Tag: conversations

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Magazine app Flipboard adds support for original content with new notes feature

Magazine reading app Flipboard is becoming the latest contender in the battle to relocate some of the online conversations taking place on Twitter onto its own platform instead. The company today announced that Flipboard’s curators will be able to publish original content into their magazine in order to engage with their readers in a conversation. The company believes the feature will allow curators to create small communities around a particular theme or interest. This ultimately would deliver a different vibe than when posting on Twitter to a more general audience.

The social magazine app first introduced the ability for users to create their own magazines in 2012, by finding articles and then “flipping” those into a magazine that others could follow in their own feeds. With the launch of the new notes feature, curators will now be able to do more than share articles and other information — they’ll be able to post text notes, which can also include uploaded images or links, and they can even @mention other users to reach outside their own community.

“It’s kind of like doing a regular post on Twitter or Facebook, but it’s going into a magazine,” explains Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue. “So it’s like a post into a micro-community…And it allows people who care about something, who are following this magazine or contributing to this magazine, to be able to talk to each other, communicate and build a stronger sense of community,” he says.

The notes have a colorful, blue background to make them stand out and can be liked, commented on, shared, or flipped into other magazines.

Image Credits: Flipboard

While curators can write in the notes without worrying about a tight character limit — another change possibly coming to Twitter —  the idea is not to create another newsletter or blogging platform, like Substack or Medium. Instead, Flipboard’s notes are designed to be more like a Facebook post in length. They can be used to write an introduction to the magazine, similar to an editor’s note, or to ask questions of the community, and answer readers’ questions, among other things.

McCue says the feature has been in development for around six months, so it wasn’t necessarily built to capitalize on the chaos at Twitter, which has prompted a portion of its user base to try out various social apps, including Mastodon, Tumblr, Post News, Cohost, Hive and others.

Still, he says, the launch’s timing could become one of those things where “preparedness meets opportunity,” as it turns out.

Flipboard is not the only publishing platform to target Twitter users in recent days. Substack also announced a discussions feature of its own in November called Substack Chat which has a similar purpose of connecting creators and readers in a community conversation.

But in Flipboard’s case, the goal may be to gain further reach by adding a social element. The magazine app is a more mature company, having been founded back in 2010 to offer a more polished news reading experience that’s also customized to users’ personal interests. The company today claims to have north of 100 million monthly active users, but this includes not only web and mobile users, but also those who open Flipboard’s news emails. It’s possible that the addition of the community notes feature could encourage users who now only read news via email to re-engage with the app more directly.

The company says there are “millions” of Flipboard magazines available, but on any given month, only around 25-50% are active as not all are updated regularly.

Ahead of today’s launch, the feature was piloted with a handful of Flipboard-run group magazines, which are curated by multiple people, including The Recipe Exchange, The Travel Exchange, and The Photography Exchange. In tests beginning in July, those saw a 40% in social activity (likes, comments, flips, and shares) from August to September and a 28% increase in October, compared with September. In addition, a handful of curators also tested the feature, including the magazines Photowalkers by Jefferson Graham, Hiking the World by Kym Tyson of 33andFree, and The Breadship by Maurizio Leo.

Alongside this rollout, Flipboard is adding a new Community tab inthe app next to its For You feed to showcase the best magazine and curators, it says.

The notes feature is launching today on the web and will reach iOS and Android over the next few weeks.

 

Magazine app Flipboard adds support for original content with new notes feature by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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JusTalk spilled millions of user messages and locations for months

Popular messaging app JusTalk left a huge database of unencrypted private messages publicly exposed to the internet without a password for months.

The messaging app has around 20 million international users, while Google Play lists JusTalk Kids, billed as a child-friendly version of its messaging app, has racked up over 1 million Android downloads.

JusTalk says both its messaging apps are end-to-end encrypted and boasts on its website that “only you and the person you communicate with can see, read or listen to them: Even the JusTalk team won’t access your data!”

But that isn’t true. A logging database used by the company for keeping track of bugs and errors with the apps was left on the internet without a password, according to security researcher Anurag Sen, who found the exposed database and asked TechCrunch for help in reporting the lapse to the company.

The database and the hundreds of gigabytes of data inside — hosted on a Huawei-hosted cloud server in China — could be accessed from the web browser just by knowing its IP address. Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases, shows the server was continually storing the most recent month’s worth of logs since at least early January when the database was first exposed.

A short time after we reported that the app was not end-to-end encrypted as the company claims, the database was shut down.

Juphoon, the China-based cloud company behind the messaging app, says on its website that it spun out JusTalk in 2016 and is now owned and operated by Ningbo Jus, a company that appears to share the same office as listed on Juphoon’s website.

Leo Lv, Juphoon’s chief executive and JusTalk’s founder, opened our emails but did not respond, or say if the company planned on notifying users about the security lapse.

Because the server’s data was entangled with logs and other computer-readable data, it’s not known exactly how many people had their private messages exposed by the security lapse.

The server was collecting and storing more than 10 million individual logs each day, including millions of messages sent over the app, including the phone numbers of the sender, the recipient and the message itself. The database also logged all placed calls, which included the caller’s and recipient’s phone numbers in each record.

Because each message recorded in the database contained every phone number in the same chat, it was possible to follow entire conversations, including from children who were using the JusTalk Kids app to chat with their parents. One conversation chain contained enough personal information to identify a pastor who was using the app to solicit a sex worker who lists their phone number publicly for their services, including the time, location and the price of their meeting.

None of the messages were encrypted, despite JusTalk’s claims.

We also previously reported that the database also included granular location data of thousands of users collected from users’ phones, with large clusters of users in the U.S., U.K., India, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and mainland China. The database also contained records from a third app, JusTalk 2nd Phone Number, which allows users to generate virtual, ephemeral phone numbers to use instead of giving out their private cell phone number. A review of some of these records show the database was logging both the person’s cell phone number and every ephemeral phone number that they generated.

But TechCrunch found evidence that Sen was not alone in finding the exposed database.

An undated ransom note left on the database suggests it was accessed on at least one occasion by a data extortionist, a bad actor that scans the internet for exposed databases in order to steal it and threaten to publish the data unless a ransom of a few hundred dollars worth of cryptocurrency is paid.

It’s not known if any JusTalk data was lost or stolen as a result of the extortionist’s access, but the blockchain address associated with the ransom note shows it has not yet received any funds.

Messaging app JusTalk is spilling millions of unencrypted messages

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Twitter now lets you pin up to 6 DM conversations

Twitter is slowly continuing to enhance its direct messaging interface amid a tidal wave of product updates over the last year. The company announced today that it will now enable users to pin six conversations to the top of their DM inbox for easy access. The feature is available on iOS, Android and web.

Last year, Twitter made some long-awaited changes to DMs, including the ability to DM a tweet to multiple people at once in individual conversation. Instead of timestamping individual messages with the date and time, Twitter also started grouping messages by day to “reduce timestamp clutter.”

It wouldn’t be shocking if Twitter unveiled even more new DM features over the next several months. Twitter acquired two messaging companies in the last few months of 2021: Sphere, a London-based group chat app, and Quill, a would-be Slack rival. Employees at both Sphere and Quill were absorbed into Twitter, with former Quill staff working specifically on messaging. Quill founder Ludwig Pettersson, the former creative director of Stripe, joined Twitter as a project manager on the Conversations team.

Twitter rolls out a series of improvements to its Direct Message system

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Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

Twitter will test the use of Reddit-like upvote and downvote buttons as a way to better highlight the more interesting and relevant replies in a longer conversation thread. The company announced this afternoon it would begin what it’s calling a “small research experiment” that will add upvote and downvote buttons to replies, or even replace the “Like” button entirely. In some cases, the upvote and downvote buttons may be up arrows and down arrows, while in other cases they may be thumbs up and thumbs down buttons.

And in one group of testers, users may continue to see the “Like” button (the red heart) but will now find a downvote button alongside it. In this group, the upvote would count as a “Like,” Twitter said.

Twitter clarified to TechCrunch that only a small number of testers will see these options appear in their Twitter iOS app, and users’ votes will not become public.

The company also said it’s not currently using this vote information to rank the replies at this time. (If, however, such a system ever become a public feature, that could certainly change.)

The goal with the test is to help Twitter to learn what sort of replies users find most relevant during their conversations, which is something Twitter has studied for some time. According to Twitter user researcher Cody Elam, past studies determined that users tended believed replies that were informative, supportive, positive and funny were the “best” types of replies. However, some of the best replies wouldn’t surface quickly enough — an issue Twitter hopes to be able to address with an upvoting and downvoting feature.

Elam says the feature would allow users to privately voice their opinion on the replies’ quality without having to publicly shame other users. Over time, this data could help Twitter to improve its conversation ranking systems.

If Twitter were to act on this information to actually rank the replies, it could make it easier and more enjoyable to read longer Twitter threads — like those that follow viral tweets, for example. But it could also help to better showcase the replies that add something informative or interesting or even just funny to a conversation, while pushing any trolling remarks down the thread.

Today, Twitter allows users to manually hide the replies that detract from a conversation by placing them behind an extra click. Perhaps, in time, it could do something similar for replies that received too many downvotes, too — like Reddit does. But none of these types of features are being tested right now, to be clear.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has shown interest in other types of engagement buttons beyond the Like and Retweet. Earlier this year, for example, Twitter was spotted surveying users about their interest in a broader set of emoji-style reactions, similar to what you’d find on Facebook. That feature has since been put into development, it seems.

The same survey had also asked users how they felt about upvote and downvote buttons, in addition to emoji reactions.

Twitter says the test is rolling out now to a small group on iOS only.

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Google’s Duo video chat app gets a family mode with doodles and masks

Google today launched an update to its Duo video chat app (which you definitely shouldn’t confuse with Hangouts or Google Meet, Google’s other video, audio and text chat apps).

There are plenty of jokes to be made about Google’s plethora of chat options but Duo is trying to be a bit different from Hangouts and Meet in that it’s mobile-first and putting the emphasis on personal conversations. In its early days, it was very much only about one-on-one conversations (hence its name), but that has obviously changed (hence why Google will surely change its name sooner or later). This update shows this emphasis with the addition of what the company calls a ‘family mode.’

Once you activate this mode, you can start doodling on the screen, activate a number of new effects and virtually dress up with new masks. These effects and masks are now also available for one-on-one calls.

For Mother’s Day, Google is rolling out a special new effect that is sufficiently disturbing to make sure your mother will never want to use Duo again and immediately make her want to switch to Google Meet instead.

Only last month, Duo increased the maximum number of chat participants to 12 on Android and iOS. In the next few weeks, it’s also bringing this feature to the browser, where it will work for anyone with a Google account.

Google also launched a new ad for Duo. It’s what happens when marketers work from home.

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Twitter’s latest test lets users subscribe to a tweet’s replies

Twitter in more recent months has been focused on making conversations on its platform easier to follow, participate in, and in some cases, block. The company’s latest test, announced via a tweet ahead of the weekend, will allow users to subscribe to replies to a particularly interesting tweet they want to follow, too, in order to see how the conversation progresses. The feature is designed to complement the existing notifications feature you may have turned on for your “must-follow” accounts.

Many people already have Twitter alert them via a push notification when an account they want to track sends out a new tweet. Now you’ll be able to visit that tweet directly and turn on the option to receive reply notifications, if you’re opted in to this new test.

If you have the new feature, you’ll see a notification bell icon in the top-right corner of the screen when you’re viewing the tweet in Twitter’s mobile app.

When you click the bell icon, you’ll be presented with three options: one to subscribe to the “top” replies, another to subscribe to all replies, and a third to turn reply notifications off.

Twitter says top replies will include those from the author, anyone they mentioned, and people you follow.

This is the same set of “interesting” replies that Twitter has previously experimented with highlighting in other ways — including through the use of labels like “Original Tweeter” or “Author,” and as of last month, with icons instead of text-based labels. For example, one test displayed a microphone icon next to a tweet from the original poster in order to make their replies easier to spot.

The larger goal of those tests and this new one is to personalize the experience of participating in Twitter conversations by showcasing what the people you follow are saying, while also making a conversation easier to follow by seeing when the original poster and those they mentioned have chimed in.

This latest test takes things a step further by actually subscribing you to those sorts of replies — or even all the replies to a tweet, if you choose.

The new experiment comes at a time when Twitter is attempting to solve the overwhelming problem of conversation health in other ways, too. Beyond attempting to write and enforce tougher rules regarding online abuse and harassment, it also last month officially launched a “Hide Replies” feature in Canada that would allow the original poster to put replies they didn’t feel were valuable behind an icon so they weren’t prominently displayed within the conversation. It’s unclear how “Hide Replies” would work with this new reply notifications option, however — presumably, you’d still get alerts when someone you follow responded, even if the original poster hid their reply from view.

Twitter says the new test is available on iOS or Android.