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Selasa, 06 Oktober 2015

How Twitter’s new ‘Moments’ feature is ‘Trending’ done right fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Twitter has made its first significant product update since Jack Dorsey returned to the helm on Monday: A feature called “Moments” that collects tweets, photos, and videos related to a single topic, such as rising floods in South Carolina. The world’s most gnomic social network is getting into the aggregation business.

Well, it’s expanding that aggregation business, at least. The company previously experimented with a similar feature that collected important tweets for Android smartphone owners. Now this distillation of the mind-boggling amount of stuff posted to the service every day is being made a core part of its website and apps.

Keeping people better informed

Several of the Moments highlighted by Twitter are devoted to the news. There’s one devoted to the United States bombing a hospital in Afghanistan, one to the refugees fleeing the Middle East’s conflict zones, and one to the South Carolina floods mentioned earlier. In addition to highlighting content related to those topics, Twitter also offers a brief summary of the news on top of each Moment.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. Twitter is great for breaking news: journalists often use it to share information that hasn’t been published in official reports, or to highlight aspects of their reporting that might have otherwise been missed. Combine that with the amount of news shared by ordinary citizens and you have a social network that is most useful whenever important news starts to break.

Moments solves a problem with that paradigm: Never knowing who to follow. A Twitter feed filled with nothing but journalists is its own special kind of hell, one where the jokes are overblown and the knee-jerk criticism is far too prevalent. But if you don’t follow these overgrown children who by some miracle have access to the publishing systems behind the world’s premier news organizations, it can be hard to get up-to-the-minute updates from Twitter’s main timeline.

This new feature changes that. Now anyone can view tweets about the news, and while there isn’t too much in each Moment yet, I suspect we’ll see them expand in the future. Twitter is a social network and a news service; Moments separates the two so people don’t have to surrender their timeline to remain informed. A feed for people you follow, another for things you might want to know. Great.

Screenshots of Twitter’s new “Moments” feature in action on Mobile.

Also? Keeping folks entertained…

That isn’t to say that every Moment is devoted to the news. That would quickly make for a depressing section of Twitter’s website that only a few people might visit with any regularity. (Many of those people probably follow a lot of journos anyway, so the first benefit of this new feature wouldn’t help them very much.) So the company mixed a few parts news and a few parts entertainment to bake a new feature with enough sugar to taste good and enough protein to be healthy.

This model is familiar. Just look at BuzzFeed, which combines feel-good lists with hard-hitting news. Or at the New York Times, which covers stories from around the world but also trolls anyone who reads its oft-mocked Style section. Twitter understands that being strictly devoted to news, or to entertainment, isn’t the best way to reach as many people as it can. It has to do everything.

Combining these two categories is likely a gambit to keep people coming back for more. Twitter famously struggles with users trying its service for a while before abandoning it — Moments provides quick, informative-yet-entertaining snippets that people might check when they have a spare moment. At the very least it’s more interesting (and in-users’-faces) than Facebook’s trending stories.

…while expanding revenue opportunities

There’s very little chance that Twitter won’t allow companies to sponsor Moments. It’s inevitable, like the sun eventually collapsing on itself. Social networks ask companies to promote messages on their services; large stars eventually die, and will take nearby planets with them. It’s the way of things.

But I suspect, unlike the sun’s last cosmic kiss to the planet Earth, we’ll be around to see Twitter introduce sponsorships to Moments. The feature kinda makes Twitter a media company, and many of those companies have to rely on “native advertisements” to survive in a world where ad revenues keep falling. Besides, they already pay to sponsor tweets, and what are Moments but a bunch of tweets gathered into one easy-to-find section?

What I’m saying is that it won’t be long before “Tom Hanks finds student ID” and “Faces of the refugee/migrant crisis” are buttressed by “Subway’s great!” and “Volkswagen really cares about the environment.” These sponsored Moments probably won’t be that interesting (most native advertising isn’t) but it could help Twitter continue to grow its revenues.

Showing that Twitter can still innovate

Twitter’s changed a lot of things lately. It has removed the 140-character restriction from direct messages, making it easier for people to have private conversations. It’s redesigned its profiles. It’s expanded its focus on photos, reportedly considered ways to work around its restrictive character limit, and made it easier to follow conversations, among other additions to its service.

All of these changes make Twitter easier to use for most people. The service has gone from being a frenetic hangout for media-addicted tech writers trying to show the world how funny they are to being a slightly-easier-to-follow service where non-journalists discuss everything from breaking news to their lives. But until the company keeps that latter group coming back for more and gets more users, commentators won’t stop criticizing it for being outside the mainstream.

Continuing to release new features like this shows that Twitter can make the moves necessary to appeal to a mainstream audience. It almost doesn’t matter if it works — as long as it seems like it’s working, or like Twitter’s working to achieve that goal, it should be given a little slack. Not a lot — everyone loves a good “Twitter is doomed!” story — but perhaps enough to quiet things a little.

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Atlassian splits flagship JIRA product into three ahead of IPO fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

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Senin, 05 Oktober 2015

Amazon will stop selling Apple TVs and Chromecasts. So what? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Although it seems pretty cut and dry, there are folks in tech media that feel Amazon shouldn’t actually stay competitive, as businesses tend to do to survive.

Case in point: Amazon doesn’t like that neither the Apple TV nor Google’s Chromecast provide easy access to its Prime Video service, so it’s taking steps over the next month to stop businesses from selling the products through its website.

“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” Amazon said in an email to employees. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”

This means that products which play nice with Amazon’s streaming video service — like most game consoles, Roku’s set-top boxes, and the company’s own FireTV — will remain available on Amazon. Apple and Google are the only ones being booted.

It’s hard to be too upset about this. Could this frustrate Apple and Google? Maybe. Will it be annoying for Amazon Prime customers who expect to be able to purchase anything through the company’s marketplace? A little, I guess. But that’s about it.

But let’s not pretend this is going to hurt Apple or Google that much. Apple has the highest sales per square foot of any retail store in the United States, and it can easily promote its products by emailing the hundreds of millions of people who gave the company their email addresses so they could download stuff from the App Store.

As for Google? Well, running the world’s most popular search engine has its perks. It can also put ads for the Chromecast on YouTube, in Gmail, and basically anywhere else it desires through its advertising platforms. Sure, it won’t offer free two-day shipping, but I doubt most people are in a rush to purchase a new dongle.

Could this be the start of a worrisome trend? Maybe. I guess it would be a problem if Amazon stopped selling e-readers that don’t support the Kindle Store, given that it’s all-but-synonymous with the product category. But those competitive devices are still listed on the company’s site, and that seems unlikely to change any time soon.

At this point, the only entity harmed by this action will be Amazon. It’ll frustrate people who want to make it their one-stop-shop for all things commercial, and it makes the company seem like a petulant child stomping its feet because the other, more popular kids don’t want to play with it. Does that seem like a stable company?

This move reeks of desperation. Amazon might be the biggest online retailer in the United States, but it’s not the only place where people can buy these products. It would’ve been better off allowing them to be listed on its site, if only to keep up its appearances, than to plan the products’ downfall to serve its own selfish purposes.

But we’re only discussing this because of the companies involved. Remove the brands and this becomes a lot less interesting. A retailer pulled some items from its virtual shelves. There are other stores, and luckily for anyone with a decent Internet connection, it only takes a few seconds to visit them and buy those items.

Yawn.

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Twitter board names Jack Dorsey as full-time CEO fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Jack Dorsey has been named Twitter’s newest chief executive.

A confluence of tweetstorms revealed the news early this morning. Dorsey tweeted that he would become the company’s full-time chief executive while remaining in the same role at Square; Dick Costolo congratulated the team and announced that he will be stepping down from Twitter’s board; and a board member said that the search for a chief executive ended with a unanimous vote for Dorsey to come back.

That might over-simplify the company’s hunt for its new leader. It took them 96 days to replace Costolo as Twitter’s chief executive — a move which board member Chris Sacca criticized after Volkswagen replaced its chief executive in just a week. The board was reportedly worried about Dorsey leading Twitter while continuing to work at Square because it wanted someone to focus entirely on the social network.

There were probably other misgivings about bringing Dorsey back. As Fortune explained when reports emerged about him dropping “interim” from his title:

Dorsey’s focus on outside hobbies, including sewing and drawing classes, and his frequent party appearances annoyed his co-workers. His lack of communication to investors and apparent six-figure text message bills annoyed the board. He had frequent arguments with Williams, who had provided the initial funding for Twitter. Oh, and while he was in charge, there was no backup of Twitter’s database.

Dorsey’s experience at Square appears to have changed that. Now he’ll be able to lead the company he co-founded with the benefit of having led another company without being made a “passive chairman” and “silent” board member. And if recent news is anything to go by, being led by the same man could benefit both companies. The split attention that so worried Twitter’s board might actually be a good thing.

These rumblings should mean much to Twitter. “As I step off the board, two reminders: those banging pots and pans outside Twitter know the least about what’s going on inside Twitter,” Costolo tweeted this morning, “and @Twitter, there is only one narrative that matters and it’s the one you’ll create for the world.” I suspect a publicly-traded company’s image is a little more important than Costolo lets on, but it’s probably a welcome sentiment inside the company’s tumultuous headquarters.

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Kamis, 01 Oktober 2015

Snapchat plans advertiser-supported ‘sponsored lenses’ fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Snapchat has found a new way to monetize its service — and this time it’s not undermining the reason it’s become such a popular social tool in the process.

The Financial Times reports that Snapchat wants advertisers to pay for “sponsored lenses” that change the way its users’ selfies look. Citing the ever-popular “people familiar with the matter,” the report says the feature should debut on Halloween, which seems like a good time to launch a tool devoted to making things look weird.

Sponsored lenses are said to cost $750,000 during important dates like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. They’ll cost $450,000 during other days — an option which could make it attractive to companies looking to promote new films, albums, or other content that is tied to a specific date but doesn’t coincide with any holiday.

Advertisers who want to reach Snapchat’s valuable millennial user base have other options, too. They can pay to create special “geofilters” that allow people to modify their photos with stickers unique to specific locations. They can also pay to show ads in the app’s Discover section, with Snapchat taking varying portions of the revenues.

All those ads live alongside other, non-sponsored features inside Snapchat’s app. People can use lenses to change their selfies even if an advertiser didn’t pay for it, modify their photos with geofilters from places unaffiliated with any business, or watch a couple dozen videos through Discover without encountering a single ad.

These sponsored lenses would follow another new revenue scheme: Asking people to pay for the ability to re-watch the ostensibly-ephemeral content sent to them. The feature is available for free, but consumers are asked to pay 99 cents to receive three more of the “Replays,” as they’re called. A used-to-be free feature went freemium.

That change is worrisome. As I wrote when Snapchat changed the feature:

Snapchat has now popularized and, indeed, monetized, a concept that runs counter to the notions that made it popular in the first place.

Today it’s paying a little less than a buck to re-watch some videos or take another peek at a photo. What might it be later? A few dollars to view a snap more than twice? Doing away with the restriction when teens don’t pay for Replays? Perhaps that won’t happen, but it seems more likely than it did yesterday.

Features like these new sponsored lenses are a little less hostile to Snapchat’s original vision. Besides looking like a goofball for a few seconds — double if someone uses one of their precious Replays to view the snap again — they’re harmless. They’re also fun, and they fit with Snapchat’s monetization strategy to date.

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Microsoft’s Outlook to steal features from social networks fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Microsoft is bridging the gap between email services and social networks.

The company announced yesterday that it plans to upgrade Outlook, the email service that surged in popularity when Microsoft released an upgraded iPhone client earlier this year, with features taken directly from sites like Facebook and Twitter. These features will probably be popular — but not for the reasons Microsoft thinks.

First among the new features is the addition of “@mentions.” These notify someone when they’re mentioned in an email thread, which is bound to save many a worker who stops paying attention to office-wide emails after the first couple of messages. (Let’s not pretend we’ve never ignored “important” company email conversations.)

People already do this in email threads. I’ve participated in long conversations with a half-dozen people in the past, and whenever we really wanted to address someone, we would stick the “@” symbol before that person’s name. Microsoft isn’t pioneering anything; it’s just assigning real functions to otherwise all-but-meaningless symbols.

More important is the “like.” Anyone who’s ever pressed the thumbs-up button on Facebook or the little star beneath someone’s tweets knows what this does. While the action is supposed to suggest approval — why else would it be called “liking” or “favoriting” something? — they’re used a little differently in professional settings.

This is true in other communications tools like Convo or Yammer or Asana. Sometimes these “likes,” “hearts,” or whatever the company wants to call them are used as intended. Often they’re used to save something for later, or just to indicate to someone that their message was received, even if it doesn’t warrant a response.

Both of these features solve common problems with email: It’s hard to get someone’s attention without sending them more messages, and it’s impossible to know if someone saw your message without them sending something in return. If your inbox is anything like mine, these two issues probably occur every single day.

There are some receiver-facing solutions to the first problem. Someone could choose to use an app like Mailbox, which can remind them about certain messages, or could use their smartphone’s virtual assistant to do the same thing. Outlook’s new “@mentions” give some of this control back to the person sending the message.

And I think the “like” will serve a happy middle ground between ignorance (has someone seen my email?”) and automatic read receipts, which are problematic. Nobody has to send another message. No-one has to wonder if their message was received. It’s just the right amount of effort to make everyone a little bit happier.

Microsoft says these features will debut in stages depending on whether someone is a “First Release member” or not, and on what device they are using. Mentions will debut first on the Web in mid-October, then on Outlook’s apps for Windows, OS X, Android, and iOS “in the first half of 2016,” while likes will debut “at a later date.”

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It’s time to revisit Apple buying Dropbox fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Dropbox once told Apple’s Steve Jobs that it wasn’t for sale, but now might be a good time to change its tune.

The bottom’s dropped out of Dropbox’s market. In 2011, it was invaluable. But now, in 2015, it’s clunky — an unnecessary step that feels a bit too far removed from the dozen or so apps we use regularly. Dropbox is decently integrated, but it doesn’t feel like enough now, when we can easily send files through interoffice chat and collaboration platforms like HipChat and Slack that do much more than file-sharing. While many individuals did (and still do) use Dropbox for sharing photos and big, totally legal files, Dropbox is largely for business, used by colleagues to exchange big folders and files. In fact, Dropbox says that 60 percent of its basic and pro users use Dropbox primarily for business.

It’s vital to businesses, this service of making file-sharing easy. Unfortunately for Dropbox, file-sharing is just a portion of the connected service suite that digital work today requires. To put it simply, Dropbox is underpowered for 2015. And given it’s incredibly (read: actually insane) high valuation, that’s a big ol’ $10 billion problem.

A better solution than iCloud

While we’re on the subject of services that just don’t quite pull their weight in 2015, let’s chat about iCloud.

My mom calls me all the time to ask if a photo she mistakenly deleted is in iCloud. I tell her what I’ve told everyone else who has ever asked me anything about iCloud: “I have no earthly idea.”

I don’t know what’s in my iCloud. 22.1GB worth of miscellaneous things, apparently, but I don’t actually know what makes up all of those mysterious gigabytes (edit: I checked — it’s a lot of photos, Contacts, and maybe half of my total Reminders), and I definitely don’t know how I would go about retrieving any of that purportedly precious data in the event of a catastrophic iDevice meltdown. I’m confident that I could figure it out, but I haven’t attempted it.

I don’t use iCloud at all. And that’s because iCloud is garbage. It’s only recently graduated from “glorified landing page” to “somewhat usable interface”, but it remains a part of my Apple life that I feel no real need to interact with at all, unless something goes absolutely and horrifically wrong and I’m forced into the iCloud interface as a data Hail Mary.

To be fair, I’m glad that iCloud exists. I’m glad that Apple’s making an effort to save the data that I’m too stubborn or lazy to back up. I’m glad that it’s trying to save me from myself. Or maybe it’s just trying to save a Genius or two from having to explain to a customer that all of his photos are gone because he carelessly dropped his iPhone 6 Plus into a chocolate fondue fountain. Maybe it’s both.

Either way, the fact remains that iCloud is trash, even when it’s helpful, and that’s largely because it is so underachieving. iCloud could be better, but first it has to be useable, and maybe that’s where Dropbox comes in. Because iCloud, too, is underpowered.

When Dropbox founder Drew Houston met with Steve Jobs in 2009 to talk about Dropbox, Houston famously shut down Jobs’ approach to buy the file-sharing service. According to a report from Forbes in 2011, Jobs let Houston know that he was making something of a mistake banking on Dropbox’s service to sustain a company, telling him that Dropbox was “a feature, not a product.”

Now, it sort of feels like Jobs was right. Dropbox doesn’t feel like it’s future trajectory is up. In fact, it kind of feels like the rain has started and the Dropbox is getting soggy. Dropbox isn’t going to get much further without becoming easier, more meaningful and high-powered. Dropbox isn’t going anywhere but down as a standalone app, but if it can find a way to make itself a part of our lives the way it began to before iCloud, Google Docs, Box and the rest, it might stand a chance. And, well, if there’s one company that’s become the leading expert on making itself an essential part of daily life, it’s Apple.

Theoretically, if Dropbox were to see the soft, brushed aluminum, backlit writing on the wall and decided that it wanted to take Apple’s offer six years later, would Apple even want to buy?

Well, yeah. It should, anyway.

Tiptoeing into enterprise with iPad Pro

Apple wants a bigger piece of the enterprise pie. iPad Pro proves that. Dropbox has a very solid base of enterprise users (for now), and perhaps a more robust file sharing, synching and management platform for the super-sized tablet would tip the business scales in favor of Apple’s answer to the Surface Pro.

Furthermore, as previously discussed, Apple’s iCloud leaves a lot to be desired–bringing in the world’s most valuable cloud service is far from the worst idea Apple’s ever had (a right that I have assume is reserved for the rollerball on the Mighty Mouse). Beyond that, Apple could really benefit from something of an ecosystem overhaul. Between iPads, Apple Watches, iPhones, Apple TVs and iMac/MacBook/MacBook Pros, many people now find themselves with more than one iDevice. The better those devices communicate and sync data, files, photos, contacts, etc., the more things “just work”, as Apple likes to say.

Perhaps best of all, never again would a Genius have to try to explain what the hell iCloud actually does.

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