gaining Amazon’s suite of apps, starting with Prime Video while Ring doorbell and smart home controls are on the way. Beyond Messenger calls and AR Storytime where you don characters’ AR masks as you read aloud a children’s book, there are new AR games like Cats Catching Donuts With Their Mouths. Designed for kids and casual players, the games had some trouble with motion tracking and felt too thin for more than a few seconds of play. But if Facebook gave Portal TV a real controller or bought a better AR games studio, it could dive deeper into gaming as a selling point.

WhatsApp is the top new feature for all the Portals. Though you can’t use the voice assistant to call people, you can now WhatsApp video chat friends with end-to-end encryption rather than just Messenger’s encryption in transit. The two messaging apps combined give Portal a big advantage over Google and Amazon’s devices since their parents have screwed up or ignored chat over the years. Still, there’s no way to send text messages which would be exceedingly helpful.

Reserved for Portal TV-to-Portal TV Messenger chats is the new Watch Together feature we broke the news of a year ago after Ananay Arora spotted it in Messenger’s code. This lets you do a picture-in-picture video chat with friends while you simultaneously view a Facebook Watch video. It even smartly ducks down the video’s audio while friends are talking so you can share reactions. While it doesn’t work with other content apps like Prime Video, Watch Together shows the potential of Portal: passive hang out time.

“Have you ever thought about how weird bowling is, Josh? Bowling is a weird thing to go do. I enjoy bowling. I don’t enjoy bowling by myself that much. I enjoy going with other people” Boz tells me. “It’s just a pretext, it’s some reason for us to get together and have some beers and to have time and have conversation. Whether it’s video calling or the AR games . . . those are a pre-text, to have an excuse to go be together.”

This is Portal’s true purpose. Facebook has always been about time spent, getting deeper into your life, and learning more about you. While other companies’ products might feel less creepy or be more entertaining, none have the ubiquitous social connection of Facebook and Portal. When your friends are on screen too, a mediocre game or silly video is elevated into a memorable experience. You can burn hours simply co-chilling. With Portal TV, Facebook finally has something unique enough to possibly offset its brand tax and earn it a place in your home.

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technicalsolutions88 · 5 years

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Facebook wants to take over your television with a clip-on camera for video calling, AR gaming, and content co-watching. If you can get past the creepiness, the new Portal TV let you hang out with friends on your home’s biggest screen. It’s a fresh product category that could give the social network a unique foothold in the living room where unlike on phones where it’s beholden to Apple and Google, Facebook owns the hardware and operating system.

The $149 Portal TV is the star of the show, turning most televisions with an HDMI connection into a video chat smart screen. And if you video call between two Portal TVs, you can use the new Watch Together feature to co-view Facebook Watch videos simultaneously while chilling together over picture-in-picture. The Portal TV is genius way for Facebook to make its hardware both cheaper yet more immersive by co-opting a screen you already own and have given a space in your life, thereby leapfrogging smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

“The TV has been a staple of living rooms around the world, but to date it’s been primarily about people who are physically interacting with the device” says Facebook’s VP of consumer hardware Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. “We see the opportunity for people to use their TVs not just to do that but also to interact with other people.”

The whole Portal gang lack essential video apps like Netflix and HBO, and Boz claims he’s not trying to compete directly with Roku, Fire TV etc. Instead, Facebook is trying to compete where it’s strongest, on communication and video chat where rivals lack a scaled social network.

Battling The Creepiness

To that end, privacy on Portal no longer feels clipped on like the old plastic removeable camera covers. “We have to always do more work to grow the number of people who have that level of comfort, and bring that technology into their home” says Boz. “We’ve done what we can in this latest generation of products, now with integrated camera covers that are hardware, indicator lights when the microphone is off, and form factors that are less obtrusive and blend more into the background of the home.”

One major change stems from a scandal that spread across the tech sector, with Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook all being criticized for quietly sending voice clips to human reviewers to improve speech recognition in what felt like a privacy violation. “Part of the Portal out-of-box experience is going to be a splash screen on data storage and it will literally walk through how . . . when we hear ‘hey Portal’ a voice recording and transcription is sent, it may be reviewed by humans, and people have the ability to opt out.”

But if Portal if battling the perception of creepiness, why make human reviews the default? Boz defended the call from the perspective of accessibility. “We say ‘oh they’re good enough” but for a lot of people that might have a mild speech impedentment, a subtle accent, who might use different words because they’re from a different region, these assistants aren’t inclusive.” He claims more voice data reviewed by humans means better products for everyone, though better sales for Facebook wouldn’t hurt.

Hands-On With The New Portals

If you can get past Facebook’s toxic brand, the new Portals are quite pleasing. They’re remarkably polished products for a company just a year into selling consumer hardware. They all feel sturdy and elegant enough to place in your kitchen or living room. The Portal and Portal Mini work just like last year’s models, but without the big speaker bezel, they can be flipped on their side and look much more like picture frames while running Portal’s Smart Frame showing your Facebook, Instagram, or Camera roll photos.

Portal TV’s flexible form factor is a clever innovation, first spotted as “Codename: Ripley” by Jane Manchun Wong and reported by Alex Heath for Cheddar a year ago. It has an integrated stand for placing on your TV console, but that stand also squeezes onto a front wing to let it clip onto both wide and extremely thin new flatscreen televisions. With just an HDMI connection it brings a 12.5 megapixel, 120-degree camera and 8 mic array to any tube. It also ships with a stubby remote control for basic browsing without having to shout across the room. TechCrunch.

Portal TV includes an integrated smart speaker that can be used even when the TV is off or on a different input, and offers HDMI CEC for control through other remotes. The built-in camera cover gives users piece of mind and a switch conjures a red light to signal that all sensors are disabled. Overall, control felt a tad sluggish but passable.

Portal’s software is largely the same as before with a few key improvements, the addition of WhatsApp, and one big bonus feature for Portal TVs. The AI Smart Camera is the best part, automatically tracking multiple people to keep everyone in frame as zoomed in as possible. Improved adaptive background modeling and human pose estimation lets it keep faces in view without facial recognition, and all video processing is done locally on the device. A sharper Spotlight feature lets you select one person, like a child running around the room so you don’t miss the gymnastics routines.

The Portal app platform that features Spotify and Pandora is gaining Amazon’s suite of apps, starting with Prime Video while Ring doorbell and smart home controls are on the way. Beyond Messenger calls and AR Storytime where you don related AR masks as you read aloud a children’s book, there are new AR games like Cats Catching Donuts With Their Mouths. Designed for kids and casual players, the games had some trouble with motion tracking and felt too thin for more than a few seconds of play. But if Facebook gave Portal TV a real controller or bought a better AR games studio, it could dive deeper into gaming as a selling point.

“Have you ever thought about how weird bowling is, Josh? Bowling is a weird thing to go do. I enjoy bowling, I don’t enjoy bowling by myself that much. I enjoy going with other people” Boz tells me. “It’s just a pretext, it’s some reason for us to get together and have some beers and to have time and have conversation. Whether it’s video calling or the AR games . . . those are a pre-text, to have an excuse to go be together.”

This is Portal’s true purpose. Facebook has always been about time spent, getting deeper into your life, and learning more about you. While other companies’ products might feel less creepy or be more entertaining, none have the ubiquitous social connection of Facebook and Portal. When your friends are on screen to, a mediocre game or silly video is elevated into a memorable experience. With Portal TV, Facebook finally has something unique enough to offset its brand tax and earn it a place in your home.

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jamesgeiiger · 5 years

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Five trends that will change how businesses use social media in 2019

For social media’s biggest players, 2018 represented a trying year. Simmering issues with privacy and data integrity came to a boil at Facebook, with effects felt at the highest levels of government. Networks in the crosshairs of Congressional investigations have had to reckon with their own power and potential for abuse, while users have been left to question the larger impact of social media on politics, culture and civic discourse.

What does this mean for 2019? How will users and networks respond to these seismic shifts? How will the way companies use social media evolve in light of changing attitudes on privacy and meaningful connection? In our annual Social Trends Report, Hootsuite surveyed more than 3,000 businesses, from small agencies to huge enterprises, to see how they plan to adapt in 2019. Here are some of the most salient findings and a look into the crystal ball on what the year ahead holds.

Who needs the Kardashians — Meet the new breed of influencers tapping social media’s ‘gold rush’

Five big-picture trends to help businesses stay ahead of social media shifts

Investors unfriend Facebook in droves as social media giant hits the reset button

Real is back

Waves of scandal have had a tangible impact on faith in social networks. According to Edelman’s 2018 Trust Barometer Report, 60 per cent of people no longer trust social media companies. Against a backdrop of “fake news” and data manipulation, users have grown distrustful of influencers — both celebrities and media personalities. In a major reversal, trust has reverted back to immediate friends, family and close acquaintances on social media, individuals whose personal credibility speaks far more than the size of their followings.

For businesses on social media, this presents a delicate challenge in 2019. Using social media as just another ad channel — filled with flashy clickbait and promo codes — feels increasingly out of step with societal norms and user preferences. Instead, progressive companies will focus less on maximizing reach in 2019 and more on generating transparent and meaningful engagement. Fifty per cent of respondents to our survey agreed that personalizing social content will be a key challenge. Brands such as Adidas and The New York Times exemplify this emerging ethos. They’re creating focused communities and sharing insightful, relevant content, then allowing passionate users to connect with one another.

Stories that disappear

This shift to more personal ways of engaging on social media is echoed in the type of content being shared. Instead of posting on their news feeds, users are increasingly sharing Stories with their network. In contrast to standard updates, these ephemeral slideshows generally disappear after a day, and they’re growing 15 times faster than feed-based sharing, with more than a billion users of Stories across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Snapchat. Facebook’s own chief product officer, Chris Cox, has noted that Stories stand to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends within the next year.

Facebook’s Chris Cox

In 2019, companies seeking to stay relevant on social media will need to up their Stories game. Two-thirds of respondents to our survey have either implemented Instagram Stories or plan to this year. This means rethinking social updates as less of a static block of text and more of an intimate, often raw, multimedia glimpse behind the scenes. Integrating video, simple graphics and a narrative arc is key, but it’s important not to lose sight of authenticity. Pioneers such as the Guardian in the U.K. have figured out that less polished and more realistic Stories generate the highest engagement. What’s clear is that, especially for Millennial and Gen Z users, Stories are second nature, and the news feed may be ceding its throne.

LinkedIn comes into its own

While scandal and controversy have rocked other networks, one channel — LinkedIn — has quietly trucked along in the background. The buttoned-down business network passed the 500 million member threshold in 2018. A content powerhouse, LinkedIn now publishes more than 100,000 articles a week on its blogging platform. Beefed up groups for functionality, native video and a new API for integrations with third-party apps all show that, these days, the network is far from just a place to warehouse your resume. At a time when other feeds are increasingly filled with toxic rants and viral memes, LinkedIn’s no-nonsense professionalism has a stronger appeal than ever.

Companies who succeed in social media in 2019 will find creative ways to leverage LinkedIn’s unique place in the social universe — at the intersection of the personal and the professional. A natural choice for B2B marketing, LinkedIn is also, increasingly, a channel to reach affluent consumers. Of its half-billion members, 44 per cent earn more than US$75,000 and more than half boast a college degree. Meanwhile, in a record tight labour market, in which recruitment is an existential challenge for many businesses, the network also offers an ideal platform to showcase employer brand, i.e. a company’s culture and reputation as a place to work. Case in point: Our LinkedIn blog post on how much we value our sales team and how hard it is to find great tech salespeople led to more than 1,000 visits to our career page and 100-plus applications.

Group think

The Facebook Group isn’t a new innovation. Spaces for people to gather and discuss specific subjects — from pets and hobbies to celebrities — date to the platform’s earliest days. But, the renewed interest in privacy and intimacy among users means Groups are suddenly having their moment. In the past year, Facebook Group membership is up 40 per cent, with 1.4 billion people now using Groups every month. Indeed, well before the Cambridge Analytica privacy issue reached its crescendo, the platform had recalibrated its algorithms to prioritize engagement with friends, family and Groups, while downranking public content shared by businesses, brands and media.

In 2019, succeeding on social means finding ways to tap into resurgent interest in Groups and users’ desire to have a safe enclave for discussion on otherwise unruly social platforms. And, here, exclusivity can help. Brands such as Condé Nast have had extraordinary success with carefully focused “Closed Groups,” where users have to seek permission from an admin before viewing or posting content. For instance, the publisher’s Women Who Travel Closed Facebook Group counts more than 50,000 members, three-quarters of whom are active on a daily basis. Scaling Groups without losing intimacy is not without its challenges: active moderation and restraint when it comes to overt sales pitches are keys. But companies that tap into shifting user tastes and shifting network algorithms stand to see big gains this year.

Personal messaging eats the world

Another manifestation of the inward turn among social users: the ascent of messaging platforms. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) now count more than 2.8 billion users between them. Add in popular Chinese platforms such as WeChat and QQ, and most of the planet is now on messaging apps. Rather than sharing openly on social networks, these users are opting to engage in private or small group conversations. For companies, this raises new challenges in 2019. As eyeballs shift to private feeds, are messaging channels the next hot platform for reaching customers? Or will users resent the intrusion into “their space”?

While the verdict remains out, one area in which there’s clear demand for more messaging is customer service. Nine of 10 consumers want to use messaging to communicate with businesses, though fewer than half of businesses responding to our survey have implemented messaging apps. AI-powered messaging bots represent a tempting option for bridging that gap, but they’re hardly a panacea — an estimated 70 per cent of Facebook bot interactions fail and require human intervention. Scaling without losing the human touch, always easier said than done, will be key. Makeup company Sephora offers a model for how to do this right in 2019, deploying an army of chatbots to help with tutorials and product suggestions but having real humans on call when a customer requires more help.

Five trends that will change how businesses use social media in 2019 published first on https://worldwideinvestforum.tumblr.com/

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mikemortgage · 5 years

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Five trends that will change how businesses use social media in 2019

Who needs the Kardashians — Meet the new breed of influencers tapping social media’s ‘gold rush’

Five big-picture trends to help businesses stay ahead of social media shifts

Investors unfriend Facebook in droves as social media giant hits the reset button

Real is back

Stories that disappear

Facebook’s Chris Cox

LinkedIn comes into its own

Group think

Personal messaging eats the world

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2Ty8vCB via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

#IFTTT #Financial Post

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newstfionline · 7 years

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I Joined Airbnb at 52, and Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and the Tech Industry

Chip Conley, HBR, April 18, 2017

A growing number of people feel like an old carton of milk, with an expiration date stamped on their wrinkled foreheads. One paradox of our time is that Baby Boomers enjoy better health than ever, remain young and stay in the workplace longer, but feel less and less relevant. They worry, justifiably, that bosses or potential employers may see their age more as liability than asset. Especially in the tech industry.

And yet we workers “of a certain age” are less like a carton of milk and more like a bottle of fine wine--especially now, in the digital era. The tech sector, which has become as famous for toxic company cultures as for innovation, and as well-known for human resource headaches as for hoodie-wearing CEOs, could use a little of the mellowness and wisdom that comes with age.

I started a boutique hotel company when I was 26 and, after 24 years as CEO, sold it at the bottom of the Great Recession, not knowing what was next. That’s when Airbnb came calling. In early 2013 cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky approached me after reading my book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. He and his two Millennial cofounders wanted me to help turn their growing tech startup into an international giant, as their Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. Sounded good. But I was an “old-school” hotel guy and had never used Airbnb. I didn’t even have the Uber app on my phone. I was 52 years old, I’d never worked in a tech company, I didn’t code, I was twice the age of the average Airbnb employee, and, after running my own company for well over two decades, I’d be reporting to a smart guy 21 years my junior. I was a little intimidated. But I took the job.

On my first day I heard an existential tech question in a meeting and didn’t know how to answer it: “If you shipped a feature and no one used it, did it really ship?” Bewildered, I realized I was in deep “ship,” as I didn’t even know what it meant to ship product. Brian had asked me to be his mentor, but I also felt like an intern.

I realized I’d have to figure out a way to be both.

First, I quickly learned that I needed to strategically forget part of my historical work identity. The company didn’t need two CEOs, or me pontificating wisdom from the elder’s pulpit. More than anything, I listened and watched intently, with as little judgment or ego as possible. I imagined myself as a cultural anthropologist, intrigued and fascinated by this new habitat. Part of my job was to just observe. Often I would leave a meeting and discreetly ask one of my fellow leaders, who might be two decades younger than I was, if they were open to some private feedback on how to read the emotions in the room, or the motivations of a particular engineer, a little more effectively.

That brings me to the second thing I learned, which can be summarized in a one-line trade agreement: “I’ll offer you some emotional intelligence for your digital intelligence.” Many young people can read the face of their iPhone better than the face of the person sitting next to them. I’m not saying young people don’t understand emotions. Our digital world is full of emojis, and the term “emo” didn’t exist back in my schoolyard days. But emojis don’t create interpersonal, face-to-face fluency. I was surrounded by folks who were tech-savvy--but were perhaps unaware that being “emo-savvy” could be just the thing to help them grow into great leaders. I realized that we expect young digital-era leaders to miraculously embody relationship wisdoms, with very little training, that we elders had twice as long to learn. Over time, I learned that being an intern publicly and a mentor privately was essential, since no one wants to be criticized in a meeting by someone who sounds like their dad.

I also learned that my best tactic was to reconceive my bewilderment as curiosity, and give free rein to it. I asked a lot of “why” and “what if” questions, forsaking the “what” and “how” questions on which most senior leaders focus. I didn’t know any better. Being in a tech company was new for this old fart. My beginner’s mind helped us see our blind spots a little better, as it was free of expert habits. We think of “why” and “what if” as little kid questions, but they don’t have to be. In fact, in my experience it can be easier for older people to admit how much we still don’t know. Paradoxically, this curiosity keeps us feeling young. Management theorist Peter Drucker was famously curious. He lived to age 95, and one of the ways he thrived later in life was by diving deeply into a new subject that intrigued him, from Japanese flower arranging to medieval war strategy.

Although some older folks in the tech world feel they have to hide their age, I think doing that is a missed opportunity. Being open helped me succeed in tech; I’ve spent a lifetime being curious about people and things, which, I guess, means I’m well-read and well connected. I’m not sure there’s anyone in Airbnb who’s been asked to chat by a more diverse collection of employees. I always did my best to respond with an enthusiastic yes to these invitations. And I’m grateful. Because if I were to plot all of those conversations across the various islands (or departments) of the company, you’d see a rich web of relationships and knowledge. This served me even more as a strategic advisor to the founders, since I had a real sense of the pulse of the company and its various teams.

Boomers and Millennials have a lot to offer, and learn from, each other. Enter the “Modern Elder,” who serves and learns, as both mentor and intern, and relishes being both student and sage. The opportunity for intergenerational learning is especially important to Boomers, as we are likely to live 10 years longer than our parents, yet power in a digital society has moved 10 years younger. This means Boomers could experience 20 additional years of irrelevance and obsolescence. That the number of 65-and-older workers last year was 125% higher than in 2000 presages a national human resource tragedy.

Wisdom is about pattern recognition. And the older you are, the more patterns you’ve seen. There’s an old saying I love: “When an elder dies, it’s like a library has burned down.” In the digital era, libraries--and elders--aren’t quite as popular as they used to be. But wisdom never grows old.

#airbnb #Chip Conley #age in the tech industry #tech industry #wisdom

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pogueman · 7 years

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Besides its name, Windows 10 Creators Update is a fine, free update

I don’t even understand the concept of Windows 10 Creators Update, which you can download starting today.

In 2015, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 would be the last named version of Windows ever. That thereafter, the company wouldn’t release huge megalithic new versions, as it always had before—it would, instead, trickle out improvements and new features as they were ready, piece by piece. “Windows will be delivered as a service, bringing new innovations and updates in an ongoing manner,” the company said.

Well, so much for that. Apparently, we’re back on the annual schedule.

The other baffling element is the name: Creators Update. As it turns out, most of the features that would have justified that title never saw the light of day. Evidently Microsoft figured it couldn’t have them ready in time for its big 2017 update, and abandoned them.

For example, there was supposed to be a cool app that would let you wave your phone around an object and automatically generate a 3-D model of it on the screen. There was supposed to be an app called Groove Music, something along the lines of Apple’s GarageBand. The promised People bar on the taskbar never materialized, either.

Start menu, power, Action Center

A new column in the Start menu. Microsoft has moved the icons for Power (containing the Restart, Shut Down, and Sleep commands), Settings, File Explorer (new desktop window) icon, and Personal (containing “Change account settings,” “Lock,” and “sign out”). Instead of clogging up the main Start menu, they now appear in a special, skinny vertical stack of buttons at its far left. As a result, the main (middle) Start menu column lists only apps.

Hide the apps. On the other hand, you can hide that list of apps, so that the entire Start menu is made of tiles. (You do that in Settings -> Personalize -> Start.)

The Start menu itself

Folders in the tiled area of your Start menu. Just drag one tile atop another to create a new folder. You’ve just created a tile that, when clicked, sprouts tiles showing its contents.

Control Panel is gone from the Start menu contextual menu. (That’s an unenhancement for most people.)

Action Center updates. Volume and brightness sliders now appear in the Action Center, saving you a click or two every time you tweak them.

Security

Dynamic lock. If you pair your smartphone (even an iPhone) with your PC using Bluetooth and turn this feature on, then the PC locks automatically when you walk away with your phone. It takes about 30 seconds for the computer to notice that you’re gone, so it’s not what you’d call Fort Knox security, but it’s better than no safety net at all.

Privacy settings for your apps’ access to your location, calendar, typing, and so on are now listed individually.

Design

More control over accent colors (title bars, Start menu, taskbar, action center); for example, you can specify any color you like. You’re no longer limited to a handful of shades.

Downloadable themes (desktop wallpaper photos with associated color schemes) in the Microsoft Store.

Night Light changes the screen tones from blue to warmer ones, on the theory that blue light messes up your sleep juice before bed.

In Settings -> Apps and features, you can now restrict Windows 10 to running apps that came from the Windows Store—and, in theory, have been proven to be safe by Microsoft. (See also: Gatekeeper on the Mac.)

Cortana

Understands your requests for recurring reminders. So you can say, for example, “Remind me every Friday at 5 PM to buy the party pizza,” or “Remind me about my anniversary once a year.”

More commands. You can now turn off, lock, restart, or sleep your PC computer with a voice command to Cortana. You can also adjust your computer’s playback volume by voice, and play/pause/skip tracks from the iHeartRadio and TuneIn apps. You can even ask Cortana, “What song is this?”

More apps can respond to Cortana commands, including Netflix, Hulu, Twitter, Pandora, and so on. (Here’s the complete list.) To learn what commands an app can understand, type its name into Cortana.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/collections/appsforcortana/pc

Full-screen Cortana. Once you’ve left your PC unused for at least ten seconds, you can say, “Hey, Cortana” to see Cortana’s full-screen mode, where text is big enough to read from across the room.

You can also navigate the Windows 10 setup process by voice.

Apps

Paint 3D is one of the few pieces left of the grand 3-D vision that Microsoft originally defined for the Creators Update. It’s a simple app that lets you create 3-D shapes by combining, turning, and resizing basic spheres, cones, rectangles, and so on.

If your PC has a touchscreen, and you have a stylus, you can draw a path in the Maps app; the app tells you its real-world distance.

The new Traffic Check icon in Maps produces an estimate of the driving time to your work address, if you’ve recorded it.

Draw or write on photos and videos in the Photos app, using your finger or a stylus. (If you write on a video, your writing will appear during playback at that spot.)

New filters in the Photos app.

More “Insights” in Sticky Notes. The Sticky Notes app spot data types like fight numbers, email and Web addresses, phone numbers, and stock abbreviations. Once those items turn blue, you can click them to produce a related command button. For example, click a phone number to see a Call button, or a date to see an Add Reminder button.

An evolving Settings app. There’s now a page called Apps, where you’ll find all of your programs’ settings. The redesigned System -> Display page has been reorganized. On the Devices -> Bluetooth & Other Devices page, you now get a single screen to manage all of your peripherals.

Maintenance

The Storage Space feature, if you turn it on, monitors your PC and automatically deletes temporary files and empties the Recycle Bin after 30 days.

Centralized troubleshooter. In Settings -> Update & security -> Troubleshoot, Microsoft has assembled icons for all of Windows’s troubleshooting wizards in one place.

A revamped security center, with a one-click Fresh Start button that reinstalls Windows when things are really messed up. (Unfortunately, this new app is called Windows Defender Security Center, which is not the same thing as the regular Windows Defender anti-malware app. Confusing.)

Specify longer work days, of up to 18 hours (“Active hours”), during which Windows will never restart to install an update.

Edge browser

Save sets of tabs for later re-use.

Tab previews! Point to a tab without clicking to see a miniature of the window it represents. Or click the little down-arrow button to see thumbnails of all of them at once.

No Flash on unknown websites.

You can read ebooks from Microsoft’s new ebooks store (or other ePub-format documents) right in the browser. You can adjust the font, type size, or page color, and even have it read aloud to you.

Gaming

Game Mode is supposed to give you better frame rates (smoother game animation) by dedicating more PC resources to your game, but most people report that the difference isn’t noticeable.

Beam: you can now broadcast the games you’re playing live to the Internet, and interact with your admirers.

Productivity

A new Share menu. Now, if you want to send a page (or other material) to someone else, you have to look for Windows’s special Share icon. There’s no longer a Share panel on the side of the screen, and the Windows+H keystroke is dead.

Copy screenshot. Press Windows key+Shift+S to copy a rectangular area of your screen to your clipboard. (The existing screenshot shortcuts are still around.)

Accessibility upgrades include compatibility with Braille devices; availability of the Narrator during installation (and during the Windows Recovery Environment); and the keyboard shortcut for Narrator is now Ctrl+Windows key+Enter (rather than Windows key+Enter), in hopes of making it less likely that you’ll hit it accidentally.

Better ink. If you have a touchscreen and stylus, you can do more when you write on the screen. For example, you can add more to a drawing you’ve made earlier, you can erase only part of a line, and you get improved onscreen tools like protractor and ruler.

Microsoft says that it has also made zillions of under-the-hood changes: better stability and security, greater options for software companies to exploit Windows’s power.

Download away

So no, Creators Update isn’t nearly as big a deal as Microsoft originally intended—actually, not an especially big deal at all. But even though most of the changes are small, they build on Windows 10, which was already coherent, attractive, and stable.

If you already have Windows 10, Creators Update is free. So download away—even if you wonder why it’s called what it’s called.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can read all his articles here (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/david-pogue/), or you can sign up to get his columns by email (http://j.mp/2mCizxV).

#_uuid:359631b3-63aa-3eb6-b241-92423553ea6c #_lmsid:a077000000DAfMuAAL #pogue #review #_revsp:usnews.finance.yahoo.com #video #windows 10 #_author:David Pogue

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