Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Begin: WordPress Article Content Chatbots could replace 1-800 numbers, and Facebook wants them on Messenger. But most businesses don’t have the resources or technical skills to build chatbots themselves. That’s why Facebook is currently providing developers with API tools to build chatbots and Live Chat web plug-ins for business clients, according to multiple sources and a leaked…
Remember ChatRoulette? You’d log on, click through webcam feeds of obese men having sex with fruit, and walk away feeling like you’d finally made a human connection. Just take away the anonymity, the second camera, the sense of fate, and the fruit intercourse (for now) and you get Facebook Live’s new map—a digital panopticon fueled…
Tl;dr; Facebook still owns social, but other networks show promise With all the buzz around publishers rapidly diversifying their content distribution across social networks, we wanted to see how the top social networks are actually performing. We analyzed social engagement for 68,581 top articles across 7 major media companies. Like most modern publications, each…
Facebook wants big media companies like BuzzFeed and the New York Times to use its new livestreaming video service. So it’s paying them to do it. In recent weeks Facebook has been pushing influential media properties and celebrities to use its Facebook Live product, which makes it easy to stream live video from your phone….
On Mar. 31, Nintendo’s first mobile app, a strange question-and-answer social network called Miitomo, launched in the US. It’s been available in Japan for a few weeks, and according to Nintendo, it was downloaded over 1 million times in the first three days there. Nintendo, which pretty much single-handedly created the portable video-game industry with…
Miitomo offers a disquieting prophecy of social networking’s future, one in which we largely cede the actual labor of interacting with other people to the networks themselves.Nintendo On Sunday, a new co-worker wearing a pair of cat ears dropped by to say hello. I would have liked to offer her a drink, but I…
In 2013, the lyric-explanation website Rap Genius rebranded simply as “Genius,” and announced that it would try to annotate not only songs, but poems, essays, and news articles. Three years later, the startup has become a flash point in the panicked and disingenuous hustle to scrub the internet of unkindness, which has since gotten confused…
Sharing items on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Weibo can affect how well a user understands what they read, according to a new study. The finding comes after researchers from Peking University and Cornell University carried out a study on users of Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging site which is similar to Twitter. Two…
paging_filter Annotation start-up Genius made it easier on Monday to report abusive comments on the platform on Monday, following criticism from Massachusetts congresswoman Katherine Clark. Clark, a Democrat who has campaigned against online harassment, sent a letter to Genius on Monday asking the company to respond to concerns about online harassment. “Now that your platform…
By now you’ve probably heard the story of Tay, Microsoft’s social AI experiment that went from “friendly millennial girl” to genocidal misogynist in less than a day. While Tay promised to learn from her interactions with people online, Microsoft apparently hasn’t learned anything from the countless headlines about how Twitter users like to talk to…