Saturday, June 24, 2017

Instagram's Favorites will let you share with a specific group of people, currently in testing

Instagram's pace of new feature rollouts isn't showing any signs of slowing down. The Facebook-owned company is now testing a new function that lets you share with only a specific group of people. It is, rather unsurprisingly, called Favorites.

This is basically a 'friend list'. But Instagram wants to succeed in making this a thing, where its parent or even Twitter have mostly failed. Instagram will only have one friend list - Favorites. And it is private. That should keep things simple.

If you get this feature, you can choose who to share with, regardless of whether you're composing a regular post or a story post - publicly or your favorites. When you pick "favorites", only the people on that list will see that post, which will be denoted by a green badge. Your profile will also receive a new favorites tab (signified by a star). Here you will see all of the non-ephemeral posts you've ever shared with your favorites.

You can add anyone to favorites, and there's no limit to how many accounts are on that list. No one gets notified when you add or remove them from the list. They will only know they're your favorite through that green badge showing up at the top of those posts that are shared with favorites only. After you remove someone from the list, they lose access to all of your private posts of course.

Gmail will stop scanning emails for ad personalization later this year

Some Gmail haters have always claimed that you can't trust Google's email service because it automatically scans the content of your messages in order to personalize the ads it shows you. While this process doesn't involve any humans, a lot of people have been irked by the realization that it is in fact what is going on.

Well, today Google has announced that this email scanning will be retired from the free consumer Gmail service "later this year". So what is basically the most controversial thing about Gmail is going away. Oh, the poor haters, what will they choose to focus on afterwards? That remains to be seen, but we trust that they will be resourceful.

After the change is implemented, Gmail ads will be "in line" with how Google personalizes ads for its other products. The ads you see will be shown based on your settings, which you can switch at any time in your Google account - including to disable ad personalization completely. Google says Gmail has more than 1.2 billion users, and in the future add-ons will enable things such as payments and invoicing directly within the email service.