Instagram is testing out a favorite friends list

Instagram as we know it now is pretty black and white when it comes to sharing. You either share to the public or you keep it private. People have tried to work around that with the creation of Finstagrams or “fake Instagrams” or private accounts only followed by a handful of their closest friends. But this approach, when more and more people are added to it have its users become less attracted to using Instagram. The social network is hoping to simplify the process of sharing with a select few with its new “Favorites” list. These people are your closest friends whom you’d want to share certain photos, too. Instagram is testing it out with a few users but it’s expected to come to more, if not all, users later on.

Basically, when you make a post and you have this feature, you’ll get an option on whether to share the photo or story with your favorites. These people on your list will have a green “favorites” badge (which is a star) attached to them. You’ll also get a new favorites tab, which is also denoted by a star that shows all the non-ephemeral posts you’ve shared to your favorites. It’ll be like a second timeline. Favorites lists are private and you can add or delete as many friends as you like. No one will know if they’ve been added to or removed from your list but they would see a green badge at the top of your post to signify that they’re on your favorites list. If you remove them, they’ll lose all access to private posts and your favorites tab will appear empty to them.

Source: The Verge

Netflix cancels 'Girlboss'

Netflix

Following the high profile cancellation of Baz Luhrmann's The Get Down and the Wachowski's Sense8, Kay Cannon's Girlboss is the next Netflix show to get axed. Loosely based on the life of Nasty Gal's founder Sophia Amoruso, the show's first (and now only) season took inspiration on the start of her business back in San Francisco. Netflix has promised to be a bit more ruthless with cancelling its original works. What do you think about this latest cancellation? Is there any other Netflix show you'd want to see cancelled or saved?  

Source: Vulture 

Google will stop scanning your emails for targeted ads

Regular Gmail users have long been complaining about their privacy being intruded on for them to see contextually aware ads. But with Google trying to grow its enterprise customer base, there have been concerns among its current clients and promising ones that Google plans to use their data for their advertising business. Hoping to assuage fears, this is the policy Google is choosing to employ for everyone later this year. They will still continue to scan emails for potential spam or phishing attacks as well as offer automated reply suggestions. But you have to take note that they will still show ads and use data from its other services like YouTube and Search to give you these advertisements.

Source: New York Times

YouTube’s set to introduce dynamic video resizing on mobile app

Having to adjust to the age of smartphone-shot videos where users sometimes don’t know they’re shooting in vertical (or prefer to shoot that way), YouTube is set to update its mobile app and accommodate the different formats people shoot videos these days. The upcoming update will have the software itself play the video in its appropriate size and not have it comply with a fixed area within the app. So in the future, you will see vertical, square, or horizontal videos as they were shot. You get to see a bit of that in the GIF above.

Source: TechCrunch