Taking a photo and posting it on Instagram, with or without a mug in the frame, is a way for all of us to become our own historians, grasping at tangible evidence of our time on the planet. “Instagram,” Suler said, “is therefore a tool for validating one’s life.”
Never forget…
I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.
The bot era has officially begun. In a widely expected move, Facebook today announced tools for developers to build bots inside Facebook Messenger, bringing a range of new functions to the popular communication app. Facebook believes Messenger can become a primary channel for businesses to interact with their customers, replacing 1-800 numbers with a mix of artificial intelligence and human intervention. If they are embraced by the general public — which is still far from certain — bots could represent a major new channel for commerce, customer support, and possibly even media.
Source: Facebook launches a bot platform for Messenger | The Verge
Expect to see much more about this in the coming months and get ready to change how you interact with many services and businesses.
If you are a business or church or nonprofit or provide a service, it’s time to start thinking about messaging and bots.
The concept is to reduce the size of the spacecraft to about the size of a chip used in electronic devices. The idea is to launch a thousand of these mini-spacecraft into the Earth’s orbit. Each would have a solar sail. This is like a sail on a boat – but it is pushed along by light rather than the wind. A giant laser on Earth would give each one a powerful push, sending them on their way to reaching 20% of the speed of light.
Source: Hawking backs interstellar travel project – BBC News
Fascinating.
Remember what I said yesterday about messaging bots becoming the main way you interact with tech services?
Now, when you tap the More button in Messenger for iOS or Android, you’ll see Dropbox as an available source. With the Dropbox app installed on your phone, you can share any file in your Dropbox without having to leave the Messenger app.
Source: Share Dropbox files directly from Facebook Messenger | | Dropbox Blog
The ancient Greeks and Romans were more lavish than the modern world in their expressed affection for beasts. Theirs was a splendid opportunity to know animal life at first hand, not because there were more animals, but on account of the very close relationship effected by polytheistic principles and religious customs.1 Both literature and art attest that there were but few animals not dedicated to gods or goddesses; since religion penetrated ancient life so deeply, it is understandable that animals were freely admitted into the house, and gradually attempts were made to transform even the fiercer beasts into pets and companions.
Source: Greek and Roman Household Pets — CJ 44:245‑252 and 299‑307 (1949)
Just seeing the difference in emoji presentations is revelatory in itself. But then it gets even more interesting. GroupLens researchers asked subjects to rate 22 anthropomorphic emoji from five platforms by sentiment, using a scale that ranged from strongly negative (-5) to strongly positive (5). And here’s where you start to see where “grinning face with smiling eyes” goes so very wrong. Apple’s average sentiment ranking was almost -1, while Microsoft, Samsung, LG, and Google all were 3 or above.
Source: That Emoji Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
My wife (and almost all of my close friends that I’d use emoji with) is an iOS user and I’m an Android user… that’s led to a few miscommunications before we realized that the emoji we were sending “cross-platform” didn’t carry the same intended meaning.
Perhaps that’s one of the beautiful aspects of emoji and symbolic language additions… the meanings are left to the receiver to first decrypt and then to import meaning into based on their own background, experiences, culture (and operating system).
“Is everything going to become a bot? I don’t think so. There’ll probably still be static apps for professional and authoring tools; Photoshop and CAD and Excel and Evernote aren’t going away; and video games will still be video games. Most of the squishy stuff in the middle, though, will go conversational. Anything that involves collaboration, communications, consumption, organization, etc. will probably become a bot. I think bots will replace 80% of what we use at work and half of what we use at home.”
Source: A Charge of Bots — The Tech World As We Know It Is About To Be Rewritten — Medium
As I’ve said before, it’s time for social organizations (churches, nonprofits, some businesses) to think through what the coming years of tech will bring… and one of the major revisions we’re going to see is the way we interact with tech. Messaging bots will be the driving force behind that.
When I use “messaging” and “bots,” I’m not referring to what we consider tools such as Facebook Messenger or Slack now. I’m also referring to interactions such as the voice driven Amazon Echo (or Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana etc). Bots will interact seamlessly with our lives from our music selections to our banking to the status of our HVAC home systems. Here’s a good rundown on bots from Re/Code.
There was a time when we thought software keyboards (such as on the now ubiquitous iPhone) would “never catch on.” The same with laptops. And a computer mouse. And color screens. And computers in your home. And punch cards.
Voice, gesture, and messaging bots will be the norm. Just as if you walk into our home now, the primary way to start playing music involves the salutation “Alexa,” followed by what you’d like to hear, rather than our previous practice just a few short months ago of having to go over to a computer keyboard and type in a search. It happened seamlessly and Amazon’s Echo, along with Siri, is just a sign of what’s to come.
Will everything we do with / on computers be taken over by bots and messaging? Of course not. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, some people need trucks but most everyone can get by with a car. You probably don’t launch Photoshop or complicated accounting software that often. If you do, don’t worry.
The point is, the way we interact with all of this tech we surround ourselves with is about to dramatically change. Think ahead for what that means for your business, church, group, and workflow.
On Friday, Facebook dropped its restriction around how branded content can be distributed on its social network. Anyone who runs a verified Facebook page — a publisher, brand or celebrity, for instance — can now post articles, videos, photos, links or other content to that page that someone else paid for without needing Facebook’s permission or cutting the company in on the proceeds.
Source: Facebook drops branded content restrictions for publishers
Interesting move. Typically on the web, the FTC frowns upon this type of “branded content” without proper alerts for audiences.
Facebook has built in “tagging” to try to offer some disclosure, but I’m not sure that’s going far enough for most FB users:
There’s another catch: any eligible account posting content paid for by a brand to its Facebook page has to tag the brand so that the top of the post carries the line “[Publisher] with [Brand].” That tagging creates a way for marketers to be notified when a publisher posts content that’s paid for by their brand so that they can share it or promote it as an ad.
The ultimate arbiter, of course, is Facebook’s algorithm itself. Shared items that have a promotional “feel” to hear typically get throttled by the algorithm, which limits exposure on users’ newsfeeds, even if they’ve Liked a page.
It’s amazing how rapidly social algorithmic feeds such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat etc are changing the notions of what is permissible and profitable in the marketing world rather than conforming to tried-and-true tactics or even federal guidelines.
Like it or not, branded content is one of the most successful online marketing strategies over the last few years, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing as brands, publishers, and social networks continue to figure out how to innovate around the concept.
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Elisabeth and Merianna talk about the art of writing and the powerful way writing can impact people’s lives. Why are you scared to share your story? There’s someone out there who needs to read it. Start introducing yourself!
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