A suggestion for Twitter: stop looking for new users
The acceleration of Twitter’s growth and identity crisis has motivated many tech pundits, journalists and bloggers to present their take on what Twitter should do in order to find a way out of its dilemma. I have a little contribution myself. I promise it’s short and (hopefully) different to what you might have read elsewhere.
So what should Twitter do? It should stop to desperately look for ways to get new users onto the service. Instead it should turn Twitter into the best experience imaginable for its officially 320 million monthly active users!
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Twitter makes humans look like bots
The advances in artificial intelligence and the rise of businesses that develop and employ chat-based bots mean that it gets increasingly hard to know whether you are dealing with a machine or a human being. The technology behind bots has gotten so sophisticated that it can require a longer conversation in order to be sure that there is no person of flesh and blood on the other end, as illustrated in this exchange with a Google support “employee” which I linked to in yesterday’s reading list. Basically, one has to run somewhat of a freestyle Turing Test. In other cases, the opposite happens: Users assume they are interacting with a machine, but in fact are having a chat with a real-human who only pretends to be a bot. An “Anti-Turing-Test”, as conducted in this example with Facebook’s experimental personal assistant M, can reveal this.
Bots pretending to be humans, humans pretending to be bots – sounds a bit bizarre, doesn’t it? Here is something else bizarre:
Think about what’s typical for a contemporary chatbot, those being used by large companies for customer service such as in the example above by Google, or by telecom operators (I recently had a chat interaction with T-Mobile which made me suspicious that I was conversing with a machine pretending to be a human): Continue Reading
Should Twitter remove the 140-character limit? 11 arguments for and against it
Here is a German version of this article.
For what seems like an eternity, Twitter has been in somewhat of a crisis mode. The fact that it currently is run by an interim CEO who at the same time is in charge of another billion dollar company completely unrelated to Twitter is quite symbolic.
It’s safe to assume that at some point in the near future, bigger changes will have to happen, at least if the goal of overall growth of all the important numbers remains. One of the more frequently debated questions of the past years has been whether Twitter should get rid of its 140 character limit. As someone who has been on Twitter since 2007, I naturally have thoughts about that – some that make me be in favor of elimination of the character limit for tweets, but also some that make me want to keep it. Here are the pros and cons. Continue Reading
Technology destroying the language barrier is real, not just a theoretical idea
How would a world look like in which the majority of people, or even every single individual, would be able to seamlessly communicate with each other?
The truth is that nobody knows. Those with an utopian ideology might suspect that many of the intercultural issues that define today’s conflicts disappear if humans would better understand each other across borders, cultures and ethnical as well as religious groups. Skeptics on the other hand could point out that thanks to English, people already have the means to make each other understood and heard around the world. Still, global peace seems to be as far away as ever.
Whatever the outcome might be: New technology is rapidly getting us closer to a point at which humans are able to interact and communicate with each other, no matter where they grew up and what their native language is. Some events of the recent weeks have made this pretty clear.
First, Skype released its experimental real time translation feature for English and Spanish. In a lengthy blogpost the VoIP service explained the challenges of allowing people to talk to each other in different languages with a tool that translates “live”, and how these challenges were overcome.
A couple of weeks later Google showed that it has made advancements in the language-translation department as well. It released a new version of Google Translate for iOS and Android that apart from the capability of reading and translation signs offers a fast real-time conversation mode. I tried it for a conversation English-Turkish and despite lots of shortcomings (that pretty much had to be expected), the feature definitely delivered on its overall promise to enable conversations in different languages.
Just some days ago, it was Twitter’s turn to present its contribution to improved cross-language communication between humans: With the help of Bing technology, tweets can now be translated automatically into the user’s prefered language. While nobody should expect to receive perfect translations that can deal with Twitter slang, abbreviations and the usual sarcastic comments made in tweets, the translate feature certainly helps to get the gist of a tweet in a foreign language. Ideally, this makes it more manageable to follow users that alternative between different languages when tweeting (yours truly belongs to that group, too).
Simultaneously to the advancements in automated translation technology for the mass market, language learners receive increasingly better, easier accessible tools to practice foreign languages and to become polyglots. Duolingo, the mobile-first language learning app by Captcha inventor Luis von Ahn, has reached impressive 60 million registered users. The language learning community busuu just passed the mark of 50 million users. Unlike traditional online language learning tools, theses contenders have found ways to offer language learning for free, destroying one of the main barriers of language learning: costs.
As in some many other parts of the digital life, the rise of smartphones and tablets is what accelerates the impact and effects of the translation and language sector. From a user point of view, it is a huge difference whether you sit at a computer translating, or whether you are “out in the wild”, being in need of quick translations or language help.
Also the usability improvements that come with touch screens must not be underestimated. One of my personal language hacks is using my iPad RSS reader of choice, Mr Reader, for automated word-by-word translation of news articles in a language in which I managed to acquire basic theoretical knowledge but in which I want to improve (which currently is Spanish). In my personal experience, being able to read a text in a partly unfamiliar language where I can instantly translate specific words with no effort, using nothing but a tap of my finger, is a big deal.
Slowly but steadily, language learning and translating loses a lot of its previous annoyances and inconveniences. That itself is the key to introducing more people to these possibilities and tools . At the same time, the quality and speed of translations is improving.
It still might take decades in order to reach a state in which ubiquitous near-perfect real time language translation compatible with all of the major languages is the reality. But if one only looks at the progress that has been made over the past 1 to 2 years, and acknowledging that the smartphone is the first suitable personal translation device ever, one must expect rapid progress over the course of the next years.
While we today only can make assumptions about what reduced obstacles for global conversations and an improved understanding between humans with different native languages mean, we might get the actual answer sooner than we think.
(Photo: Flickr/Alfonso, CC BY-NC 2.0)