Researchers can guess your age based on your Instagram likes
If you’re the sort of person who carefully prunes your unloved Instagram photos, chances are good you’re a teenager. At least, that’s one of the findings in a new set of research papers on social media behaviors from Penn State University. As associate professor Dongwon Lee told the Atlantic, the practice of going back and deleting photos is common among teens on the platform because they, “want to be very popular so they’re very conscious of the likes they’re getting.”
Teens also tend to interact, comment and like more photos than their older counterparts, Lee’s team found, but they also post fewer of their own photos. (Although, this might only seem true, since teens are more likely to go back and delete their own content.) On the other hand, adults tend to have a broader range of interests, whereas teens usually post about their “mood or personal well being.”
Lee’s team focused their research on Instagram and its 500 million users because the API was the easiest to work with out of the major social networks. They also found that a “Like” on Instagram is a much less complex compared to a similar reaction Facebook or Twitter, where a heart could mean anything from “I like your tweet” to “I saw this and now I’m ending this conversation.”
Facebook’s Instant Articles are heading to its Messenger app
Facebook’s fast-loading news stories have been around for a while now, but soon they’ll make their way to the company’s standalone chat app. Instant Articles will son be available inside Messenger. When someone shares a link with you, a lightning bolt icon will let you know that it’s available as one of the quick-to-load stories. This means you won’t have to wait for it to appear like a regular ol’ web article. There are ads inside the Instant Articles and those will make the trip over to Messenger as well.
Before now, links shared inside the Messenger app loaded up in a mobile browser. With the addition of Facebook’s own articles, those items will appear up to 10 times faster and the communication application will offer the same reading experience as the full-on social app. Facebook says the stories will debut on Android today with iOS to follow “in the coming weeks.”
Via: Recode
Source: Facebook
Tech leaders say Trump would be a disaster for innovation
While at least one notable tech billionaire is willing to openly support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a whopping 145 other leaders from major tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yelp, Tumblr, Slack and even Steve Wozniak himself have banded together to publish an open letter denouncing Trump’s “divisive candidacy.” The list of names ranges from CEOs and founders, to VCs and law professors and they’re making it clear they speak for themselves rather than their respective companies, but the message couldn’t be more clear: some of the biggest influencers in tech believe a President Trump would kill America’s innovative spirit.
“We believe in an inclusive country that fosters opportunity, creativity and a level playing field,” the letter, originally posted on Medium explains. “Donald Trump does not. He campaigns on anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people, and a fundamental belief that America is weak and in decline. We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation.”
The letter goes on to point out that “America’s diversity is our strength,” and that 40% of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. The group is also very clear that Trump’s plan to “shut down” parts of the internet as a security strategy is not only misguided but also demonstrates “both poor judgment and ignorance about how technology works.”
C-SPAN will stream convention coverage on Facebook Live
Facebook inadvertently replaced C-SPAN during a Democrat sit-in on gun control, but during the Republican and Democrat national conventions, C-SPAN will stream on Facebook Live. The social network will also feature footage filmed by convention participants, delegates, politicians and the media, according to Politico. “This is the most engaged we’ve been at the convention and its highly correlated to the fact we have a lot of tools to offer,” said Facebook Manager Crystal Patterson.
Facebook told Engadget that C-SPAN will stream convention proceedings each evening between 8 and 11 PM on Facebook Live, from its own Facebook page. PBS NewsHour will also stream in a similar manner. On top of hosting the coverage, the social network will provide the Facebook Lounge to media partners including CNN, The New York Times and Fox News. The lounge will act as a studio for live broadcasts, though Facebook won’t provide much direct support and isn’t paying media outlets. “We make the tools pretty straightforward for people to use them on their own,” Patterson told Politico.
This is the most engaged we’ve been at the convention and its highly correlated to the fact we have a lot of tools to offer.
There’s no word on how outlets will use the lounge, but one says it will help supplement coverage and let it interact with the public. The Fox 8 affiliate in Cleveland, where the Republican National Convention will take place, said that “your questions will be answered as our anchors bring you coverage next week from the Facebook Live lounge right outside Quicken Loans Arena.” It seems recent criticism that Facebook was ignoring conservative news feeds is water under the bridge, then.
Source: Politico
Behind Facebook’s efforts to make its site accessible to all
Earlier this year, Facebook launched a new feature for iOS screen readers called automatic alt text. Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, it recognizes the objects in a photo and then describes them, which is incredibly handy for users who are blind. It arrived on Android soon after, and two weeks ago, the social network officially made the tool available in 20 other languages. These are just a few recent examples of how Facebook is attempting to make its products — as well as the internet as a whole — more accessible to those with disabilities.
It all started five years ago when Jeff Wieland, who worked in the company’s user research team at the time, discovered that there were people with disabilities who were having a rather terrible experience with Facebook. For example, he found out that screen readers — software used by blind users to know what’s happening on a page — would interpret a button on a site as simply, well, “button.” It would have no information on what the button does. “This is a really simple example,” he said. “For an engineer, adding a label to a button is one line of code. But it changes everything.”
The problem, he said, was that developers were not designing the web experience with screen readers in mind. It seems like a “No, duh” explanation, but as Wieland tells me, accessibility is not a subject that’s often taught in computer science classes. “It’s not part of the core curriculum. You have people graduating from great programs, but who have no exposure to accessibility. It’s a real tragedy.” Indeed, he says that almost all incoming engineers have no prior exposure to the subject.
And the fact is, the community that needs this tech is a large one. According to the World Health Organization, about 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired, and of those, around 39 million are fully blind. And that’s just those who suffer from vision loss. “Accessibility is about more than that; it’s about serving those who have varying ability,” said Wieland. “I discovered there was this vast community we were underserving.”
In response to this, Wieland set about creating an accessibility team at Facebook with the company’s blessing. “Philosophically, people got it,” he said, adding that the goal aligns with Facebook’s mission for connecting the world. “But the big question was, how do we do this?”
Over the years, the team has worked to raise awareness of accessibility issues and assistive technologies within the company. It started out with two people, but now it’s grown to more than 20. It’s a cross-functional group made up of people in design, user research, data science, operations and more. Remember those unlabeled buttons? Now, Wieland said, that’s a mostly solved issue (though, given the scale of Facebook, there are probably still a few unlabeled ones here and there). The key factor? Working with existing teams on Facebook to integrate accessibility across the board.
That automatic alt text photo captioning, for example, required the assistance of Facebook’s artificial intelligence team. “There’s this concept of alt text for photos, which used to be provided by the site owner or web developer,” said Wieland. “But now the internet is all photos … The only way we could really provide the text for photos at our scale, would be to use computers to do this.” Fortunately, Facebook’s AI team has been working on computer vision for at least a year and a half already and had the technology and expertise to work on the project.
According to Crista Earl, the director of Web Services for the American Foundation for the Blind, most sites have incorrect or poorly designed forms. “For example, when trying to book a flight on a travel site … the manner of selecting choices poses an obstacle to users of assistive technology.” Inadequately labeled videos and images are also a problem. Other common issues are low-contrast images and tiny fonts for those with low vision.
“During my experience online with accessibility issues, I have struggled with a lot of different things,” said Kevin Cao, a visually impaired tech support employee for the New York Institute for Special Education. Examples include the lack of voice descriptions for images and text. A few of his favorite sites are YouTube and Applevis.com, a community website for low-vision Apple users, which he said have “clear label buttons, links and heading recognition.”
As for how he thinks Facebook is doing, he believes it’s good for now, but it could use improvement. “I would like to add more picture descriptions with faces, people,” he said. That’s the same feedback Wieland heard as well. “They want to know what a person’s hair is like, et cetera. A human can describe a full context, but we’re just returning a list of objects … Hopefully in the future we can tell a richer narrative.”
Facebook’s work on accessibility encompasses more than just vision loss. Back in 2014, the company added the ability for users to provide closed captions to videos. It’s currently working on a more automated captioning system with the help of Facebook’s language-and-speech-technology group.
“The real lion’s share work that we do is to prepare our teams to write and design applications that are accessible, to make it foundational,” said Wieland. “We want to embed accessibility into all of the steps along the way, from ideation to actually shipping the product.” To help this along, Facebook has now integrated accessibility to the QA process that Wieland says has been useful. “It helps push accessibility earlier in the process, without waiting to hear user feedback.”
As part of the education process, the accessibility team has done a lot internally to raise awareness of the issue. There’s an Empathy Lab located in the middle of the Facebook campus that’s partially designed to simulate disabilities to engineers and developers. On display are assistive technologies such as a Braille display for phones, a computer that uses eye tracking for control as well as screen-reading software. “It allows them to play with some of the technologies that people use day in and day out,” said Wieland. “It makes it feel real and close to home.”
As an extra step to increase accessibility training, Facebook joined a bunch of peers including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and IBM, along with leading academic institutions like Stanford and MIT, to tackle the challenge of bringing it into the classroom. The initiative is called Teach Access, and the idea is to make sure students of technology will be able to graduate with more exposure and understanding of the needs of disabled users.
Just last Thursday, Facebook released a Teach Access tutorial on GitHub that aims to teach developers best practices to writing accessible code and designing accessible experiences. It’s free, and anyone can use it and edit it.
Other companies have increased their accessibility efforts too. Twitter recently enabled users to add alt text to images. Google and Apple have made their products more accessible across the board. For example, Google introduced voice commands to Docs a few months ago, allowing users to type, edit and format text just by talking. Swift Playgrounds, an iPad app that teaches coding skills to kids, had the input of a blind engineer at Apple so that even kids who can’t see could learn to program.
“Our long-term goal is that we want systemic changes to happen in schools,” Wieland said. “Every computer science program should include accessibility to some degree. We don’t expect people to be experts. But we want them to have at least some level of understanding of what accessibility is about.”
Facebook Messenger offer 3D Touch previews on your iPhone 6s
Add one more to the list of Facebook apps belatedly making use of recent iPhone features. Facebook has introduced 3D Touch support to Messenger on iOS, making your iPhone 6s or 6s Plus that much more useful when you’re chatting up a storm. The update adds pressure-sensitive previews to seemingly everything — you can peek at chats, contacts, locations, media, web links and even stickers. If you want to find out whether or not that conversation or photo is worth viewing, you’ll want to get the new version right away.
Source: App Store
Facebook Messenger Adds Support for New Peek and Pop 3D Touch Gestures
Facebook Messenger today was updated to version 79.0, bringing with it the debut of new Peek and Pop gestures within the messaging client. On the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, users will now be able to try out the pressure sensitive abilities of 3D Touch to more easily navigate through the app.
Within each conversation thread, 3D Touch allows for quick previews of any links or contacts posted within a message.
The company also noted that throughout the app, Peek and Pop will be available to “preview contacts, conversations, photos, videos, stickers, links and locations.”
Facebook Messenger previously added 3D Touch support on its app icon with a few Quick Actions that present options to jump into recent chats, start a new message, or generate your personal messenger code to add a friend on the service.
Anyone who wants to check out the new 3D Touch features of Facebook Messenger can download the app for free from the App Store. [Direct Link]
Tags: Facebook, Facebook Messenger
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Pizza Hut and Whole Foods debut social media chatbots
If you can’t be bothered chatting with Facebook’s news and weather bots, maybe a pizza bot can change your mind. Pizza Hut is launching a Facebook and a Twitter chatbot this fall that can take your order and show you current deals. The Facebook bot even comes with something extra: it can connect your FB with your Pizza Hut account, so it can list your past orders. You know, in case somebody asks you to prove that you’ve never had Hawaiian before. But what if you eat healthy and don’t like pizza? Well then, you’ll probably enjoy chatting with Whole Foods’ Facebook bot instead.
It’s not a delivery bot like Pizza Hut’s. Instead, it features thousands of curated recipes you can explore using keywords (e.g. vegetarian or gluten-free) and emoji. Since it’s not clear when Whole Foods’ bot is coming out, you may want to keep an eye out for it. Both chatbots use the Conversable platform and were launched at Venturebeat MobileBeat conference today. Similar to other social media bots, you can access them by striking up a conversation with the companies’ official social media accounts through Facebook Messenger or Twitter DM.
Source: Pizza Hut
Oculus Rift is finally up to date on pre-orders
After months of shipping delays and in-store demos Oculus is finally all caught up on pre-order shipments for their flagship Rift headsets. While that means the folks who signed up early should have received their hardware by now, those who were waiting for availability to bounce back will now be able to order Rift and have it shipped within two to four business days.
The news was tucked into Oculus’ announcement for the third edition of the company’s Connect developer conference which takes place this October 5th – 7th in San Jose, and also included a light apology for all those previous shipping delays. If you did place a pre-order but still haven’t seen it show up (or haven’t already cancelled to order an HTC Vive), Oculus would like to point you to their support page here.
Finally, Oculus reports they are on track for the Oculus Touch controller launch and increasing Rift inventory for their retail partners, so expect to see the headsets stocked in “select Microsoft stores” and over 500 Best Buy locations by the end of the summer.
Families of terror victims in Israel sue Facebook for $1 billion
The families of five Israeli and US citizens killed by Palestinian attacks on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the West Bank are suing Facebook for $1 billion in damages, Reuters reports today. In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs claim the social network “played an essential role in Hamas’s ability to carry out its terrorist activities” and made it easier for the group to “communicate, recruit members, plan and carry out attacks, and strike fear in its enemies.”
Under 1992 Anti-Terrorism act, American businesses are banned from providing any sort of goods or services to a designated terror groups like Hamas. Although the group has only claimed responsibility for one of the attacks named in the suit, attorneys for the plantiffs claim they have expert proof to link the terror group to other attacks. The suit also names members of Hamas and their Facebook accounts allegedly used for conducting terrorist business, in order to argue that Facebook has the ability to stop or block the organization, but has so far refused.
Facebook has yet to responded to the lawsuit, which was filed in a US District Court in New York, but the company did remind users to follow Facebook’s Community Standards and to use the built-in reporting tools if they see unsafe or threatening behavior. On the other hand, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza told Reuters that the lawsuit was an Israeli attempt to use Facebook to spy on Palestinians.
AIVAnet 