Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
“Alexa, I’m depressed.” “Alexa, I’m being abused.” “Alexa, I’m considering suicide.” When Amazon introduced Alexa in 2014, it quickly discovered that users wanted more than traffic reports and Taylor Swift songs. According to the company, more than 50% of interactions with Alexa are “nonutilitarian and entertainment related,” a category that includes professions of love for…
Begin: WordPress Article Content While Facebook prepares to offer readers a way to subscribe and pay for news directly from inside its app, the social network continues to tinker with how it presents publishers’ content elsewhere. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook has removed Instant Articles — Facebook’s self-hosted, faster-loading article format for…
Facebook seems to think it can advertise to more U.S. millennials than actually exist Image: Stephen Lam/Getty Images By Patrick Kulp2017-09-06 18:06:25 UTC Facebook is promising advertisers that it can reach 25 million more American millennials than the Census believes to exist. The social network boasts that ads on its platform will be seen by…
Everything old, or not really that old, is new again in Silicon Valley. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, Google is working on its answer to Snapchat. It’s called Stamp — a portmanteau of “stories” and “AMP,” the acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google’s quick-loading web articles — and you could…
Even though she’s been wiped clean from the web, I still found Nicole Mincey. The Nicole Mincey who was personally thanked by President Trump on Twitter over the weekend. The one everyone thinks is a bot. She’s a real person—with a slightly different name—living in Newark, New Jersey. The online phone number listed for the…
react-text: 248 On Saturday, at /react-text react-text: 249 a Charlottesville rally populated by alt-right activists and white supremacists, a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring 19 and /react-text react-text: 251 killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer /react-text react-text: 252 . The man arrested in connection with the murder, James Alex Fields, Jr., had previously /react-text…
An image being shared online that people are claiming shows a black police officer guarding Saturday’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was actually posted in July. Tim Hogan, who worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and is now the national press secretary for a Washington, DC, nonprofit, also shared the image on Saturday with…
Our own Napier Lopez spotted an odd change in Google’s search service on Android today: search results don’t include URLs like they used to. Instead, they only display the page’s title, a thumbnail of a featured image from the site, and a blurb. It isn’t clear if Google is merely running a test or gradually…
“Meh. There’s always Death to look forward to,” my dad would say whenever I would air my frustrations with a world that was at odds with the one I had conjured in my mind. Though I found his blatant disregard for my artful misery frustrating in my youth, I later found myself boomeranging the exact…
If there’s any brand that knows Facebook, it’s NowThis. In January 2015, the digital video news publisher for millennials shut down its site and became a distributed publisher, and it quickly became one of the most-watched news publishers on Facebook, with its video-with-text-overlay style widely copied. But growth has its limits on Facebook, which has its…