Google recently dealt with 6 dangerous apps. From this application, the
user used to work from slowing the speed of the phone to mobile heat.
Google QR Code Free Scan, QR Code Scan Best, QR Code / Barcode Free
Scan, QR & Barcode Scanner, Smart compass These six apps are
strictly outlined in Google Play Store. Google has been mandated to allow users to access information in the application for the application. Can not ask for information other than The user's personal information or his phone can not be accessed without the user's permission.
In simple words, you download an app to your smartphone. As soon as you open an app, you are asked for your personal information. Including information such as name, address, email id and contact number. The app also wants access to the location, contact book, gallery, camera, microphone etc. As soon as you allow, your phone uses third-party access to your information.
Research done by a German university has found that Google has found
234 applications on the Play Store, in which the user's information is
misused. Users' TV viewing habits were also monitored through microphones.
Google has removed an important feature from its search engine. This feature is related to the image option. It is being said that Google has taken this step in view of the copyright issue. In fact, you can no longer view view image option on any photo in Google image. Before using this feature, users could see the photo in its original size. Not only that, it could also be downloaded easily. But now it will be difficult to download the image in the original size.
Google has given information about this on its official Twitter account. Google has been tweeted and is going to make some changes to the image section to connect with users and many websites. Under it, the View Image option will be deleted. However, the visit option will remain unchanged so that the news related to the image can be read on the website.
It is being said that the deal with this image is an agreement with the image. This change in the image section has been found in stock photo provider Gatey's image after Google's partnership with the company. Goggle recently signed a Multi-Year Global Licensing Deal with Gati Image. Under this agreement, Google will also have to provide the correct copy information related to the photo section in the image section.
It is noteworthy that many photogroups had previously objected to Google's ability to download photos easily without any effort from Google. Despite the copyright, people were downloading the image by image section. The same complaint was also made by Gatti Image.
In October 2017, Google CEO came out with a pretty strong Ai focused statement and said that “Google is now an Ai first company”.
This announcement made clear that world’s leader in internet search
engines was truly embracing the Ai revolution and that it will make
establish itself as a first class leader in this technology. The
acquisition of the most advanced artificial intelligence platform,
API.AI, now known as Dialogflow was the first stepping stone to get from
a mobile first company to an Ai first company.
Social Media Versus Digital Devices Usage
Lately, I asked the following serie of questions to every friends and family members I have:
Carl: “How much time you spend on Facebook each day ❓”
Them: “IDK 5 to 30 minutes per day, why ❓” 🤔
Carl: “You’ll see…Now how much time do you spend doing the following things:
- Interacting with a mobile device 📱
- Watching tv 📺
- Streaming music or videos on an app 🎵
- Driving your car 🚗
- Browsing on internet 💻
- Searching an answer to a question you have by googling it
Them: “Pretty much half of my day…why❓” 🤨
The
time you spend using your car, browsing on the internet, watching
Netflix, driving your car, interacting with your phone is much greater
than the time you spend on all of your social media platforms. This mean
that the opportunity Google Assistant has to capture your attention is
more likely to retarget you then any other Ai platform.
In
the future you will not only ask voice recognition questions to the
Google Assistant with your mobile phone or with Google Home devices, you
will also do the same with your car’s Internet of Things (IoT) device
and with any other IoT gears such as mirrors, smart tvs, your fridge and
so on.
Some Social Media are Getting Old 👴🏻
The
first social media I used was Mirc, I made a lot of great friends on
this social media, we would do Get Together at punk bands shows in my
Quebec home state. Then came MSN Messenger, and then came the Google
search engine which my father introduced to me first and then came
Facebook. When I made my Facebook profile I remember that I was the only
one I knew that had a Facebook profile, more than 10 years ago.
Facebook
got to what we called the maturity stage in technology. It’s nothing
against it, but everything in life, including corporations, get old one
day. Some companies grow older quicker, some companies seems to have
take a sip of the golden grail from Indiana Jones third movie with
eternal life.
In
my personal opinion, Google seem much younger now than its main rival
and to be honest the corporation owned by Alphabet has been much more
transparent in its course of action toward artificial intelligence, to
say the least, than its main competitor.
Also some of the youngest players in the Ai world are getting bright future in the Ai ecosystem,, according to a report by Global Web Index Telegram,
BBM and WeChat are respectively the front runners social media with
89%, 81% and 81% active users interested in money transfer features on
mobile . Money transfer is crucial for any Ai platform in order to make a
interesting return on investment (ROI) for its investors.
YouTube Star Amongst the Most Wanted Career for Primary School Students
When
I was 12 years old my dream was to become the next Kurt Kobain, I
learned to play bass guitar and my punk band was named No Way Out.
Nowadays kids want to be the next PewDiePie and become a YouTube star.
A
couple weeks ago when I was at my parents’ house a news report
mentioned that becoming a YouTube star was now one of the top 10 most
wanted job for children in primary school. Why does that have anything
to do with artificial intelligence?
Because
technology changes have always been driven by the kids, notably because
they have the biggest social channels and because they also want to
affirm themselves by being different from the older generations.
Which
mean that if kids want to become YouTube stars they are more than
likely going to interact with Google Ai than any other digital giants
wanting to get a piece of the robots age revolution.
Google Assistant Will Make Ai Friendly
I
don’t know for you, but I am getting bored of texting. It is slow,
inefficient and it lacks emotional warmth of a real conversation. Google
Assistant not only allow you to create voice recognition Ai, it allows
to be personalized the voice by selecting a male or a female voice,
slowing down the pace of the Ai voice and this is only the beginning of
it.
In a couple years from now kids will interact with Ai robots like they now do with their cat and their dog:
They will be active members of their family.
This
prediction of the future might seem crazy to most of you right now, but
my prediction about cryptocurrencies that would become the next mean of
economical trade also seemed crazy 4 years ago to all my peers. At that
time, Bitcoins were being traded at values of in between $200 to $800
dollars.
I
recently spoke to a friend who said he “didn’t care about what a phone
looks like anymore — they’re all the same”. It’s true; pretty much every
phone looks like the same cold, lifeless slab of glass and aluminium.
Even Apple’s iPhones, once lauded for bringing hardware design to a
higher level, have started to feel boring.
It seems like the looks of a phone played a way larger role a few years
ago. Now, we want a phone that works well and takes great photos.
Google’s
announcement of the Pixel 2 phones, Google Homes, the creepy camera,
the VR headset, their Pixel buds, speaker and laptop/tablet hybrid made
me think of Dieter Rams’ work for Braun—although the great Teenage Engineering also popped up.
Rams has created or overseen the creation of numerous products for Braun.
Most, if not all these products, have a certain elegance and
timelessness, mostly due to their materials, the sparse use of colour
and typography, and their ease of use.
Without
lingering on it too much, I think this line of Google products is close
to achieving the same thing. Their speakers and Home products look like
furniture that will seamlessly blend into their surroundings. Their
phones feel like—bear with me—a useful utility made for a human being,
rather than a brick of computing power. From a product design
point-of-view, the look of these products is an exciting development.
One
of my fears was that the phone would be too big. I’ve been an iPhone
user since the iPhone 4 and have never chosen the larger model. After
six weeks with the Pixel 2 XL, I don’t see myself going back to a small
phone anytime soon.
While
comparing the Pixel 2 XL to the smaller version, I noticed the
difference in size between the two is minor. I’d say the Pixel 2 is more
awkwardly sized than the XL version, and the XL gives you a lot more
screen. It runs all the way to the edges, while the screen of the
smaller version reveals larger bezels. Even if you have small hands, it
might be worth holding both before deciding that a big phone is not for
you. I worried it might slip out of my hands, but the Pixel 2 XL has an
aluminium body and the matte coating provides more grip.
I’ve enjoyed the larger screen a lot
so far. Reading articles on Instapaper’s black background is very
immersive. The edges of the screen seem to disappear completely. With
this phone I’ve done more reading in the Kindle app than I used to, and
watching YouTube or Netflix in fullscreen is great.
Instapaper in fullscreen
One charge every two days
My iPhone 7 running iOS 11 was a shitshow when it comes to battery life. I had to charge it around 8pm every evening if I wanted to keep it on until bedtime.
The Google phone’s battery lasts me so long I can afford to forget charging it. On a full charge I can use it for at least
a full day. That’s snapping photos and Instagram stories, sending
messages on Telegram or Whatsapp, listening to podcasts for about an
hour, a Headspace session, and reading an article or chapter of a book
here and there. I’ll go to bed without having thought of charging the
battery. When I wake up, it’s usually at 55%, lasting me another day
before charging it the following evening.
From iOS to Android
Many
friends mentioned being “locked into the Apple ecosystem”. For me,
switching was as easy as or easier than switching from one iPhone to the
other. The phone comes with a dongle you can plug into your iPhone.
Within half an hour it has copied your contacts and whatever apps you’ve
decided to keep, provided they are available for Android.
After
switching I realised I’m more locked in to Google’s ecosystem than I am
into Apple’s. I use Google Maps, Google Mail, and Google Photos, as
Apple’s offering has sucked on those fronts for as long as I can
remember. I only used iCloud to sync iA Writer documents between my
phone and computer, but using Dropbox instead was a piece of cake.
Nifty details and customisation
I
had a ton of duplicate contacts on my iPhone for whatever reason.
Deleting them on iOS is a pain, so I never got around to it and accepted
a contact list three times the size it should be. After importing all
my contacts, the Google phone first asked if I wanted to merge all my
duplicates in one tap. Aces! ✨
It’s
details like those that make the Android OS a delight to work with. The
control centre is customisable — I know, Apple also introduced that
recently — and if the keyboard is not to your liking, you can choose a
theme (light, dark, with or without button shapes) that better suits
you. It listens to music playing around you and provides you with the
song on your lock screen, which is scary and
more convenient than I’d imagined. You can choose to set several
widgets on your home screen; my calendar widget shows me my next
upcoming appointment, if available.
If
you feel like going all-in with customisation, you can tap the phone’s
build number 10 times to enable developer mode. “You are now a
developer!”, it’ll say, after which you can customise even more things,
like the speed of animations. I won’t encourage messing too much with
those, but the fact that the OS has numerous ways of customising it to
your personal preference is a big plus.
Squeeze for help
The Google Assistant — which you can bring up by long pressing the home button or squeezing the phone — is a gazillion times better than Siri. I actually use it now and, occasional screw ups aside, it’s very accurate. Also, you can squeeze the phone to bring up the Assistant!
😏
At home I use a Chromecast Audio
to stream music to my speakers. Pairing it with an iPhone was pretty
OK, although it did force me to turn Spotify or wifi on/off on a regular
basis. With the Google phone, connecting is instant and I haven’t had
any problems. I wouldn’t expect otherwise from one Google product
talking to the other, but it’s nice nonetheless.
Swiping and squeezing
Fingerprint sensor and NFC payments
The fingerprint sensor is on the back, conveniently placed for your index finger. Swiping down on the scanner
brings down the notification/control centre. When the phone is on its
back, you don’t have to pick it up to see your notifications. Double tap
the screen to light up the lock screen and see if you have any. The way notifications are displayed on the lock screen minimises my urge to open apps, which is a plus.
Photo: Mark Wilson (Fast Co Design)
The
phone has a built in NFC chip, so I can now use it to pay at PIN
terminals. I had to install an app from my bank to enable it. After that
I could hold it near a terminal once the cashier had entered the
amount. It has proven to be quicker than pulling a card out of your
wallet, and it has worked without fault almost every time.
Photos of my food have never looked better
The
camera is great. I’ve taken some photos in low light and they come out
very well. It has a Portrait Mode, which blurs the background and leaves
you with a nice portrait. Much has been said about the difference
between Google and Apple’s portrait mode (one being software-based while
the other is created by hardware), but I don’t see or care much about
the difference. I’m not going to use this phone for professional
photography. I just want to take a nice picture of my girlfriend or a
plate of food now and then, and it more than does the job for that.
A photo in low light and Portrait Mode used on a bowl of ramen
Google Lens
The camera has Google Lens
integrated. Snap a photo, hit the Lens button and it will try to find
whatever it sees in the photo. Again, this works very well and has been
convenient for looking stuff up now and then. It’s also built into the
Google Assistant, allowing you to open the camera and tap anything you’d
like to find more information about. See below.
Google Lens integrated into Google Assistant ✨
A note on apps
The
only apps I’ve missed so far are Darkroom, for editing photos, and
Things, for my to-dos. Luckily, Things recently added a feature that
allows you to email tasks to your to-do list, so that helps. It’s a bit
of a bummer that I can’t look at my to-dos on my phone — and judging by
Cultured Code’s development speed, an Android app might be scheduled for
2022 — but it’s not that big of a deal. For editing photos I’ve simply switched back to VSCO.
I
used iMessage with my girlfriend and 6 other friends, and have switched
to Telegram or Messenger with them. This might be a hassle if you’re
all-in on iMessage, but it was hardly an issue for me.
Google’s
apps are high quality and I enjoy using them. Some apps from
third-party developers have proven to be a little less great than they
are on iOS. Instagram’s compression on videos taken with an Android
phone is lousy, for whatever reason. Instapaper crashes more often than
I’m used to, and it expresses the time it takes to read an article in a
range of dots instead of minutes. I have no idea why an Android user
would prefer that. Goodreads is an absolute mess on Android, but that’s
no surprise.
Watching videos on YouTube in fullscreen is glorious 👌
I’ve found a worthy replacement for the iOS Podcasts app in Pocket Casts. For email and my calendar I use Outlook — which is basically Sunrise, rest in peace—and I’ve been keeping my notes in the great Dropbox Paper more often. The Twitter app on Android is fine (as it is on iOS). Google’s Inbox is great for email too.
Overall, the Material Design language does make well-designed apps more fun and immersive to use. As Owen Williams put it:
Apps
are full of color, playful animation and fun design flourishes. Where
iOS has become flat, grey and uniform, Google went the opposite
direction: bright colors, full-on fluid animations and much, much more.
Aside
from this, apps are able to integrate more closely with the OS. A good
example of this is that Spotify, Sonos or Pocket Casts can show on your
lock screen persistently, allowing you to skip or pause playback.
Overall, I’m finding the Google ecosystem to be much more pleasant to
work with than Apple’s, and agree (again) with Owen that Google is eating Apple’s ecosystem for lunch.
TL;DR — I am very happy with this phone
The
Google phone is here to stay. I’m not tempted to go back to iOS, as I
haven’t missed it since I switched. If you’re considering making the
switch, I’d fully recommend the Pixel 2 XL 🔁
I’m
currently tempted to purchase a Google Home Mini and might even replace
my Apple TV (which has mostly been an expensive disappointment) with a
Chromecast. Slippery slope.
I look forward to see what Google will do on their next iteration!
We wanted to put the Museum of English Rural Life
(The MERL) on Google Streetview to make us more accessible to those
with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). For people with ASD it helps to
know what to expect at a place before they arrive, and Google Streetview
remains one of the most popular ways of scoping a place out. (Our offer
for people with ASD is forthcoming at the MERL.)
We thought it would be difficult to get on Streetview. What we didn’t realise is that:
pretty much anyone with the right equipment can put themselves on Google Streetview
it isn’t rocket science
So,
in this blog I’m going to tell you how we did it, in case you also want
to do it. If you want to skip straight to our Google Streetview tour, click here.
The background
In case you don’t know, Google Streetview
is attempting to capture every street in 360-degree photography. You
just drag the little yellow guy on Google Maps onto the street and have a
look.
The closest you could previously get in Streetview (hey, that’s my bike!)
Google Streetview also extends inside buildings, for which you used to have to hire a Trusted Pro to photograph your building. Google now allows anyone to do it themselves, kind of like what crowd-sourcing Panoramio used to be except for 360° photos.
The equipment
Google
will accept any photos taken with decent 360° cameras, and even accepts
photo spheres made with a normal smartphone camera if they’re good
enough. They have a very good page on how to publish for Google Streetview here.
These people are in exciting places but most of the 360 photos I’ve seen are of ducks on the canal and nail parlours
So,
technically you just need a smartphone, but the photo-spheres I’ve made
using just a normal camera almost always come out a bit glitchy. So I
suggest getting a real camera.
The
Theta-S takes images using two cameras on either side of its body, then
stitches them together for you. You just export the jpeg and upload it
onto something like Google Streetview or Facebook – sites which can
translate the file into an interactive photo-sphere.
Setting up the tour
So taking 360° photos is literally as easy as pressing a button, but planning the actual 360° tour? Not so much.
For
starters we didn’t want the photographer in the photo, so we mounted
the Theta S on a monopod and hid behind walls as we took the photo. This only failed once.
We
decided to capture the Museum while it was empty and shot on a Monday,
our closure day. Images of an empty museum, however, may give the wrong
impression of the museum to someone with ASD, as we usually have
visitors milling around. We plan to test this out with focus groups.
The ground floor had more than enough photos.
We
also wanted to be able to capture the whole museum, and planning our
tour was made easier by how our galleries are fairly one-way and linear.
Because
we only have our ground floor layer on Google Maps, though, we had to
miss out our first floor open store. We originally had both ground and
first floors published, but rapidly realised it was confusing people as
they kept switching randomly between floors in Streetview. We hope to
see whether getting our ground and first floor plans published on Google means we can then separate Streetview tours between them.
GO INSIDE WITH INDOOR MAPS WHENEVER GOOGLE CAN BE ARSED TO ACTUALLY UPLOAD YOUR SUBMISSION
Taking photos
Google
suggests taking photos a metre apart indoors, but we rarely kept to
this. On our first run we had a distance of something like five metres,
and then we went back to fill in some gaps.
There’s
an option to connect the Google Streetview app to your 360° camera, but
we chose to take the photos and upload them separately (Import 360°
photos). I highly suggest taking all the photos you need, cut any
mistakes and then upload them all in one batch. If you have a museum the
size of the MERL you can do the whole museum in one go (76 photos), or
if you’re larger you could do it by gallery.
After
taking our photos we also realised some of them featured copyrighted
artworks. We opened these images in Photoshop, blurred out the artworks
and re-saved them – they still worked fine after editing, which was a
relief. The Google Streetview app also gives you the option of
automatically blurring faces.
Publishing
Once you have your photos collected you need to select all your photos and attach them to an address (i.e., your museum).
With
all the photos still selected, you then need to choose their precise
locations on Google Maps. This step is probably the most time-consuming.
As well as placing them in the exact spot you took them on your
floorplan, you also need to orient them to the compass so they’re
pointed in the right direction. This is very important for when you
connect your photos in a tour.
When
your photos are placed and oriented you can publish them to Google
Streetview. They usually show up fairly fast on the app and on desktop.
Connecting photos
The
beauty of Streetview is that you can place your photos in a sequential
tour. The option to link photos is only available after publication.
To do this I’d again suggest selecting all your photos at once, and then choosing the option to place and link.
You connect your photos by simply tapping the line between them, and you can link more than one picture to another.
That’s it.
It
updates instantly on the app, but it takes a couple of days before you
will be able to navigate through your photos on desktop using your
keyboard’s arrow keys or on your phone by tapping around.
The
aim of publishing our museum on Google Streetview is to prepare people
for what to expect at the Museum. It definitely accomplishes that.
We
considered photos and video, and have these options available too, but
nothing beats Streetview for giving the full picture. People already use
Google and Streetview, and it meant we could also embed the tour on our
website.
With
our planning, testing and re-runs the whole process probably took us
three full days of work. If you know what you need to capture, organise a
day for photography and dedicate the day to editing the photos then you
could easily get a museum the size of the MERL done in a day’s work.
A note on the Google Streetview app
I
don’t know whether it’s because I installed it on an iPad, but the
Google Streetview app is buggy as hell. It crashes, it is unresponsive
and often the map is completely obscured by cards. Prepare to be
frustrated, and work/save in batches to avoid losing your work.
Another
weird glitch which hasn’t been fixed yet is the option to transfer the
rights of your photos to the place where you took them. This is
primarily intended for Trusted Pros who are hired to make 360-degree
tours, and who then transfer the rights to the people who commissioned
the tour. It seemed strange that we could transfer rights to photos
taken using the MERL Google account to our same Google account tied to
the business. We did it anyway and all of our photos promptly
disappeared from Google Maps.
So, don’t do that until they’ve fixed it? But otherwise have fun.
Social
media and digital executives in newsrooms already have a tough job
connecting their content to consumers via social media, but Facebook’s proposed changes in the algorithms of its ‘newsfeed’
are going to make it a lot harder. Social networks offer immense
opportunities for reaching vast new audiences and increasing the
engagement of users with journalism. The most important platform in the
world is about to make that more difficult.
Clearly,
this is a blow for news publishers who have spent the last decade or so
fighting a battle for survival in a world where people’s attention and
advertising have shifted to other forms of content and away from news
media brand’s own sites. They are clearly very concerned. Yet, could this be a wake-up call that will mean the better, most adaptive news brands benefit?
I’m
not going to argue that this is good news for news publishers, but
blind panic or cynical abuse of Facebook is not a sufficient response.
The honest answer is that we don’t know exactly what the effect will be
because Facebook, as usual, have not given out the detail and different
newsrooms will be impacted differently.
It’s exactly the kind of issue we are looking at in our LSE Truth, Trust and Technology Commission.
Our first consultation workshop with journalists, and related
practitioners from sectors such as the platforms, is coming up in a few
weeks. This issue matters not just for the news business. It is also
central to the quality and accessibility of vital topical information
for the public.
Here’s my first attempt to unpack some of the issues.
Mark Zuckerberg: making time on Facebook ‘well spent’
Firstly,
this is not about us (journalists). Get real. Facebook is an
advertising revenue generation machine. It is a public company that has a
duty to maximise profits for its shareholders. It seeks people’s
attention so that it can sell it to advertisers. It has a sideline in
charging people to put their content on its platform, too. It is a
social network, not a news-stand. It was set up to connect ‘friends’ not
to inform people about current affairs. Journalism, even where shared
on Facebook, is a relatively small part of its traffic.
Clearly,
as Facebook has grown it has become a vital part of the global (and
local) information infrastructure. Other digital intermediaries such as
Google are vastly important, and other networks such as Twitter are
significant. And never forget that there are some big places such as
China where other similar networks dominate, not Facebook or other
western companies. But in many countries and for many demographics,
Facebook is the Internet, and the web is increasingly where people get their journalism. It’s a mixed and shifting picture but as the Reuters Digital News Report shows, Facebook is a critical source for news.
From Reuters Digital News Report 2017
If you read Zuckerberg’s statement he makes it clear that he is trying to make Facebook a more comfortable place to be:
“recently
we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts
from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments
that lead us to connect more with each other.”
His users are ‘telling him’ (i.e. fewer of them are spending less time on FB) what a plethora of recent studies and books
have shown which is that using Facebook can make you miserable. News
content — which is usually ‘bad’ news — doesn’t cheer people up. The
angry, aggressive and divisive comment that often accompanies news
content doesn’t help with the good vibes. And while the viral spread of
so-called ‘fake news’ proves it is popular, it also contributes to the
sense that Facebook is a place where you can’t trust the news content.
Even when it is credible, it’s often designed to alarm and disturb. Not
nice. And Facebook wants nice.
“We
can’t make money unless you keep telling us things about yourself that
we can sell to advertisers. Please stop talking about news.”
Another
accusation is that Facebook is making these changes because of the
increasing costs it is expending at the behest of governments who are
now demanding it does more to fight misinformation and offensive
content. That might be a side-benefit for Facebook but I don’t think
it’s a key factor. It might even be a good thing for credible news if
the algorithmic changes include ways of promoting reliable content. But
overall the big picture is that journalism is being de-prioritised in
favour of fluffier stuff.
Even Jeff Jarvis, the US pioneer of digital journalism who has always sought to work with the grain of the platforms, admits that this is disturbing:
“I’m
worried that news and media companies — convinced by Facebook (and in
some cases by me) to put their content on Facebook or to pivot to
video — will now see their fears about having the rug pulled out from
under them realized and they will shrink back from taking journalism to
the people where they are having their conversations because there is no
money to be made there.”*
The
Facebook changes are going to be particularly tough on news
organisations that invested heavily in the ‘pivot to video’. These are
often the ‘digital native’ news brands who don’t have the spread of
outlets for their content that ‘legacy’ news organisations enjoy. The
BBC has broadcast. The Financial Times has a newspaper. These
organisations have gone ‘digital first’ but like the Economist they have
a range of social media strategies. And many of them, like the New York
Times, have built a subscription base. Email newsletters provide an
increasingly effective by-pass for journalism to avoid the social media
honey-trap. It all makes them less dependent on ‘organic’ reach through
Facebook.
But
Facebook will remain a major destination for news organisations to
reach people. News media still needs to be part of that. As the
ever-optimistic Jarvis also points out,
if these changes mean that Facebook becomes a more civil place where
people are more engaged, then journalism designed to fit in with that
culture might thrive more:
“journalism
and news clearly do have a place on Facebook. Many people learn what’s
going on in the world in their conversations there and on the other
social platforms. So we need to look how to create conversational news.
The platforms need to help us make money that way. It’s good for
everybody, especially for citizens.”
News
organisations need to do more — not just because of Facebook but also
on other platforms. People are increasingly turning to closed networks
or channels such as Whatsapp. Again, it’s tough, but journalism needs to
find new ways to be on those. I’ve written huge amounts
over the last ten years urging news organisations to be more networked
and to take advantage of the extraordinary connective, communicative
power of platforms such as Facebook. There has been brilliant
innovations by newsrooms over that period to go online, to be social and
to design content to be discovered and shared through the new networks.
But this latest change shows how the media environment continues to
change in radical ways and so the journalism must also be reinvented.
Social media journalist Esra Dogramaci has written an excellent article
on some of the detailed tactics that newsrooms can use to connect their
content to users in the face of technological developments like
Facebook’s algorithmic change:
“if
you focus on building a relationship with your audience and developing
loyalty, it doesn’t matter what the algorithm does. Your audience will
seek you out, and return to you over and over again. That’s how you
‘beat’ Facebook.”
Journalism Must Change
The
journalism must itself change. For example, it is clear that emotion is
going to be an even bigger driver of attention on Facebook after these
changes. The best journalism will continue to be factual and objective
at its core — even when it is campaigning or personal. But as I have written before,
a new kind of subjectivity can not only reach the hearts and minds of
people on places like Facebook, but it can also build trust and
understanding.
This
latest change by Facebook is dramatic, but it is a response to what
people ‘like’. There is a massive appetite for news — and not just
because of Trump or Brexit. Demand for debate and information has never
been greater or more important in people’s everyday lives. But we have
to change the nature of journalism not just the distribution and
discovery methods.
The media landscape is shifting to match people’s real media lives in our digital age. Another less noticed announcement from Facebook
last week suggested they want to create an ecosystem for local
personalised ‘news’. Facebook will use machine learning to surface news
publisher content at a local level. It’s not clear how they will vet
those publishers but clearly this is another opportunity for newsrooms
to engage. Again, dependency on Facebook is problematic, to put it
mildly, but ignoring this development is to ignore reality. The old
model of a local newspaper for a local area doesn’t effectively match
how citizens want their local news anymore.
What Facebook Must Do
Facebook
has to pay attention to the needs of journalism and as it changes its
algorithm to reduce the amount of ‘public content’ it has to work harder
at prioritising quality news content. As the Guardian’s outstanding
digital executive Chris Moran points out, there’s no indication from
Facebook that they have factored this into the latest change:
Fighting
‘fake news’ is not just about blocking the bad stuff, it is ultimately
best achieved by supporting the good content. How you do that is not a
judgement Facebook can be expected or relied upon to do by itself. It
needs to be much more transparent and collaborative with the news
industry as it rolls out these changes in its products.
When
something like Facebook gets this important to society, like any other
public utility, it becomes in the public interest to make policy to
maximise social benefits. This is why governments around the world are
considering and even enacting legislation or regulation regarding the
platforms, like Facebook. Much of this is focused on specific issues
such as the spread of extremist or false and disruptive information.
This
past summer I managed the largest acquisition campaign in my company’s
history. I work at HubSpot, a marketing software company that
popularized lead-gen campaigns and the whole idea of “inbound
marketing,” so this is no small feat (we’ve run massive campaigns over
the years).
The campaign, Four Days of Facebook, drove 10x the number of average leads of a typical acquisition campaign and 6x the lifetime value of projected customers.
But I didn’t do it alone. This campaign involved 11 teams and 33 people who directly contributed to the work.
Cross-functional
campaigns like this can be big, complicated, and challenging which is
why they so often take a boss or recognized leader to make them happen.
So I wanted to share my experience as a “non-boss.” I hope it encourages
other individual contributors out there to get their co-workers in
other departments excited about working on high-impact, cross-functional
projects.
Pre-planning: create alignment
You won’t have all the answers on day one, but make sure every conversation you’re having at this stage focuses on one thing: impact.
You’ll be asking a lot of people to work hard on something outside of
their normal day-to-day, make it clear that your asks will translate
into business results.
Meet with senior leaders of each team before you ask for their employees commitment on helping. Again, make it clear that you won’t be wasting anyone’s time, you’re out to generate big results.
Have a kickoff meeting with the team who will be responsible for delivering the work. At
a high-level, you want to let everyone know that you have senior
leadership buy-in and the project will be worth their time. On a more
tactical level, you’ll also want to get people up-to-speed on the tools
you’ll be using to manage the project.
Go the extra mile to develop a team culture for your team.
You know how developers name their projects crazy-sounding names? It’s
surprisingly effective! Give your temporary team a name that makes
people feel like they’re a part of something, set up an email alias, and
create a Slack channel. Get people excited!
Throughout
the pre-planning stage, keep your vision front and center. For Four
Days of Facebook we were partnering with Facebook, a fact I repeated
constantly.
If people are excited and engaged with your vision, they’ll put up with the inevitable bumps as you achieve lift-off.
During: maintain momentum
The Progress Principle
is the idea that humans love the satisfaction of wins, even if they’re
small. It’s your best friend as you seek to keep multiple teams and
dozens of people aligned and moving in the right direction–constantly
show (and celebrate) forward progress.
Display it:
I put together a registration goal waterfall chart that was updated
everyday to show progress. It’s motivating to close-in on and cross that
goal line.
Never shut up about it:
I linked to information about this campaign in my email signature,
Slack rooms, wherever I had the attention of my co-workers. And that
information was short, sweet, and up-to-date.
Be a good partner: You’re
not technically the manager of the people on a cross-functional team,
but you should implement some management best practices: give people
autonomy, figure out how they like to work and what kind of support they
need from you.
Ask for feedback:
I asked questions constantly– Is this system or process working for
you? Can I set up these reports in an easier way? At one point during
this campaign I asked the senior manager of a few folks working on the
project if she had thoughts on how I could run it better, she told me
she would love to see weekly updates sent to her and other senior
managers. I was avoiding this as I didn’t want to clutter inboxes, but
it ended up being one of my best tools for building internal momentum
around the campaign.
Don’t overlook the fundamentals of good project management. A framework like DARCI
makes roles & responsibilities super easy so you the project lead
can just say, “This meeting is for people who are Responsible and
Accountable only, we’ll be covering deadlines for next week”, or “This
meeting is for people that need to be Informed, it’ll be a milestone
check-in.”
Find a project management framework, and stick to it.
Wrapping up: close-the-loop
I
run 4–5 acquisition campaigns at HubSpot every quarter and running a
campaign of this size and impact was a complete rush and I can’t wait to
do it again. But before jumping into the next big project, it’s
important to do a clean wrap-up, I want people to be excited to work
with me and my team again in the future.
Say thank you:
Do it publicly via a company announcement or email, and privately. I
wrote handwritten notes to every person who contributed to this
campaign.
Share results soon:
Share the quantitative results, but don’t miss Twitter comments from
attendees, feedback from partners, or the accolades of your co-workers.
This is your chance to make it clear that you promised impact and
delivered it.
Look for improvement opportunities:
Because no matter how successful your campaign was, there are
opportunities to do better — Were any deadlines missed? Why? Did any
team members not work well together? Can this be addressed?
It’s
easy to get stuck in a rut of executing one marketing campaign after
the next, and it’s scary to think about leading a big cross-functional
project that could potentially fail publicly.
But
so often the answer to higher impact is better collaboration. Learning
how to lead across teams 10x’ed the impact I was having at my company, I
hope it does the same for you.
This
week, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on the future of
net neutrality. Whether you’ve been following the political back and forth,
skimming the headlines, or struggling to decode acronyms, the decision
will have an impact on what we can do online (and who can afford to do
it). Because the internet has effectively been free and open since the
day it was born, it’s easy to lose sight of the impact this vote will
have.
The reality is, the internet is a fragile thing. Open, crazy, weird spaces where people swap stories and secrets, create rad digital art projects,
type furiously and freely with people seven time zones away — these
spaces are rare. People build them, people sustain them, and now, people
are trying to restrict them. If this week’s vote passes — which is
looking increasingly likely — the internet’s gatekeepers will have more
control over their gates than ever before.
Because
we live and breathe the internet, laugh and cry on the internet,
connect with people who’ve tangibly changed our lives on the internet,
we decided to gather some perspectives on this moment in time. Why it
matters, how we got here, and what the future may hold. Here are some of
the most insightful essays we’ve found on Medium to help us make sense
of the fight to keep the net wild and free.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
invented the World Wide Web. Now, he’s defending it. “I want an
internet where consumers decide what succeeds online, and where ISPs
focus on providing the best connectivity,” Berners-Lee emphasizes.
Content and connectivity are two distinct markets, and they must remain
separate. Conflating them risks blocking innovation, free expression, and the kind of creativity that can only thrive online.
What’s happening now is not just about net neutrality, law professor Lawrence Lessig
argues, but about the foundations of our democracy. Tracing the history
of the concept from its origins in the aughts (one of his students, Tim Wu,
coined the term “net neutrality”), Lessig sees the rollback of
Obama-era regulations as a symptom of a larger issue: a democracy that
doesn’t serve its people.
Through statistical analysis and natural language processing, data scientist Jeff Kao
shows that millions of pro-repeal comments submitted to the FCC were
faked. Organic public comments, according to Kao’s analysis,
overwhelmingly supported preserving existing regulations. The report
calls into question the legitimacy of the FCC’s comment process, and the
basis of chairman Pai’s intention to roll back regulations.
In part one of a five-part series on net neutrality, computer scientist Tyler Elliot Bettilyon
takes us back to FDR’s New Deal. Piecing together the history of
“common carrier” laws — those that govern everything from shipping to
telephone lines — Bettilyon contextualizes today’s fight for a free and
open internet.
Social psychologist E Price
interrogates the idea that the internet we’ve grown to love is really
as “free and open” as we’d like to think. “Internet activity is already
deeply centralized,” Erika writes, and major social media sites are
today’s answer to the Big Three TV networks of a few decades ago. The
internet is closer to cable than we think, and it’s (probably) about to
get even closer.
Why should the internet be a public utility? Economist umair haque
debunks the “competition will lower prices” argument against internet
regulation, and makes a compelling case for why going online, “just like
water, energy, and sanitation,” should be a basic right: “It
dramatically elevates our quality of life, best and truest when we all
have free and equal access to it.”
Visit battleforthenet to write or call your congressperson in advance of the vote. You can also text a few words of your choice to Resistbot.
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.
