R edesign Hopes, Live Video Partnership and AI Moderation
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there. For those looking to dig in, click on the links for the full story.
Skype Hopes Its Redesign Takes It Beyond Video Chat
By AUTHOR: DAVID PIERCE From Wired
- “Microsoft wants Skype to be a social network for the people you know. Skype calls it your “personal network” of family, friends, and colleagues. The app eschews a public side entirely—like Snapchat before stories, or Facebook before you could mark anything public. “
- “Raghav tells me (over Skype, natch) that he kept hearing users say they used Skype for scheduled calls, but other apps for quick chats and sharing. He hopes to change that, to at least keep Skype users in Skype. So he took all the features people use in other apps and crammed them into Skype.”
- “But where Facebook can just jack features from other apps and count on them being popular—because everyone on the planet is on Facebook—Skype has no such luck.”
Twitter and the BBC partner for the first time on live video
By Sarah Perez From TechCrunch
- “The new deal will bring live video and breaking news from the BBC’s U.K. election coverage to Twitter’s network. This is the first time Twitter has ever partnered with the BBC on streaming video, the company notes.”
- “In addition to the curated selection of real-time tweets that display next to the video streams, Twitter will also display immediate commentary from BBC experts and BBC Reality Check alongside the other updates.”
- “The BBC partnership is also now one of several new deals Twitter has announced with the goal of having live video available on its site 24/7.”
New York Times picks an AI moderator over a Public Editor
By Andrew Tarantola From Engadget
- “In a surprising move, the New York Times announced to its staff on Wednesday that it will immediately eliminate the position of Public Editor at its publication.”
- “In its place, the NYT will install a “Reader Center” helmed by editor Hanna Ingber where the staff will be able to ‘respond directly to tips feedback, questions, concerns, complaints and other queries from the public,’ per the memo.”
- “The NYT’s commenting system is powered by Google Jigsaw’s Conversation AI, a neural network that has been trained to find and flag trolling, hate speech and gratuitous shitposts in the paper’s online comments sections. However, the system is currently only working on around ten percent of the sites articles.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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