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Kamis, 22 Oktober 2015

Facebook search tools take aim at Twitter’s relationship with news fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Facebook is updating its search tool to make it easier for users to find things that interest them among the 2 trillion items archived by the company’s index.

The update boasts personalized search suggestions, the ability to search through public posts in addition to those made by friends or family, and a new tool that allows people to view public conversations around news stories. That last item is by far the most interesting — and the one most likely to worry Twitter.

Twitter often bills itself as a forum for public conversations. Unless someone makes their entire account private, every 140-characters-or-fewer missive is indexed and can be found by anyone using the service’s search function. This makes it relatively easy to find and participate in active conversations — especially when used in conjunction with hashtags, Twitter’s defining mark. Facebook has basically just recreated one of the most useful parts of Twitter.

I doubt this will convince Twitter users to suddenly use Facebook as a home for their pithy, snarky-or-smarmy remarks about the day’s news. And that’s OK. Facebook has many times as many monthly active users as Twitter; and with more and more people using services like Instagram or Messenger, it’s already established itself as the social network of choice for more than a billion people. Now, it just has to make sure those people don’t have dalliances with other apps.

Put another way: Facebook has just removed another reason people might decide to sign up for Twitter instead of remaining content with its services. (Or, at the very least, given casual Twitter users one less reason to occasionally stray from Facebook.) The company has become a magician willing to pull anything — Snapchat clones, standalone messaging apps, improved search tools, etc. — from its hat to prevent its all-but-captive audience from checking out another exhibit.

The changes to Facebook’s search tool will likely seem weird to people who joined the network for the purpose of staying in touch with their real-life social circles. But if Twitter and other platforms (like Reddit) have shown us anything, it’s that many will also want to have conversations with interesting folks they’ve never met, and discuss topics that might not appeal to the people in their daily lives. It’s a very kumbaya-esque mission to connect people with random people who happen to share their interests as well as the people in their everyday lives.

Still, the changes are unlikely to make Twitter a ghost town. Twitter users have their cliques; they prize their follower counts; and probably value having a place where they can express an opinion without repercussion. One of the main things stopping people from having public conversations on Facebook’s platform is the “real name” policy that prevents users from hiding their identities. (Or in some cases embracing their true selves, trying to escape dangerous situations, or simply using whatever unique name their parents gave them.) Twitter and Reddit are both popular at least partly because they don’t have policies like that.

Then again, Facebook doesn’t have to win anyone’s heart or mind — it just has to hold its users’ attention tightly enough that it doesn’t wander. This improved search feature is just the latest beast it’s pulled from its hat to do just that.

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Parse teams up with Heroku to make devs’ lives easier fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Facebook’s cloud development platform, Parse, has partnered with Heroku to make it easier for developers to take advantage of both platforms’ capabilities.

Parse announced last month that it would now support Node.js alongside its own Cloud Code, which is based on the same V8 JavaScript engine. Partnering with Heroku is supposed to make it easier to bridge the gaps between the two.

“Developers choose Heroku because it gives the developer experience they deserve and allows them to focus on building great apps. Heroku’s elasticity makes it easy for for them to scale their apps to the needs of their business — whether a tiny Y Combinator startup or Macy’s,” says Heroku’s head of product for ecosystem Craig Kerstiens. “This new partnership and integration means they can combine those benefits with powerful SDKs from Parse. Whether you’re targeting mobile, embedded devices, or IOT, you’ve now got new choices on how to build them with Heroku and Parse together.”

Parse and Heroku are both popular amongst startups and large companies alike. Connecting the platforms could not only make life easier for cloud developers, but could also make both platforms more popular by virtue of cross-promotion.

“Parse and Heroku have similar goals — helping developers build great apps using the best cloud backend tools,” says Parse product manager Supratik Lahiri. “Because of this similar focus, our teams have been in touch for a while, and the conversation developed naturally. At Parse, we’ve been looking for ways to make Parse more open and flexible for developers and a Heroku integration was a great way to do that.”

Facebook acquired Parse in 2013, just two years after its debut. Wired characterized the deal as Facebook buying its way into the “heart of the app world” because so many developers relied on Parse for their mobile apps. It’s now used by everyone from Cisco and MTV to McDonald’s and Samsung.

Heroku was founded in 2007, and it’s used by many startups to build and deploy their Web apps. It was acquired by Salesforce, which spent an approximate $212 million on a startup that raised only $13 million in funding, so it could be “the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers.”

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Instagram’s Boomerang takes on Vine & Apple’s Live Photos with 1-second videos fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Instagram has released a new standalone application called Boomerang. It allows users to share 1-second video clips with their friends, effectively taking the “don’t-call-them-GIFs” animations from Vine and chopping them into sixths.

Boomerang “takes a burst of photos and stitches them together into a high-quality mini video that plays forward and backward,” according to the blog post announcing the app, automatically saving the result to a user’s camera roll. The brief animations can also (of course) be shared to Instagram’s main app.

Boomerang users won’t have to sign in to Instagram to use the app, according a TechCrunch report. It’s supposed to be a lightweight tool that does one thing — capture a short video — and one thing only. Instagram users who see a video made with Boomerang in their feeds, however, will be shown a link to download the app.

This is the third standalone application Instagram has introduced since it was acquired by Facebook. The first was Hyperlapse, a video recording app that makes it easy to shoot time lapses and other edited videos; the second was Layout, which allows people to share photo collages to Instagram proper.

All of these apps could have been included as features in Instagram’s primary app. But, as I explained when Layout was announced, breaking them into pieces makes it easier for Facebook to lay claim to more of a person’s home screen:

Facebook knows that a smartphone home screen has limited space, and if it manages to make at least some of [its copycat services like Slingshot or Rooms] stick, it can take control of mobile devices without having to make its own platform. Until then, all it has to do is rip various aspects of its service out from its ‘big blue app.’

That’s where Instagram comes in. The service was so simple when it was acquired that many additional features can be introduced as standalone apps and explained away by claiming it doesn’t want to make things complicated. It gets to take over people’s smartphones, those people get access to new apps, and Facebook gets to control even more of the home screen. Everyone wins.

Sure, Boomerang mimics something the new iPhones can already do with Apple’s Live Photos. (That might be part of Boomerang’s appeal, actually; no need to buy a new phone just to make fancier animated GIFs.) Sure, the videos are shorter than Vine’s and make it seem a bit like Instagram’s playing catch-up.

But that won’t matter if people have fun with Boomerang. Instagram has enough users who want to find new ways to express themselves that it can probably get thousands of Boomerang downloads in just a few short hours. Then Instagram is happy, Facebook is happy, and consumers are happy. That’s how companies take over a home screen — one quirky little app at a time.

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Clear Labs uses kickstarter to fund ‘consumer reports’ for food quality fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Have you ever spent a little more money on a supposed “premium” brand of hot dogs? You know, the ones that claim to be all-natural and contain 100 percent beef? The truly unnerving thing about hot dogs is you still don’t quite know if spending a few extra bucks means you’re getting something more healthy. It’s something food analysis startup Clear Labs aims to do something about, and today has launched a crowdfunding campaign to make it happen.

It’s often weird when venture-backed startups turn to crowdfunding platforms. Somehow it feels like someone double-dipping a potato chip: There’s no law against it, but it’s hard not to feel a little grossed out when you see it happen. Clear Labs, a food analytics company hoping to raise $100,000 on Kickstarter shortly after receiving $6.5 million in funding, knows this might be the case.

“As is typical for most venture-backed startups,” co-founder Mahni Gharashi told me, “we raised just enough to hit our milestones and get the company where it needs to be for the next round of financing.” The costs of making the consumer-facing reports Clear Labs will make when the Kickstarter campaign finishes weren’t included in the financial model the company used to fundraise.

First, a little more about the reports themselves. Clear Labs was founded to analyze on a molecular level the foods people might find in grocery stores. The company is currently focused on selling its services to members of the supply chain, but it’s introducing a Clear Food division that will tell consumers about all the potentially gross things they’re picking up off the grocery store shelves.

This will be a costly endeavor. For each report Clear Labs needs to buy foods, catalog them, run it through a series of tests, then analyze the results against its own database and several public domain databases it uses to inform its findings. When all this is done the company will assign different brands a Clear Score ranging from zero to 100, which is supposed to indicate the accuracy of the brand’s labeling in terms of ingredients, nutrients, and other information.

Clear Labs estimates this will cost $10,000 per report; the campaign will fund 10 of these reports, which will be published once a month, after which the hope is they’ll be funded in other ways. (The idea is that revenues from the business-focused side of Clear Labs will be able to subsidize reports after the first 10.)

“After these first 10 reports, we kind of see consumers demanding more and more transparency in the industry and having a bigger say in what does the industry adopt,” Gharashi said. “The cadence might slow down a bit, given that we’re not crowdfunding additional reports, but we still hope to keep the initiative going and to provide value to consumers on an ongoing basis.”

Gharashi and his co-founder, Sasan Amini, also say the consumer-facing reports could help Clear Labs land more enterprise customers. Turning to Kickstarter is supposed to make consumers even more interested in learning more about their food; backers will be able to choose the categories examined by Clear Labs, and having a little skin in the game is a sure way to keep people’s attentions focused.

There’s also the potential gross factor associated with each category. The first report focused on hot dogs — probably the most disgusting foodstuff on Earth — and claims made by different brands. It found that many “vegetarian” dogs aren’t, that a small percentage of hot dogs contained human DNA, and that hot dogs supposedly made from something other than pork do, in fact, contain pork. (That’s the kind of shit — possibly literally, in terms of the human DNA — people like to gross each other out with on Facebook and viral email threads.)

Clear Labs will have to overcome the stigma of a fairly-well-funded startup turning to the masses for even more money. But once it does that, it’s not hard to see the company’s reports becoming popular among people curious about their food.

“We’re super excited to launch Clear Food on Kickstarter and start to measure consumer demand,” Gharashi said, “and we believe the data we’re going to publish over the next six to 12 months will grab consumer attention, and the attention of industry as well.” That’s probably the understatement of the year.

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Mobile video ads are poised to explode—So what’s holding it back? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Josh is chief executive officer at AerServ.

Video has always been one of advertisers’ most powerful engagement tools. And as digital video in general has become a regular aspect of our daily media consumption, advertisers are looking for new ways to leverage it to boost results and gain an advantage over competitors.

Enter mobile video. Last year, a study from digital ad firm Undertone and market research company Ipsos ASI determined that high-impact ads deliver the best brand recall. Not exactly a revelation, but this year, those firms tested the theory on mobile devices and discovered that the same was true: High-impact ads still deliver the highest engagement and brand recall, regardless of screen size. This is good news for both publishers and advertisers, who need not worry about banners and other traditional formats on mobile; they can still grab attention on a small screen by leveraging targeting technology and compelling video content.

Not only that, but mobile also affords advertisers the ability to target specific users at specific locations like no other medium can. Using device ID, coordinates/ location data, demographic data, browsing behavior and more, advertisers can target at an extremely granular level to hone in on the most qualified audiences to boost efficiency and overall results.

So with all those capabilities and benefits, why hasn’t mobile video spending exploded? Why aren’t advertisers, who are constantly looking for new ways to engage today’s ever-connected consumer, absolutely desperate to get into the mobile video game?

Well, like any emerging technology, mobile video still faces certain challenges that need to be overcome, or at least mitigated, before risk-averse agencies and brands will be eager to take the plunge. A fairly common concern about mobile video is its newness; even the industry old guard is learning about it along with everyone else. And that lack of familiarity among the experts and decision makers, as well as its relative lack of field-testing, is enough to keep it off the budget for another year.

Another key challenge associated with being a relatively recent innovation is the fragmentation of the mobile video market. Creative formats vary across devices and platforms and there is a general lack of standards and best practices for both advertisers and publishers. TV buyers want to reuse their TV spots and desktop buyers want to reuse their desktop videos, neither of which is going to seamlessly fit a mobile platform. Desktop Flash VPAID creatives don’t work in mobile environments either. Mobile VPAID, while standardized via IAB, is still emerging and actually varies wildly per vendor.

And boy are there a lot of vendors. And a lot of devices. The mobile space is getting more complex with every release of a new phone, tablet, operating system or feature upgrade. For advertisers and agencies, it becomes extremely difficult to plan for every possible combination of device, OS and ad format, and it can cause significant hiccups in deploying creative.

Further challenges arise with regard to targeting; while mobile offers highly advanced targeting capabilities, it does also lack transparency with regard to context. Specifically, advertisers cannot necessarily be certain that their ads are not running alongside inappropriate or irrelevant video content. Context is extremely important when it comes to brand integrity and getting your money’s worth out of the ad buy, and some advertisers want to see improvement in this area before investing.

Anyone who has been working in the ad-tech space for more than a few years won’t be surprised by what is perhaps the largest hurdle that mobile video must overcome in order to establish itself in the marketer’s standard arsenal: measurement. Measurement challenges have plagued every traditional and digital advertising medium for years, but mobile engagement actually can be tracked through multiple metrics including clicks, views, leads, installs, purchases, foot traffic, etc.

That said, mobile video measurement is not always a piece of cake. Viewability is the industry’s current favorite metric, but advertisers and publishers alike struggle with what it actually means — at what point is the video ad considered viewable or count as an impression? Some define a viewable impression as three seconds onscreen, but there is still no industry standard. A concept that seems so simple is still being debated due to new technologies like in-feed or “native” video. In addition, common analytics vendors from the desktop space are not yet mature in the in-app space.

For agencies and marketers concerned with justifying their ad spend with tangible, understandable results, the murkiness of mobile video measurement is a significant stumbling block. For vendors and solutions providers, the chief concern is attribution, or making sure they are appropriately credited and compensated for each conversion. It’s not easy for anyone to take a risk on an emerging tech solution when you don’t even have a clear, validated way of gauging its effectiveness and communicating it to the holders of the purse strings.

Mobile video absolutely can be an advertiser’s secret weapon; it is just crucial for those issues to be addressed and clarified if possible. Luckily, there are several ways forward and a plethora of mobile tools available to help get there. Utilize those tools, like the rich interactive video experiences of VPAID and custom video and, if viewability is a concern, many vendors have in-app viewability tools to offer comfort and peace of mind. To deal with creative challenges, it can be useful to partner with a company boasting a solid history of mobile campaign execution, such as Telemetry or Sizmek, and data providers and DMPs such as Neustar and Factual are working every day on ways to improve targeting accuracy and contextual transparency.

Any nascent technology has its growing pains, but the benefits of mobile video are well worth the effort of overcoming those challenges to be at the forefront of an important shift in the industry. More and more tools are emerging for advertisers and publishers to handle the challenges of navigating the still somewhat murky waters of mobile video, but soon enough, consumer response will dictate the industry’s rate of advancement in this area. Your consumers have cut the cord — to the TV, to the desktop — and they are holding devices in their purses and pockets capable of delivering the same positive user experience and even better engagement results. The mobile market is ready, you should get ready, too.

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Rabu, 21 Oktober 2015

With polls, Twitter continues its siege on developers fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Twitter has released its new polling feature to the masses — but unless you tweet from its desktop website or mobile applications, you’d probably never know it.

The polling feature, which allows Twitter users to ask their followers a question that can be answered with one of two predetermined responses, is yet another of the updates to Twitter’s service that might never make it to third-party software, making it just another in a long line of features limited to Twitter’s official apps.

Other updates that haven’t made it to unofficial Twitter clients include the new Moments feature that curates news-related tweets into a single place, the new conversation view that makes it easier to follow the service’s frenetic updates, and access to the search index that has archived every tweet since Twitter’s debut.

Developers are also unable to use Twitter’s photo-editing tools, collect notifications in the same compact view as the company’s official software, or display the same information about how many people saw a particular tweet. (At least one app, Tweetbot, was able to build some of those features, however.)

All of these changes mean using Twitter through one of the company’s official, baby blue portals is different from accessing it through third-party applications. Twitter isn’t taking more steps to kill these apps outright, but it’s doing its best to give consumers as many reasons as possible to use its apps instead of others.

Not that the company needs to try to kill third party apps. Some have shut down because of Twitter’s limits on the number of users they can have; others have been demoted to side projects after Twitter hired their creators; and still others seem to have just been forgotten to the vagaries of a fast-changing digital world.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber once described Twitter clients as a “UI design playground” that allowed app developers to tinker with features that might appeal to users who weren’t happy with other options. That changed — now there are just two regularly updated Twitter clients, Twitterrific and Tweetbot, available for the iPhone. Everything else is either dead, dying, or unpopular.

I asked Gedeon Maheux, the principal-slash-designer at the Iconfactory, which makes Twitterrific, if developers have access to the new polling feature. He said:

As with any newly announced feature, it takes a while to digest what the scope of it is, if Twitter is making an API available for it and so on. Honestly we just heard about it so I can’t say one way or another. We’d love to support it of course, but as with group direct messages, Twitter never provided an API for us 3rd party devs. I hope that isn’t the case with this new feature but we’ll have to wait and see. Keep your fingers crossed :-)

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey took the stage today at the company’s annual developer conference to address some of these complaints. “Somewhere along the line, our relationship with developers got a little complicated. Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion,” he said, according to the Wall Street Journal. He’d like to “reset the relationship,” he said, though it’s not clear how.

And what does Maheux think about Dorsey’s promise to change Twitter’s relationship with developers? “Making APIs like these available to all of us would go a long way towards that,” he said. Twitter doesn’t have to bend over backwards to mend its developer relationship — it just has to remove some of the discrepancies between the tools available to its internal developers and those available to third parties. Whether or not that happens is up to Dorsey.

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‘YouTube Red’ is Google’s master plan to take on rival media subscriptions fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

After months of speculation, YouTube has announced today that it is indeed launching yet another monthly subscription service called YouTube Red.

The service will run $9.99 per month and allow you to access regular YouTube videos ad-free, while also providing some premium content produced by creators well-known to the YouTube audience such as PewDiePie. Additionally, your $10 per month will also give you access to YouTube Kids, YouTube Music Key, Google Play Music, and Twitch rival YouTube Gaming. YouTube will also give subscribers premium features such as the ability to save videos for offline viewing.

So, it’s a decent enough value, provided you watch a lot of YouTube content regularly.

The combination of streaming music and premium video is likely to attract at lease some degree of attention from younger consumers, as well as those that really don’t like ads. I think YouTube is also going in the right direction by attempting to differentiate itself from the other major players in streaming video, specifically Netflix and Hulu. And if YouTube Red does take off, my guess is that it wouldn’t be that difficult for Google to negotiate more premium TV content to give those other services a run for their money.

The new YouTube Red service is set to debut Oct. 26.

h/t Engadget

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