Milos Cuparic - Softonic English

Exploring the Facebook Explore feed

Last week Facebook surprised us with what seems to be a test feature in a select few countries, and we’ve now had a chance to see it in action. The name of this new feature is Explore Feed, and it appears to filter out all the good stuff for both users and publishers.

This new feature eliminates any post from pages you’ve liked on Facebook from your regular feed. To see those posts, you have to click on the Explore Feed tab. Facebook page owners, or publishers, have seen an 80% drop in organic reach (a measure of how many users can see a publisher’s post) during this test thanks to the Explore Feed. After testing the feature for a while, we’ve noticed that promoted (or paid) posts still show up in our regular feed, so this just might be a publisher’s worst nightmare.

It is no secret that content creators drive traffic to websites via their Facebook pages, and they have the right to do that, but it looks like Facebook now wants them to pay up if they want to reach their audience. Page owners who used Facebook for traffic boosting back in the day certainly remember easy it was to reach their Facebook fans with their posts. That was slashed by a staggering 80% when Facebook decided that they wanted publishers to start using their paid post-boosting option. A lot of them adapted, but a lot of them just gave up. Those who adapted are now facing the same scenario again.

Of course, Facebook has the right to change its policies and implement new features to earn money, but in addition to being bad for publishers, the Explore Feed isn’t very user-friendly. The icon is barely noticeable on the left-hand side of the screen. And if you are like me, and you’ve disabled automatic updates for your apps, you won’t be able to access the Explore Feed option at all. I didn’t even get a notification about this change on my phone, only on desktop, and the number of desktop users is rapidly plummeting. The general impression is that users aren’t well informed about the new feature, and those who are rarely use it.

If the Explore Feed rolls out as an official Facebook feature, content creators will be in big trouble. Some reports indicate that it will be an official feature, but there is no final confirmation yet. I personally hope that it doesn’t, because over the past ten days I haven’t clicked on it more than twice, and that was only for test purposes. As for page owners, it looks like you guys will either have to pay up or go home.

How to Create a Poll in Instagram Stories

Story Poll is a new Instagram feature that will help you get input from your followers in no time at all. By now, you have probably seen a lot of them in your Instagram feed. If you want to try creating one yourself, here’s how.

How to Create Polls on Instagram

When you start creating your Insta-Story, you will see a happy face icon at the top of your screen. This is where you start.

Once you click it you’ll be able to start creating your own little survey by selecting the Poll option towards the middle of your screen.

After that, it’s up to you what kind of poll you want to create. It could be a simple yes or no question, or you could ask questions that are more complicated, like favorite movies, for example. You can customize the poll however you want.

Do you want more followers? Get Followers Pro for Instagram now!

Once your poll is live, your followers can instantly start interacting with them. Live stats are available by swiping up on your poll.

The poll will disappear in 24 hours, just like any other Insta-Story, and it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. These can be useful for regular users and for brands as well. Polls allow big brands to ask their audience what they think of a new product, what changes they’d make to it, and ask for constructive feedback… The possibilities are endless. You just need to get creative!

How to Delete a Gmail Account Completely

So you created a bunch of Gmail accounts for what seemed like a good reason at the time, but now you want to get rid of them? Perhaps you’re worried about privacy and security or you just want to tidy up your online footprint.

Whatever the reason, you’ll be happy to know that it is actually possible to delete a Gmail account completely. Most people aren’t even aware of this because they’ve never tried it before or thought to look into the possibility. You’re different, however; so let’s have a look at how it’s done.

How to Completely Delete a Gmail Account

First, open your Account settings.
Under account preferences, you will find a Delete your account or service option.
From there, click Delete products. It’s good to know that you can also delete your Google account completely. That would remove your search history, YouTube account, and anything else related to Google.
Select the Gmail address you want to delete.
Type in the password.
Press Next.
Find the trash can icon next to Gmail. Click it.
Enter an alternative email address. This address will be your new Google username, so be sure not to use an email that you can’t access.
Click Send verification email.
You will now get an email from no-reply@accounts.google.com, which will give you the link you have to click in order to delete your Gmail.
If necessary, log into your Gmail account.
From here, you will just have to follow the instructions. Once you click Yes, I want to delete youremail@gmail.com, the email account will be completely deleted forever. This step can’t be undone.

Once you complete all of these steps, your Gmail inbox and outbox will be wiped. People who send you emails will get a delivery failure message every time. If you want to save your messages before you delete your Gmail account, you can do so with Google Takeout.

New Facebook Feature Aims to Help Increase Blood Donations in India

The whole world, including India, has a problem with a shortage of safe blood. There aren’t enough people donating blood to cover everyone in need and families are often forced to find donors on their own.

Facebook has noticed this this and have decided to take action on their end. Their research suggests that if people are more informed about the issue they are more willing to help. That would also make the job much easier for people who are in need of blood donors.

From October 1st National Blood Donor Day users in India will have had the chance to try out this new feature from Facebook. They will be able to sign up as blood donors. All information will be private by default but users will have control over that and will be able to share their donor status with their friends if they choose to. This feature will first be available on Android and mobile web.

Blood banks and people looking for donors will also find this feature very helpful. They will have an option to create a special type of post with all the information donors need and Facebook will automatically notify people that fit the profile. The donors can then contact the person who needs blood via WhatsApp, Messenger or a simple phone call. Profile privacy will be kept safe unless the donor wants it to be available.

We love this project because it has a lot of potential to become a global thing and help solve so many problems, not to mention, potentially save millions of lives.

Via: Facebook

How to Delete Your Google Voice Search Data

It might surprise you to learn that Google records all of your voice searches. In fact, Google records everything you type in or search by voice. Here’s how to find that data and remove it. (You can even listen to it first if you’d like.)

In June 2015, Google created a portal for Google account activities. This is where you can find and control your privacy settings. If you go to the Google activity page, you will likely find a whole lot of data if you’ve never cleared your browsing history. Everything you do via Google is stored there, including your voice searches.

As you can see, everything is there, including every audio file. This enables advertisers to reach you based on your searches.

How to delete your recordings:

1. Log into history.google.com

2. Click on “Delete activity by”

3. In the dropdown menu, select “all time”

4. Press Delete

Simple as that.

As far as we know, Google doesn’t use these recordings for some evil agenda; they are used primarily for ad targeting purposes and probably to improve language processing algorithms. That way, voice search will be able to distinguish accents and improve the user experience even more. But if you’re reluctant to let Google have all your data for its ad targeting, now you can wipe it away with a few satisfying clicks.

The New Internet Promises Complete User Privacy and Data Security

For the past four years, a Hong-Kong software engineer named Larry Salibra has been working on a decentralized internet where big companies like Facebook, Google, ad Alibaba will have no access to your personal data and browsing history. His creation is ready to come to life.

“It’s a really big change from the current internet … we [take] the value away from these big centralized companies like Facebook and Google and put data back into the users’ control…”

-Larry Salibra to the South China Morning Post

This is how the “New Internet” will operate

Salibra saw more possibilities for blockchain, and he wanted to implement those ideas into Blockstack. If you are unfamiliar with blockchains and Bitcoins, more info can be found here.

“By using bitcoin transactions and putting some special data into each transaction, we’re able to create a virtual blockchain on top of the bitcoin blockchain that just has Blockstack-specific data.”

Blockstack will enable users to buy an ID and share only the information that they want to share with the rest of the community. Everything that they want to keep private will be kept private. A decentralized internet also means that hackers won’t have access to any personal data unless they target an individual. And that would be expensive and time-consuming, according to Salibra.

Blockstack has been in development since 2013, and was created to counteract censorship. China’s government has a “great firewall” that blocks access to websites they don’t find fitting for their citizens. They can block anything from big websites like Facebook to small media outlets. Blockstack, being a decentralized internet, will not allow that; there is no way for anyone to control the flow of information on a Blockstack network.

“We envision a world where … if what they’re doing is illegal, you get a court order and you enforce that against them in the real world. You don’t want Google making its own decision about what’s acceptable or governments going to them to delete domains.”

Blockstack apps are currently distributed via regular internet domains, but once the “new internet” is up and running there will be no need for that. Blockstack will also allow software developers to earn money by creating new apps. Payments will be made with cryptocurrency only. App creators will register on a blockchain and will have full control over their creations. No one will be able to remove them except the creator.

In August it was announced that the budget for this project is 25 million USD and that Blockstack will be released for desktop computers in the first quarter of 2018. Users will access it via a browser that is developed by Salibra.

A mobile app is also being developed,but it is unclear if Google and Apple will approve the app for their devices.

Why Is Cuphead So Popular?

Who would have thought that in 2017 a 2D run-and-gun game could be so much fun? A lot of people had their doubts, but studio MDHR has done a truly amazing job with Cuphead. The game is taking the world by storm and seems ready to break some serious records. Why is it so popular? Let’s have a look.

When it was first announced in 2014, Cuphead promised a 1930s cartoon art style that got a lot of attention. Unfortunately, players had to wait three years for the game to be published. Some even lost hope in 2016 when there was close to no info about the game online. It finally launched on September 29 of 2017 and has been a smash hit.

The game looks even better than we could have hoped, and it is much harder than we could have guessed. Cuphead has set a new standard when it comes to difficulty, and people will probably have to rephrase the “Dark Souls of X” to “The Cuphead of X.” The game itself focuses mostly on boss fights. Classic levels are rare, and you only play them to collect coins that are spent on upgrades.

The boss fights are a story all on their own. I had a chance to play the game and called it a day after I had finished about five bosses. It took me about three hours to get past those five bosses on regular difficulty. The game makes you learn the patterns of boss attacks, but even if you know them all, it can still feel impossible to dodge them all.

Cuphead is hard and nerve-wracking, so what makes it so special?

Cuphead is a unique title that gives new meaning to video games as a whole. The art style is one of a kind. The team has captured the 1930s cartoon theme in the best possible way, and they’ve also made players realize how bad at gaming they really are. Another benefit: in the age of the microtransaction – witgh for example, cosmetics that you can buy for real money in full priced games – Cuphead comes out with a $20 price tag and for that you get everything. All of this has resulted in great review scores. The game is currently at 10/10 on Steam and has an 86 score on Metacritic.

With over 100,000 copies sold on Steam in the first 3 days and a ton of active players, Cuphead is on its way to set some serious records and break a lot of controllers in the process. Maybe big studios that highly depend on in-game currency and microtransactions will learn a thing or two from studio MDHR. As they have proven, good games can be made without additional monetization; you just have to put a lot of work into the creative process and give the players what they really want. Polished, finished games with a single price. Is that so hard?

What are the best Siri Commands?

Apple’s virtual assistant Siri has been around for some time now and a lot of people don’t know that Siri has some very interesting and useful commands. Apple have never published a full list of commands for Siri but we managed to find almost all of them on the internet and pick out the best ones.

Find out what airplanes are currently flying above you. Ex.: “What airplanes are above me?”
Siri will search the live airplane map and tell you exactly what airplanes are flying above you. It’s not very useful but it’s still fun.

Flip a coin

Whenever you can’t make a decision on your own you can always ask Siri to flip a coin for you.

What does the fox say?

Siri may try to convince you that she doesn’t have a sense of humor but this video shows the opposite.

Now that we got the funny ones out of the way let’s see what Siri can really do. Since iOS 10 came out developers have been able to implement voice commands into their apps and now you can send messages VIA WhatsApp or make payments with Square Cash. You can view and customize which apps are granted access to Siri on your device under Settings > Siri > App Support.

Pay [contact name] 10 dollars with Square Cash/PayPal/other app.
Send a message using WhatsApp/LinkedIn/Skype/WeChat/etc.
Call me an Uber/Lyft
Show me photos in [app name].

Siri is also highly optimized for navigation and can be very useful when traveling. For example, if you say, “take me home” Siri will get the shortest path and display it on your phone. You can also use one of these when traveling:

What is traffic like on the way home?
Find [driving, walking, transit] directions to [destination].
How do I get to [destination] by [walking, bus, bike, car, train…]?
Where is [business name]?
Where is the nearest [business type]?
Find out how long until you arrive. Ex.: “What’s my ETA?”
How much does gas cost right now?

You can also take pictures and change phone setting with simple commands:

Increase/decrease brightness
Turn on/off [Wifi, bluetooth, airplane mode…]
Open [App]
Take a picture
Take a selfie

As you can see, Siri can be very useful if used in the right way. Here is one more pro tip before we finish up here. Siri can do fact checking very easily so if you ever get into an argument Siri can settle it in a matter of seconds. Just ask ”How many calories does a Big Mac have” or whatever you are arguing about.

If you think that we left out some important commands please feel free to post them in the comments below!

What is a Cryptocoin?

You are probably bombarded every day with news about price fluctuations for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but has anyone ever bothered to explain what is a cryptocoin, exactly? If you want to become familiar with the history of cryptocurrency bear with me and let’s look into the past.

Back in 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin while working on a very different project. When he announced Bitcoin he said that his creation was “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.“ which was something that had eluded a lot of people who had been trying to develop just that.

Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. It’s completely decentralized with no server or central authority. – Satoshi Nakamoto, 09 January 2009, announcing Bitcoin on SourceForge.

After Satoshi realized that a centralized system wouldn’t work he decided to go with a decentralized approach, something like a peer-to-peer file sharing network. This small change gave birth to Bictoin as a currency.

For digital cash to work you need a payment network with accounts, balances and a track-record of transactions so someone can’t use the same amount of digital cash for two different transactions. That is a centralized system. In a decentralized system, there is no server so every entity on the network has to do the job itself. This means that every peer in the system has to have a list of transactions in order to prevent double spending.

In theory, if one entity has the wrong numbers everything fails because if every single peer doesn’t agree on every single digit there is no consensus and the system can’t work. Satoshi changed all of that with Bitcoin. Bitcoin made it possible to achieve consensus without a central authority

What is a cryptocurrency?

The definition of a cryptocurrency – limited entries in a database no one can change without fulfilling specific conditions. It may sound complicated but that is the most basic explanation that you will find. Think of a purchase with cash, you want to buy a pair of shoes but the price requires a certain amount of money. In the cash world, that would be a database entry that fulfills a specific condition – the price of the product.

How is it mined?

As we said earlier, the purpose of this network is to keep track of every transaction on the planet. If you make a payment with Bitcoin every peer in the network will know that you made a purchase and have that record stored in the database.

imgpsh_fullsize (7) — Image source: Blick Geeks

It takes some time for the network to confirm your transaction, but once it gets confirmed there is nothing that can reverse the process. You could say that it is the most secure payment system in the world right now. The transaction becomes a part of a blockchain and that is how a bitcoin is forged.

The job of miners in a cryptocurrency-network is to confirm transactions by solving the blockchains. The more transactions made, the bigger the blockchains and that is why miners need to upgrade their equipment every now and then. After solving a blockchain a miner is rewarded with a number of tokens or just a fraction, it depends on the value of the cryptocurrency that he is mining and the difficulty of the blockchain.

I hope that this article helped you understand how cryptocurrency works and what is a cryptocoin. Right now, you know more about cryptocurrency than 70% of people on our planet. We know that because recent studies showed that over 70% of people either have no idea what a cryptocurrency is or how it works. Feel smart yet?

Artificial Intelligence – How It Will Change The Gaming Industry

While Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are having a debate about the distant future and whether AI will destroy humanity or not, let us take a look at the years in front of us and what we can expect from AI in the near future.

There is no doubt that the year 2017 has been the year of AI, there has been plenty of talk about it and it is expanding rapidly. We can thank video games for this because AI was mostly used by game developers. The most primitive AI example are the goombas that attack Super Mario by moving on a coded trajectory or the game of Pong on the old Atari console. Fast forward to the present and we now have machine learning, a thing that allows AI to observe, record and learn.

imgpsh_fullsize (17) — AI timeline (Source: Medium)

The first big breakthrough in Machine Learning was definitely Microsoft’s project – the Tay bot. It was released on March 23, 2016, via Twitter and caused controversy in just a few hours. Tay was watching what other people were talking about online but we all know what kind of stuff is posted on the internet. In no time at all, Tay started posting racist tweets, stated that Bush did 9/11 and in the end Tay had to be taken down just 16 hours after release. Tay was not a failure, she just wasn’t prepared for the internet.

Now let’s talk games. As I said before, AI is an essential part of gaming and the better it gets the more great games we will have. During the Dota 2 world championship, Elon Must put his Open AI to the test. Open AI observed the moves and tactics of pro players and ended up beating a lot of them in 1v1 games. What does it all mean? It means we will have more intelligent opponents in our games in the near future and multiplayer games won’t require an actual human anymore.

Imagine this, you go online, end up in a lobby with 3 -4 strangers, have a friendly conversation and play some games. After a few hours, one of them tells you that it’s actually an AI and you have been talking to machines this whole time. Just as Google’s AI defeated a team of pro GO players, it can also learn to behave like a human and talk like one. This can also be implemented by combining AI and machine learning, showing them footage of human behavior and using what they learned from NPC’s in games. But what’s in it for the game developers?

Automatic level and character creation are might be a bit too much to expect but according to some sources, we are heading in that direction. The aim of this is to enable developers to focus on other things other than modeling and customising levels. That is the most time-consuming part and just imagine if they had a program that could do all the work for them. More time could be invested on other aspects of the development process that could improve the gaming experience even further. Of course, we can’t expect to simply wave magic word and let the AI do all the work but simple commands may soon start to replace actual coding. This could then enable people with no coding skills to create their own models and even their own games.

AI will definitely be the engine that pushes gaming even further with AI-based game design. AI based characters will not merely resemble intelligence, but will, actually be intelligent and that is what we are all aiming for. As for the Musk vs Zuckerberg debate… I’m on Musk’s side.