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Facebook's Snooze feature which has been in testing for sometime now, has finally arrived; it lets users hide certain people, groups or brand pages for up to 30 days, instead of permanently unfriending, leaving a group or unfollowing a brand.

While some users could get fed up with updates from some people/pages on their list, and for some reasons may detest outright unfriending/unfollowing, Snooze makes it possible to temporarily mute friends, groups and brand pages on Facebook.

And it's quite handy in cases a user is having tensions with a friend or partner, or if they just want to avoid certain topics altogether.

But most especially, it's beneficial from marketers point of view, as having expansive networks on the site allows them to target ads to users, and without the expected crowded news feed from strangers who they don't want to see on their network.

The feature is coming on the heels of the recent criticism of the company and social media in general on their impact on people which might have negative effect (psychological and emotional) on the well-being of the people.

It also follows on the company's efforts to improve the news feed, which for a long time has been the bane of most misinformation and spread of discord on the platform.

Albeit, the temporarily muting of a connection is better for Facebook than someone permanently cutting off the service.

But given the prominent role social media now plays in many people's lives, Facebook has promised to do more to dig into these questions, share their findings and improve on its services.

Facebook Snooze to give users more control over the news feed



Google unveiled ARCore in August - which was a huge step forward for AR on Android, requiring no additional hardware, just like Apple's ARKit and to bring full AR capabilities to millions of Android devices.

While the erstwhile related Google's Tango augmented reality platform, to date, is known to be functional in only very few devices. As getting phone manufacturers to build the rather expensive functionality into their devices to support Tango was most probably the reason it suffered a low adoption. And Google only succeeded in getting the Tango platform running on a few devices over the course of three years.

Now, the company has set the deadline of March 1, 2018 to end support for its Tango augmented reality platform, shifting full focus to ARCore, in order to expand ARCore products reach to more Android devices.

According to the official Twitter account for Tango which announced the shutdown earlier today:



The ARKCore SDK works with Java/OpenGL, Unity and Unreal; while focusing on three core areas: motion tracking, environmental understanding, and light estimation.

Google ease out the process by focusing on plane detection rather than building a 3D mesh of the space, allowing ARCore functionality to run on popular phones like the Galaxy S8 and Pixel without crazy built-in multi-camera IR setups.

Tango shutdown became necessary since there’s no logic in having a fractured development process for a tool that’s remarkably so difficult to align with a single AR platform.

Google to end support for Tango augmented reality platform



Snap has launched an AR developer tool for desktops, called the Lens Studio to help developers in creating World Lenses: the interactive, imaginary 3D objects in Snapchat photos and videos. The Snapchat Lens Studio opens up the platform so that outside developers can contribute to its offerings and bolster augmented reality experiences beyond the in-house capabilities.

The tool is seen as a bolstering of Snapchat’s AR capabilities, and helping it to compete with Facebook’s own Camera Effects AR platform which have also been opened to all developers this week.

While brands will have to promote their own Lenses, thereby serving a new monetization medium for the platform, and the promotion of the QR Snapcodes to users who would scan to unlock an AR effect for 24 hours.

And, Snapchat won’t show the business Lenses in its camera unless the businesses buy Sponsored Lens ads from the company. They can also pay a partnered creative agency to build them a special effect, though for now the platform only allow World Lenses and not selfie masks.

Albeit, developers can build static or animated objects, 2D cutouts, windows into other worlds, floating picture frames and even 3D objects that react when you tap, look at or approach them.

Snapchat, however, enforce rules stating that Lenses can’t depict violence, weapons, nudity, sex acts, profanity, hatred, stereotypes, illegal activity, hashtags, usernames, threats, bullying or encourage Snapping while driving.

The company plans to offer Lens Studio Challenges, where it will provide an unspecified reward for developers who create Lenses that match a proposed theme or use case.

These AR capabilities will definitely give Snapchat the much-needed boost to users' sharing at a time when growth has been slowed in the wake of Instagram’s fierce competition.

Snapchat Lens Studio AR platform to help developers create World Lenses

A lot of people believe that in order to invest into real estate you need to have a large initial capital but this is not exactly true! Letting apartments daily as a business is a strategy of investing into real estate that you can start up without any initial capital. First, you will need to figure out how to work with the market of daily rent of apartments. And finding different, attractive and cheaper offers from real owners at https://jiji.ng/houses-apartments-for-rent is certainly a no-brainer.

While the best deals have long been made on Jiji: it offers the widest range of products and services, the opportunity to find an offer anywhere in the country - and choose the best price among the many real sales vendors in a couple of seconds with the help of a search engine with smart filters. And all transactions are protected by strict anti-scam site policy!

How to earn on a daily rent of apartments?



First, rent an apartment or a townhouse for a long time, say for $ 500 a month, with a sublease agreement. Then let it out daily, for example, for $ 50, thus getting a profit from the difference in cost. If you rent that apartment 25 days a month, you can receive a cash flow of $ 600 per month.

What determines the effectiveness of the daily lease?

It all depends on how often the selected object is rented. The average occupancy should be at least 80% - so your investments could be paid off.



How to test the location of the apartment?



Simply place an ad about an apartment for rent, specifying the particular area. Then monitor and count how many calls a day you receive about this ad. Sometimes you can specify not the address, but the nearest large object, - for this pattern it is better to select customers with a car. When a person realizes that he or she can rent an apartment $ 20 cheaper than the average market price, it will not be a problem to drive 2-3 kilometers.

The trial should be considered successful if more than 30 customers a day were willing to rent your apartment.

In fact, it often happens that only 15 people call today and 10 people will call tomorrow. These downtime are unacceptable for a high-quality business – if you want the optimal result you should receive more applications than you have objects.

If the occupancy rate of the objects falls to 70%, this company will have to leave the market. The market also becomes inefficient if your price is slightly higher than that of the competitors. And, on the contrary, we can attract more customers, if our price is lower. This way the flow of people will increase, and the apartment will not stay without tenants.

This is just one of the strategies of increasing your income. This method implies making money with the help of other people's objects. As the time goes by, you can buy your own objects and pay off the mortgage from the rent you receive. So you can combine business with investment strategies!

Letting Apartments as a Strategy of Investing into Real Estate



Microsoft's effort to tackle Google's advances, continues as the company is exploring more avenues to bring Bing at per with Google, even with Yahoo Search partnership, which invariably brought improvement in users engagement, Google, nonetheless still retains overall lead in search traffic.

Now, Microsoft at an AI-focused event in San Francisco, announced a number of new updates coming to Bing that it hopes will make it smarter by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).

Albeit, Bing search engine already got some injecting of AI-capabilities, like what powers its natural language search technology, the latest updates are focused on bringing more conversational, nuanced answers to users in the “cards” UI being used by competitors like Google.

The latest AI infusion expected to roll out include: Intelligent Search, Intelligent Image Search and Conversational Search.

Microsoft aims to stay competitive with Google in integrating machine learning into search mechanism, and the Intelligent and Conversational Search technology, could enable searchers sort out things like discovering more about a piece of jewelry a celebrity is wearing.

It works by simply tapping the “search within image” button and given that your search term isn't a controversial query.

The company also announced a partnership with Reddit to make some intent-driven queries more effectively covered. And the integration of Reddit content directly into Bing search results, will perhaps funnel information from Reddit crowd-sourced AMAs (Ask Me Anything posts).

Bing Search will especially benefit from the highly-localized information from Reddit posts, and its searchers with related queries can be given more nuanced results.

Microsoft Bing to leverage AI to make search results smarter

Twitter users clamoring for extension of the number of tweets allowed on the platform got a cheering news earlier, as if that's not enough, the company has launched a new feature that will allow people to more easily post tweetstorms.

While tweetstorm is simply a series of connected tweets, which is quite a popular workaround for getting past Twitter’s character count limitation.

Albeit, this method of Tweeting, while effective and popular, can be tricky for some users to create and it’s often tough to read or discover all the Tweets in a thread.



Twitter's new thread feature makes it simpler to thread Tweets together, and to find threads, so it’s easier for users to share and discover information on the platform. And the use case includes; to connect facts surrounding a breaking news, personal rant or political discus and other issues, or to just make a rather long post easier to read.

The threads feature makes it all easy, as there’s now a plus (“+”) button in the composer screen where users can type out their series of tweets.

Also, you can add GIFs, images, videos, and more, to any individual tweet in the thread, as is normal on Twitter composer. And you can go back and edit the tweets at any time while composing your tweetstorm.

There’s currently a limit of 25 entries in a thread, but Twitter assures that it is subject to change depending on wide adoption of the new feature by the user base. It is currently rolling out on all platforms, including iOS, Android and the web.

Twitter adds ‘Threads’ feature to make Tweetstorming easier

Facebook's AR Studio is a platform that enable creators to connect their art works with its data to bring augmented reality into everyday life via the Facebook camera. And through the Camera Effects platform (CEP) and AR Studio tool, Facebook intends to empower all developers to start building on AR experiences.

The CEP first closed beta at F8 had recorded a strong response from the 2,000+ creators using AR Studio – building fun, animated frames, masks, and interactive AR experiences.

Facebook’s copy of Snapchat’s World Lenses, World Effects will be enabled within AR Studio, even as the company promises on giving creators more powerful tools.



And as part of AR Studio's expanded availability, creators will soon be able to develop 3D digital objects for people to place onto surfaces and interact with in the environment.

The company aims to put the power of augmented reality in the hands of all creators through the expanded AR Studio toolset, enabling creators to build and share AR experiences with the Facebook community.

The roll out of AR Studio begins today for creators worldwide. Additional information can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/fbcameraeffects/home/

Facebook Opens up its AR Studio creative tool to everyone



While Instagram already supports the usual hashtags search functions, the social media platform has taken the hashtags function a step further by allowing users to "Follow Hashtags" to see top posts and Stories about any topic on the News Feed.

The "Follow Hashtags" feature is to help users see beyond their own social graphs and dive deeper into niche communities they care about, making Stories discovery on Instagram more easier.

And instead of having to dig through contents all the time via the search or the Explore tab, Instagram users would be able to follow the hashtags they find interesting on search or clicking on one of the tags.

Albeit, it will require some filtering to prevent repulsive content or spam from being distributed by hashtag following.

The company has assured on the implementation of smart filters, and has refuted the claims that hashtag following could give the app more power at ad targeting data, thereby showing more interstitial ads between Stories.

But it remains unknown how Instagram get to chose what's shown to hashtag’s followers, and whether its algorithm is based on factors like recency of the content.

Instagram, however has made improvements to how it sources and ranks hashtag content to ensure that hashtag pages is safe, and employs automated and manual systems for flagging inappropriate contents and blocking its authors.

Instagram's "Follow Hashtags" brings top Posts and Stories to News Feed



Google Research on Monday introduced Appsperiments (acronym for Apps Experiment) to explore the potentials of mobile photography, with slew of new apps (actually 3, namely: Storyboard, Selfissimo!, and Scrubbies) available on both the iOS App Store and Google Play.

While the first installment of the series of photography appsperiments will focus on usable and useful mobile photography experiences built on what it calls "experimental" technology.

The experimental technologies includes: style-focused algorithms, object recognition, person segmentation, efficient image encoding and decoding technologies, among others.

Appsperiments is inspired in part by Motion Stills, an app developed by researchers at Google that converts short videos into cinemagraphs and time lapses using experimental stabilization and rendering technologies.

Motion Stills was originally developed to make iOS’s Live Videos less shaky, and later a variation of that app was extended to Android to offer a new recording experience for shooting sharable video clips.

The project is intended to avail the company a way to test out more experimental features and see how users respond to the enhancements.

So, Google is inviting users to try them out and report what they think, using the in-app feedback links. The feedback and ideas from the new and creative ways people use appsperiments will help guide some of the technology Google builds around it.

Google Research “Appsperiments” on Mobile Photo Applications



While SQL (Structured Query Language) is designed for managing data held in a relational database management system, the most fundamental choices to make when developing an application is the use of an SQL or NoSQL database to store the data.

Originally based on relational algebra and tuple relational calculus, SQL are designed for reliable transactions and ad hoc queries, the staple line of business applications.

NoSQL, also called "Not only SQL" to emphasize that they may support SQL-like query languages, are increasingly used in big data and real-time web applications. It's a response to the limitations of the SQL systems, and it can store and manage data in ways that allow for high operational speed and great flexibility on the part of the developers.

The NoSQL databases have existed since the late 1960s, but did go by the moniker (NoSQL) until a surge of popularity in the early twenty-first century, triggered by the needs of Web 2.0 companies.

The term NoSQL was first used by Carlo Strozzi in 1998 to name a lightweight open-source relational database that did not expose the standard Structured Query Language (SQL) interface, though still relational, and quite distinct from the circa-2009 general concept of NoSQL databases.

The data structures used are viewed as "more flexible" than relational database tables, with suitability of the database depending on the problem it must solve.

Fundamentally, the difference between SQL and NoSQL is that each has a different philosophy for storage and retrieval of data. And Many NoSQL stores compromise consistency in favor of availability, partition tolerance, and speed.

Albeit, some applications still call for the kinds of constraints, consistency, and safeguards that SQL databases provide, which supposedly “advantages” of NoSQL may turn to disadvantages for such use case.

Other disadvantage of NoSQL is the relative lack of expertise, and the rather nascent market for the database system.

But SQL and NoSQL systems will still have their place for many more years to come, even as there are signs that future generations of databases may thread the paradigms and offer both NoSQL and SQL functionality.

Jargon Buster: What's the meaning of NoSQL database?

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