Webcurios 31/3/17

“>LET’S KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH A NEW DEEP HOUSE MIX BY INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED SOCIAL MEDIA FUNCTIONARY FAT BOB!

THE SECTION WHICH FORGETS HOW MUCH IT HATES THE PERIOD IMMEDIATELY BEFORE F8 WHEN FACEBOOK DECIDES IT HAS TO RELEASE ALL ITS FEATURE UPDATES AT ONCE AND FORCES ME TO HAVE TO WADE THROUGH EVEN MORE S*C**L M*D** RUBBISH THAN USUAL:

• Facebook Is Now Actually Snapchat: It is FINALLY HERE! Yes, the feature that noone was clamouring for and, if the somewhat puzzled screencaps taken by normie ‘friends’ appearing in the Timeline is anything to go by, noone really understands yet! All the previously-trailed Snapchat-esque features (lenses, Stories, ephemeral conversations) are now available for us all to use in the FB app on iOS and Android. No brand angle here, at least not immediately, but HERE’S A PREDICTION – ‘Stories’-style units are going to become a significant ad option very soon (they’ll open up to Pages, fine, but, seriously, there will be NO POINT without ad spendzzzzzzz), so, much as it pains me to say so, you either need to learn how to make stuff like this or you need to hire people who do, as this is what is going to sell to clients in 2017-18. WELCOME TO YOUR IMMINENT OBSOLESCENCE, AGEING ADVERMARKETINGPRDRONES! Erm, that would include me, obviously. BONUS CONTENT!: This is actually a useful practical guide as to how all the new features work.

• Facebook ‘Collection’ Ads: Better ecommerce ad units, basically (also, this should have been in here last week but I done a forget; sorry). ‘Collection’ ads (not, I don’t think, fully available in the wild yet, but ask your rep) are a video ad with a 4-part product carousel beneath; clicking a product on the carousel takes users to an AMP-style page within FB featuring upto 50 other products to browse, which then link out to individual sales pages on a client’s site. Sounds like an awful lot of clicks to me, but apparently the test results on these were good so ignore me.

• EVERYONE Can Now Go Live In 360: Got a 360 camera you can attach to your phone? An overinflated sense of how interesting your life is to people on Facebook? Great! Get broadcasting! There are obviously lots of options for interesting streams here – I would love to see a series of live 360s streamed by people navigating the world’s most populous cities at rush hour, for example (well, ‘love’ is maybe a bit strong, but you know what I mean), but there is going to be MUCH dross.

• FB Extended ‘Branded Content’ To More Pages: You remember the ‘Branded Content’ thing, right? The feature that lets ‘influencers’ and Pages tag brands in their posts to connote a brand partnership and make it TOTALLY TRANSPARENT that monies changed hands for the content that you’re preparing to enjoy? Yes, well this is being extended to non-verified Pages, meaning that ANYONE can now be a content shill for a large brand. If you do INFLUENCER WORK on Facebook, or indeed work with any third parties to make stuff, you need to know this stuff.

• FB Launches Live Location Sharing: Just like Google did the other week, you can now share live updates as to your physical location with a group of friends (or just one) for upto an hour. Just a safety feature, but please let me reiterate how much you could mess with people’s heads using this come the end of October.

• Facebook Comments In Gifs: Gifs! In comments! Oh community managers, the fun you will have with this! Also, brands, there is NO WAY you won’t be able to pay ££ to have clips from your show / movie / game included into the gifsuggestiontool as part of your INTEGRATED MARKETING STRATEGY, so get thinking.

• Facebook Launches ‘Town Hall’: US-only at the moment, with no suggestion that it will extend elsewhere, this is Facebook getting its social conscience on and adding features allowing users to contact their elected representatives, find information about local government and the like. Just FYI for now, but if you do lobbying stuff then be aware that there is a whole ‘future of campaigning’ thing here that you might want to start considering.

• Facebook Bringing Bots To Groups: Or at least it’s planning to launch this at that bloody F8 conference. Sketchy details at present, but the report suggests they are going to be of the ‘here’s a menu in chat’-type rather than the ‘have a conversation with a bot’-type; I envisage this effectively working in the same way as bots in Slack do, depending on the flexibility. The potential here is REALLY big, and could have implications for the use of FB as a collaborative working tool (cf [email protected]). As an aside, I think I may have mentioned before that Shardcore built a Muirbot on Slack which cobbles together phrases based on the Curios corpus – I just tested it and it spat out “Were flash cards a thing I can tell, just that they obviously couldn’t afford the prime Shoreditch billboard placement which would mean he wouldn’t run for reelection, but who also predicted some truly BRILLIANTLY mad and dreadful and high camp”, which fits pretty much seamlessly and makes me realise exactly how quickly this sort of thing is going to make me entirely redundant.

• Better Donations Through FB: This is also very big, and not in a positive way if you’re JustGiving or other donation platforms. Users in the US, and eventually everywhere, will now be able to use Facebook to seek to raise funds for themselves; similarly, the fundraising options made available to non-profits last year are being extended to all verified Pages. This is A Good Thing, I think, although it doesn’t take a genius to imagine all the scammers who are going to see this as an excellent opportunity to screw people out of monies with artfully-told sob stories (God, what an unpleasantly cynical git I am; sorry).

• Twitter Finally Fixes Harrassment Issues: AHAHAHAHAHA YOU CHUMPS! Of COURSE that hasn’t happened! Instead, Twitter has removed @usernames from the character count in replies, meaning that you now have a full 140 characters at your disposal, regardless of how many people you’re replying to and how long their @usernames are. Oh, and it also means that they’ve made the interface really, really horrible and confusing, massively increased the opportunities for spammers to aggressively target people en-masse, made notifications a total car-crash as a result, and generally done one of those occasional Twitter things whereby they introduce a feature update which noone asked for, noone wants and which serves to make the platform significantly less good for its core userbase whilst simultaneously doing nothing to make it simpler and more accommodating for new users. Which, when you think about it, is an impressive list of achievements for one relatively minor feature tweak so WELL DONE YOU TWITTER! This is a decent writeup of why this is broken, in case you need more telling.

• Pre-roll Ads Come To Periscope: Is anyone really betting big on live video on Twitter outside of news orgs? Anyway, on the offchance they have now moved to monetise it through the existing ‘Amplify’ pre-roll ad programme (this is the one which lets you buy inventory against certain video content) – they’re guaranteeing that it will only work with certain verified ‘premium content publishers’ to ensure that Marriot don’t get their ads rolling before anything horrific, which is wise in the wake of the whole YT farrago.

• Shoppable Instagram Rolling Out More Widely (In The US): Literally that – no new features, but a wider range of retailers are getting to play with this stuff. Inevitably opening up to the world by the end of the year, I reckon, so get ready.

• Foursquare Making Data Available To Marketers: They are calling it ‘Google Analytics for the real world’ which made me die a little inside, but all this data about footfall, etc, is obviously hugely valuable if you’re a bricks-and-mortar retailer. Although I remain unconvinced that the userbase in the UK is large enough to make this data in any way meaningful.

• Google Optimise Free For All: REALLY useful, this, particularly if you’re a small business – Google Optimise is a formerly paid service which is now being made available for nothing, and which effectively lets you do auto-A/B testing on your website, serving different layouts, etc, to different customer sets. This sounds complicated but it’s actually surprisingly easy to use, honest – it really is worth looking at, particularly if you sell stuff online.

• BrexitBot: An excellent example of a clever use of Messenger Bots from the BBC, which launched this on Wednesday in the wake of The Triggering (I think, like The Fappening, this should always be capitalised); not flashy, but a really nice way of delivering the latest BREXIT BOMBSHELLS and allowing users to access explainer content about what is going on (what is going on?). A perfect example of how this stuff can / should work, imho.

• Something About Cars: I don’t really understand the car that this site is selling – I think it’s probably very fast and expensive – but the site is quite future; it presents hundreds of different cuts of the same video, each subtly different, delivering a new one each time you hit refresh; the videos themselves are generic ‘LOOK AT MY SHINY EXPENSIVE CAR’ rubbish, but the way it’s taken a bunch of pre-cut stuff and Frankensteined it together in all these different ways is EXACTLY how lots of TAILORED BRAND CONTENT is going to be made in the future I reckon – get a whole load of source footage in one place and then get a rudimentary AI (not an AI, obviously, but it’s the generic catch-all term du jour for anything like this, so forgive me) to recut it for different audience profiles. Cheaper and faster than getting people to do it, this sort of thing is going to become VERY common sooner than you think. Or, alternatively, I am a know-nothing idiot who has just broken his own ‘no predictions post-Trump’ promise AGAIN. Christ.

• Social Stalking: This is actually a long-ish read about how the author managed to find FBI Director James Comey’s supposedly private Twitter account in about 4h, but it is ALSO an incredibly good explainer on how to go about snooping on social media – this is essential reading for junior researchers, etc, as well as for anyone you know who is trying to keep an online identity secret (IT IS VERY HARD). Fascinating and useful.

• Eckhaus Latta: You know how American Apparel’s ads were always borderline bongo, and really seedy bongo at that? Well Eckhaus Latta have gone one better, and made their new ad campaign ACTUAL BONGO. This is totally and utterly NSFW, even with the Japanese-style genital pixellation, but well-done them for the pleasingly unheteronrmative range of couples they’ve gone for here. I, er, don’t see *that* many clothes in these pictures, but perhaps I’m missing the point.

• Sourcing Bloch: Andrew Bloch of Frank is obviously really successful and rich and stuff, and probably a nice guy, but he also nicks other people’s funny stuff and presents it on Twitter without attribution just for the numbers, which is the sort of behaviour which really fcuks me off, particularly when he just lifts stuff from Scarfolk or whatever without credit. This is a Twitter account pointing out exactly where he’s nicking the stuff from – no, I don’t run it, but I highly approve of its purpose FWIW.

• Valenstein & Fatt: I spend a lot of time high-handly calling out what I think is rubbish on here, so it’s only fair that I give credit where it’s due – Grey London is rebranding as Valenstein & Fatt for 100 days, taking back the identity of its founders (who were unable to name the agency after themselves when they founded it because of the prevailing antisemitism of the era) as part of a broader push to increase diversity and tolerance within the industry. Even I can’t be cynical about this – good on them for taking the lead on something important.

NEXT, ONE OF THE BEST MASHUP MIXTAPES I HAVE EVER HEARD, COURTESY OF THE HOOD INTERNET!

THE SECTION WHICH PROMISES THAT AFTER THAT TEDIOUS CAVALCADE OF ‘NEWS’ THERE ARE SOME HONEST-TO-GOODNESS GEMS IN THIS WEEK’S LARGELY RANDOM COLLECTION OF WEBSPAFF AND WHICH SINCERELY HOPES THEY MAKE UP FOR ALL THAT BORING WORK STUFF, PT.1:

• Beta.Parliament.uk: Erm, ok, so this isn’t actually a FUN GEM, but it’s worth pointing out because, well, because it made me ANGRY. A friend of mine works in digital in Government and she told me some *hair-raising* stories the other week about exactly how much money has been spent on digital transformation over the past few years, how much has been wasted on cancelled projects, and exactly how much they are forking out to contractors given they’ve reduced the civil service headcount from a few hundred to a few dozen (£1200 a day? ARE YOU MAD???) – and look! A new Parliament website! Except, er, all it is is a list of MPs and Peers. Look, I am a BIG FAN of GDS as a rule, and the gov.uk site was A Good Thing, but this…this is just starting to feel like a bit of a joke, isn’t it? Also, anyone want to speculate as to exactly how much DIGITAL PROGRESS is going to happen now that every single Civil Servant in the UK is going to be engaged in the Great Find & Replace Bill? No, of course you don’t, because it’s BORING, but the answer is ‘not very much at all’.

• Brilliantpad: By way of a ‘humorous’ antidote to the above, this is a crowdfunding campaign (target met, thank the Lord!) raising money to produce a self-cleaning indoor dog potty. Let me just take a moment to explain this – you train your dog to relieve itself on the device, which then rolls up the resultant mess into itself; you then throw away the disposable element when the roll is ‘full’. Go on, click the link, you’ll get it immediately. Now, is it only me who thinks that this is simply a recipe for a horrendous fecal apocalypse all over your living room? No? Also, YOU ARE NOT MEANT TO LEAVE DOGS INDOORS TO DEFECATE. I hate people.

• Women’s Voices Now: An initiative promoting and advocating for the rights of women across the world through film. Their blurb’s as follows: “Women’s Voices Now promotes and amplifies the free expression of the worldwide struggle for women’s civil, economic, political, and gender rights. Through online content and community-based events, we create platforms that connect conscientious art and media creators, activists, filmmakers, audiences, and advocacy organizations…our long-term vision is to create an interconnected and mobilized women’s rights community, working together to improve the status of women worldwide. Using the medium of film, we bring that vision into reality, fostering awareness of women’s rights issues and providing clear channels of action that encourage our viewers to join the movement for women’s rights.” So there.

• The Avatar Museum: It’s quite likely that when you read this this won’t actually be working – sorry about that. Still, if you happen to be getting your Curios fix at some ungodly hour of the night, you will be able to enjoy this interactive exhibition currently taking place in Japan – the Avatar Museum lets visitors around the world interact with the museum and its physical visitors via a series of remote interfaces (avatars – DO YOU SEE?). Your mileage will vary depending on how busy the gallery is and a few other factors, but I personally enjoyed projecting a series of increasingly desperate “will somebody please help me please?” messages onto the walls to the apparent bemusement of the Japanese gallerygoers.

• SAD: The White House website with a small, subtle tweak.

• Kreations Ministerns: It’s been a while since I’ve seen a decent set of ‘really, wtaf?’ animations like this – these are GREAT. This is the instagram account of Robert Ek, a designer and animator who makes these very odd, vaporwave/seapunky CGI loops featuring blank-eyed mannequin-type creatures inhabiting slightly sinister 90s ray-traced landscapes in which slightly unsettling things happen to them. Excellent and properly odd.

• The Human Library: This is a lovely project, I think – The Human Library is a repository of stories from/by people of all sorts from around the world, presented only with their ‘cover’ – ‘books’ are titled things like ‘The Single Mother’, ‘The Extreme BME Enthusiast’, or ‘The Alcoholic’, because, you know, LABELS. There’s perhaps a disappointing lack of depth to the content, though I hope that this is because the project’s in its infancy; regardless, it’s a good idea and one worth exploring.

• Loopy: Lovely looped animations in a variety of styles by graphic designer Muti; what’s most impressive, aside from the quality of the work, is the breadth of visual identities adopted here.

• Wonder: This is potentially great and potentially rubbish and I won’t know until the 583 people ahead of me in the waiting list (DAMN YOUR EYES) get out of the way – the theory, though, is that Wonder is a London-based tech rental service which will let you rent gadgets for a defined period of time at a set cost. They probably offer drones and stuff – I DON’T CARE I JUST WANT A NINTENDO FOR A MONTH DAMMIT (this isn’t working, is it?).

• Penna: I don’t think anyone uses tablets anymore, do they? Aside from watching Come Dine With Me marathons in bed whilst smoking oneself into a coma they have broadly been declared obsolete. Maybe this will bring them back (it won’t) – Penna is a forthcoming Kickstarter campaign to fund this retro typewriter-style keyboard which works with your tablet to provide you with a BEAUTIFUL RETRO TYPING EXPERIENCE, should that be your thing. Personally I think that this screams ‘twat’, but I am so far from cool as I hurtle towards my 40s that this is probably some sort of ringing endorsement of its stylishness.

• Burned Your Tweet: Twitter art project of the week, in which every time The Donald spekes his branes in 140 characters the Tweet gets printed and burnt by this little robot setup, the whole thing is filmed and then this account tweets the resulting video. Impotent rage, obviously, but it is *very* satisfying.

• Google Open Source: All of Google’s Open Source projects in one place. Obviously this is only of interest to coders/developers, but it’s a hell of a resource with over 2000 individual projects available to mess with, covering everything from engineering to games to email and all things inbetween. Some of you will find lots of things to play with in here.

• Scheduled: More Messenger bots! This time one which lets you outsource your caring about other people to an unthinking machine, thereby eliminating one more of the unique and fundamental qualities that make you human! Oh, ok, fine, I am hyperbolising slightly (SHOCKER), but still, there’s something a touch…cold about this. Scheduled lets you set reminders to yourself within the bot interface; so, say, check in with so-and-so in 6 months, or say thanks to your partner for just being lovely, that sort of thing. No real clue why this is doing anything better than A FCUKING CALENDAR, but it’s a BOT and therefore it’s COOL. See the BBC thing I pointed out up top as a good and useful thing? This is pretty much the opposite imho.

• Bendy10: You’ll need to open this on your phone, but it’s a really nicely made site to sell you posters. Have a play with it – it uses your phone’s sensors to make you change your posture, and displays lovely scrolling graphics as you so do to make some SERIOUS POINTS about how much we all stare at the fcuking things all the time (and then tries to flog you some artworks, but the site’s so lovely you don’t really mind by that point). I’ve not seen anything done quite like this before – it’s a really neat use of the screen and sensors I think.

• Lightform: Oh wow, this is interesting. Lightbox is apparently coming later this year – it’s effectively a mini projection-mapping setup, designed to be used by small businesses or artists, which lets you do projection-mapped video onto small areas using just the one bit of kit (and the software, obviously). The use cases shown on the site are interesting in themselves; the menu thing hadn’t even occurred to me, and there are all sorts of interesting angles in terms of what artists could do with this in terms of creating site-specific digital work. Really quite inspiring (unusually positive, I know, but I just had a cinnamon bagel and am feeling more upbeat about things momentarily).

• The Cloud Atlas: I had NO IDEA that this was a thing, but am very happy that it is. The Cloud Atlas is the World Meteorological Organisation official classification site for clouds – it was brought to my attention this week by the SEISMIC news that NEW TYPES OF CLOUD HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED! I know, right? “One new species (volutus), five new supplementary features (asperitas, cauda, cavum, fluctus and murus), and one new accessory cloud (flumen)”; can we just pause a second to contemplate what a lovely thing the concept of an ‘accessory’ cloud is? I WANT AN ACCESSORY CLOUD.

• Explore The Chicago Collections: The US does this stuff so well. This is a unified search platform and archive for historical municipal data from the city of Chicago – images, maps, etc, from a bunch of different archives and institutions all with one front-end interface. Obviously of most interest if you’re, you know, interested in Chicago, but this sort of historical archive is always a treasure trove regardless of your specific focus.

• Alex Yeatts: The latest in the long line of Instagram bakers producing stuff so jaw-droppingly pretty/impressive that you don’t believe it’s edible. Alex Yeatts makes really lovely-looking confectionary, but also makes stuff that looks like ACTUAL ROCKS that you can break open to reveal amazing edible crystals and things – this stuff is actually unbelievable, really (I had no idea that ‘Geode cakes’ were a thing, but apparently they are).

• I Am Inuit: A photo project by the OTHER Bryan Adams who takes photos, documenting the lives of the Inuit people across Alaska. Wonderful portraits of some very, very cold people and places.

• Smart Satnav: This looks like it might actually be quite a good idea, though having spent a grand total of 30 minutes in my entire life in control of a car I am probably not best-placed to judge. This is a now-funded Kickstarter which is going to absolutely destroy its targets (it reached its goal in 7h) – the gimmick is that this is basically a satnav with massive bells on; voice recognition, gesture control, etc etc. Obviously the fact that it’s SMART also makes it VULNERABLE, so look forward to the first cases of clever kidnappers directing the tech to make you drive to a secluded spot where they will rob you blind and hold you for ransom. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

• The European Music Incubator: “European Music Incubator is an innovative training program for European emerging musicians who want to develop a long-term career grounded on entrepreneurial mindset and beyond the traditional framework of popular music.” It’s open to musicians from Liverpool in the UK (that seems to be the partner area that’s been selected), and you have until 30 April to apply – so if that is you, or someone you know, send them this – these things are always appallingly promoted and richer than you’d expect, so it would be silly not to give it a go. God, I’m SO GLAD we’re leaving behind a system where support for emergent art and artists is subsidised, aren’t you? Eh? Oh. Me too.