Facebook is constantly changing its policy after its data is leaked. Now the company has made a major change to the users. Indeed, it is now difficult to find a friend on Facebook. The first users searched for someone's mobile number were searched. Now the company has stopped this feature.
Users will no longer be able to find anyone with a mobile number. Indeed, because of some profile of the same name, people were searching their friends on Facebook from mobile number. But this feature was misused. Some unknown people searched for people on Facebook using their mobile number and searched for their information. So the company has stopped this feature now.
Apart from this, Facebook has tightened the Third Party App's rules. No third party app can now collect information about Facebook users' wedding, religion, views and offices. Facebook has given this information in its blog post. In another blog post, Facebook said that now users themselves will decide whether they will see or not see anything. The blog said that Facebook will not share user information with any advertiser companies. Facebook's advertising policies have a broad knowledge that we have decided to show users some advertisements. He told the area how we share our services, infrastructure and information.
All apps will have to seek approval from Facebook for receiving
information such as post, photo, video, like, check-in, event and group
of users. Facebook
's CTO said that we started applying this kind of approval to the apps
in 2014, but any app will have to pass through strict provisions to get
approval from Facebook to access these statistics.
Imagine if you could capitalize on the explosive growth of cryptocurrencies and the power of virtual reality in one investment. Would that be something you’d be interested in? I sure am. That’s why I am buying up all the Voxels I can get, which is currently trading at $.23. Believe me when I say that Voxel will be the OFFICIAL currency of virtual reality. This cryptocurrency has been created by Voxelus, a leading virtual reality world builder and marketplace, AND it’s compatible with Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR. As of today, Voxelus is the world’s largest source of virtual reality content, with more than 500 unique assets, 50 working games, and 7,000 additional pieces of content through their partnerships. I can confidently say that in 2020 Voxels could be trading at $1.50 a coin because the team is lead by legendary entrepreneur Halsey Minor,
have strategic partnerships, an upcoming release of their first
standalone game, and several other drivers of growth that I will outline
below.
Basics:
Voxelus is a platform that allows anyone, anywhere to create and play VR games without needing to write a single line of code
The platform consists of the Voxelus Creator, a 3D design app for PC and Mac; Voxelus Viewer, which works on desktop PCs, Oculus Rift, and Samsung VR devices; Voxelus Marketplace, which allows creators to sell and user to buy VR content and games for the Voxelus ecosystem
The only form of payment within this ecosystem is Voxel, the in-game cryptocurrency
Ticker: VOX Price: $.23 Ranking by Market Cap: 70 Market Capitalization: $47,036,640 Circulating Supply: 210,000,000 VOX Max Supply: 210,000,000 VOX Average Trading Volume: $8,316,144 Consensus: PoW
Team:
The Voxels team is lead by no other legendary entrepreneur than Halsey Minor. Mr. Minor was the founder of CNET, co-founder of Google Voice, Salesforce.com, OpenDNS, Uphold, and Rhapsody.
The development team is led by Argentinean software industry veteran Martin Repetto.
Mr. Repetto previously created, Atmosphir, a video game creation tool
that was the runner up on the TechCrunch 50 in 2008. He was also the CEO
of Minor Studios.
The business development and marketing teams are based in Los Angeles. The development and operations teams are located in Rosario, close to Buenos Aires, Argentina
As of 2016, the Voxels team has 10 individuals working on this project full time
Drivers of Growth:
Simply put, the team. Mr. Minor is arguably the most impressive and seasoned leader I have ever come across in the cryptocurrency space. He will squeeze every ounce of value out of this project
The Voxels team is on the verge of launching their first standalone game,
Xtraction Royale. The game will be compatible with Oculus Rift, HTC
Vive, and Steam VR. These are all large VR platforms with a good portion
of the total VR market share
Voxels has engaged in a recent partnership with Flatpyramid.com, which will give Voxels users access to 7,000 digital assets like animated characters and environments
The team established the Voxel Foundation
to help expand Voxel’s ecosystem to a variety of network games, VR
platforms, and various entertainment outlets. The team has dedicated $5 Million Voxel towards this effort, with the option to add an additional $10 million
The team is currently undergoing a rebranding effort that should help boost their market exposure and increase public awareness. They have also alluded to introducing a newly formed partnership once the rebranding has been completed
Voxel has multi-platform wallets for MAC, PC, and Linux
It has been estimated that the market value for VR in 2020 will exceed $40 billion and Voxels will be at the epicenter of that explosive growth. Current market value for VR is about $6 billion
Headwinds:
Both
VR and cryptocurrency are very young, evolving types of technology, so
there will be lots of growing pains as a result. However, this team is
lead by arguably the best leader which will help them navigate through
the turbulent times
Since regulation will always trail innovation, the digital currency space can be subject to new regulations in the future
As
of now, Voxels’s growth has happened purely through word of mouth.
There has currently been no marketing dollars spent on this project
Summary:
Since this project is so unique
we will have to do a little math and make some assumptions to get our
price target. The current market value for VR is about $6 billion and
the price of Voxels is:
As I previously mentioned, it is estimated that the market value for VR will reach $40 billion by 2020. So, if you apply the same growth rate to Voxel’s current price, it would be valued at about $1.50 a coin in
2020. However, this is assuming that Voxels market share stays the same
into 2020, but I will promise you it will only grow from here.
For many, it’s difficult to imagine life before smartphones.
At the same time, it’s hard to believe that the original Apple iPhone, considered a genuine unicorn at the time thanks to its superior experience and stunning, rainbow-worthy display, released over 10 years ago.
Even though the iPhone is older than most grade school students, some of its capabilities remain a mystery to the masses.
Sure, we all hear about the latest, greatest features, but what about those lingering in the background just waiting to be discovered?
Getting your hands wrapped around those capabilities is what separates you, a soon-to-be power user, from those who haven’t truly unleashed its full potential.
So, what are you waiting for? Release that unicorn and let it run free like the productivity powerhouse it was always meant to be.
Here are 9 ways to get started.
1. Get Back Your Closed Tabs
We’ve all done it. While moving between tabs or screens, our fingers tap the little “x” and close an important browser tab.
With the iPhone, all is not lost. You can get that epic unicorn meme back from oblivion!
The included Safari browser makes recovering a recently closed tab a breeze. Learn more about the process here: Reopen Tabs
2. Smarter Photo Searching
Searching through photos hasn’t always been the most intuitive process…until now.
Before, you had to rely on labels and categories to support search functions. But now, thanks to new machine learning supported features, the photos app is more powerful than ever.
The iPhone has the ability to recognize thousands of objects, regardless of whether you’ve identified them. That means you can search using keywords to find images with specific items or those featuring a particular person.
Just put the keyword in the search box and let the app do the hard part for you.
3. Find Out Who’s Calling
Sometimes, you can’t simply look at your iPhone’s screen to see who’s calling. Maybe you are across the room, are driving down the road, or have the phone safely secured while jogging.
Regardless of the reason, just grabbing it quickly isn’t an option. But that doesn’t mean you want to sprint across the room, pull your car over, or stop your workout just to find out it’s a robo-dial.
Luckily, you can avoid this conundrum by setting up Siri to announce who’s calling. Then you’ll always know if you actually want to stop what you’re doing to answer before you break away from the task at hand.
In the business world, fine print is the donkey we all face on a regular basis. You can’t sign up for a service or look over a contract without facing some very small font sizes.
Thanks to the iPhone, you don’t have to strain your eyes (and likely give yourself a headache) to see everything you need to see when faced with fine print on paper. Just open the Magnifier, and your camera is now a magnifying glass.
Yes, notifications can be great. They let you know what’s happening without having to open every app individually.
But, if you haven’t tended to your iPhone for a while, they can also pile up quick. And who has the time to handle a huge listed of notifications one at a time?
iPhone’s that featured 3D Touch (iPhone 6S or newer) actually have the ability to let you clean all of your notifications at once.
Clear out here screen by following the instructions here: Clear Notifications
6. Close Every Safari Tab Simultaneously
iPhones running iOS 10 can support an “unlimited” number of Safari tabs at once. While this is great if you like keeping a lot of sites open, it can also get out of hand really quickly if you don’t formally close the ones you don’t need.
If you have more tabs open than stars in the sky, you can set yourself free and close them all at once.
To take advantage of this virtual reset, see the instructions here: Close All Safari Tabs
7. Request Desktop Site
While mobile sites are handy for the optimized experience, they can also be very limiting. Not every mobile version has the features you need to get things done, but requesting the desktop version wasn’t always the easiest process.
Now, you can get to the full desktop site with ease. Just press and hold on the refresh button at the top of the browser screen, and you’ll be given the option to request the desktop site.
8. Get a Trackpad for Email Cursor Control
There you are, doing the daily task of writing out emails or other long messages. As you go along, you spot it; it’s a mistake a few sentences back.
Trying to use a touchscreen to get back to the right place isn’t always easy, especially if the error rests near the edge of the screen.
Now, anyone with a 3D Touch enabled device can leave that frustration in the past. The keyboard can now be turned into a trackpad, giving you the cursor control you’ve always dreamed of having, the equivalent of finding a unicorn at the end of a rainbow.
I
started writing a blog in May 2016, partly because I kept writing rants
on Facebook that apparently were “too good not to be online somewhere”,
and partly because I was bored after my Master’s degree and wanted
something to do with my Sunday mornings.
Sleeping in, of course, was never an option.
18
months later, and I’ve written about 100,000 words, been published in
all sorts of places, and am now getting regular offers to pitch to major
publications — more on this in the coming months.
And
most importantly of all, I got to 10,000 followers. This time last
year, it was 100 and about half of them were related to me.
All in all, it’s been a good year.
So
what’s in store for the Health Nerd? You’ll be happy to know that this
year I’ve applied for a PhD with the University of Wollongong, which is
actually super exciting and not scary like it feels to me sometimes. I’m
also going to be — hopefully — releasing some episodes of a podcast
that I’ve started with a brilliant co-host. The topic will be science in
the media and I’m really excited to introduce all of you to my dulcet
tones over the airwaves.
I’m so much less awkward than I am in text.
What
does all of this activity mean to the blog? Nothing! I’ll still be
aiming for my regular one health story a week on Medium, as well as an
extra member’s-only article a month for all you subscribers who love
that extra content.
To
sum up, I’d just like to say thank you to you all. I’d never have made
it here without all you brilliant people following me and making this
all worthwhile. It was a fantastic 2017, and 2018 shows every sign of
being brilliant as well.
How to Design Social Systems (Without Causing Depression and War)
Here
I’ll present a way to think about social systems, meaningful
interactions, and human values that brings these often-hazy concepts
into focus. It’s also, in a sense, an essay on human nature. It’s
organized in three sections:
Reflection and Experimentation. How do people decide which values to bring to a situation?
Practice Spaces. Can we look at social systems and see which values they support and which they undermine?
Sharing Wisdom. What are the meaningful conversations that we, as a culture, are starved for?
I’ll
introduce these concepts and their implications for design. I will show
how, applied to social media, they address issues like election
manipulation, fake news, internet addiction, teen depression &
suicide, and various threats to children. At the end of the post, I’ll
discuss the challenges of doing this type of design at Facebook and in
other technology teams.
Reflection and Experimentation
As I tried to make clear in my letter, meaningful interactions and time well spent are a matter of values.
For each person, certain kinds of acts are meaningful, and certain ways
of relating. Unless the software supports those acts and ways of
relating, there will be a loss of meaning.
In the section below about practice spaces,
I’ll cover how to design software that’s supportive in this way. But
first, let’s talk about how people pick their values in the first place.
We often don’t know how we want to act, or relate, in a particular situation. Not immediately, at least.
When
we approach an event (a conversation, a meeting, a morning, a task),
there’s a process — mostly unconscious — by which we decide how we want
to be.
Interrupting
this can lead to doing things we regret. As we’ll see, it can lead to
internet addiction, to bullying and trolling, and to the problems teens
are having online.
So, we need to sort out the values with which we want to approach a situation. This is a process. I believe it’s the same process, whether you’re deciding something small — like how openly you will approach a particular conversation — or something big.
Let’s start with something big: many teenagers are engaged in sorting out their identities: they take ideas about how they ought
to act (manly, feminine, polite, etc) and make up their own minds about
whether to approach situations with these values in mind.
For
these teens, settling on the right values takes a mix of
experimentation and reflection. They need to try out different ways of
being manly, feminine, intelligent, or kind in different situations and see how they work. They also need to reflect on who they want to be and how they want to live.
These
two ingredients — experimentation and reflection — are required to sort
out our values. Even the small decisions (for example, deciding how to
balance honesty and tact in a conversation) require experimenting in real situations, and reflecting on what matters most.
This process can be intuitive, nonverbal, and unconscious, but it is vital.¹
If we don’t find the right values, it’s hard to feel good about what we
do. The following circumstances interfere with experimentation and
reflection:
High stakes.
When deviation from norms becomes disastrous in some way — for
instance, with very high reputational stakes — people are afraid to
experiment. People need space to make mistakes and systems and social scenes with high consequences interfere with this.
Low agency. To put values to the test, a person needs discretion
over the manner of their work: they need to experiment with moral
values, aesthetic values, and other guiding ideas. Some
environments — many of them corporate — make no room for being guided by
one’s own moral or aesthetic ideas.
Disconnection. One way we judge the values we’re experimenting with is via exposure to their consequences.
We all need to know how others feel when we treat them one way or
another, to help us decide how we want to treat them. Similarly, an
architect needs to know what it’s like to live in the buildings she
designs. When the consequences of our actions are hidden, we can’t sort out what’s important.²
Distraction and overwork.
We also lose the capacity to sort out our values when reflection
becomes impossible. This is the major cost of noisy environments,
infinite entertainment, push notifications, and some types of poverty.
Lack of faith in reflection. Finally, people can come to consider reflection to be useless — or to be avoided — even though it is so natural. The emotions which trigger reflection,
including doubt and confusion, can be brushed away as distractions. One
way this happens, is if people view their choices through a behaviorist
lens: as determined by habits, reinforcement learning, or permanent
drives.³
This makes it seem like people don’t have values at all, only habits,
tastes, and goals. Experimentation and reflection seem useless.
Software-based social spaces can be disastrous for experimentation and reflection.
One
reason that private group messaging (like WhatsApp and Messenger) is
replacing virality-based forums (like Twitter, News Feed, and
increasingly, Stories) is that the latter are horrible for experimenting
with who we are. The stakes are too high. They seem especially bad for
women, for teens, and for celebrities—which may partly explain the rise
in teen suicide—but they're bad for all of us.
A
related problem is online bullying, trolling, and political outrage.
Many bullies and trolls would embrace other values if they had a chance
to reflect and were better exposed to consequences. In-person spaces are
much better for this.
Reflection can be encouraged or discouraged by design — this much is clear from the variety of internet-use helpers, like Moment and Intent. All of us (not just bullies and trolls) would use the Internet differently if we had more room for reflection.
Exercise: On My Own Terms
In order to learn to support users in experimentation and reflection, designers must experiment and reflect on their own values. On My Own Terms is an exercise for this. Players fill out a worksheet, then socialize in an experimental way.
In
the experimentation part, players defy norms they’ve previously obeyed,
and see how it works out. Often they find that people like them better
when they are less conventional — even when they are rude!
Here’s
one thing this game makes clear: we discover what’s important to us in
the context of real choices and their consequences. People often think
they have certain values (eating kale, recycling, supporting the
troops) but when they experiment and reflect on real choices, these
values are discarded. They thought they believed in them, but only out
of context.
This is how it was for me with consistency, rationality, masculinity, and being understated. When I played On My Own Terms, I decided to value these less.⁴ My true values are only clear through experimentation and reflection.
For
users to have meaningful interactions and feel their time was well
spent, they need to approach situations in a way they believe in. They
need space to experiment and reflect.
But this is not enough.
Practice Spaces
Every
social system makes some values easier to practice, and other values
harder. Even with our values in order, a social environment can
undermine our plans.
Most social platforms are designed in a way that encourages us to act against our values: less humbly, less honestly, less thoughtfully,
and so on. Using these platforms while sticking to our values would
mean constantly fighting their design. Unless we’re prepared for a
fight, we’ll likely regret our choices.
There’s a way to address this, but it requires a radical change in how we design: we must reimagine social systems as practice spaces for the users’ values — as virtual places custom built to make it easier for the user to relate and to act in accord with their values.
Designers must get curious about two things:
When users want to relate according to a particular value, what is hard about doing that?
What is it about some social spaces that can make relating in this way easier?
For example, if an Instagram⁵ user valued being creative, being honest, or connecting adventurously,
then designers would need to ask: what kinds of social environments
make it easier to be creative, to be honest, or to connect
adventurously? They could make a list of places where people find these
things easier: camping trips, open-mics, writing groups, and so on.
Next,
the designers would ask: which features of these environments make them
good at this? For instance, when someone is trying to be creative, do
mechanisms for showing relative status (like follower counts) help or
hurt? How about when someone wants to connect adventurously? Or, with
being creative, is this easier in a small group of close connections, or
a large group of distant ones? And so on.
To take another example, if a News Feed user believes in being open-minded,
designers would ask which social environments make this easier. Having
made such a list, they would look for common features. Perhaps it’s
easier to be open-minded when you remember something you respect about a
person’s previous views. Or, perhaps it’s easier when you can tell if
the person is in a thoughtful mood by reading their body language. Is
open-mindedness more natural when those speaking have to explicitly
yield time for others to respond? Designers would have to find out.⁶
Exercise: Space Jam
To start thinking this way, it’s best if designers focus first on values which they themselves have trouble practicing. In this game, Space Jam, each player shares something they’d like to practice, some way of interacting. Then everyone brainstorms, imagining practice spaces (both online and offline) which could make this easier.
Here’s an example of the game, played over Skype with three designers from Facebook:
Eva says she wants to practice “changing the subject when a conversation seems like a dead end.”
Someone
comments that Facebook threads are especially bad at this. We set a
timer for three minutes and brainstorm on our own. Then everyone
presents one real-world way to practice, and one mediated way.
George’s
idea involves a timer. When it rings, everyone says “this conversation
doesn’t meet my need for ____”. Jennifer suggests something else:
putting a bowl in the middle of a conversation. Player can write out
alternate topics and put them in the bowl in a conspicuous but
non-interrupting way. (Jennifer also applies this idea to Facebook
comments, where the bowl is replaced by a sidebar.)
We
all wonder together: could it ever be “okay” for people to say things
like “this conversation doesn’t meet my need for ____”? Under what
circumstances is this safe to say?
This leads to new ideas.
In the story above, Eva is an honest person. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy
to be honest. She struggles to be honest when she wants to change the
conversation. By changing the social rules, we can make it easier for
her to live according to her values.
Games like Space Jam
show how much influence the rules of social spaces have over us, and
how easy it is for thoughtful design to change those rules. Designers
become more aware of the values around them and why they can be
difficult to practice. They feel more responsible for the spaces they
are creating. (Not just the spaces they make for users, but also in
daily interactions with their colleagues). This gives them a fresh
approach to design.
If
designers learn this skill, they can support the broad diversity of
users’ values. Then users will no longer have to fight the software to
practice their values.
Sharing Wisdom
I hope the previous ideas—reflection, experimentation, and practice spaces—have given a sense for how to support meaningful actions. Let’s turn to the question of meaningful information and meaningful conversation.
We are having a problem in this area, too.
Amidst
nonstop communication — a torrent of articles, videos, and
posts — there is still a kind of conversation that people are starved
for, because our platforms aren’t built for it.
When this type of conversation — which I’ll call sharing wisdom — is
missing, people feel that no one understands or cares about what’s
important to them. People feel their values are unheeded, unrecognized,
and impossible to rally around.
As
we’ll see, this situation is easy to exploit, and the media and fake
news ecosystems have taken advantage. By looking at how this
exploitation works, we can see how conversations become ideological and
polarized, and how elections are manipulated.
But first, what do I mean by sharing wisdom?
Social
conversation is often understood as telling stories, sharing feelings,
or getting advice. But each of these can be seen as a way to discover
values.
When we ask our friends for advice — if you look carefully — we aren’t often asking about what we should do. Instead, we’re asking them about what’s important in our situation. We’re asking for values which might be new to us. Humans constantly ask each other “what’s important?” — in a spouse, in a wine, in a programming language.
I’ll call this kind of conversation (both the questions and the answers) wisdom.
Wisdom,
n. Information about another person’s hard-earned, personal
values — what, through experimentation and reflection, they’ve come to
believe is important for living.
Wisdom
is what’s exchanged when best friends discuss their relationships or
jobs, when we listen to stories told by grandmothers, church pastors,
startup advisors, and so on.
It comes in many forms: mentorship, texts, rituals, games. We seek it naturally, and in normal conditions it is abundant.
For
various reasons, the platforms are better for sharing other things
(links, recommendations, family news) than for asking each other what’s
important. So, on internet platforms, wisdom gets drowned out by other
forms of discourse:
By ideology.
Our personal values are easily eclipsed by ideological values (for
instance, by values designed to promote business, a certain elite, or
one side in a political fight). This is happening when posts about
partisan politics make us lose track of our shared (or sharable)
concerns, or when articles about productivity outpace our deeper life questions.
By scientism.
Sometimes “hard data” or pseudo-scientific “models” are used to justify
things that would be more appropriately understood as values. For
instance, when neuroscience research is used to justify a style of leadership, our discourse about values suffers.
By bullshit.
Many other kinds of social information can drown out wisdom. This
includes various kinds of self-promotion; it includes celebrities giving
advice for which they have no special experience; it includes news.
Information that looks like wisdom can make it harder to locate actual, hard-earned wisdom.
For
all these reasons, talk about personal values tends to evaporate from
the social platforms, which is why people feel isolated. They don’t
sense that their personal values are being understood.
In
this state, it’s easy for sites like Breitbart, Huffington Post,
Buzzfeed, or even Russia Today to capitalize on our feeling of
disconnection. These networks leverage the difficulty of sharing wisdom,
and the ease of sharing links. They make a person feel like they are
sharing a personal value (like living in a rural town or supporting women), when actually they are sharing headlines that twist that value into a political and ideological tool.
Exercise: Value Sharing Circle
For designers to get clear about what wisdom sounds like, it can be helpful to have a value sharing circle.
Each person shares one value which they have lived up to on the day
they are playing, and one which they haven’t. Here’s a transcript from
one of these circles:
There
are twelve of us, seated for dinner. We eat in silence for what feels
like a long time. Then, someone begins to speak. It’s Otto. He says he
works at a cemetery. At 6am this morning, they called him. They needed
him to carry a coffin during a funeral service. No one else could do it.
So, he went. Otto says he lived up to his values of showing up and being reliable.
But — he says — he was distracted during the service. He’s not sure he
did a good job. He worries about the people who were mourning, whether
they noticed his missteps, whether his lack of presence made the ritual
less perfect for them. So, he didn’t live up his values of supporting the sense of ritual and honoring the dead.
In
the course of such an evening, participants are exposed to values
they’ve never thought about. That night, other people spoke of their
attempts to be ready for adventure, be a vulnerable leader, and make parenthood an adventure.⁷
Playing
this makes the difference between true personal values and ideologies
very clear. Notice how different these values are from the values of
business. No one in the circle was particularly concerned with
productivity, efficiency, or socio-economic status. No one was even
concerned with happiness!
Social platforms could make it much easier to share our personal values (like small town living) directly, and to acknowledge one another and rally around them, without turning them into ideologies or articles.
This
would do more to heal politics and media than any “fake news”
initiative. To do it, designers will need to know what this kind of
conversation sounds like, how to encourage it, and how to avoid drowning
it out.
The Hardest Challenge
I’ve pointed out many challenges, but left out the big one. 😕
Only people with a particular mindset can do this type of design. It takes a new kind of empathy.
Empathy can mean understanding someone’s goals, or understanding someone’s feelings.⁸ And these are important.
But to build on these concepts — experimentation, reflection, wisdom, and practice spaces— a designer needs to see the experimental part of a person, the reflective part, the person’s desire for (and capacity for) wisdom, and what the person is practicing.⁹
As with other types of empathy, learning this means growing as a person.
Why?
Well, just as it’s hard to see others’ feelings when we repress our
own, or hard to listen to another person’s grand ambitions unless we are
comfortable with ours... it’s hard to get familiar with another
person’s values unless we are first cozy with our own, and with all the
conflicts we have about them.
This
is why the exercises I’ve listed (and others, which I didn’t have space
to include) are so important. Spreading this new kind of empathy is a
huge cultural challenge.
Hardik Gandhi is Master of Computer science,blogger,developer,SEO provider,Motivator and writes a Gujarati and Programming books and Advicer of career and all type of guidance.