Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - AdWords No More

Episode Date: June 27, 2018

Google rebrands AdWords and demos Duplex for reporters, Twitter takes steps to fight spam and make your account more secure, Facebook wants to help you avoid spoilers and is Blackberry back with the Key2? Links:Google is retiring the AdWords & DoubleClick brands in a major rebranding aimed at simplification (Search Engine Land)Google opens its human-sounding Duplex AI to public testing (CNET)Google Duplex really works and testing begins this summer (The Verge)Facebook tests 30-day keyword snoozing to fight spoilers, triggers (TechCrunch)BlackBerry KEY2 review: One of the most unique phones around comes up short of awesome (Android Police) 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 TechMeme Right Home for Wednesday, June 27th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Google rebrands AdWords and Demos Duplex for Reporters.

Twitter takes steps to fight spam and make your account more secure. Facebook wants to help you avoid spoilers. And is Blackberry back with The Key 2? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So this is just a story of corporate rebranding. but if you're in a certain segment of the web game, this is really big news. All of Google's suite of advertising products

will now go under one of three new umbrellas. AdWords will now be known as Google Ads. The Double-Click for Advertisers product and Google Analytics will now be known as the Google Marketing Platform. And double-click for publishers, as well as the double-click ad exchange, will now go under the moniker Google Ad Manager. So AdWords, of course, are those text ads that you see when you do a search on Google.

They used to run along the side, but they've been integrated in the main search results for a while now. AdWords was Google's first major product nearly 18 years ago, the key innovation that turned on Google's Money Geyser for the first time and made Google into a juggernaut. Double-click is actually 22 years old. It was the first banner ad juggernaut back in the dot-com era. Google purchased DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion in cash, and DoubleClick basically put Google into the display advertising game. Again, this is nothing more than a rebranding,

but it's also Google simplifying its advertising offerings for advertisers and publishers. Sridhar Ramoswamy, Google's senior vice president of ads, said, quote, the underlying products aren't changing. This is primarily a name change, end quote. And in an interview with search apps, engine land. Ramaswami went on to say, quote, with Google Ads as opposed to Google AdWords, it's moving the imperceptible default opinion that you get as an advertiser when you hear Google AdWords, you think, oh, words, search. It's basically a slight cognitive dissonance

to all the other great things that we're doing in terms of both the format and surfaces these new ads can show. And so Google Ads, in our opinion, is a much more straightforward representation of what Google advertising can provide, end quote. As search engine land elegizes, quote, when it launched in 2000 with roughly 350 advertisers, AdWords was a platform for running text ads on desktop search. Fast forward 18 years, and AdWords has evolved into a platform that supports many different ad formats, text, shopping, display, video, app installs,

across search, YouTube, Gmail, maps, and a network of partner sites and apps. millions of advertisers spend billions on the platform annually. It's outgrown its name. In other Google News, the company said that its oddly controversial Duplex AI system is being opened to a small group of, quote, trusted testers, as well as businesses that have specifically opted in to receiving calls from Duplex. If you'll remember, Duplex was that G-Wiz Wow technology that Google demoed,

which showed in AI making a reservation over the phone. The person on the other end of the call seemingly had no idea they weren't speaking to an actual human. And that rubbed some people the wrong way as they were concerned about testing AI on people without their consent. Google says that over the coming weeks, the software will only be able to make calls to businesses to confirm business and holiday hours. July 4th is next week in the U.S., of course. but people will be able to begin booking restaurant and hair salon reservations later this summer. Google gave the media the opportunity to see Duplex in action by inviting them to a hummus shop in Mountain View, California, as well as a Thai restaurant in New York City. One notable change in the demos the reporters saw, Duplex began the calls by saying some version of,

Hi, I'm the Google Assistant, calling to make a reservation for a client. This automated call will be recorded. C-Nets Richard Nieva, who got to try out the demo, reports, quote, receiving a call from the Google Assistant is both eerie and reassuring. The flexibility of the software is impressive. On the one hand, it's unsettling to talk to the software because its intonations sounds so natural. But there are some pauses that are maybe just a millisecond too long, and that can throw the dynamic of the conversation off kilter.

Hearing a disclosure that says, this is the Google Assistant, is reassuring, though, your mind starts to process it as any other robocall once you've heard it, end quote. Google has actually apparently made the voice more lifelike, since apparently tests of a more robotic voice led to an increased number of hangups. So there are more of those pauses and ums and oz. Here's the verges, Dieter Bone, with his take on the experience, quote, part of making it sound natural enough to not trigger an oral sense of uncanny valley was

adding those ums and oz, which VP of engineering for the Google assistant Scott Huffman identified as speech disfluencies. He emphasized that they weren't there to trick anybody, but because those vocal tics, quote, play a key part in progressing a conversation between humans, end quote, he says it came from a well-known branch of linguistics called pragmatics, which encompasses all the non-word communications that happen in human speech, the ums, the ahs, the hand gestures, etc. quote, Google has invented a lot of things, Huffman said, but we did not invent ums and Oz. Twitter continues its efforts to clean up its platform. For the first time, Twitter will require confirmation of an email address or a phone number

if you want to sign up for a new account. Obviously, it's not that hard to get a throwaway email address, but it's long been too easy to set up a spammy Twitter account because basically all you had to do was sign up. Twitter is also using AI to actively take action on spamming accounts. Twitter says it has picked up 9.9 million potentially spam or automated accounts per week in May, up from just 3.2 million detected last September. Twitter is also reportedly reaching out to suspected accounts to offer them the chance to prove

that their spam classification is wrong. In a blog post, Twitter wrote, when we challenge an account follows originating from that account are hidden until the account owner passes that challenge. This does not mean accounts appearing to lose followers did anything wrong.

They were the targets of spam that we are now cleaning up. We've recently been taking more steps to clean up spam and automated activity and close the loopholes they exploited and are working to be more transparent about these kinds of actions. Our goal is to ensure that every account

created on Twitter has passed some simple automatic security checks designed to prevent automated signups. The new protections we've developed as a result of this audit have already helped us prevent more than 50,000 spammy signups per day, end quote. On Twitter itself, CEO Jack Dorsey wrote, We do not value fake engagement, taking bigger steps to improve, end quote. To which Daray Obasanjo responded, quote, Really nice to see Twitter investing in a meaningful way to address bots, trolls, and spammers.

Got to give credit where it's due for their reviewed folks. on this." Twitter also made the very welcome announcement that it has also added support for login verification through physical USB security keys such as UBiki. If you're not familiar with this type of two-factor authentication, it's basically the most secure login system you can reasonably expect to employ. As Maurice Turner tweeted, quote, every government and political campaign account needs two-factor authentication and should definitely consider a security key as that second factor.

Facebook is trying to make things better as well, in their case, by helping you avoid spoilers or triggers. Facebook has announced it is testing what it is calling keyword snooze, and it works like this. If you see a post in your news feed, you can hit the drop-down arrow on the post, which will now lead you to an option to snooze particular keywords in that post. You'll see a list of words, select the ones you want to not see, show up in posts for around 30 days, and BAMO. Post containing that word, will be hidden for a month. In a blog post announcing the feature,

Facebook described the use case this way. Quote, ever read a spoiler online before you've watched the last episode of the season, or maybe you waited years for a movie sequel only to have your favorite blogger reveal the ending? We've all been there. To prevent future heartache, we're beginning to test the next edition

to our suite of newsfeed controls. Keywords News. Located in a post's upper right-hand menu in the newsfeed, this feature gives people the option to temporarily hide posts by keywords, which are pulled directly from the text in that post. If you choose to snooze a keyword, you won't see posts in your newsfeed containing that exact word or phrase from any person, page, or group for 30 days. In other words, fewer spoilers, end quote. So a couple of caveats here. This test is beginning today, but only a small number of users will

see it because it's a test. And also, if someone posts something about something that I don't want to see, like, I don't know, the next England game, and I don't want to have the result of the match ruined for me. If I can only block the keyword England after I see it show up in a post, doesn't that kind of defeat the point? Because I've been spoiled at that point. According to TechCrunch's Josh Constine, quote,

when asked about that problem, a Facebook spokesperson told me the company is looking into adding a preemptive snooze option in the next few weeks, potentially in news feed preferences. It's also considering a recurring snooze lists so you could easily reenable hiding your favorite sports team before any game you'll have to watch on delay, end quote. The spokesperson also told Constine that this ability to snooze keywords was something that kept coming up when Facebook interviewed users about

which features they'd like to see. But why can't we mute keywords permanently, like Twitter allows us to do? The spokesperson said they'd consider that, but not yet. As Constine rightly notes, quote, when it comes to abuse, permanent muting is something Facebook really should offer. Instead, it's relied on users flagging abuse like racial slurs, and it recently revealed its content moderation guidelines. Some topics that are fine for others could be tough for certain people to see, though, and helping users prevent trauma probably deserves to be prioritized above stopping reality TV spoilers.

Speaking of Facebook and spoilers, we all know that when Facebook made algorithmic changes to its news feed. Spoiler alert, traffic to certain publishers cratered. For an on-the-ground perspective of what this really looked like, read Willa Ramis' piece in Slate that I've linked to in the show notes. TLDR, in January 2017, Slate got more than 85 million clicks that originated from other sites and apps, and about a third of those clicks came from Facebook. But then came the news feed change, and Slate's traffic from Facebook dropped a staggering 87%. So wherefore. Facebook once sent Slate 28 million visits a month, it only sent four million in May of 2018. Quoting from the piece, to put it another way for every five people that Facebook used to send to Slate about a year ago, it now sends less than one.

Every time Facebook traffic would go down, we'd think, okay, maybe this is the low point, said Slate's editor-in-chief Julia Turner, and then it would go down further. Turner declined to estimate the precise amount of advertising revenue slate has lost as a result of the nosedive, though she does acknowledge that, quote, the drop in traffic does come with a financial hit. A rough back of the envelope calculation using prevailing ad rates and ad loads, that is, the number of ads a reader sees when she visits a site, suggests that a loss of 15 million visits per month could mean something on the order of 1 million per year in revenue, which in a newsroom might equal a dozen or more journalists' salaries. Slate laid off five editorial staffers in early 2017, but the company told me those were unrelated to Facebook traffic. It has not announced any staff cuts since, end quote. Aramis says that Slate might have been able to actually weather the crash in Facebook traffic better than some other publications since it has never gone all in on its reliance on referral traffic. Slate has its Slate Plus membership program, which apparently makes up 25% of Slate's revenue. And of course, there are all those Slate podcasts.

And apparently over the last few months, Slate has seen an uptick in referral traffic from Google, Apple News, Twitter, and Flipboard, which might be making up for some of the lost traffic from Facebook. And many publishers have been reporting over the last several months in uptick in direct traffic to their home pages, which suggests people still want to get their content from specific places. It was just that for a couple of years there,

it was easier to get to those destinations via Facebook. As Slate's Julia Turner said, quote, The Internet is a completely different place every 18 months, and that's been true since we launched in 1996. We never expected the Facebook boom to last forever, end quote. P.S. a shameless plug here. I had Julia Turner and Jacob Weisberg on for a great episode of the Internet History podcast around the 20th anniversary of Slate.

Check that out. Well, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, if you still long for a hardword keyboard on your smartphone, the Blackberry Key 2 is your last best hope. And today, the reviews are in. The general consensus seems to be that the key 2 has an excellent battery life, good security-focused apps, but with a lower-end chip set than some competitors and unimpressive cameras. The key 2, as Android Police says, comes up just short of awesome. So let's go around the horn, starting with the verge. Stefan Etienne says,

Having a hardware keyboard requires compromises in key areas, namely the display. It forces the key two to have a small, squarish screen that is the exact opposite of the massive displays on every other phone. The BlackBerry Key Two tries and fails to get around these issues with gestures that aren't useful, end quote. In the aforementioned Android police, Stephen Schenek says, The Key 2 is a decent upgrade over the Key 1 and delivers a handful of well-appreciated improvements. But it's also held back in many of the same ways, encumbered by design, software, and key decisions that do nothing to make the key to as attractive as it could be to shoppers. There's one person in a crowd for whom the key two just might be the perfect phone,

but the rest of us should keep looking, end quote. And in Mashable, Raymond Wong said, The key two is a great phone. I like its different design, its keyboard, its shortcuts, and even many of the BlackBerry software features. Privacy shade is so great to keep your phone's content from prying eyes on the subway. But as good as the phone is, certainly much better than the key one. Its biggest challenge is convincing people to care about the keyboard.

And that's a very hard sell. So at the time of this recording, it's back, at least for me, but you might have been aware that Slack was down for most of us this morning. Everyone was left to their own devices and pretty much seemed to content themselves with World Cup watching and tweeting. But for a while, as many people said on Twitter, you did sort of wonder if Slack never came back. Maybe we could just all go home and maybe shut down the entire media and tech industries forever. And maybe that would be a good thing. Alas, since Slack is back, I guess I'll be talking to you again tomorrow.

See you then.