The tech industry is
evolving every day, and every big tech company, as well as the
startups, are coming up with new service, products and updates every
sing day. So there has to be something that the other existing
companies have to do to sustain through the increased competition.
Despite being one of the biggest social media networks, Twitter also
knows that it has to experiment with new things so that it can
maintain its position in the market.
Taking a step in the
same direction, Twitter announced that is working on a new feature to
be included into the platform, that would allow the users to see
tweets based on their chosen interest on their timeline. For now, the
company is still testing the feature and will be launching soon after
the successful tests take place.
With the new feature, the users will be able to follow their interests as they do for any individual’s account, and this way, Twitter will curate a relevant feed for the users. The platform is going to take the help of machine learning to bring the tweets based on the user’s interest together and show it up in their feed.
Image Source: sciencemag.org
The company is
calling the new feature “dedicated interest experiences”, which
it has already talked about in recent years and finally it is
conducting tests with them. The topic of interest for the users can
be any of the sports teams, celebrities, or the television shows, but
according to the product manager at Twitter, Rob Bishop, for now, the
interest will only be based on sports. The initial tests are being
carried out on the android devices only.
With the feature, Twitter will also bring up topic suggestions for the users, so that they can find their interest among the suggestions and follow them. Also, there will be an option to mute a particular topic you do not want to see the tweets about.
Twitter is also
testing another feature, through which the users will make a list of
their interests they follow and want to follow. The company even
demonstrated the feature, where a product manager mixed hashtags and
a few individual accounts to make a list. The list was accessed by
swiping the app’s home screen.
The company is also looking forward to testing the other features like search option in DM, reordering a certain photo in a posted tweet, customizable timeline and support for Apple’s Live Photos.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
Entrepreneurship demands skills and experience, but for some people, it comes all by birth. They do not need much experience, instead, their passion helps them to reach their goals. One such name is Evan Williams, who is the founder of the biggest blogging websites, Blogger and Medium. He has also co-founded some other ventures and is one of the co-inventors of the largest micro-blogging website, Twitter. From a part-time farmer to an internet entrepreneur, Williams’ story, definitely, includes motivation for people.
Early Life
Evan Williams was born as Evan Clark Williams on March 1972 in
Clarks, Nebraska, to Laurie Howe and Monte Williams. His family was
into farming, so he also worked in the farms in the summer holidays
as help. After completing high school from a local government school,
Williams joined the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he also
became a member of the FarmHouse Fraternity. But as he was more into
starting his own business and making a career, he left college only
after a year and a half.
Career
Image Source: wefornews.com
Looking for a better work opportunity, Williams ended up working with a few startup companies based in various parts of Florida, Texas, and Austin. Later, he moved to Sebastopol, California, to join the marketing team of O’Reilly Media. While working at O’Reilly, he switched to the coding department of the company. He was successful in learning the required skills and developed a personal blog website EvHead.com. Eventually, he left the job to become a freelance coder. As a freelancer, he worked with companies, like Intel and Hewlett-Packard.
Founding Blogger
Evan Williams along with Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs. The aim
behind founding the company was to create management software for
businesses. The first product that the company produced was a web
application named ‘Pyra’, which included a project manager,
contact manager, and a to-do list.
I999, they used the elements of ‘Pyra’ and created a
blog-publishing tool named Blogger. It was officially launched in
August in the same year. The platform was entirely free, so it faced
a lot of trouble to survive. But soon, when it started getting ads,
it began to stabilise. Soon Williams added some premium features to
the platform, to monetise it. Hourihan left the company just after a
few years of the inception of the company.
In February 2003, Google acquired PyraLabs, and eventually, Blogger. With the acquisition, the premium features of Blogger also became free to use. Williams continued to work with Google for one year after the takeover and left the company in 2004.
With Google, Blogger got new redesigns every few years and became the
number one blogging platform. Blogger has provided its users with the
freedom to create blogs for free. It provides the users to create
beautiful looking designs for their blogs, and also, buy a separate
domain to host their blogs as a distinct channel.
After PyraLabs: Obvious Corporation, Twitter, Medium
After PyraLabs, Williams went on to found Odeo, a podcast company, in
October 2004. Sonic Mountain later acquired the company in 2007. He
also co-founded Obvious Corporation in late 2006.
The famous micro-blogging website, Twitter, was one of the various projects that Williams co-worked on along with other key members of Obvious Corporation. Later April in 2007, Twitter was spun off to become a separate company. Williams held the position of the CEO of Twitter, the most successful venture he has worked on, in 2008. After serving the company for two years, Williams stepped down as the CEO to focus entirely on product development. Williams holds around 30-35 per cent stake in Twitter.
After Twitter, Williams wanted to develop a platform that would provide the users with an increased character-limit to write their blogs, as in the beginning, Twitter allowed writing 140- characters. So, in 2012, he founded Medium. Initially, it was only open to the early adopters, but later, it was opened for public.
In the first two years of its inception, the platform did not have
much of users, but by March 2015, the platform recorded over 1.5
million hours reading time by its visitors. The company hired a staff
of writers and editors to put good content over the platform. In
2015, the platform was nominated for the National Magazine Award.
In May 2017, Medium.com had gained an average of over 60 million
unique monthly readers. By this time, the company started paying the
writers based on the likes and the number of readers their posts had
on Medium. Williams added ad banners to the platform, such that to
make some profits through ads, but this business model did not work
for the company, and he had to remove those ads from the platform.
Personal Life
William is married to Sara Williams and has two children. He lives in
San Francisco with his family. He has a net worth higher than $1
billion.
William got his name under the list of top 100 innovators in the
world under the age of 35 in the MIT Technology Review TR100, in
2003. In the next year, he was named “People of the Year”
along with his partners Hourihan and Paul Bausch in one of the PC
Magazines.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
Reportedly,
the major social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp,
and Twitter, went down for over an hour on Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. ET.
The users of these apps around the world reported issues while
downloading and sending images, audios, and videos for some time.
It has become quite common for Instagram to go down, in the past few months. But this time, the other three prime apps, FB, Twitter, and Whatsapp, were also facing the same issues at the same time.
Image Source: telegraph.co
Every
time the users were trying to see an Instagram post, it was showing
the error, “Couldn’t refresh feed” or “Couldn’t load the
image. Tap to retry”. Though, the app was able to load the caption
under it. Same issues went with Whatsapp multimedia sending and
downloading, whereas Facebook was unable to publish the posts.
Twitter users, on the other hand, were unable to direct message. It was showing notification of unread messages, even after the users read the message.
Facebook,
while facing these issues, said on the behalf of all its apps in a
report, “During one of our routine maintenance operations, we
triggered an issue that is making it difficult for some people to
upload or send photos and videos. We’re working to get things back
to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any
inconvenience.”
Where
Facebook gave a proper explanation for its app going down, Twitter
did not say anything on what caused the issue. But after resolving
the issue, Twitter took it to its support handle and wrote, “almost
at 100% resolved. There may be some residual effects for a small
group of people, but overall your DMs should be working properly now.
We appreciate your patience!”
Around
8 p.m. ET, Facebook also said, “The issue has since been resolved
and we should be back at 100% for everyone.”
Instagram has been facing such troubles quite often. Last time, it was three weeks ago when the platform faced the interruptions, that too for two hours. Before the four apps went down yesterday, apps like OKCupid, Peloton, Feedly, Discord and DownDetector have also gone down the day before yesterday, after an outage at Cloudflare.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
The
India-based social networking app ShareChat is becoming more popular
and is about to raise over $100 million from different investors,
including from the microblogging website Twitter. According to the
sources, Twitter is leading a financing round for ShareChat and will
be investing $50 million from itself in the company.
It will be the first international investment round for ShareChat, after which the company may value at $600-650 million. Along with Twitter, ShareChat’s existing investors will also be participating in the investment round. Those existing backers include Xiaomi, Shunwei Capital, Morningside Ventures, etc. Another Hongkong based firm named Hillhouse Capital will also be joining the investors for the round. According to sources, Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey will be directly involved in the process.
The
investment round will help ShareChat grow as a leading social network
against its rival company, and the parent company of TikTok,
ByteDance, which has got a firm hold on most of the Indian audience
through its various subsidiaries, including TikTok and Helo. AMong
which Helo is the biggest rival of ShareChat.
Before
Twitter, ShareChat was in talks with the Chinese tech giant Tencent
for the investment, which proved to be a failure, that too, twice in
the period of one year. After Twitter will be leading the investments
for ShareChat, it will get a minority stake in the latter’s shares.
In fact, we can expect to see an integration of ShareChat into
Twitter soon.
“Twitter never makes a minority investment of this kind, it is usually an acquisition. This is very significant for ShareChat looking at how the Chinese players especially ByteDance have been able to wean away users onto their platform,” said an investor tracking the segment.
The
round of investment and partnership with Twitter can bring a lot of
opportunities for ShareChat. In fact, the usual number of monthly
users for ShareChat may rise above 30-35 million. Also, the company
may monetise its platform to earn some profits and to improve the app
after receiving the investments.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
Twitter made its third appearance at the NewFronts event for digital advertisers on Monday, where it announced a series of new and expanded deals in the IAB-managed digital marketing series. The event was all about Twitter’s new partnerships and the live video strategy for news based on sports, finances as well as politics.
Image Source: valoso.com
The company wants to move the focus of its users from trolls, celebrity feuds, and Donald Trump, to more productive live video sessions. The company has partnered with the news mainstays like Time and The Wall Street Journal, to bring more of the sports and news content as well as has completed a deal with Univision, to produce content for its U.S. Hispanic audience.
Noticeably, the company has been in partnership with companies like Viacom, Major League Soccer, NFL, Live Nation, ESPN, and Activision Blizzard in attempt to build connections with the target audience through its live video platform.
“When you collaborate with the top publishers in the world, you can develop incredibly innovative ways to elevate premium content and bring new dimensions to the conversations that are already happening on Twitter. Together with our partners, we developed this new slate of programming specifically for our audiences, and designed the content to fuel even more robust conversation on Twitter,” said Kay Madati the Twitter Global VP and Head of Content Partnerships.
The company through its new deals and partnership will provide the marketers more control over the message they want to convey within the advertisements. In the deal with Univision, Twitter will be streaming the sports, news as well as entertainment content in Spanish. It will also air the 2020 Election analysis and reporting.
Along with The Players’ Tribune, Twitter is also about to release a talk show, named Don’t @ Me. Twitter has extended its partnership with its previous partners and with its new partner, Wall Street Journal, the company is releasing a new show WSJ What’s Now. Also, Twitter will be streaming all the WSJ events live.
On the other hand, another new partner to Twitter, CNET, will cover the major tech industry events and Time will be airing two shows in collaboration with Twitter, named Person of the Year and Time 100.
The company has also announced that its other partners including Live Nation, Bloomberg and Blizzard Entertainment have also plans for their new content release with Twitter, and companies like Viacom will be live-streaming red carpet coverage from their events.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
According to the recent reports, Facebook, Instagram as well as Snapchat will have to remove the like button and in the case of Snapchat, the streaks for the users under 18. The ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) has said that it is going to impose 16 new rules for various social media platforms in order to make those platforms safer for young kids.
Image Source: wsj.com
One of those rules is indicating towards removing the like button from the different social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as according, to ICO the like button nudges the kids to stay online on those platform for a longer time.
“We’ve
launched the draft of our Age Appropriate Design code, which sets the
standards for those designing, developing and providing online
services to children.” a tweet from the official account of ICO
stated.
ICO
is also working on the other rules to stop the social media companies
from nudging the users younger than 18 years old, to reduce the
screen time for them and to control their privacy. According to the
new rules the social media platforms will have to keep the user
information private by default, and until necessary, the kids should
not be asked to share their private information.
The
new guidelines will also prevent the companies to ask the kids under
18 to share their geolocations in any circumstances, as the
geolocations map the accurate location of the phone.
The
initiative of crafting new rules, for keeping the kids under 18 safe,
has been taken by the government of UK, after the MPs and other
public figures criticised those social media platforms for bad
effects on the children. In fact, the Duke of Sussex has called those
platforms more addictive than drugs and alcohol.
Though
it is a great initiative, for now, it has been only taken in the UK.
In fact, in the UK too, the rules will be imposed only in 2020, after
the consultation will be over in May 2019, for the other rules. The
ICO will start working on making the guidelines starting from Monday,
and will consult and take opinions from the public as well as
experts. After the guidelines come into effect, the companies would
need to pay fine in millions and billions, if it failed to follow.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
