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Men drool over the mere sight of them and rest of the women are jealous of their greater ‘gifts’, but in reality no one knows the plight of busty girls except busty girls themselves…
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A new internal memo has been sent out to Apple employees detailing what staff should do when confronted with Wi-Fi issues on the new iPad. According to the leaked screenshot above, staff should “capture” (code: take it and send it for testing) any faulty iPads along with all original accessories. It’s important to note that this doesn’t apply to…
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Somewhere off in the future, there will be a mobile app that shows you all of the nearby people who you might find interesting — without you having to click a single button to check in. But we’re not there yet, as thousands of South By Southwest attendees have been discovering over the last few days.
New background location apps like Highlight and Glancee have certainly been trying hard. As everyone else has partied, the tiny teams at these startups (and their various rivals) have been working around the clock to tweak the notifications they send and the nearby people they show.
Have they been successful?
The proximity of massive numbers of other users have pushed what these apps do to the breaking point, and I’ve been hearing lots of criticism about their inability to stop the notification spam, or deliver the right results.
The complaints are anecdotal so far. Background apps aren’t for everyone, whether because people don’t want to share their locations, because they want to conserve their batteries, or because they simply don’t care about finding nearby friends or interesting strangers.
But there’s evidence that both apps have been getting decent traction. Highlight has broken into the top 25 social networking app category in Apple’s US iTunes store. While it’s not available for Android, rival Glancee is — and has been racking up some strong numbers lately on Google Play.
So what have these apps been doing to fix themselves up for the crowds? I’ve been talking to the chief executives/cofounders/engineers of Glancee and Highlight for a few more details.
The changes aren’t going to leave every user satisfied, but the results could be a much more nuanced discovery experience when you use them in everyday life.
Andrea Vaccari of Glancee tells me that his apps’ notifications are currently based on three things. The first is relevancy of someone based on friends and interests, with friends weighted more. The second is the recency of any previous recommendation. And from that, the third is the recommendation for that particular person. It also fine-tunes the experience for each user, so these are not hard and fast rules.
“What we explore,” he explains, “is how to best compute relevancy (friends over interests, rare interests over popular ones), how often to send out recommendations with respect to your movement habits (more recommendations if you are moving, less recommendations if you are in the same place for a long time or if it’s late at night), and to distinguish between your roommates and coworkers (people you already know are nearby) and everyone else.”
It also looks at how often you, the user, are moving around. If you stay in the same place, it’ll slow down the frequency of notifications; if you regularly get stationary at certain times, like at 9am when you get to work, it’ll also take that into account.
Highlight has a somewhat different approach, although the themes are broadly similar. It’s currently providing push notifications about people in the following order of importance: friend connections, things in common, time of day, location (ten feet versus 200 feet), and whether you’ve crossed paths before with the other person.
Back in San Francisco, you might see people show up who only had a friend or two in common, or even no friends and just a couple interests. But here, as chief executive Paul Davison told me yesterday on TCTV, you’ll need to have high numbers of friends and interests connecting you (think: dozens) in order to register.
The startup also made a subtle but significant design change partway through the event. It switched to only showing you the top ten most relevant people who were nearby. While this has created an asymmetrical view, in that you might not see the other person even if they see you, it also allowed each user to get a more customized view.
Overall, Highlight notifications have felt way more minimal than the others — some that I’ve tried have had like 50 a day. Davison confirmed this yesterday, saying that users should be getting them in the single digits. However, he noted, if you’re using the messaging feature or getting marked as a Highlight (a new feature to identify people you find particularly interesting), you’ll see those as well. In its next version, look for the app to add a feature where each user can manually control frequency for each type of notification.
So, as SXSW attendees head back to the real world, these app developers will be figuring out how to balance day-to-day activity with the changes they’ve had to make for the event. After all, lots of users will be going to other conferences and concerts around the country and the world — and they’ll be wanting to use these apps to make the same sorts of connections in the middle of crowds, too.
My sense is that these apps are in the middle of a new way of sharing, that will be adopted by larger companies (Facebook and Foursquare?). The white-hot pace of experimentation this weekend might one day be viewed as a watershed moment of widespread location sharing, not just a crowded, noisy and battery-draining affair.
[Top image via Erick Schonfeld.]
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Let’s just make sure everyone has read the title and caught the word “RUMOR” in the front, because that’s exactly what this story is — rumor. According to SemiAccurate, TSMC is having trouble manufacturing 28nm chips, in fact they have gone as far as halting production in mid-February. It’s said (if this rumor is in fact, fact) production will not… Read more
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I believe the children are the future. (What, too soon?) But in the case of the new FTC report on mobile applications for kids, which references the current data handling practices employed by mobile developers, the children are the future. They’re the future indicators of how our personal information needs to be handled in today’s mobile app ecosystem.
Although the new report makes recommendations specifically for children’s applications, there’s obviously an undercurrent of outrage and violation underway now (thanks mainly to addressgate). People, not just parents, need to control and understand how and why their data is being collected, used, and shared, and what that really means. The question is, how is this done?
In the FTC report titled “Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing,” the agency found that applications on both the Apple App Store and the Android Market did little to provide information about their data collection practices. The majority of the time, there’s no way for a parent to read an app’s description to make any sort of informed decision about whether it’s appropriate for a child.
Apps are capable of accessing a variety of personal information, including a person’s name, their contacts list, their call logs, unique identifiers, precise location and more. Apps are also capable of connecting to social media and often contain ads, which opens up other vectors for data collection.
As Alexia already pointed out, much of the problem with the current set up and the privacy issues it causes has to do with a general lack of enforcement by the mobile application stores themselves (i.e., Apple and Google). The FTC backs this up, basically saying that without proper enforcement of the stores’ own guidelines, developers have little incentive to comply. And certainly, they have no incentive to go above and beyond to provide special disclosures to parents.
What’s more, the FTC suggests that mobile applications designed for use by children may even be in violation of COPPA, aka the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. This rule requires operators of online services, including interactive mobile apps, to provide notice and get parental consent prior to collecting information from children under 13. Over the next 6 months, the FTC will be reviewing apps to determine whether some are in violation. Likely, many are.
But the root of the concerns detailed in this report have to do with the fact that there is no easy, common, standard method to understand what an app does behind the scenes or why. The FTC plans to address this issue in 2012 through a public workshop where it attempt to define how “mobile privacy disclosures” should work, including how they can be “short, effective, and accessible to consumers on small screens.”
Already, Apple and Google have their own ways to alert users to apps’ access requests. iOS apps display pop-ups when an app wants to use your location, for example, while Android asks you pre-installation if you agree to allow the app access the data it requests, which is then listed below. Neither of these means are effective enough to provide a deeper understanding of what data the app may be after, (like address book, as was the case with Path), but also whether that data is shared, with who, and for what purposes.
The creation of such a “mobile privacy disclosure” as the FTC describes would clearly not be a kids-only venture in light of recent events. And if additional parental controls are needed to thwart potentially invasive data-sharing behaviors as related to children’s apps, it’s an obvious next step to make those same controls available to all.
That may not be a bad thing. After all, why shouldn’t developers implement the technical solutions that prevent problems like addressgate from occurring in the first place? Why shouldn’t apps be more careful about which data they request? The answer, of course, is that they should, and probably more of them would if rushing to market in the app gold rush wasn’t such a priority.
In many cases, apps in violation aren’t “evil” so much as they’re a result of lazy coding, young developers and mistakes getting overlooked. Put governmental requirements in their way, and the exponential app growth slows down. Code has to be checked again and again. The app review progress gets longer. Maybe Google has to actually implement an app review process for Android apps. Apps will be submitted, rejected, and resubmitted over and over while code gets cleaned up. All in the name of privacy. Again, that may not be a bad thing, but it will definitely change the game.
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