Tech Roundup: Facebook "Buy" Button, OkCupid & More
[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]
Facebook err... Instagram releases a new messaging app Bolt:
Facebook-owned photo-sharing social network Instagram unveiled Bolt on Tuesday, a new messaging app that lets users share photos and videos that disappear once they have been read (or watched). This might be Instagram's answer to Snapchat, but it's worth noting that Facebook too released a similar app Slingshot not long back to rival the popular ephemeral messaging app. The only difference with Bolt is that you don't even need a Facebook or Instagram account to use it. Instead, it requires just your mobile number to sign up like WhatsApp, Viber and other instant messaging apps. The market for ephemeral messaging has caught on big time ever since last year's NSA revelations and for a change it's a good thing. But what I cannot fathom is Facebook's obsession with too many messaging apps. Hope there's something to fix the deluge of these apps.
OkCupid brags about experimenting on human users:
Facebook's tinkering of 700,000 users' news feeds to elicit an emotional response showed the social network to be capable and powerful enough to influence human emotions (which needs to be addressed no doubt), but it also made us confront the queasy fact that most web companies perform a lot of similar experiments for testing and other purposes, and that Facebook had been at least forthcoming about it. The main problem of the study centred around the aspect of informed consent, but as Farhad Manjoo writes in this New York Times article, obtaining express consent would make it possible to experiment only on users who have agreed to it and may thus mess up the results. The randomness, which is crucial to studies such as these, is lost. Facebook, however, is not alone in this regard.
Online dating website OkCupid has not only took the social network's side on the issue but also proudly announced that it had been conducting several experiments on human users. In a blog post titled "We Experiment on Human Beings!", the site's co-founder Christian Rudder writes about three different experiments, stating "if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work." The studies found that people engaged in deeper conversations when their profile pictures were removed (blind dates as Rudder puts), that people "just look at the picture" (depending on their level of attractiveness), and that a mere algorithmic suggestion that two people have high compatibility was enough to actually like each other, even if pairs of bad matches (algorithmically of course) were falsely told to be "exceptionally good for each other". If Facebook played with emotions, OkCupid played with love.
Facebook aims for your credit card through "Buy" button:
Controlling your impulse buying is going to get hard, real hard. As if Amazon is not making this easier enough through its 1-Click Ordering, social network Facebook is planning to take this to a whole new level with a "Buy" button to allow users purchase products directly from ads and posts on their news feeds. This latest feature is said to be in testing phase currently, but it's pretty evident that Facebook is trying as much to get your credit (or debit) card numbers in the process and make users not leave its app/website even for making online purchases. Furthermore in high-growth markets like India, it is also testing a new type of ad that builds on the missed call behaviour. When a person places a missed call - dialling a number and hanging up before the person on the other end gets to answer - by clicking an ad containing the "Missed Call" button (similar to the "Buy" button), he "receives valuable content, such as music, cricket scores or celebrity messages, alongside a brand message from the advertiser", according to a blog post.
With 1.32 billion users worldwide and them spending on average 40 minutes a day on Facebook, it remains to be seen if these enhanced advertising strategies will pay off. For it is primarily a place for social interactions and not for buying products. And users can put up with only so many ads on their news feeds (especially on mobile). Meanwhile, Amazon hasn't been sitting quiet either. It recently teamed up with Twitter to let Tweeples add any product to their shopping cart by replying to a tweet containing an Amazon product link with "#AmazonCart".
Microsoft's sweeping jobs cuts is much more than 18,000:
Redmond-based tech giant Microsoft recently announced the largest layoff in company's history, with plans to cut down 18,000 jobs off its employment roll. Though 12,500 of these jobs are related to its purchase of Nokia's handset business this year, what has now emerged is that the cuts extend to contractual workers too. According to an internal memo obtained by Geekwire, contingent workers ("v-dash workers" in Microsoft parlance) "will be prevented from accessing Microsoft’s buildings and network for a period of six months after every 18-month period in which they perform work for the company." The report further adds, "although the contingent workers could technically continue working on projects during the break, the lack of access to buildings and the network would make that impractical in many cases — effectively imposing a six-month break across the board for Microsoft’s contingent workforce."
OnePlus, Motorola, Xiaomi and the rise of affordable smartphones:
For every iPhone 5S, Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8, Sony Xperia Z2 and LG G3 that's out there, there's now a Motorola Moto X/G/E, OnePlus One and Xiaomi Mi 3/Mi 4, all offering compelling specs - both in terms of hardware and software - at an affordable price point. In fact when Xiaomi Mi 3 (priced at Rs. 13,999) launched exclusively via Flipkart on July 22, the demand was so much that the website crashed and the phone went out of stock in a matter of 40 minutes. Even more shockingly, the second batch of phones got sold out yesterday in, wait for it, five seconds. This is what Hugo Barra, Xiaomi's Vice President, tweeted:
In other news:
Facebook err... Instagram releases a new messaging app Bolt:
Facebook-owned photo-sharing social network Instagram unveiled Bolt on Tuesday, a new messaging app that lets users share photos and videos that disappear once they have been read (or watched). This might be Instagram's answer to Snapchat, but it's worth noting that Facebook too released a similar app Slingshot not long back to rival the popular ephemeral messaging app. The only difference with Bolt is that you don't even need a Facebook or Instagram account to use it. Instead, it requires just your mobile number to sign up like WhatsApp, Viber and other instant messaging apps. The market for ephemeral messaging has caught on big time ever since last year's NSA revelations and for a change it's a good thing. But what I cannot fathom is Facebook's obsession with too many messaging apps. Hope there's something to fix the deluge of these apps.
 |
| Present instant messaging app situation! (XKCD) |
Facebook's tinkering of 700,000 users' news feeds to elicit an emotional response showed the social network to be capable and powerful enough to influence human emotions (which needs to be addressed no doubt), but it also made us confront the queasy fact that most web companies perform a lot of similar experiments for testing and other purposes, and that Facebook had been at least forthcoming about it. The main problem of the study centred around the aspect of informed consent, but as Farhad Manjoo writes in this New York Times article, obtaining express consent would make it possible to experiment only on users who have agreed to it and may thus mess up the results. The randomness, which is crucial to studies such as these, is lost. Facebook, however, is not alone in this regard.
Online dating website OkCupid has not only took the social network's side on the issue but also proudly announced that it had been conducting several experiments on human users. In a blog post titled "We Experiment on Human Beings!", the site's co-founder Christian Rudder writes about three different experiments, stating "if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work." The studies found that people engaged in deeper conversations when their profile pictures were removed (blind dates as Rudder puts), that people "just look at the picture" (depending on their level of attractiveness), and that a mere algorithmic suggestion that two people have high compatibility was enough to actually like each other, even if pairs of bad matches (algorithmically of course) were falsely told to be "exceptionally good for each other". If Facebook played with emotions, OkCupid played with love.
Facebook aims for your credit card through "Buy" button:
Controlling your impulse buying is going to get hard, real hard. As if Amazon is not making this easier enough through its 1-Click Ordering, social network Facebook is planning to take this to a whole new level with a "Buy" button to allow users purchase products directly from ads and posts on their news feeds. This latest feature is said to be in testing phase currently, but it's pretty evident that Facebook is trying as much to get your credit (or debit) card numbers in the process and make users not leave its app/website even for making online purchases. Furthermore in high-growth markets like India, it is also testing a new type of ad that builds on the missed call behaviour. When a person places a missed call - dialling a number and hanging up before the person on the other end gets to answer - by clicking an ad containing the "Missed Call" button (similar to the "Buy" button), he "receives valuable content, such as music, cricket scores or celebrity messages, alongside a brand message from the advertiser", according to a blog post.
With 1.32 billion users worldwide and them spending on average 40 minutes a day on Facebook, it remains to be seen if these enhanced advertising strategies will pay off. For it is primarily a place for social interactions and not for buying products. And users can put up with only so many ads on their news feeds (especially on mobile). Meanwhile, Amazon hasn't been sitting quiet either. It recently teamed up with Twitter to let Tweeples add any product to their shopping cart by replying to a tweet containing an Amazon product link with "#AmazonCart".
Microsoft's sweeping jobs cuts is much more than 18,000:
Redmond-based tech giant Microsoft recently announced the largest layoff in company's history, with plans to cut down 18,000 jobs off its employment roll. Though 12,500 of these jobs are related to its purchase of Nokia's handset business this year, what has now emerged is that the cuts extend to contractual workers too. According to an internal memo obtained by Geekwire, contingent workers ("v-dash workers" in Microsoft parlance) "will be prevented from accessing Microsoft’s buildings and network for a period of six months after every 18-month period in which they perform work for the company." The report further adds, "although the contingent workers could technically continue working on projects during the break, the lack of access to buildings and the network would make that impractical in many cases — effectively imposing a six-month break across the board for Microsoft’s contingent workforce."
OnePlus, Motorola, Xiaomi and the rise of affordable smartphones:
For every iPhone 5S, Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8, Sony Xperia Z2 and LG G3 that's out there, there's now a Motorola Moto X/G/E, OnePlus One and Xiaomi Mi 3/Mi 4, all offering compelling specs - both in terms of hardware and software - at an affordable price point. In fact when Xiaomi Mi 3 (priced at Rs. 13,999) launched exclusively via Flipkart on July 22, the demand was so much that the website crashed and the phone went out of stock in a matter of 40 minutes. Even more shockingly, the second batch of phones got sold out yesterday in, wait for it, five seconds. This is what Hugo Barra, Xiaomi's Vice President, tweeted:
Mi 3 flash sale in India today, gone in... 5 seconds on @Flipkart @MiIndiaOfficial #GoneIn5secs
— Hugo Barra (@hbarra) July 29, 2014
But it's not just Xiaomi which is making a splash in India's price conscious market. Motorola's latest handsets have been huge hits as well (There isn't a single day where I don't encounter a Moto X or G when I am either at work or going out for any occasion). These phones have redefined the term "affordable", bringing in great features that were previously reserved only for the flagships. As Mat Honan writes in his Wired piece, "(i)t's gotten easy to get blasé about high end flagships. The processors, cameras, screens, and, increasingly, the apps are all very, very good. We've reached the point of incremental improvements. They have parity. You basically know what's coming, year after year. But these cheap, fast, out of control handsets are something else entirely. Something new. Something different. Something we can't really predict. And that's really exciting." I completely agree!In other news:
- Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa claims 672 lives as first case is reported in Nigeria; National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at CDC calls it "a forest fire with sparks".
- Google to fix Chrome battery drain issue in Microsoft Windows after Forbes investigation.
- Amazon rolls out mobile payment service Amazon Wallet; stores only gift cards, loyalty cards and membership cards for now.
- Instant messaging app Line adds hidden chat feature that deletes messages from its servers after a certain period of time in latest push towards ephemeral messaging.
- Google has 'forgotten' more than 100,000 links from its European search results following European Court of Justice ruling.
- Android Wear gets its first keyboard, game, file manager and web browser!
- Google quarterly results show Google Play to be the second largest source of its revenues; Apple sells 35.2 million iPhones as iPad sales continue to decline.
- Facebook shares surge after yet another fantastic quarter - 62% of revenue now comes from mobile; boasts of 1.32 billion user base and 399 million mobile only users.
- China opens investigation into Microsoft's monopolistic behaviour over complaints from rival companies about compatibility issues with Windows and Office software.
- Google is reported to be working with its erstwhile subsidiary Motorola on a 5.9 inch Nexus phablet codenamed Shamu for launch later this year.
- Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart raises US $1 billion in fresh funding; Amazon announces an additional US $2 billion investment in the country "to think big, innovate, and raise the bar for customers in India."
- Apple granted iTime patent for a "wrist-worn electronic device" with built-in media player, sensors and support for arm and wrist gestures, fuelling further speculations of upcoming "iWatch" smartwatch.
- Google acquires Finnish GPU benchmarking startup drawElements for over US $10 million and said to be negotiating to purchase game live-streaming video platform Twitch for US $1 billion.
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