Technology

&I think the mistake everyone made was to think that Stories was a photography product& says Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. &If you look at all these interactivity features we&ve added, we&ve really made Stories something else. We&ve really innovated and made it our own.&

His version of the ephemeral slideshow format turns two years old today. By all accounts, ita wild success. Instagram Stories has 400 million daily users, compared to 191 million on Snapchat which pioneered Stories. While the first year was about getting to parity with augmented reality filters and stickers, the two have since diverged. Instagram chose the viral path.

Interactivity > Photoshop

Snapchat has become more and more like Photoshop, with its magic eraser for removing objects, its green screen-style background changer, scissors for cut-and-pasting things, and its fill-in paint bucket. These tools are remarkably powerful for living in a teen-centric consumer app. But many of these artistic concepts are too complicated for day-to-day Snapping. People don&t even think of using them when they could. And while what they produce is beautiful, the slides get tapped past and disappear just like any other photo or video.

Instagram could have become Photoshop. Its early photo-only feedediting filters and brightness sliders pointed in that direction. Instead, it chose to focus not on the &visual& but the &communication&. Instagram increasingly treats Stories as a two-way connection between creators and fans, or between friends. Itnot just one-to-many. Itmany-to-one as well.

Instagram Stories arrived three years after Snapchat Stories, yet it was the first to let you tag friends so they&d get a notification. Now those friends can repost Stories you tag them in, or public posts they want to comment on. You could finally dunk on other Instagrammers like you do with quote-tweets.It built polls with sliders friends can move to give you feedback about &how ridiculous is my outfit today& Music stickers let you give a corny joke a corny soundtrack or share the epic song you heard in your head while looking out upon a beautiful landscape. And most recently, it launched the Question sticker so you can query friends through your Story and then share their answers there too. Suddenly, anyone could star in their own &Ask Me Anything&.

None of these Instagram tools require much ‘skill&. They&re designed not for designers, but for normal people trying to convey how they feel about the world around them. Since we&re social creatures, that perception is largely colored by someonefriends or audience. Instagram lets you make them part of the Story. And the result is a product that grabs non-users or casual users and pulls them deeper into the Instagram universe, exposing people to the joy of creating something the last until tomorrow, not always forever.

Snap has been trying to get more interactive too, adding tagging for instance. Italso got new multiplayer filter games called Snappableswhere you play with your face and can then post the footage to your Story. But again, they feel overly involved and therefore less accessible than where Instagram is going.

Stories Express InstagramWild Side

Mimicking Photoshop reinforces the idea that everything has to look polished. Thatthe opposite of what Systrom was going for with the launch of Instagram Stories. &There will always be an element in any public broadcast system of trying to show off& Systrom explains. &But what I see is it moving in the other direction. GIF stickers allow you to be way more informal than you used to be. Type mode means now people are just typing in thoughts rather than actually taking photos. Things like Superzoom with the TV effect or the beats — itanything but polished. If anything ita joke.Quantitatively people feel comfortable to post way more tp Stories than to feed.&

Systrom is about to go on paternity leave, and has been using Stories from friends with kids to collect ideas about what to do with his own. When asked if he thinks Stories produces less of the dangerous envy inherent in the feeds of social media success theater we passively consume, Systrom tells me &Just personally, itinspired me rather than itcreated any sense that I&m missing out&. Of course, that might be related to the fact that his life of attending the Met Gala and bicycling through Europe doesn&t leave much to envy.

AR filters have become table-stakes for Stories. On the left, Instagram. On the right, Snapchat.

The sense of comfort powered by Instagram purposefully pushing Stories to diverge from its classy feed has contributed to its explosion in popularity — not just for Stories but Instagram as a whole. It now has over 1 billion users, in part driven by it introducing Stories to developing countries Snapchat never penetrated.

&Remember how at the launch of Stories, I said it was a format and we want to make it original And there was a bunch of criticism around us adopting this format& Systrom chides, knowing a fair amount of that criticism came from me. &My response was this is a format and we&re going to innovate and make it our own. The whole idea there is to make it not just about photography but about expression. Ita canvas for you to express yourself.&

At the time, Systrom also told me, regarding copying Snapchat, &They deserve all the credit&ButStories has since emerged as how Instagram expressed itself too, allowing it to break away from the staid perfection of the feed, becoming something much more goofy.

Now that success has emboldened it to try something truly new. IGTV lets people share longer-form vertical videos up to an hour in length in an age when vertical is for 15-second Stories and lengthy clips only exist in landscape mode.

&What I&m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video thatmobile only. That doesn&t exist anywhere else& Systrom beams. &So the question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good.& We&ll see if thatborn out in the numbers. Stories benefitted from early adopters immediately knowing what to post thanks to Snapchat. The price IGTV pays for originality is a steep learning curve.

Swallowing His Pride Saved Facebook

Last week when Facebook announced its revenue was decelerating as users shifted attention from its lucrative News Feed to Stories where itstill educating advertisers, its share price tanked, deleting $120 billion in market cap. Yet imagine how much further it would have dropped if Systrom hadn&t been willing to put his pride aside, take Snapchat Stories, and give it the Insta spin Instead, it led the way to Facebook now having over 1.1 billion (duplicated) daily Stories users across its apps. The poises Facebook and Instagram to earn a ton off of Stories.&

&There was a long time that desktop advertising worked really, really well but we knew the future was mobile and we&d have to go there. There wassome short-term pain. Everyone was worried that went wouldn&t monetize as well& Systrom remembers. &We believe the future is the combination of feed and Stories, and it just takes time for Stories to get to the same level or even exceed feed.&

So does he feel vindicated in that once-derided decision to think of Stories not as Evan Spiegelproperty but a medium meant for everyone &I don&t wake up everyday trying to feel vindicated. I wake up everyday trying to make sure our billion users have amazing stuff to use. I just feel lucky that they love what we produce& Systrom says with a laugh. &I don&t know if that fits your definition of vindicated.&

Facebook this morning announced the launch of a new set of educational resources focused on helping young people think critically and behave thoughtfully online. The Digital Literacy Library, as the new site is being called, is aimed at educators of children aged 11 to 18, and address topics like privacy, reputation, identity exploration, security, safety, wellbeing and more.

There are 830 million young people online, the company notes, which is why digital literacy is necessary. We&ve seen the results what can happen when people are lacking in digital literacy & they&re susceptible to believing hoaxes, propaganda and fake news is true; they risk their personal data by using insecure apps; they become addicted to social media and its feedback loop of likes; they bully and/or are bullied; and they don&t take steps to protect their online reputation which can have real-world consequences, to name a few things.

However, many teachers today lack the educational resources that would allow them to teach a digital literacy program in their classroom, or in other less formal environments.

Facebook says the lesson plans in the new library were drawn from theYouth and Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet - Society at Harvard University, where they were released under aCreative Commons license. In other words, the company itself did not design the lessons, itonly making them more broadly available by placing them on Facebook where they can be more easily discovered and used.

The lessons themselves are based onover 10 years of academic research from the Youth and Media team, who also took care to reflect the voices of young people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, geographies, and educational levels, Facebook says. Initially, the 18 lessons are launching in English, but they&ll be soon available in 45 additional languages.

For educators, the lessons are ready-to-use as free downloads, and state how long each lesson will take. Outside the classroom, parents could use them to teach children at home, or they could be used in after-school programs. Teachers can also modify the lessons& content to meet their own needs, if they choose.

The courses will be made available in FacebookSafety Center and Berkman KleinDigital Literacy Resource Platform for the time being. Facebook says italso working with other non-profits worldwide to adapt the lessons and create new ones.

This isn&t the first time Facebook has offered educational resources aimed at young people.

The company also recently launched itsYouth Portal, which provides educational material directly to teens, not their teachers. However, those resources are focused more on Facebook itself, providing guidance on things like how to navigate the service, how to stay secure, and how to understand how peopledata is used. (Arguably, this sort of information is something a large number of adults could use a refresher on, as well.)

In addition, Facebook has begun to roll out educational guidance into its new app, Messenger Kids, aimed at the under-13 crowd. The app encourages children to be kind and respectful online, by promoting empathy and positive messaging through things like the &Messenger Kids Pledge,& kindness stickers, and other in-app challenges.

At the root of all this is the fact that Facebook, along with most social media, has corrupted the way people interact and navigate the online world. And it is now belatedly is waking up to its role and its responsibilities on that front. These large platforms were built by optimistic engineers who for years only saw the positive side of connecting the online world, and not the potentially negative outcomes & like data theft and misuse, fake news, hacking, attempts to disrupt democracy, bullying, targeted harassment, and even genocide.A literacy program could help the next generation of users, but it has arrived too late for many of Facebookusers.

Below, are the lesson plans& description, for reference:

The Surface Go is an odd thing. Not because of the device itself, so much as how Microsoft ultimately arrived at it. The tablet was reverse-engineered, the low-end addition to the premium Surface line.

What the company ultimately arrived at was the closest thing itoffered to an iPad/iPad Pro competitor, to date. For its part, however, Microsoft is positioning the product as a portable, low-cost alternative to its other Surface devices.

Ita bit of branding confusion, to be sure, but thatnever stopped Microsoft before. Thatbasically the Surface line in a nutshell. The company has the resources and infrastructure to throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks — and for the most part, thatworked well with the Surface line, which has effectively transformed from proof of concept into the Windows flagship line.

In a lot of ways, the Surface Go is a strange sort of in-between device. The form factor is essentially that of the Surface Pro, shrunk down to 10 inches, with rounded corners. The smaller footprint comes with some sacrifices, of course, including the dual-core Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y, which is a notable downgrade from the Intel Core m3/i5/i7 found on the Surface Pro. The battery, rated at nine hours, is smaller than the one you&ll find on the iPad Pro.

The port situation more closely mirrors what you&ll find on a tablet, versus a full-fledge computer, with a single USB-C, a headphone jack and the proprietary Surface Connect port. That latter bit seems like an odd choice, given the limited real estate here (not to mention the fact that you can charge via USB-C), but Microsoftclearly as interested in keeping existing Surface owners on board here as it is converting new ones. Part of that means making sure the system is backward-compatible with old accessories, for the multiple Surface-owning power users out there.

The keyboard is an additional $99 on top of the $400 asking price. Pretty standard with this sort of device, really. Ita sort of SophieChoice for manufacturers when building these kinds of convertibles — go the full swiveling keyboard, à la the Pixelbook, or add it as an accessory.

The latter decision is better for those devices primarily intended to be used in slate mode, but ultimately keyboard cases just aren&t going to provide the same manner of typing experience as a devoted keyboard. The Surface line has long offered one of the best keyboard cases around, but itjust not a proper replacement if you plan on using the product primarily as a word processing device. That said, it still beats the hell out of attempting to file a story using a touchscreen.

I&ve been using it a bit in meetings and still finding it tough to get used to it. The keys are soft and necessarily lack the sort of tactile impact I&m used to on my full-time laptop. Therealso the inarguable point that these kinds of devices really remove the &lap& part from the laptop equation.

Microsoft has press shots of happy users sitting cross-legged, with the device and keyboard nestled warmly in their lap. During my initial briefing, I asked a rep whether he thought that was a reasonable use case. He gingerly attempted to recreate the pose — which is to say, itpossible, but not particularly convenient.

You end up tensing your muscles so the whole thing doesn&t split apart. This is one category where SamsungGalaxy Tab S4 has the competition beat. Seems it would be easy enough to build a keyboard case that sticks together after a good jostle — but then, I&ve never attempted to make one myself.

The lovely fabric covers that have been a hallmark of the service line are here on the 10-inch model. That, coupled with multiple matching peripherals, means the Go can pass as a pretty decent fashion accessory to slip in and out of a hand bag. The device itself is a bit on the chunky side, however, which has also been something of a hallmark with the Surface line.

Windows 10 S is back, as well. The locked-down operating system has certainly found its share of critics, but Windows RT itnot. There are a bunch of implications for using the hobbled version of Microsoftoperating system, but chief among them is the barring of apps not downloaded from the Windows app store. That puts the device at a decided disadvantage against the iPad, which apparently boasts around 1.3 million apps optimized specifically for the tablet form factor.

The tweaks are in place for security purposes, so the systems with lower specs can handle the workload — the latter certainly makes sense here.

More than anything, however, the inclusion betrays Microsoftbroader intentions with the device. The 10 S has two distinct targets: students and older, less-savvy users who don&t want to be bogged down with the nuances and demands of a fully open operating system.

The first category is the tell here. Microsoft has been struggling to find the right way back into education in this post-Chromebook world. Like so much of what the company does, ittaken an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that includes everything from the $1,000 Surface Laptop to a new category of $189 third-party devices. Therea lot to be said for that approach. After all, no two schools/students/teachers are alike. When you&ve got the scope and resources of a Microsoft, why the heck not just make something for as broad a user base as possible

In the realm of education, the Surface Go represents a kind of middle-ground. Itsomewhere between a Chromebook and full-fledged tablet. Like the vast majority of convertibles, it doesn&t get the balance exactly right. But, then, no device is going to be everything to everyone. The price point will certainly make it too costly for a lot of classrooms, however.

For those schools who prefer to go with the Windows camp, due to its more mainstream usage beyond the classroom, it will ultimately be difficult to justify the premium when you can go out and pick up a Windows 10 S laptop for $189. After all, the main selling point of convertible functionality is the ability switch to tablet mode for entertainment purposes. Kids these days have enough distractions already, right

What Windows does afford users that you won&t get on the iPad, however, is the ability to switch over into desktop mode. Applemobile-only tablet approach is a pretty big roadblock toward becoming a full-fledge laptop replacement. Thatprecisely why Samsung is going all-in on DeX desktop mode with the Tab S4.

Windows can do both, which is why these sorts of convertible devices are the sweet spot for Microsoftoperating system. The company has also brought some nice additions over the years, like Windows Hello face login and a number of features for Pen input. Microsoftmagnetic pen snaps onto the side of the device magnetically, which is good news for those of us who regularly misplace peripherals.

Of course, Microsoftalways had some of the strongest productivity offerings around. Given the relative limitations here, however, I don&t think I&d want to rely on the Surface Go (or any other tablet-first convertible, for that matter) as my primary work device. As a supplemental portable device for the meetings when you don&t want to lug a bigger laptop around, on the other hand, it could certainly make some sense.

Iteasy to see why Microsoft made the Go. Convertibles are a rare bright spot in an otherwise stagnating tablet category. Thatpart of whatmade the Surface line something of a surprise hit for the company. Ithardware cache that the company hopes will finally propel Microsoft into more mainstream tablet success.

And the Surface Go isn&t a bad little device, at the end of the day. At $400, iton the pricier side for a tablet, and certain sacrifices have been made for the sake of keeping the price down versus the souped up Surface Pro. And unlike other Surface devices, the Go is less about pioneering a category for Windows 10 than it is simply adding a lower-cost, portable alternative to the mix. As such, the product hits the market with a fair bit of competition. Acer and Lenovo have a couple, for starters, most of which fall below the Goasking price.

For Windows devotees looking for something smaller and portable with nice fashion sense, the Go is worth a look. Italso worth having a look around at the competition. A better deal shouldn&t be too tough to find.