Twitter will stream its first live awards show on December 1st
Twitter is already a hotbed of discussion during awards shows, and now it’s ready to broadcast one of those shows — if not necessarily the one you expect. The social network has reached a deal to stream The Game Awards when they kick off December 1st at 8:30PM Eastern. You can watch the whole of Geoff Keighley’s hybrid of ceremony and game premieres through either Twitter’s website or its official mobile apps, whether or not you’re logged in. It’s an easy fit when TGA caters to a tech-savvy audience that already offers running commentary on Twitter, but you no longer have to juggle apps or websites to have your say.
The awards show may amount to a test run for Twitter. The company is no longer a stranger to streaming live sports or political events, but live entertainment is relatively uncharted territory. If it can show that there’s a significant audience willing to watch awards broadcasts directly on Twitter, it may stand a better chance of scoring deals for massive galas like the Emmys or Oscars. And that’s important for a company counting on video to turn around its ailing fortunes.
Source: PR Newswire
Twitter iOS App Gains ‘Highlights’ Notifications Feature
Twitter has began rolling out its opt-in Highlights feature to all iOS users.
The feature notifies users via push notifications (up to two a day) about the most interesting content from Twitter, tailored just for them.
Highlights are based on a number of different factors, says Twitter, including but not limited to: Conversations among people users follow and popular tweets from their accounts, as well as trends, news, and personalized topics.
The Highlights feature, which has been available on Android for some time, began rolling out to iOS users on Monday. To enable it, Twitter account holders should tap on the gear icon in the Twitter app, tap Notifications, followed by Mobile notifications, and toggle the “on” button next to Highlights.
Twitter is a free download for iPhone and iPad from the App Store. [Direct Link]
Tag: Twitter
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Twitter adds business auto-replies for faster customer service
Twitter has been coming to terms with its role as a customer service platform recently, and the social network’s latest update for business users should help speed up response times even further. According to today’s announcement, Twitter is rolling out quick replies and welcome messages for businesses who communicate with their customers via DMs.
The features are fairly straightforward and combine a bit of automation with a human touch. Twitter hopes the new tools will “help businesses create rich, responsive, full-service experiences” with pre-written greetings and commonly used replies. Welcome messages are exactly what they sound like: a quick response to greet new users when they slide into a business’s DMs without the need for a human to type it out. The interesting hook here is the ability to create multiple variations of the message and deep link directly to other Tweets, websites and apps.
Get faster and easier help from businesses. Try it now with @EvernoteHelps and @PizzaHut. #CarpeDM pic.twitter.com/T8vHnLESEM
— Twitter Advertising (@TwitterAds) November 1, 2016
Quick replies work much the same way, by guiding users to specific options or asking for things like existing support tickets. The idea is to use both features together, much like your old-school customer service phone tree, to save time and human effort on the company’s side. According to Twitter, companies like Evernote, Spotify, Pizza Hut and Airbnb are already taking advantage of the features. Other businesses that wish get to on board can set a DM Welcome Message through the support settings page starting today, but for access to the developer APIs that power deeper integrations you’ll need to apply for private beta access here.
Source: Twitter Blog
Twitter Tests Opening All Web links in Safari ‘Reader Mode’ on iOS
Twitter for iOS is currently testing a new way of opening web links in Safari with the Reader mode automatically turned on (via TechCrunch).
Safari’s built-in Reader mode, usually activated by tapping an icon in the browser’s search bar, enables users to load a distraction-free version of websites minus formatting, ads, links, and so on, with font type and size custom options available.
The Guardian was the first to notice that all the links they were clicking on in the Twitter app defaulted to the Reader mode. Twitter later confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing the feature with select users, the aim being “to refine the product and make Twitter easier to use”, according to a spokesperson.
The downside to any potential rollout is that content publishers can’t customize the Reader view of their site, nor will they be able to generate ad revenue from page views that come from Twitter links. And as pointed out by The Guardian, some sites do not display correctly in Reader mode, potentially detracting from the user experience.
Twitter developers are said to be testing a series of changes to the social media network, in an attempt to improve the service after the company’s recent internal turmoil, such as layoffs, the shutdown of Vine, and its much-publicized failure to find a buyer.
Tag: Twitter
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Twitter test makes Reader mode the default on iOS
For its latest experiment, Twitter has enabled the Apple-built ‘Reader’ feature by default inside its iOS app. As the Guardian reports, this meanssome, but not all users are seeing simplified web pages when they click on links contained within tweets. The option, which appeared in the mobile version of Safari back in 2011, removes the formatting found on almost any site, giving you a cleaner, arguably more readable layout. The drawback is that you lose the page’s visual identity and sometimes, Safari will make a mess of it, giving you a broken or space-riddled article.
For now, it’s just a test. Twitter does these all the time and only some result in a global roll-out. Still, it’s useful to know what the company is working on. Chief executive Jack Dorsey has described the platform as “the people’s news network” in a recent internal memo. If it’s doubling down on journalism, it makes sense for the company to experiment with how the news is presented to people. Twitter doesn’t have a competitor to Facebook’s Instant Articles, or Google’s AMP initiative both of which promise faster load times and a more consistent user experience. Reader, for now, could be a substitute while Twitter works on something in-house.
Source: The Guardian
Vine’s biggest stars asked for money to save the app
Vine’s collapse didn’t surprise some of the platform’s biggest stars. For months, they had seen the views on their videos fall as users left the app for Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. They considered leaving Vine themselves, but — as BuzzFeed first reported in March — decided to give the Twitter-owned team an intriguing one-time offer: money for Vines. Now that Vine is winding down, Mic has published new details about the deal which never came to fruition. Eighteen users reportedly asked for $1.2 million each in exchange for 12 original Vines, per user, every month.
These clips, they argued, would keep the public interested in the service. If the team declined, each of the ‘stars’ would naturally transition to rival platforms, where audiences and money-making opportunities are greater. The group demanded some product changes too, including better comment filtering for overly negative and harassing viewers. (Vine eventually rolled this out, according to one user, but it was “too little, too late.”) Ultimately, the company turned down the deal, trudging along the path that led to last week’s sad but not all that surprising decision.
Would the proposal have changed its fate? Probably not, however the fact it was deliberated at all shows just how much power social media “influncers” can wield, particularly when their platform is struggling.
Via: Gizmodo
Source: Mic, BuzzFeed
Giphy is giving orphaned Vines a new home
Yesterday, Twitter announced that it will effectively kill off the struggling short-form video platform Vine in the coming months. The news did not go over very well with the service’s fanbase, many many of whom took to Twitter to express their outrage. Today, Giphy offered disgruntled Vine users a lifeline: the ability to transfer their existing video content to the animated image site.
The Vine.io website will not be shut down, as Twitter’s earlier announcement specified, but instead will act as a digital archive for the videos. Giphy is offering its importation tool as an alternative means of saving that content. Giphy, however, has not specified when the tool will be released, only stating that “it’ll be launching very soon”.
Source: Giphy (Medium)
Hey Twitter, hiding usernames won’t help you
Once Twitter announced that links, pictures and usernames would no longer count towards a tweet’s 140-characters, it also started testing changes to how @ reply messages look. This week my account was included in that test, and as a longtime user, I don’t think this change is a good one. As you can see from the screenshots, it puts more emphasis on accounts “real” names. that would be fine, except I’ve spent ~8 years getting used to the usernames of people I follow and commonly tweet to. Now, I can recognize some of those names faster than the person’s “real” one, because this is Twitter, not Facebook.
Of course, Twitter would love to have Facebook’s real name ties (and its ever growing user base), and maybe it thinks that phasing out the hacky @reply convention is a way to siphon people away from that other social network. Whatever the reason behind the move is, I don’t like it.
WI know who @nicole is, but who is Lunaticole Lee?
One of my biggest issues is due to Twitter hiding the names of additional people you’re replying to behind an “and others” link that leads to a checkbox menu. When you could see the usernames, it was easy to pick and choose who to reply to without making that extra click. Additionally, since people often change their “name” on Twitter (at least, more frequently than they change their handle), what displays may not even be something I can recognize. I’m not the only one with complaints about the new look, and hopefully, it will get tweaked before it rolls out to everyone — Vine didn’t die for us to lose @replies this way.
Someone really wants ‘No Man’s Sky’ developers to apologize
The internet hivemind’s vile side was at it again this morning. This time, by apparently hacking the Twitter, Linkedin and email accounts of No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games. Buckle up because this gets messy. “No Man’s Sky was a mistake.” Following an extended period of silence from the developer, that (now deleted) tweet went out earlier today. Thinking something was afoot, Kotaku reached out to the developer via email and was told that, “No, the tweet was not a hack, but rather a disgruntled employee. The email that we sent however was official.” Except the publication had received no prior emails.
When Polygon reached out, the culture and video game site was told, by someone apparently posing as lead developer Sean Murray, that “The tweet is from me, but somebody from the team took it down. We have not been coping well.”
Both Kotaku and Polygon received the following email:
“No Man’s Sky was a mistake.
I have contacted you because the silence from Hello Games has been unwarranted and unprofessional. The community has asked me to speak up, and I have a confession to make. The game was simply unfinished upon arrival. Our hand was forced by not only Sony, but the community as well. The constant harassment and absolute gross misconduct on the community’s part has made it hard to fulfill our artistic vision, while the pressure from Sony to release the game as soon as possible forced us to cut key features. I want to apologize for what we did not deliver on, as the game does not meet up to what our artistic vision was.
However, we do wish that the community was more understanding of our situation. Many people have asked for refunds despite our promise to continually improve and update No Man’s Sky. We are just a small studio that has poured our blood, sweat, and tears into this project. The complete lack of respect when it comes to the work we have done absolutely saddens not only myself, but the team as well. We want to improve the game to the point we dreamed of it being and beyond.
I hope everyone affected understands,
Sean Murray”
And then, Murray began tweeting from his personal account that there was a server hack, chiding that the team was watching Mr. Robot episodes to help find a solution.
If anything was a mistake, it was using Linked In without 2FA.
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) October 28, 2016
Kotaku writes that the tweets in question were sent via a linked account on your college professor’s favorite social networking site.
.@NoMansSky 100% not hacked anymore… obviously those mails and that tweet were fake. Back to work 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻
— Hello Games (@hellogames) October 28, 2016
When No Man’s Sky came out this summer it was met with a heap of backlash. Players have incited investigations over false advertising, claiming the game they bought wasn’t what they’d been promised. The game’s subreddit was shuttered after its moderator calling it a “hate filled wastehole of no actual discussion.” It’s since been reopened, but the rage has metastisized into more nefarious forms like today’s hacks and campaigns to lower the game’s Steam rating. Imagine what could happen if the perpetrators put this type of effort into doing good for the world.
We’ve reached out for additional information and will update this post should it arrive.
Source: Kotaku, Polygon
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