Technology - Google News

Instagram's botched experiment is a reminder that the future of Facebook is Stories - Mashable
New iPad Pros are coming out of the box already bent - Boing Boing
The Morning After: Instagram experiments with our swipes - Engadget

Instagram's botched experiment is a reminder that the future of Facebook is Stories - Mashable

Posted: 27 Dec 2018 04:09 PM PST

Stories are the future of Instagram.

Image: lili sams / mashable

By Karissa Bell2018-12-28 00:09:00 UTC

You'd think Instagram would know by now that even the smallest changes can send users into a paranoid frenzy. That still didn't stop the company from unintentionally pushing out a major update that screwed up users' feeds this morning.

Annoying and confusing as it may be, the "bug," which made Instagram feed posts look and feel more like Story posts, underscores an important point: Facebook is preparing for a future where Stories are more important than feeds.

That's more evident then ever today, when Instagram abruptly began testing a new horizontally-scrolling UI in which users had to tap through feed posts instead of scrolling, with a much larger group of users than it had originally intended, according to Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. The update, which Instagram PR declared a "bug," was swiftly rolled back, but not before igniting a massive backlash against the change.

In some corners of Twitter, conspiracy-minded folks even began speculating that Instagram's "bug" was not actually a bug, but a shady effort to prep users for a feed-less future.

What if - just follow me here - what if this wasn’t a small field test and the intent was to gauge large reaction & prime the base for the possibility of change. Because ultimately that’s what it did. https://t.co/UYMzGdd2cm

— DB (@db) December 27, 2018

There's little reason to believe that's actually the case here — Instagram rarely, if ever, pushes out massive changes without any explanation — even if it's an understandable impulse given that trust in Facebook is at an all-time low. It also doesn't help that a number of Instagram users are still salty about losing their chronologically-sorted feeds in the first place.

But it is true that the future of Facebook and Instagram depends on Stories, not on the traditional News Feed.

"The Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share stuff with their friends sometime next year," Facebook's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox declared onstage at F8 in April.

Zuckerberg himself echoed the same sentiment in October, when he noted that sharing to Stories will surpass sharing into feeds in the "not-too-distant future." It's worth revisiting his full comments on the subject, made during the company's third-quarter earnings call, in light of the recent Instagram debacle (emphasis added):

All of the trends that we've seen suggest that in the not-too-distant future, people will be sharing more into Stories than they will into feeds. And that the whole market across all of the Stories type of product will be bigger and a market where people are sharing more moments from their days into Stories type products than into Feed type products. And this happened very quickly. This whole trend has been — is much newer than the trend with News Feed and feeds overall. And it continues to grow incredibly quickly.

Again, this isn't to suggest that there's some big conspiracy to do away with feeds or permanent posts entirely. But it's worth remembering just how important the Stories format is to Facebook when you think about why Instagram would do these kinds of tests in the first place. In a world where Stories is the most dominant format, of course it makes sense to also change up the dynamics of the main feed to make it look and feel a bit more like Stories. Hell, even Google is aggressively pursuing these kinds of features.

The fact that users also hate these kinds of big changes matters less than you might think. Facebook and Instagram users are notorious for hating pretty much every major change upon launch. Even News Feed, the most iconic Facebook feature, was initially hated before almost every other service ended up copying it.

Though some people may resent Stories or the influence the feature has had on other apps, it's becoming just as influential as News Feed was a decade ago. And, just as feeds creeped in to every other app, it's inevitable too that the mechanics of Stories will soon be showing up in more places before you know it.

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New iPad Pros are coming out of the box already bent - Boing Boing

Posted: 28 Dec 2018 05:53 AM PST

It hasn't been a good year for Apple. The company's had to confirm that they've been throttling speeds of older iPhones to maintain battery efficiency. They were caught throttling their latest MacBook Pros to well below their advertised base processor speeds in order to deal with the thermal demands of the chipset inside of them. iOS 11 was buggy as all get out. Worst of all, the keyboards that are baked into almost all of the laptop computers sold by Apple over the past few years are so delicate that dust or a crumb getting beneath a key cap could be cause for costly repair.

The problem was such that a class action lawsuit over it was launched and Apple, caught up in a PR nightmare, was forced to start offering free repairs for their faulty input devices to all comers. The release of the company's latest crop of iPad Pro tablets, unfortunately, seems to have fallen into line with this new quality control status quo.

A few days ago, The Verge contacted Apple over the online rumors, later reinforced with hands-on demonstrations, that the new iPad Pro was so thin that it proved hilariously easy to bend. Some owners of the tablet also complained that the tablet came to them ever-so-slightly warped, right out of the box. The Verge's Chris Welch was among the victims of the industrial design tomfoolery. He reported that he could personally vouch for the issue:

...my 11-inch iPad Pro showed a bit of a curve after two weeks. Apple asked if I would send it their way so the engineering team could take a look. But the replacement 11-inch iPad Pro I received at Apple’s Downtown Brooklyn store exhibited a very slight bend in the aluminum as soon as I took off the wrapper.

So, that sucks.

Days later, in response to questioning from a customer, a member of Apple's executive team assured everyone that these bends are totally fine and we should be fine with the bends. Everything Apple is just fine.

From The Verge:

Dan Riccio, Apple’s VP of hardware engineering, offered the most informative response yet on the matter late Thursday night when he responded to a customer email, saying that the 2018 iPad Pro “meets or exceeds all of Apple’s high quality standards of design and precision manufacturing. We’ve carefully engineered it and every part of the manufacturing process is precisely measured and controlled."

Riccio’s email goes on to say that Apple’s “current specification for iPad Pro flatness is up to 400 microns which is even tighter than previous generations. This 400 micron variance is less than half a millimeter (or the width of fewer than four sheets of paper at most) and this level of flatness won’t change during normal use over the lifetime of the product. Note, these slight variations do not affect the function of the device in any way.” It’s possible that the flat sides of the new design make minor bends easier to spot with the naked eye; older iPads (with the exception of the original) have all had sloped edges.

So, iPads have always been bent. We were all looking at them the wrong way.

According to The Verge, Apple was supposed to offer an official statement to the media on the matter this past Friday. However, no such statement was made.

From the way that things are looking, it'll take a holiday miracle to keep the company from sliding into another hardware scandal before 2019's even out of the barn. It's a shame: the latest iPad Pro looks like an incredible productivity tool.

Image via Apple

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The Morning After: Instagram experiments with our swipes - Engadget

Posted: 28 Dec 2018 05:24 AM PST

Friday already? That was quick! Not quick enough for Instagram, which faced blowback for an aggressive app design change (it was just a test -- for now). As we scowl in Facebook's direction, a Fake Alexa setup app tricked parents around the world and Jack Black has started his own YouTube channel.

Instagram gave your feed the stories treatment.
Instagram accidentally made users' feeds scroll horizontally

No no no no. If you opened up Instagram yesterday and found that your timeline orientation was totally switched, you weren't alone. Plenty of users discovered that their timeline had moved to 'left to right', where posts could be tapped through as they can be in stories. When the new timeline appeared, Instagram surfaced a notice that said, "Introducing a New Way to Move Through Posts," and told users to tap through to see their posts.

A number of Engadget editors had the new feed orientation but it seems this update was another quick test that Instagram has already concluded.

It asks for an IP address and a device serial number.
Fake Alexa setup app is topping Apple's App Store charts

Riding the tide of holiday gifting, a fake Alexa setup app has been making its way up Apple's App Store charts. The app is called "Setup for Amazon Alexa" and it's from a company called One World Software that, as 9to5Mac points out, has two other shady apps in the App Store as well. As of writing, the app was ranked at #75 in the "Top Free" apps list and #6 in the list of top utilities apps. When you launch the app, it asks for an IP address and your device's serial number, and so far at least, neither Apple nor Amazon seem to have taken any action against it.

Check out 'Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run' and 'Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance.'
Disney's 'Star Wars' theme park trailer takes you inside its rides

The full-blown Star Wars theme park -- the dream. Disney's dropped a new trailer for the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge theme park and two of its main attractions, "Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run" and "Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance" -- with Disney describing the latter as "the biggest and most immersive Disney Parks attraction ever."

Whether it's due to feedback or just a temporary move isn't clear.
Capcom pulls in-game ads from 'Street Fighter V'

While it was no side-swiping Instagram interface, were you less than thrilled with Capcom throwing ads into Street Fighter V? You'll be glad to hear that they're gone, at least for now. Polygon and others have noticed that Sponsored Content ads have disappeared from both the "ad-style" costumes (which remain available) and the stages themselves. The company hasn't explained the move, but series producer Yoshinori Ono said in mid-December that the team was "collecting everyone's feedback" on Sponsored Content.