Anonymity App Secret Says Goodbye
Anonymous sharing app Secret is shutting down, but competitor Whisper is doing just fine.
Whisper is doing just fine. Huh.
Secret, an app that lets users share anonymous confessions with others, is no more.In a piece posted on Medium Wednesday, Secret cofounder David Byttow said that after less than a year and a half of availability, the app would be shuttered and money returned to investors; the reason, he said, is that Secret “does not represent the vision” he had when starting it. The app, which had been free to Android and iOS users, is no longer available through the app stores for either mobile platform.
In his post, Byttow said that while he believes in anonymity to promote “honest, open communication and creative expression,” it’s “the ultimate double-edged sword, which must be wielded with great respect and care.” That sounds pretty vague, but he also said he intends to post more about what happened to illuminate “the unique mistakes and challenges” the Secret team dealt with.
It was clear Secret had issues for some time. After an initial explosion of popularity, the app fell off the radar screen for many. In January, after a redesign made in hopes of helping the app gain more users, cofounder Chrys Bader left.
I wrote about Secret and one of its competitors, Whisper, in September (see “Confessional in the Palm of Your Hand”); at the time, I enjoyed using both to post, read, and respond to comments. I even arranged an anonymous meetup at a bar through Secret. Only one person showed up, but it was fun anyway because it turned out that my companion and I had a lot in common (we both grew up in the Bay Area, went to UC Berkeley, and majored in English, for instance). Though there was some bullying evident on both Whisper and Secret, I didn’t find it to be much of a problem; the fun of it outweighed the negativity.
And yet, Secret flopped while Whisper is still going strong. Also on Wednesday, Whisper reportedly hired its first president and noted that it has 10 million active monthly users.
So why did Secret, which started out so strong, eventually flop? Maybe it had something to do with how they work. While both let you post and comment anonymously, Secret showed users posts from people they were connected to socially (pulled from phone contacts and Facebook), while Whisper is more truly anonymous in what it shows you. Maybe it didn’t appeal to a big enough group of people. Or maybe users just got bored with it, which could be problematic for Whisper at some point, too.
Apple and IBM’s Plan to Make Smarter Health-Tracking iPhone Apps
Apple helped IBM create a service that can analyze medical data collected by iPhone apps, and could deliver personalized health advice.
Apple’s vision for tracking your health via an iPhone is expanding.Some hospitals and electronic medical records companies have already begun using an Apple software platform called HealthKit to add extra detail to patient files. For example, patients can opt to automatically share readings from a home blood glucose monitor with their provider using the software. Apple and IBM are now working together to help health-care providers make sense of that data, and to do things like automatically offer advice to patients.
IBM has created a new online service, called Watson Health Cloud, designed to analyze data funneled through HealthKit. It is intended to help companies and researchers find medically useful patterns in data collected via Apple’s platform, and to build tools that offer personalized medical advice based on an individual’s HealthKit data.One way that apps built on IBM’s new service could do that is by comparing data from an individual’s phone against piles of anonymized records from previous patients, says Steve Gold, a vice president in IBM’s Watson Group. “An app could tell me what actions I can take, personalized to my age, past conditions, and activity,” says Gold. “For example, ‘We know that people like you need to make sure to take a baby aspirin a day or eat less red meat.’ ”
Last week, IBM announced it had acquired a company, Explorys, which has a database of 50 million medical records that it uses to search for revealing patterns in patient care (see “The Health-Care Company IBM Needed”). IBM could also help health-care providers and researchers combine HealthKit data with information from genetic tests, says Gold. HealthKit does not yet handle genetic data, but IBM’s platform does. The company is also an investor in the genetic-testing company Pathway Genomics.
No Apple executive was available for comment in time for publication.
Apple’s HealthKit was announced in June 2014, and rolled out to iPhones with an update to Apple’s mobile operating system in September of that year. It creates a kind of information vault on a person’s iPhone that collates health data from a person’s Apple gadgets as well as other apps and medical devices, such as blood glucose monitors (see “Why Apple Wants to Help You Track Your Health”).
IBM plans to use its platform and HealthKit to offer apps for companies wishing to provide their employees with health advice. This is part of a deal IBM struck last year to sell Apple’s hardware, software, and compatible apps to businesses.
The collaboration with IBM is Apple’s first publicly announced HealthKit partnership focused purely on analyzing HealthKit data. The Watson Health Cloud is also designed to be compatible with ResearchKit, an Apple software platform that lets medical researchers collect data via iPhones.
Compatibility with HealthKit and ResearchKit is a major selling point for the Watson Health Cloud, but it is designed to work with any source of data. Johnson & Johnson is using IBM’s service to build an app that acts as a personal coach to help people prepare for and recover from joint replacement surgery, for example, by tracking how many steps they take each day.
Marina Sirota, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Institute for Computational Health, agrees that combining outside data sources with HealthKit, and providing automated analysis, could be very powerful. For example, it might uncover subgroups among people with the same condition who respond differently to the same treatment. “This data will allow us to understand disease better,” says Sirota.
However, researchers and doctors are only just starting to explore the usefulness of this kind of data, says Sirota. “We’ll have to start getting apps collecting data in different ways, and then start the research and analysis, which will inform development of new apps that could help patients,” she says.
The Watson Health Cloud is the main product of a new, 2,000-person business unit at IBM called Watson Health. Although named for the Watson question-answering software developed to compete on the game show Jeopardy!, not all of the unit’s offerings are based on that technology.
Facebook’s Controversial Free-App Plan Gets Competition
As Facebook offers free data on mobile phones in India, a competing plan makes the same technology available to any Android app in 15 countries.
The new system announced today by Jana, a Boston startup, will make it possible for any app developer to underwrite a user’s cost of downloading and using an app. The end users get a credit on their bills—plus a bonus of extra airtime that can be used for any online activity.
Jana’s service, implemented through Jana’s Android app, called mCent, could have broad impact because Jana will not serve as a gatekeeper or restrict it to one carrier. “We are not interested just in free Facebook and free Wikipedia, but free Internet for everybody, so we are giving people the ability to earn credit in their accounts to use it for anything,” says Nathan Eagle, founder and CEO of Jana.
Meanwhile, Facebook has revised its own plan. Facing criticism that the Internet.org app violates the concept of net neutrality, founder Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that he was expanding the India plan so that any developer can offer an app through Internet.org if it meets certain guidelines. About a million Indians had e-mailed the Telecom Regulatory Authority asking that it not approve the plan.
Jana has a unique base from which to offer its service. It has relationships with 237 mobile carriers. That is how it will put credits on customers’ accounts. “The reason why this hasn’t happened before is because we spent the last eight years building infrastructure that connects to hundreds of mobile operators’ [billing systems],” Eagle says. “This lowers the barrier for app developers.”
Jana’s technology got its start in 2006 as a way to reimburse health workers in remote locations in Kenya for the airtime they spent in sending health data to a government ministry on their mobile phones. It later expanded the concept with a service on basic feature phones that offered free airtime for users who filled out marketing surveys.
Last year Jana extended that idea further with mCent. Released last year, it was initially engineered to compensate consumers for data usage associated with downloading (but not using) apps from the likes of Twitter, Amazon, and China’s TenCent, among many other services. About 25 million people have registered for the app, which is available in 15 countries including India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil.
The new twist announced today detects and reimburses actual app usage—creating a full zero-rating service.
If an app developer becomes a Jana client, that app gets presented through the mCent app and advertised on the users’ phone. Jana collects fees in a manner similar to how ad networks conduct business. Essentially, Jana advertises a client’s app on users’ smartphones in proportion to how much the app developer has paid—a version of an auction system.
The 3,500 apps available for the Apple Watch show the device’s promise and pitfalls.
Nobody needs an Apple Watch, or any kind of smart watch, really; we haven’t quite figured out what to do with these things yet, beyond activity tracking and replicating the alerts you already get on your smartphone. But that isn’t stopping app makers from trying to figure out more things to do with wrist-worn gadgets. There are more than 3,500 apps available for the Apple Watch, which started selling this month from Apple’s website (though if you order now, you probably won’t get one until June).
Lately I’ve been getting to know the Apple Watch that I have to review by playing around with a handful of these apps. I’m trying to determine which may make the Apple Watch truly useful and which could just make it irritating.
So far, I’ve found that the apps that make the most sense tend to be those that take advantage of the watch’s proximity to your body, don’t require much time and attention, and don’t crowd its tiny display with unnecessary information. Apps that are more annoying than awesome try to cram in too many features, share content that isn’t really suited to being viewed on your wrist, or simply don’t give you enough information.
Apps That Make Sense
Apple Pay: I never understood why I’d want to pay for things with my smartphone, since it still requires pulling something out of my pocket and it’s really not hard to swipe a credit card. But paying with the gadget that’s already on my wrist? Sure, I can imagine that being useful, and Apple Pay on the Apple Watch is smartly done.
The idea behind it is pretty simple: to pay for things in stores that accept Apple Pay, you double-click the oblong button on the side of the Apple Watch, which you hold up to the store’s credit card reader.
Sure, you have to first approve your credit card for use through the Apple Watch app on your iPhone. And you have to be shopping at a store that accepts Apple Pay (such as Walgreens, Sephora, or Whole Foods).
On
the Apple Watch, apps such as Twitter, Amazon, and Instagram don’t
quite work, but Apple Pay, Clear, and Yelp are easy to use.The second time, though, I got it right, buying coffees and snacks at a Panera Bread. Not only could I avoid taking out a credit card, but I was able to leave my bulky wallet back at the office.
Yelp: The review service works well on the Apple Watch because it’s simple on the surface but contains a lot of information down below that you can get to if you need it.
Opening it up, you’ll see icons for restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and places that are popular and new. Tap on one of the icons and you get a list of 10 places along with vital stats for each (its distance from your location, price range, star rating, cuisine). If one of the places—a nearby bar, for instance—is closed at the moment, you’ll also see how long it will be until it opens today.
Tap on a result and you’ll get more precise information, like the exact location, hours, and some review highlights. You can tap a tiny map to get turn-by-turn directions, and if you want even more information you can tap on a review and read it on the watch’s screen. Yes, there’s a lot here, but it’s cleverly hidden; you can get a lot out of the app with just two taps and a turn of the watch’s so-called digital crown.
Clear: I make lots of lists, especially of the to-do and grocery varieties. For a while, I used a pretty, simple iPhone app called Clear, but the awkwardness of trying to maneuver a shopping cart while swiping my smartphone screen to delete items from the list made me switch back to handwritten lists I could crumple in my hand.
No more, thanks to Clear for the Apple Watch, which I quickly became enamored of during a trip to my local Safeway. It made it easy to see what I had to buy for dinner that night and then quickly tick it off my list.
The Clear app for the watch is pretty simple. Assuming you already have the app on your iPhone, you’ll see all the lists you’ve made, and while you can’t make new lists (a good limit, I think), you can add new items to any list by pressing a finger firmly on the name of the list, or any item within the list, and then dictating what you want.
You mark tasks as completed by tapping a little circle next to each item, and once they’re all completed the list will disappear from the Apple Watch. It will still exist on the iPhone, with a strike through each item, which is useful for things like recurring grocery lists.
Apps That Miss the Mark
Amazon: The Amazon app for the Apple Watch makes sense in theory. I’m a big comparison shopper, and I frequently pull out my smartphone in stores to see prices on Amazon. Simply talking to the Apple Watch to search for, say, a bottle of blue Essie nail polish and then buying it with a click on its tiny product page, all on my wrist, sounded like something that could be useful at times.
In reality, though, the Apple Watch isn’t yet good enough at understanding the strange words and brand names that often identify specific products. I’m not sure if it’s a voice recognition issue, a microphone issue, or both, but when I asked the Amazon app to find things like “Mr. Beams closet light” or “Essie nail polish ‘In the Cab-Ana,’” I ended up nearly shouting at my wrist in the corner of Walgreens, repeating these product names like strange incantations.
The few times it did understand me—like when I searched for “Stanley 16-foot tape measure”—the app showed me five different products in its search results, each accompanied by some basic information. Tapping a result yielded the full item name, its Amazon rating, and buttons to buy it or save it to a wish list with a tap (I had previously set up one-click ordering on my iPhone). But with so little information in the description, I was afraid of getting the wrong one, so I turned to my laptop to actually make the purchase.
Instagram: Instagram images often seem too small on my iPhone’s screen, so looking at the nine latest updates to my Instagram feed on a much smaller display strapped to my wrist was even less appealing.
In that sense, then, the Instagram app for the Apple Watch didn’t disappoint: it was about as annoying as I thought it would be.
It looks simple enough on the surface, presenting you with icons to see the feed of your friends’ photos, or likes and comments people have made on yours.
Images looked crisp on the Apple Watch’s display, but so minuscule I couldn’t always figure out what was going on at a glance. If you tap on a picture, you can see the caption and any likes and comments. Further tapping is required to see who liked the photo and who said what, and to reply to a photo by choosing from a series of 12 emoji (smiley faces, various hand gestures, and, thankfully, the smiling poop).
It’s possible to see user profiles in the app, but they’re painful to look at: just a tiny, circular profile photo atop a square containing that user’s four most recent photos. Yep—they’re even smaller than what you see in the app’s photo feed.Twitter: Twitter is meant for short interactions, so it seems like a natural fit for the Apple Watch’s small display. Unfortunately, its first iteration doesn’t show quite enough information to make it useful.
Some interactions are easy: you can retweet and mark favorite tweets with just a tap, and respond (by dictating to the watch or adding an emoji).
But the Apple Watch version of the Twitter timeline only shows you the five most recent tweets from people you follow. If you want to see more, you have to scroll down and tap “More,” over and over, until you are sated. And while you’ll get a notification when you’re mentioned on Twitter, there’s no way to view that activity by just looking in the app.
Facebook’s Filter Study Raises Questions About Transparency
Social scientists would like Facebook to be more open about its goals and guidelines for research on user behavior.
Facebook’s latest scientific research, about the way it shapes the political perspectives users are exposed to, has led some academics to call for the company to be more open about what it chooses to study and publish.
This week the company’s data science team published a paper in the prominent journal Science confirming what many had long suspected: that the network’s algorithms filter out some content that might challenge a person’s political leanings. However, the paper also suggested that the effect was fairly small, and less significant than a user’s own filtering behavior (see “Facebook Says You Filter News More Than Its Algorithm Does”).
Several academics have pointed to limitations of the study, such as the fact that the only people involved had indicated their political affiliation on their Facebook page. Critics point out that those users might behave in a different way from everyone else. But beyond that, a few academics have noted a potential tension between Facebook’s desire to explore the scientific value of its data and its own corporate interests.
Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, says the study is fascinating but adds that she would like to see more transparency about the way research is conducted at Facebook. “The study is interesting; I’m thrilled they’re publishing this stuff,” says Tufekci. “But who knows what else they found?”
Tufekci suggests that besides the new paper showing the “filter bubble” phenomenon to be less pronounced than some had thought, several other Facebook papers have painted the network in a positive light.
Facebook has published several important social-science studies in recent years. The enormous amount of data it collects is extremely valuable as an academic resource (see “What Facebook Knows”).
Indeed, many social scientists outside the company are keen to tap into Facebook’s data. Christian Sandvig, a professor at the University of Michigan, has used Facebook’s application programming interface (normally used to develop games or apps that run on Facebook) to study its users. “There’s a huge amount of data, and everybody’s hoping we can benefit from it,” he says.
But Sandvig also thinks greater transparency might help. “If a study is published in Science, and all three authors work for a pharmaceutical company and it says something positive about that company, we have a way to think about that,” he says.
Facebook’s approach to scientific research is evidently evolving. Last July, its data team published a study showing that both positive and negative emotions can spread between users (see “Facebook’s Emotion Study Is Just the Latest Effort to Prod Users”). That study proved controversial because the company had manipulated the information some users got to see in a way that made them feel more depressed (in fact, the changes made to users’ news feeds were minuscule, but the principle still upset many).
In response to the controversy over that study, Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, wrote a Facebook post that acknowledged people’s concerns and described new guidelines for its scientific research. “We’ve created a panel including our most senior subject-area researchers, along with people from our engineering, research, legal, privacy and policy teams, that will review projects falling within these guidelines,” he wrote. When asked about how Facebook decides to what to publish, a spokeswoman referred MIT Technology Review to those guidelines.
For some academics outside Facebook, those guidelines could perhaps be refined further still—for example, to guarantee that researchers can publish anything of scientific interest. “I want to empower the data team at Facebook,” Tufekci adds. “My problem is I don’t think they’re given the independence they should have.
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