Test Driving Poke, Facebook's New "Safer Sexting" App For Tweens

Not content to have one of everything, Facebook now has two standalone mobile messaging apps. Meet Poke, a strange little app that lets users send self-destructing messages. As rumored, Poke appears to be Facebook's spin on Snapchat, an app with a conspicuously identical purpose and a hit among message-crazed tweens. It's perfect for sexting without leaving an embarrassing record, which makes snickering at the name a difficult to avoid.

Poke is available now in the iOS App Store, an Android counterpart is supposedly on the way. Instant messaging and SMS apps are a hit on the iPhone as well as on the iPod Touch, a popular device among teens who haven't quite talked their parents into paying for monthly contracts on an iPhone. Poke and Snapchat both put a playful twist on more traditional messaging apps like WhatsApp and Kik, which allow users to swap messages instantly. 

I took Poke for a test-drive, which was pretty lonely considering that out of 775 Facebook friends, the overlap between early adopters (translation: tech reporters) and people who would ever consider downloading a weird little app like Poke totaled up to exactly one. In Poke, you can send a Facebook friend a message, a photo, a short video or an old-school "poke." The gimmick is that in composing your missive, you also set a timer for how long the recipient will have before the message self-destructs.

Yep.

With a maximum time of 10 seconds, the app was a bit fast-paced for me. I certainly could have spent more time looking at what I think was a blue Furby that ABC's Joanna Stern sent my way. (A picture of a tiny pink unicorn figurine seemed like the only logical response.) 

Poke = Safer Sexting?

Poke is playful by design, but it's also creepy.

Inviting tweens to swap photos and videos that leave no trace behind is basically a mandate for multimedia sexting. After all, Snapchat was reportedly inspired by the Anthony Weiner scandal, in spite of its founder's insistence that the app isn't just about sending anatomical time-bombs. To neutralize the sexting factor, Poke notifies the sender if a message's recipient takes a screenshot. It doesn't seem like much of a deterrent, but at least it's something.  

To be honest, I don't get the app's appeal, but I think it's meant for a younger demographic. The very idea of disappearing texts may seem like a weird, fluffy little phenomenon, but in the era of downloadable Twitter archives and the Facebook Timeline, their ephemeral essence offers an oddly profound alternative.  

 

Instagram Rolls Back Terms Of Service Changes, Rolls Out New "Mayfair" Filter

The Web has spoken. And it wants your paws off of its little-square-filtered-photos, thank you very much.

In response to a tidal wave of backlash among users, Instagram has rolled back the portion of its new Terms of Service agreement that pertains to advertising. Instagram users seized on the section's language, interpreting it to mean that the company would leverage user photos in future ad partnerships.

In a blog post Thursday night, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom clarified the issue in plain language: "Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don't own your photos ' you do."  

Then, in a new blog entry perhaps designed to change the subject, Instagram announced an update to its just-updated Android and iOS app that makes a number of minor improvements and adds a brand new filter - Mayfair.

More on that later - the big question is whether the ToS backtrack means Instagram is really out of the woods?

Meet The New Boss (Same As The Old Boss)

Instagram's new policy around advertising is its old policy, which has been in effect since October 2010. The proposed language, which prompted the backlash, is as follows: 

"Some of the Service is supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions, and you hereby agree that Instagram may place such advertising and promotions on the Service or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you. You acknowledge that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such."

The original/reinstated policy is this: 

Did Instagram Put The Cart Before The Horse?

Systrom also stated that in the future, Instagram won't make announcements of this kind without developing the actual plan that such a policy change exists to accomodate.

"Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work."

That could be good news or bad news for users. While overhauling the app's terms for hypothetical future use cases obviously spooks users, a fully developed ad product wouldn't be quite as easy for users to overturn. 

Lasting Damage?

It's difficult to say if Instagram will actually see a dip in user numbers after this week's policy fumble. Flickr's app shot up the iTunes free app charts this week, hitting the top 20 range, according to The New York Times. Now Flickr sits at #78, with Instagram at #24.

The boost might have been a spike in Instagram defectors, but it just as easily could be a result of buzz around the app's newest update, which was released on December 19. ReadWrite has reached out to Yahoo, but the company has yet to comment. Even if photo-sharers show a renewed interest in Flickr, it may not translate into lasting damage for Instagram, which boasts more than 100 million users. National Geographic, among Instagram's mist high-profile defectors, has announced its return to the service, where its account boasts 716 photos. 

Instagram's Fate Is Tied To Trust In Facebook

In a stroke of good timing for Instagram, Facebook's newest update to user privacy controls began its global roll-out last night. Facebook echoes Systrom's efforts to renew user trust in Instagram, which has its fate bound to the world's biggest social network. In an updated newsroom blog post addressing the new controls, Facebook takes a welcome stand on transparency: "We believe that the better you understand who can see the things you share, the better your experience on Facebook can be." 

The update, aimed at making privacy settings more understandable, makes a direct effort to assuage users' suspicion of the social network's intentions around the intersection of privacy and revenue - the heart of this week's Instagram ToS kerfuffle, too. 

Mayfair Brightens Things Up

Oh, and that Mayfair filter, which now appears in the first screen of the app's filter list, is a warm, pink-ish effect that darkens the corners and brightens up the center of a photo. Instagram suggests the filter for evenly and well-lit shots in conjunction with "lux", the app's punchy contrast tool. 

ReadWrite is not one to turn our noses up at a new Instagram filter, but the feature push kind of feels like a diversion. Instagram rarely updates its set of photo filters - and it just added a filter known as "Willow" on December 10.  

Why The World Didn't End Yesterday [Video]

It is now Saturday morning, December 22, 2012. 

We are still here. 

We at ReadWrite would like to congratulate the world for surviving its rumored apocalypse and offer a reminder that, really, the world was never going to end on December 21, 2012. 

NASA, which has been a reasonable, stabilizing voice through all of the hysteria around the so-called End, has posted a video explaining why we are all still here. 

It is a good thing we survived the apocalypse, because, as one commenter said, 'I'm pretty stoked its not happening because that would've ruined my week.'

Indeed. 

As is the nature of calendars, the Mayan cycle starts anew today. As the video above notes, the Mayans had an extraordinary concept of time, with calendars and cycles that dwarf the scales that modern folks usually think about. 

As we in the media well know, it is never too early to start hyping the next big thing. So, if we think of the Long Count Mayan cycle measured in what is known as a baktun (20 katuns, or 144,000 days) and apply the same cycle of 13 baktuns, then the next Mayan-calendar-induced end of the world hysteria will peak sometime in the year 7,137 A.D. (taking three years worth of leap years into account). If our math is correct. 

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guy Kawasaki Dishes On How Hard It Was To Work For Steve Jobs [Video]

Author, entrepreneur and early Apple veteran Guy Kawasaki talked to ReadWrite Editor-in-Chief Dan Lyons at the second ReadWrite Mix event about how he lived in fear of being publicly humiliated by legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Far from being a Zen Master, Jobs ruled with an iron fist. "With hindsight," Kawasaki said, "Fear drove great accomplishment."

See ReadWrite Mix: Guy Kawasaki Talks Apple, Google & The Book Business

Guy Kawasaki On Self-Publishing In The 21st Century [Video]

Last week, Guy Kawasaki joined us ReadWrite Editor-in-Chief Dan Lyons in San Francisco for the second ReadWrite Mix event, he shared the secrets of his new book: APE ' Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. In the following clips, Guy discusses his unique writing process and how to leverage social media for promotion. Learn how he secured, within an hour of publishing, a bevy of five-star reviews on Amazon. Hint: You gotta trust people.

 

See ReadWrite Mix: Guy Kawasaki Talks Apple, Google & The Book Business

5 Last-Minute Tech Gifts For People You Hate

The Internet is awash in gift guides. For every imaginable combination of adjectives and people (or pets, for that matter), there's a 20-item list of holiday gift suggestions. 

Those can be quite useful, of course, but what about the people in our lives for whom we are obligated to buy a gift, but may not be overly fond of? That too-chatty coworker. The obnoxious cousin you can't stand. Your mildly racist uncle. They all need gifts too. Fortunately, there's a wide range of less-than-desirable tech gifts, even if you're wrapping up your shopping at the last conceivable minute: 

1. Blackberry Storm 2

"Merry Christmas, I got you a smartphone!" Sounds exciting. Not if it's a Blackberry Storm 2, though. When it came out in 2009, RIM's touchscreen smartphone paled in comparison to Android or iPhone. Today, it looks downright ridiculous. While everybody else is unboxing Apple iPhone 5s and Google Nexus 4s, your not-so-loved one will be embarking on a new relationship with one of the least cool smartphones on the market.   

2. QR Code Blanket 

No offense to the person who worked hard to create this impressively complex tapestry, but QR codes are hideous no matter how skillfully you stitch them together. If you think normal 2D barcodes are cumbersome to scan, try ironing out every lump and wrinkle from a crocheted blanket and hovering over it with your smartphone. 

3. Annoy-a-tron 2.0 

This isn't a gift you wrap and hand to somebody in the traditional fashion. Instead, you hide it. Really well. Then it makes irritating sounds and sends the recipient on a maddening hunt to try and find it. It's tiny and at $11.99, you can afford to buy one for everyone you hate.

4. Windows Vista

Whether they use it or not, this gift sucks. If they install it, they'll have nightmares. If they don't, it's just a useless box that will sit on their shelf and periodically remind them that you don't particularly care for them. 

 5. Adobe Creative Suite 6 - On 5,077 Floppy Disks

I remember installing Photoshop 2.5 using a series of 3.5 inch floppy disks, inserting them into my PC's noisy disk drive and waiting for each one to finish crunching through 1.44 megabytes of data. What a pain. 

All these years later, Adobe is still making some of the most sophisticated design and production software on the planet. If you were to put the Adobe CS6 Master Collection onto floppy disks, you'd need 5,077 of them. That might be a cumbersome task for you, but it's worth it when you consider what a useless and annoying gift this will make. You can even throw in a USB floppy disk drive to save them the trouble of tracking one down themselves. Oh, and since you probably don't want to spend $2,400 on somebody you hate, you can always just download the trial version, which will make the whole thing even more obnoxious. 

Lead photo by jayneandd.

 

Nintendo Moves Into The Living Room, Where Apple Will Eat Its Lunch Again

Nintendo is moving beyond Mario. To better compete with the likes of Microsoft's XBox and Sony Playstation, the Japanese gaming giant is looking to expand its role in the living room beyond video games. After some delay, it's launching an integrated entertainment hub this week called TVii, which will bring live TV, Internet-based video and digital video recorder (DVR) functionality to a single interface on the new Wii U console. 

Nintendo's TVii will smartly piggyback on the "second screen" craze by turning the Wii U's tablet-style controller into a device that lets viewers interact with social media and supplemental content while they're watching TV. 

It's about time. The original Wii had little more than Netflix and Hulu when it came to video content, even after the XBox had begun firmly implanting itself at the center of people's living rooms with a variety of entertainment content sources. Meanwhile, Nintendo has seen its profits slip as cheap, ubiquitous mobile gaming eats away at consumers' desire pay big bucks for dedicated gaming hardware and software. 

That revolution in mobile gaming was originally set off by the rise of the iPhone and iOS and accelerated with the launch of the iPad and competing devices from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

This is a smart and necessary move for Nintendo, but is Apple about to eat its lunch again? 

Apple's HDTV Will Change The - Ahem - Game

Rumors, of course, continue to swirl about an Apple TV. The interface, they say, is the thing that Steve Jobs famously said he had finally "cracked" not long before he passed away. It's precisely that TV interface problem that Nintendo is attempting to chip away at here. From the looks of the demo videos, its effort is a noble one. But not only is Nintendo playing catch up with Microsoft, it will be right in the crosshairs if the fabled Apple HDTV actually does launch. 

It's been months since I turned on my Wii, a device I used to use almost nightly. Instead, my couch time is spent with an iPad in my lap, which is AirPlaying video apps to my Apple TV (a device I once thought I'd never want or use). 

The idea of being able to tune into Amazon Instant Video and live TV from my Wii sounds cool, but if it really wants to compete for my attention, Nintendo needs to offer innovative social video aggregator apps like Frequency, Showyou and Vodio. There's much more to online video these days than Netflix and Hulu. Apple is already sitting on a robust and extremely popular developer platform, upon which it will presumably build its TV-based operating system. Right out of the gate, the Apple HDTV will likely blow away Nintendo's content offerings and user interface. 

Admittedly, I'm not necessarily Nintendo's target customer. For one thing, I'm a pretty casual gamer. That's a big part of my shift away from the Wii - I'm not glued to Super Mario Galaxy 2 the way I used to be, and I don't rush out to buy all the latest titles. But I do remain loyal to many Nintendo-specific games. 

Perhaps if my online TV experience came from the same device as the games, I'd play more. In fact, if Nintendo sold old school Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) games for the iPad I'd be happily playing them on my couch and AirPlaying Mario to my TV all the time.  Nintendo refuses to do anything like that. It seems to be hoping that the reverse approach will work: bringing the entertainment console to the gaming platform rather than bringing the games to the mobile entertainment platform. 

To nail this, Nintendo has to do a very, very good job on the non-gaming entertainment side. Because it won't be long before the competition gets intense. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.