Twitter Curbs The Hate, Messenger Attacks Snapchat And More On This Week's CTRL ALT Delete Segment On CHOM 97.7 FM
Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio out of Montreal (home base). It’s not a long segment – about 5 to 10 minutes every week – about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly on iHeart Radio, if you’re interested in hearing more of me blathering away about what’s going on in the digital world. I’m really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry DiMonte morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.
This week we discussed:
Montreal and Google are getting even closer these days. Last week, Google announced that they have selected Montreal as one of it’s first Canadian Google Cloud Platform Region. The announcement was made during a keynote Thursday at the company’s Google Cloud Next ’17 conference in San Francisco last week. The new region now lets customers – such as large corporations – move large amounts of information to online storage without having to leave Canadian borders. But that’s not the only reason.
Twitter is finally doing something about the abuse and trolls on its platform. This is great news… and long overdue. All you have to do is go to your Notifications pane, tap settings and then hit “advanced filters”. You can tell Twitter to automatically mute any of the following: Accounts you don’t follow. People who don’t have a profile picture. People who haven’t confirmed their e-mail. People who haven’t confirmed their phone number. That last one may be the most powerful one. Anyone can set-up an email address, but changing a phone number is much tougher. Most troll accounts are less likely to have a confirmed phone number, making this a pretty smart strategy for curbing harassment. Too little too late? Let’s see!
As Snapchat struggles to find its financial footing and growth post-IPO, Facebook is doing everything it can to kill it. Like this: they just announced a new feature for Messenger called, Messenger Day. This new functionality will live inside Facebook Messenger — which now has more than a billion monthly active users — and allows users to share what it calls a “visual status” with others for 24 hours at a time. Yep… disappearing images and video. Poor Snapchat?