If I am friends with someone, I want their feed unless I explicitly turn it off. But then I remember that I am not the customer, I am the product.
For I don't think the problem is that my less garrulous friends aren't writing about their lives, but rather that some stupid machine learning algorithm has decided on my behalf that I don't wish to hear from them because I don't tend to reply to or "like" the things they post. I know this because I occasionally seek their facebook pages out and find out what I've been missing.
And still, blatant tangent, I can't edit my Facebook updates from the mobile client.
That IMO is an example of the true robot apocalypse: a bunch of "performance enhancements" and marching moron machine learning algorithms that pass A/B tests by some ill-conceived metric and get inflicted on us all to improve shareholder value by Google, Facebook et al.
Facebook isn't alone here: On my Android phone, Google Now was initially useful. It provided location-dependent weather, stock information, time/date-sensitive commute information along with occasional bits of news that related to frequent search terms. If only they'd stopped there. Recently, they "improved" it with a new ridiculously white-spaced layout (WTF is up with whitespacing a 6" screen anyway?) and a tsunami of distracting trivia about anything I had searched for in recent months and nearly every place I had driven, even #%$%ing gas stations and one-time doctor appointments. Obviously, this also passed some sort of A/B test to make it into production, but all it made me do was factory reset my phone and turn off nearly every feature of Google Now.
And that's why IMO people are opting for relatively simpler systems like Instagram and Twitter.
And Google Now keeps prompting me to turn on more tracking and history settings. Despite me opting out each time, I guess if they just keep asking, they'll trick people eventually.
If you use voice actions, they also store voice recordings on the cloud.
Google Now saddens me, since the obvious focus is now data collection (same goes for Fit), instead of working on the platform more (battery drain and memory leaks in Lollipop and they haven't even address it publicly after 3 months).
I'm sure Google has the resources to do both. Google Now was always touted as a personal assistant of sorts, which can only be helpful if it knows a lot about you. Don't have to use it.
And there are dozens of entire teams working on platform issues.
How do you think they process your voice to figure out what you said?
I get privacy-conscious people wanting to avoid leaking personal information, but I don't get those same people wanting personally-relevant services without providing that information.
I understand that, although I don't want such services. Neither did my cousin and his whole family, who were shocked that this was uploaded when I've shown them. They didn't even know. That's probably also in the way Google enables such things, the focus is again data collection, not the user.
If I am friends with someone, I want their feed unless I explicitly turn it off. But then I remember that I am not the customer, I am the product.
For I don't think the problem is that my less garrulous friends aren't writing about their lives, but rather that some stupid machine learning algorithm has decided on my behalf that I don't wish to hear from them because I don't tend to reply to or "like" the things they post. I know this because I occasionally seek their facebook pages out and find out what I've been missing.
And still, blatant tangent, I can't edit my Facebook updates from the mobile client.
That IMO is an example of the true robot apocalypse: a bunch of "performance enhancements" and marching moron machine learning algorithms that pass A/B tests by some ill-conceived metric and get inflicted on us all to improve shareholder value by Google, Facebook et al.
Facebook isn't alone here: On my Android phone, Google Now was initially useful. It provided location-dependent weather, stock information, time/date-sensitive commute information along with occasional bits of news that related to frequent search terms. If only they'd stopped there. Recently, they "improved" it with a new ridiculously white-spaced layout (WTF is up with whitespacing a 6" screen anyway?) and a tsunami of distracting trivia about anything I had searched for in recent months and nearly every place I had driven, even #%$%ing gas stations and one-time doctor appointments. Obviously, this also passed some sort of A/B test to make it into production, but all it made me do was factory reset my phone and turn off nearly every feature of Google Now.
And that's why IMO people are opting for relatively simpler systems like Instagram and Twitter.