Publication date: 15 Aug 2019
Twitter to let users follow topics
Twitter is testing a new feature that will allow users to follow different topics in addition to accounts.
Twitter will offer its users a variety of topics to choose from, including sports, TV shows, beauty, health, and others.
Users will soon begin to see a “follow topics” prompt, and topics of their choice will be visible on their profile.
Tweets related to the topics will be selected by machine learning; the system will be analyzing content of tweets, hashtags, who has written, reposted, or liked them.
The new feature is designed to improve communication process and break users out of the so-called “filter bubble” in which they are never exposed to conversations or people outside their inner circle.
Twitter users will be able to follow topics by the end of the year.
The company is also getting ready to launch a few more features such as a search function in direct messages, the ability to edit the order of photos after publishing, and the ability to subscribe to a conversation in order to receive notifications if someone replies on a thread.
Twitter also told about its plans to add an edit button that would allow users to edit tweets after posting. When the feature will be introduced is, however, unclear as it is not a priority one for the company.
Friends on Odnoklassniki can be added by photo
The social network Odnoklassniki has launched a new function of finding and adding friends by photos.
The neural network will analyze photos and find profiles of the right people. But at the same time, the privacy of users will remain well-protected: the name of a friend captured on camera will be revealed only if (s)he accepts a request. The service “Friendship by photo” appeared in the “Friendship” section of the mobile application. Users need to take a photo of a person with their smartphone camera and send this person a friend request by touching the corresponding button.
Odnoklassniki was the first to introduce this method of adding friends. The service uses its own facial recognition technology based on neural networks and computer vision. The creators say that it recognizes people in photos with an accuracy of over 99%.
The function works even if only old photos are loaded in a user’s profile. The neural network will extrapolate the face in the old photos until the moment when a photo is taken in the application.
A photo of a friend can be taken only in real time. It will prevent unauthorized people from using old photos of users in order to collect information about them.
Facebook to have only two privacy settings options
Facebook has simplified its privacy settings for groups and reduced the number of options to two: public and private. The update will bring more clarity to the status of groups and make it easier for users to manage group privacy settings.
If a group is public, its content and list of members are visible to anyone on Facebook.
As for private groups, only their members can see who belongs to these groups and what content is shared there.
Moreover, group admins are now able to control how their group can be found. In particular, they can specify whether their group can be found in search results or other places on Facebook.
Groups are limited to one privacy setting change every 28 days. At the same time, admins can undo the change within 24 hours if needed.
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