Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/21 - Instagram Fighting #hashtagoverload

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

More fallout from that monster Alexa event yesterday, Facebook is gonna take another swing at Portal, Instagram wants to cut down on #hashtagoverload, Gmail was too willing to say “I love you,” and the Weekend Longreads Suggestions.Sponsors:Ude.my/techTiny.websiteLinks:AMAZON WANTS ALEXA TO HEAR YOUR WHISPERS AND FRUSTRATION (Wired)Amazon just pulled an Apple on the smart home (Stacey on IOT newsletter)Facebook's 'Portal' Video Chat Device to Be Announced Next Week (Cheddar)Instagram may divide hashtags from captions to end overhashing (TechCrunch)Instagram is testing a native resharing feature for the feed (The Verge)Is This Article Worth Reading? Gmail’s Suggested Reply: ‘Haha, Thanks!’ (WSJ)The Betterment Weekend Longreads:Inside Facebook’s Election ‘War Room’ (NYTimes)Bitcoin Miners Flock to New York’s Remote Corners, but Get Chilly Reception (NYTimes)Living The Stream (ESPN The Magazine)A brief history of the numeric keypad (UX Collective)Inside the Dramatic, Painful--and Hugely Successful--Return of Reddit's Founders (Inc)Buy The History of Reddit Book Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Friday, September 21st, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, more fallout from that Monster Alexa event yesterday.

Facebook is going to take another swing at Portal. Instagram is looking to cut down on hashtag overload. Gmail was too willing to say, I love you, and the weekend Long Reads suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So I don't know if you got the sense yesterday, but that Amazon event really kind of took us all by surprise a bit. It was like yesterday morning.

Okay, Amazon event, they'll probably announce refreshed echo speakers, no big deal. But then, I mean, that was an event. So many products, like five product launch events all in one. So essentially yesterday I was giving you the hardware announcements, but there are lots of little details here still trickling out, especially on the software side. So let's round up a few of them and see. if we can see what it all means.

First, Amazon introduced Alexa presentation language, or APL, a design language for building Alexa skills for devices with screens. So devs, you can now get busy not only with the Echo Show, but other Alexa enabled screen devices like Fire TV, Fire Tablet, etc. And not only that, any third party devices with screens can use APL through the Alexa Smart Screen and TV device SDK, which is apparently coming in a few months.

This is also potentially a big deal, but we'll have to wait and see because in practice, you know, when Apple or somebody announces something like this, it tends not to work out in real life the way they demo it. But Amazon also announced what it is calling Wi-Fi Simple Setup to automatically share your home wireless network credentials with compatible smart home devices. See, Amazon is smart enough to know that if it really does want you to fill your home up with dozens of smart gadgets, then they want to help you avoid the password hell that you would have to go through not only when setting them all up, but every time one of them flaked out. Like forget charging out light bulbs every so often or batteries on smoke alarms every few months. Imagine having to get 18 different smart gadgets re-recognized on your network

every time the Wi-Fi went down. I had this yesterday too, but cut it for time. Alexa is getting a lot of new stuff around context. Quote, we're going beyond recognizing words. Rohit Prasad, the vice president who heads work on the artificial intelligence inside Alexa, told, Wired, in essence, you can now whisper to Alexa and she'll whisper back. The company demoed a command like Alexa, play a lullaby, which you can even say at a whisper, and Alexa will comply at an appropriately soft volume.

This was announced along with new additions to the free time for kids program on Alexa, which now includes routines. If you set it up within the Alexa app, if you say something like, Alexa, it's bedtime. You could have a whole chain of events set in motion like turning off the lights, then lowering the shades, then playing soft music. This is part and parcel of what Amazon is calling Alexa hunches. In essence, Alexa is going to start looking for cues and clues in your behavior over time and then use those to make suggestions based on past experience and its own intuitions. Here's how TechCrunch described it. For instance, a user might say, good night, Alexa, or,

Alexa set an alarm, and Alexa, which has heard these commands daily, will tap into all that behavioral data and follow a hunch. Alexa might respond with something like, hey, I think you left the porch light on. Would you like me to turn it off? This Alexa hunch's behavior is still being tested in the lab, but could roll out later this year. No, I did want to point out, as Stacey Higginbotham pointed out in her Internet of Things newsletter, If you don't get that sort of helpful suggestion thing exactly right, it can go pretty annoying, pretty fast. Just ask Microsoft, quote,

I do wonder if Alexis hunches could become the clippy of the smart home, end quote. Speaking of smart devices with screens to put in your home, remember how Facebook was reportedly going to release something called Portal, which was a video chat device. hardware for your home that would even recognize who you were when you were walking into a room and tailor its content to you. But then they decided to shelve it for later after the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit, and people were all like, shall we say, not sure they could trust Facebook with their private lives anymore. Well, Cheddar is reporting that Facebook is finally going to announce these devices next week.

They'll come in two screen sizes, retail for around $400 and $300, and we'll. will have Alexa support. This little nugget from the cheddar piece is interesting. Quote, portal will feature a privacy shutter that can cover the device's wide-angle video camera, which uses artificial intelligence to recognize people in the frame and follow them as they move throughout a room. The shutter was recently developed in response to worsening public trust in the Facebook brand,

and effect, employees internally refer to as the brand tax, end quote. Yeah, so I'm going to let me. the snarkerati, take it from here. Good old Yoda, Drew Olenoff tweeted, If you buy one of these, I'm questioning your sanity. Lee Drogan tweeted, you want me to put a Facebook video device in my home? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. And then there was Jason Clint who tweeted, quote, D-O-A. I really don't think the Valley or the company or the press

fully grasp the decline in trust for this brand. They should white label the product with a brand people trust more, like, say, Equifax. There apparently are a whole ton of tweaks that are possibly coming to Instagram. Instagram is testing a way for users to reshare posts from other accounts on their own feeds. Quoting Casey Newton on this, the feature which company executives have long resisted for fear it would corrupt the personal nature of the app could bring new life to the main feed at a time when it is becoming rapidly eclipsed by ephemeral stories. But if resharing is rolled out to the entire user base, it could also invite in fake news,

influence campaigns, and other negative consequences that Instagram parent Facebook has been working to address since the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, end quote. Hey, as the previous segment pointed out, even if Facebook knows how to take the temperature of public opinion, that still doesn't mean they'll ever give a damn, especially when they want to go ahead and do a thing anyway. Also, Josh Constine is reporting that Instagram may also divide hashtags from captions in an effort to curb over sharing. The feature is still being tested, but in essence, it would be a hashtag selector. quote, disambiguating hashtags from captions could make adding them to posts less invasive and distracting and thereby get more users doing it. That could, in turn, help Instagram tune its feed algorithm to show you more posts with hashtags you seem to care about, get more users following hashtags and allow it to better sort the explore page with its new topic channels like sports, beauty, and shopping.

But perhaps more importantly, it could just make Instagram less annoying. Everyone has that friend that slaps on so many hashtags that their captions become an incoherent mess, end quote. Constine notes that Instagram is also testing like crazy, including geofenced posts, if you want your posts to only reach specific areas, stories, stickers, quiz stickers, and the recently confirmed editions of gifs, indirect messages, and video tagging. Speaking of new features, if you're a regular Gmail user, you might have seen an increasingly prominent. feature called smart replies. Gmail scans your email and then when it's time to respond thinks of what your response might be if it doesn't require more than a say, cool, see you there or something short and spiffy like that. And then it suggests those as quick responses. Quick responses have been

rolled out at this point to all 1.4 billion Gmail accounts and Google claims that they now account for 10% of all Gmail responses. The Wall Street Journal, looks at how the feature uses artificial intelligence and an ever-growing library of responses that Google has identified by analyzing billions of messages. Two funny anecdotes from the early testing. The algorithm kept trying to identify the phrase sent from my iPhone as a popular response in emails. And the system had a bad habit of responding, I love you, more often than it should have. Both prompted algorithm tweaks, of course, because you don't want to respond to your boss I love you, even if you do.

But the smart replies feature has proven annoying and controversial to some, so Google will soon give desktop users the option to turn off smart replies in the coming weeks. If you use the Gmail app on your phone, you already have the ability to turn the feature off. But frankly, I think that they're actually pretty useful for the type of messages where one or two words are sufficient. And if the algorithm does get it wrong, or if the tone of the suggested response, off, you can always just, you know, ignore them. Finally, today, these are the weekend long reads brought to you by Betterment, the largest independent online financial advisor.

Check them out if you haven't done so. The word better is in the name. Sometimes life leaves you funny little clues like that. Better investment. Betterment. You get it. First up, Facebook swears up and down that it is pulling out all the stops to make sure the upcoming midterm elections don't get messed with on their platforms. So the New York Times takes a peek

inside the so-called election war room at Facebook to see what steps they're actually taking. Quote, although it is not much to look at now, as of next week, the space will be Facebook's headquarters for safeguarding elections. More than 300 people across the company are working on the initiative, but the war room will house a team of about 20 focused on rooting out disinformation, monitoring false news and deleting fake accounts that may be trying to influence voters before elections in the United States, Brazil, and other countries, end quote. Facebook's Samid Chakhtra-Bardi calls it the biggest company-wide reorientation since the shift from desktops to focusing on mobile. Also from the New York Times, and there's been a couple

of these. I might have even posted one of these before. But here's another look at the Bitcoin miners that are flocking to rural areas that happen to have cheap electricity for one accidental reason of geography or history or another. In this case, a remote corner of New York State. It's an interesting story of old industry versus new, coastal versus rural, tech versus tradition. Quote, Messina, New York, the hulking aluminum plant in this northern border town

is starting to spew heat and noise again four years after Alcoa shut it down. But now the hot hum comes from thousands of Chinese computers, servers whirring away 24 hours a day for a very modern purpose, producing bitcoins and other digital currencies. The crackerjack size machines stacked inside rusty cargo containers are powered by the same cheap source of electricity once used to extract aluminum from ore. They represent the first stage of an obscure company's plan to convert the 60-year-old smelting works into the world's biggest cryptocurrency mine, end quote. And I think I've posted a couple times profiles of

e-gamerers as well, but ESPN, the magazine, has a lengthy profile up of Tyler Ninja Blevins. Perhaps e-gaming's first true breakout crossover star, the Tony Hawk of the Fortnite crowd, if you will. This is the dude that played Drake on Fortnite on Twitch back in March. Quote, every day, people tune in by the hundreds of thousands to watch him play, and he's making bank doing it. The most commonly reported figure is $500,000 a month. Blevins suggests the number is closer to seven figures. Off subscriptions alone, Blevins makes an estimated $300,000 a month. That's not factoring in his sponsorships, which include Samsung, Red Bull, and Uber Eats,

or the revenue from YouTube, Instagram, and other sites, end quote. And I've been saving this one for you design nerds out there, a brief history of the numeric keypad. Quote, picture the keypad of a telephone and calculator side by side. Can you see the subtle difference between the two without resorting to your smartphone? Don't worry if you can't recall the design. Most of us are so used to accepting the common interfaces that we tend to overlook the calculator's inverted key sequence. A calculator has the 7-8-9 buttons at the top, whereas the phone uses the 123 format.

Subtle, but puzzling, since they serve the same functional goal, input numbers. There's no logical reason for the inversion. if a user operates the interface in the same way. Common sense suggests the reason should be technological constraints. Maybe it's due to a patent battle between the inventors. Some people may theorize its ergonomics, end quote. Well, this piece tries to give you an answer. If, like me, you geek out on stories like why we're stuck with QWERTY keyboards,

due to old holdover decisions from typewriter days, then this story is right up your alley. And finally, a book excerpt and a long read. suggestion combo. Christine Legario Chaffkin has a new book coming out called We Are the Nerds, the Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory. The book tells the story of Reddit, and Inc. Magazine has a great excerpt from the book that makes for a cool long read, so I've got a link to that.

But if you wanted to give the book a try, I've also linked to the book. It's an Amazon affiliate link. So if you read the article and decide to go for the book, click through on the list. link in the show notes and the pod will get a couple shekels. That's all for the weekend long reads brought to by Betterment. Investment involves risk, of course, but TechMeme ride home listeners can get up to one year of their investment money managed for free. Just go to betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash ride. Betterment. Outsmart average. That's all for today, everybody. As always, it's Friday, so the weekend music is playing.

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