Twitter Tests Its Own Version of Instagram Stories

Producer Megan cannot be here today, so joining me is producer Bobby Hello.

on Amazon. I mean, when have you ever lived in a time when you cannot order something you want in Amazon? It's like literally out of stock.

tech industry five hundred million dollars. And you know, you think about the travel, the restaurants, all these things, the hotels, airlines, so this was the losses to airlines, hotels, restaurants, and transportation providers. So that's not just like what the other what the companies make on these things. Let's see what else did they mention that was interesting? The games develop the Game Developers Conference. This was scheduled for March, so

that's been postponed, not one hundred percent canceled. And things that might be on the chopping block are things like south By Southwest, which is happening in Austin. A lot of the big companies have pulled out of that conference, but they still say they're having it. By the time you listen to this, that could be canceled. And then there's one a little bit down the line. But here in Los Angeles they do what's called E three, which is the big video games conference that is now kind

of up in the air. And Sony, which is a big company, they've pulled out of that a long time ago just because they don't agree with the way the show is going, so they're not going to be there. So maybe it might be a good chance for them to just be like, you know what, let's just regroup next year. And of course, all these major companies like Twitter and Square and Amazon have told either their folks to work at home or to not work at all. No, yeah, right, you know what, just don't work.

MacBook Air, but the school is Google based. So now he's been looking at the Google pixel Book Go and he wants to get her a good computer that maybe will last a couple of years, maybe her entire high school career. But he comes from an iPhone family and Apple family, but with everything at the school being Google based, he thinks that might work out better. So he's trying to figure out what he should do here. And he also mentions that price is no option.

He's saying Google based, Like does that mean they use Gmail and you know, the Google Suite of Apps?

I would I would see what your daughter wants. Number one, because some people are more creative, Like, if she's at all inclined to be creative, you probably want to go MacBook. Because if she's going to be editing video or working with her pictures in a bigger way than just Google photos, I think that that lends itself to having a MacBook. And also maybe she wants to listen to podcasts, or maybe she wants to manage her music. There's many more things you can do on a MacBook than you can

do on a pixel book. Pixel book is great if she is only writing papers, if she's only surfing the web, only going on YouTube to watch videos, and that's pretty much it.

so it's not as flexible as a full fledged computer. Personally, I go with a MacBook. I love the pixel books, but being a creative type or thinking I'm creative type, I like to have the ability to work with files and work with audio and work with video, and that's kind of what you get when it comes to the pixel Book versus the Chrome, or sorry, the Chromebook versus the versus the MacBooks. Good first question, Yeah, what about

longevity that they both pretty solid? I think, I mean a MacBook you could easily get four years out of a pixel Book actually has an expiration date. So if you google a Chromebook end of life, there's actually for every Chromebook that comes out, Google gives you a date as to when they're gonna serve the last software update, so pretty much a death date for that device. And so you can look for any device like let's say you get an a Sus Chromebit C S ten, the

auto update expiration date is November twenty twenty. If you get a Chromebook tablet CEE T one hundred from Asus August twenty twenty three, you have Intel. Now does it mean it's gonna stop working after that. No, but it's just gonna it may actually I don't even know, but it definitely stops getting any software updates anyway. Good first question, Let's talk about Twitter now, Bobby, You're on Twitter. Everyone's kind of like bailed on Twitter.

and Facebook still has the most users. But I see, just you know, in my own data and just from what me and my wife do, we're on Facebook to a much lesser extent, whereas if I'm at the line at Starbucks, every single person is on Instagram and especially Instagram Stories, which is why Twitter is now testing a new feature called Fleets. These are their brand of Instagram Stories, and so it's kind of a story that deletes after

twenty four hours. And the best way to describe this is it is an Instagram story, except It lives on the Twitter platform, which is great if you're not a big adopter of Instagram and you want to use more Twitter, if you're all on, Like we have a guy here, Chris Shawl, one of our anchors. He only uses Twitter and so this would be perfect for him, because you don't want to post necessarily everything to Twitter because it lasts forever. But this is a twenty four hour thing.

It's ephemeral, it goes away. You can be funnier, you can be short lived, you can be quirkier, you can post what you're eating, and it doesn't really matter. Now, this does not mean that it's never you know, people can't screenshot it. It can still be screenshot and all that stuff. And the other thing is that people cannot kind of retweet these just like a story. They can't like it. All they can do is reply via direct message if you have that feature turned on. And Twitter

is testing fleets in Brazil. First, I don't know why they test so many things in Brazil. Happens all the time. They must have a large user base of people that are open to new things. In Brazil. They're like, oh, sure, we'll try this new feature. I think this sounds like a winner though, because it gives more flexibility to the

Twitter platform. And I've actually thought about this myself. I actually think Twitter is the perfect social media platform because if you think about what you can do on Twitter, minus the limitations of how long your tweet can be, you can send links, you can put videos up there, you can put pictures, you can do things that are kind of fun and stupid, you can do things long form. It's a great conduit. And by adding the stories it makes it even more robust. The downside to Twitter is

the user base. There just aren't that many users.

it also brings over all the garbage. So those are little fragments of apps that you've deleted and files that you no longer need, and just settings that you might have changed at one point that maybe you want a fresh start. I personally, when I get a new computer, always do a fresh start because it just feels good. It's like spring cleaning. It is frustrating in certain aspects because you do have to go through and think about, oh, man,

my wife, I always connected to that network. Now you get to type it in again, or I always had that setting, my computer always changed to dark mode at six pm. Oh I got to go back in and all these things that you've kind of tweaked over seven years that have built up, they will all be gone. So that's the downside. The positive side is that you get a fast computer. There's nothing extra there, there's nothing running in the background that you haven't specifically kind of

thought about. Because you're going to now install all your programs again. You're going to drag over just the files that you need, and you're going to start with settings that are fresh, so you have a chance to kind of see what Apple is presenting you, and you have a chance to kind of lead your computer in the way that you want to and kind of give up that seven years of whatever you picked. You know, in the moment, you now have kind of a fresh, fresh

look at everything. I will say, the one thing that I change every single time when I first get a brand new Mac or restart it or whatever, you know, refresh it is the way that Apple tries to force you to when you pull two fingers down on your trackpad, it actually is reverse. So when you're scrolling, they call it natural scroll. Yeah, and I just for some reason, I've always scrolled with pulling two fingers down like they

want to do opposite. Like, okay, I get it. If you're pushing two fingers up, it's pushing the page up, and if you're pulling them down, it's pulling. It's just reverse. To me, it's it's anyway. So I always change that setting, literally the first thing I ever do when I get a Mac. And then when I go to someone else's computer that has not changed that setting. For instance, producer Megan I was on her computer the other day secretly looking at stuff when she left. Yeah, yeah, we all.

the classic cable TV service you know and hate. They have a new service called AT and T TV, and it's actually not a bad service because it lands squarely between cord cutting and the holdouts of standard cable. When people cut the cord, they all of a sudden go into this frenzy of like some people are fine, like obviously, like some people like I know what I'm doing, it's great. Whatever. Then you have a lot of other people who kind of like my parents, who are like, well, I do

watch the Food Network. How do I get that? Now? It's like, ooh, you wanted that, Well, you don't have that anymore. I wanted my local channels. How do you get that? Oh I can't. You can't really get those with you know, some of the streaming services do have them, or all these random cable channels. I like to watch Bravo, I like to watch, you know, my news, you know, cable news. Okay, So what AT and T is doing is they are now giving you cable TV service that

actually streams through the Internet. But it's not your typical streaming app like YouTube TV or all these things. It's called AT and T TV, And when you sign up, they will send you an Android powered box, a cable box, a cable box of the future, let's say, which actually uses kind of Google Android on the back end, and so you get your live channels which are now streaming over the Internet, So you plug it into your high speed Internet and you get your live channels just like

you would. It looks like a program grid everything, except instead of the channels being delivered through Cox Cable the way they used to do, they're just coming over your Internet. So it looks the same, but it performs the same, but it's delivered different It's delivered over IP Internet protocol. But here's the other part that I think some people will like. You also have your apps on the same exact platform, so where you have your local channels and

your cable channels. Then all of a sudden, with one hit of the remote, now you can be watching Netflix. And when it comes to a lot of these other systems, you know, if you have a cable box plus an Apple TV, let's say you have to switch inputs to flip flop between those two. Now, there's been a lot of effort made to kind of bridge that gap, and I think that AT and T is doing something here to kind of rescue a portion of their business that

they know is going away. And it does appeal to a lot of different people like my parents who may not be ready. My mom cut the cord, my dad cannot do it, but someone like him this might be good for because the price is going to be better than what you get with classic cable, but not by much.

So here is the catch to this whole thing, because you're going to be seeing advertising like crazy for this at TV is the price is really cheap when you start out, and just like regular cable, and especially if you had like Direct TV, it was super cheap to start. In that second year, the prices went crazy up, and

that's what happens with this. So your first year, you can get your TV for thirty nine to ninety nine a month for twelve months, and then you can get high speed internet bundle it for thirty nine ninety nine a month, which sounds amazing eighty bucks a month for TV and internet. I pay seventy for just internet and it's way slower than this. But in the second year the prices jump up like crazy, So the first bundle goes up to ninety three dollars a month instead of

fifty dollars a month. Pikes, so it you know, and I actually did the math on this to see because it's really tricky. Like I went on their website and I kind of put all my information in there, which you know, it kind of took a little bit, and I did, like the whole thing soup to nuts, and I figured out, like, how much is this going to cost me over to you, because then you can divide it by twenty four months and see how much it actually costs. And if I haven't made this clear, you

do have to sign a to year contract. Oh so that's why you can't just jump out after the first year. Yeah. So I did the math and here's what I came up with. So the TV was forty dollars times twelve months for the first year, then the Internet was fifty times twelve. Have to pay ten dollars service fee for your box rental. That's six hundred dollars plus four to

eighty in the first year. Then the second year the TV jumps to ninety three dollars minimum times twelve, and then Internet jumps to seventy times twelve, so eight forty. So the total you spend over the two years is two thousand and thirty six dollars man not including any taxes, fees or regional sports fees, which is another nine dollars a month. So it came out to about eighty five dollars a month before all those taxes and feet, which I'm guessing is really about one hundred bucks a month.

So again I'm paying seventy so I'm actually, if you look at it that way, you're paying thirty more dollars for TV, which I don't pay for TV right now. I have I cut the cord, so I have antenna and that's free. So again, this is really geared towards those I would call them hesitant cord cutters. They want to see what's on the other side, but they're not ready to give up their cable. This is a good middle ground.

different photos. I just want to load all my photos from both hmm, okay, so photosticks, photo sticks.

little photosticks advertised on Facebook and on Instagram. I don't recommend the one that's advertised whatever it is. I forget what the big name is, but it's it looks very scammy. You go to their website, it starts a timer of like you only have ten minutes to get this perfect price or whatever. Two dollars. Yeah, and then you know, I tried emailing the company. They never email me back,

which is a bad sign. As a journalist. You know they should at least say, hey, we're not interested in talking to you or sending you a sample so you can try it out. So I want to try it, sure, because if it's fine, I don't mind recommending it. It doesn't have to be from a big name company for me to recommend it. But with all that said, the product that I do like is from a company named sand Disk and it's called the i Expand IXPA n

D and I have tested this out. It works. It's not perfect, but the reality is it looks like a flash drive. One end plugs into the port on your phone, and in this case she would get the Android version that would plug into the bottom of her phone. The other side plugs into her computer, which is a standard USB or if you have an iPhone and be a

lightning and then USB. So the ideas you plug it into your phone, it takes all the pictures off, puts it on the sole drive, and then you can plug it in your computer, back them up whatever, put them on your computer, or you can take photos from your computer, put them on the drive, consolidate them all. It's a very I feel like it's a very messy process. It's not the best thing to do, but if that's what you want to do, it works. So again i'd recommend

the i expand flash drive. And I'm looking for like a secondary product that I could also recommend that might work similarly. And this actually looks really cool from leaf L E e F. They have a access C micro SD reader for USB C, which means it's kind of like a little flash a little card reader that plugs into the bottom of your phone, and then you can plug a card into it like a micro SD card, which is kind of cool, and then you give us copy all your pictures that way. The only problem with

this is she's saying she's computer alliterate. It is not that easy on an Android phone to just copy all your pictures onto this directory without knowing what you're doing. I'd be able to do it, but someone that's not as computer savvy is not gonna be able to do that, which is why I go back to the sand disc. Their software will actually help you do that. You download an app and it says, hey, do you want to

back up your pictures, and it will help you do that. Now, with all that said, I think your best case scenario is just download Google Photos on your phone, download it on your computer, have it back up all the photos that it finds on both places, and put them into one big library. And I think that's a lot easier and it's free.

that's slowing down. It's actually the software that's getting more complicated.

phone would still perform smoothly. Because Apple's known for this kind of buttery experience, and so they realized early on, like hold on Facebook, app is like nearing like four hundred megabytes or whatever, like if you've got if you're rocking, like an iPhone six. It's gonna be really tough for your phone to run that app without crashing crashing, So let's let's let's smooth out the experience on this phone

so that that app runs better. It might close out some of your other apps in the background, it might slow down things like the touch response, but you'll still feel like as an end user that your phone is working nicely even though things are a little slower. Well, Apple got in a little bit of trouble for that took a little heat, so they lowered the price of a battery replacement to like for a while, they were doing them for free.

or whatever. But your phone had to qualify. Long story short, Apple, is it looks like you may have twenty five dollars coming your way if you bought an iPhone six six plus, you know, any iPhone six basically, any iPhone seven or an iPhone s did you.

if you're stretching wrong or whatever. It's cool. I have not personally tested this, so I can't tell you whether it's cool or not. What I can tell you is that I think that a lot of these things are going to shake out over the years. Do I think we're gonna have magic mirrors in the future that will help us work out? Absolutely, it makes sense have a giant screen in your house. You got a trainer on there. They just help you lead you through a workout, they

give you some response. We did a story with a website called open fit, which is an app uses your iPhone and the trainer can actually look through your camera. I heard about this and watch you and give you feedback. Now, well that's probably gonna be what's built into this mirror thing as well. So if not, if it's not already, I mean it may be, but I'm looking at the

mirror online. It's at minimum fifteen hundred bucks. That's a lot. Now, if you have an expensive gym membership, maybe that sounds cheaper. But and the peloton is twenty five hundred bucks, so it's cheaper than that. But let's be honest right now, this is a first gen product. I can't imagine it's probably slick, and I'm sure the viral video was great, but I can imagine that it's going to be that great first out of the gate, even in the first couple of years out of the gate. This is an

expensive product. You're gonna put it on your wall. I mean you have to mount it, you got to keep it up to date. It probably comes with a monthly fee. That you have to pay, and so by the time you add all these things up. I think that this is right now, probably best for the early adopters, the really super techie types, and maybe someone who's sharing this with, you know, if they have a little fitness duty or something they just want to try it out and whatever.

But I think for the average person it's probably not best to invest in this technology just yet.

You know, you're not gonna let it go like you're if you're life cycle or whatever, you're probably doing stuff like this and you're you know you're you're probably buying some of this. I actually purchased. I saw this at c Yes, and I went and bought it, the Bowflex version of the Peloton, okay, And the reason I bought it is because the Peloton's twenty five hundred bucks. The

Bowflex one. Gosh, I forget how much it is total, but it was like, you know, you have to I pay, like, you know, the extra service fee for like installation and whatever. But it was like half the price of the Peloton. And the reason why I got it is because there's no service fee. Every month, you actually put your own iPad where the Peloton screen would be. I see, so you don't have to pay for that giant screen. You

don't have to pay for the Peloton. And I thought this was just a great thing at half the price or less than half to have it home because now I can do like a twenty minute thirty minute workout. Now. I bought that like two months ago, and I still haven't gotten it, so I don't know what's going on. But they did tell me they said it was so popular that it's actually sold out. They said it was sold out for at least forty five days. So I've just been waiting to get this thing, and it shows

that people do have an interest in alternatives. But again, to answer the question, I think that you kind of wait on a lot of this stuff. The bike that I bought is a standard spin bike, except you have a place for an iPad, so it's not very high tech, it's not very crazy. But if you look at Flywheel, that was an alternative to Peloton, and they went out of business, or at least or biked it whatever happened, they're now Peloton I think sued them and they're giving

those people a Peltm bike. So if you invested in one of these flywheels, it's okay because you're getting the other bike. But still it just goes to show that all these new technologies, when they're especially big and expensive.

And I go there and I had this personal trainer that was like an actor, you know, and so he would literally be like he didn't care about what he was doing. What I was doing. He'd be like, all right, go on the bike for five minutes to warm up. I'm like, all right, And I literally did only one of the classes or maybe two, and that was it, and I was so I wasted all this money. Anyway,

that's my only experience of the Personal Trainer. So anyway, all right, let's talk a little personal assistance, Google Assistant and Alexa. A couple of new features I want to tell you about. So two on Alexa that are are pretty cool. The first I think is really convenient is now you can ask a I'll say, a tell me when there's a severe weather alert, and when there's a weather alert in your area, she will chime in and

tell you. I think that is an amazing feature because if you think about it, I mean, we do have our phones with us all the time, but I don't know. I mean, I think that's kind of cool that just you're in your house and I get it. In Los Angeles we don't really have this. But I used to live in Shreveport, Louisiana, where severe weather were alerts were actually a thing where you might have a flash flood, or you might have or a tornado. Yeah, or like heavy,

heavy rain that just comes out of nowhere. Yeah, And so to have that in your living room and all of a sudden you're watching TV or maybe you know, your wife is commuting home and you're like, you know, just waiting there, and all of a sudden you hear this thing like, oh, let me, let me tell them. I mean there, it is really cool. Or in a case of tornado, like take cover.

but the reality is it's really tricky. Yeah, And I saw this firsthand because like I remember going through, you know, as a reporter and shre report. We'd go through these neighborhoods that were, you know, where there's a tornado that came through, and you couldn't know with certainty. Now, with all the cell phones, you probably would know more than be forks or so many cameras everywhere, but back in the day, it's like, oh, this area and you could

just tell by the way the trees were twisted. Oh wow, if it was actually a twister, yeah, you know, call them anyway. So that's the Alexa one, which I thought was really cool. So set that up and see how it is. I don't know how well it works, but it's kind of cool. And Google Assistant meanwhile on Android has a really cool new feature that can read any web page. And I tried this this morning and it is just one of those features that is just it's brilliant.

And I personally don't really have a need for this per se, but I think for as an assistive technology, if you have low vision, or if you're losing your vision or any sort of disability. When it comes to that, I think that this is amazing. All you have to say when you're on a web page, is h Google read this page, and Google Assistant springs into action and it starts reading the whole page. It'll be like from

the New York Times. It'll say the title and it'll just start reading the page, and it reads it in a voice that is pretty impressive, like you would think it's a robot. Overlord, how good this thing can? It can read better than I can. Let's put it out way. I mean, seriously, it really sounds really good.

football match and it's written in a different language. I think it's Spanish translating, and she's just reading it in English in real time, and you can choose what language you want to be read in. I mean, talk about the idea of you stumble upon and Google Chrome has done this for a long time, but you stumble upon a web page that's written in a different language, and you know how it says, would we like to translate?

Just that feature is amazing on your desktop. But now the fact that anyone can just be on a web page and had the and have it read to them in their language is just This is the kind of stuff that just is truly amazing. And Google continues to push the envelope with this artificial intelligence and the way that it parses the article. I mean, it read the title, it read who it was from, and then it read the article. Now I did notice it kind of stumbled

when there was an embedded tweet in the article. It kind of read the tweet, which you would do anyway, as a human, but it just kind of it didn't really get there's a difference between there. I guess see exactly. Okay, Producer Bobby, I think this is your last question. Oh last question. Let's make it make it a good one.

doesn't think it should be this hard. So she's wondering about any legitimate job apps where she'll have luck and not get weird spammy calls from this is she really stumbled upon a very good point here. And I don't know if this happens to you with the because you manage the podcasts, and every podcast has like an email address on like iTunes that's associated. Do you get like a bunch of random emails from time to time? I do?

From time to time, I do. I get a lot of weird It's it's tough to tell because because my podcasts are linked to my work email, and even through our work emails sometimes we get just like weird, weird emails, but yeah, I do. I did kind of notice an increase of just strange.

for that. And I was like, oh, that's interesting because I got that image from Google, so like Google sent it to me like the press people, and so I was like, that's weird, said to a little research, and I googled where this email address came from. And it's totally a shell blog. It's totally bogus. And I realized,

think about it. They send that automated email to a million people a day, and one person goes, oh my gosh, I'm sorry, let me pay or let me take it down, or let me, you know, fix that, or send you money exactly, and it's just it's such a brilliant scam and this is happening. So to get back to her question about the jobs, it's really tough. My dad runs a small business and so I get his emails for a small business, and it is unbelievable how much spam

he gets from people purporting to be yelp. Hey, let me help you get a better YELP rating people being on Google. Hey, do you want to be on the first search? We work with Google? Yeah, you know, they don't necessarily say they are Google. We work with Google. Well what does that mean? And for him, he's running his business, he's busy. Of course he'd like more calls or of course he'd like more clicks to his website. So sometimes he'll respond to these people and I'm like, now,

this is totally bogus. These people are literally just trying to get you on pay them, give them a credit card fee, whatever it is. And just so it's the same thing with its job stuff. It's really tough because you've got to put yourself out there and put your resume and your information to get these leads, especially as an independent contractor. But then you're going to get all the garbage as well, people just slamming you with all

kinds of crap that you don't need to. You know that you shouldn't be taxed with going through, but you have to. And that's kind of the name of the game with the Internet is that you really need to be on your toes. And I actually emailed this person back and ask them if they read what they were using like LinkedIn or you know whatever, and they said, it happens across all these sites. So and I'm on LinkedIn and I get spammed on there. You know, people just hey, we saw your article. Can you do a

story on this? Now? It looks like it's a pitch, but it's really not. It's just like spam most of the time. So I don't really have good advice, except my main advice is, whenever you're writing your email address on these different things, I always write out Rick at KTLA dot com, like the word at at and then

KTLA and then dot com. And the reason I always send that whenever I'm typing out my email address to someone or putting it on a website or sending it through a message, is that if there's a spider out there that's that's crawling for email addresses, it's gonna be a little bit trickier for them to figure out that that's my email address. Good tip, And I don't mind. Like I said, I just gave it out on here. I don't care if you email me because a human has to listen to that now and say, oh, I'm

gonna email Rich. That's fine. But if it's now, if a transcript of this makes it out somewhere, it's gonna say, you know Rich at KTLA dot com. And that doesn't mean as much to a spider. Right now, these spiders might have gotten more sophisticated, and maybe it does mean more. And so I just kind of gave oh now, I'm just kidding, but I think that's kind of my best advice is really just protect your personal information. You have to put it out there to be on these sites,

but just protect it as best you can. So that's a that's a good question. Okay, real quick, because I did I did tease this and I want to mention this story before we go, but this just blew my mind.

This company, Wolfcom one zero, did an exclusive with the kind of showing what they're what technology they are selling to police departments and the bottom line is it is that terminator technology where when they're looking at someone through their police cam, it circles the person's face, scans against the database of known offenders, and identifies says like outstanding warrant, wanted for felony, missing person, And so you can see how this could be good for the missing person thing.

But if you're the person with the outstanding warrant, you wanted felony, I mean, look at that. It's crazy. But this is the future. I mean, I have no doubt with facial recognition, it is going to be the wild West.

to this example that I had as a kid. I always thought, in the future, when you sped on a freeway, what's going to keep technology from knowing that your car is speeding, reporting that to the law enforcement, and outspits a ticket from your dashboard? What is keeping us from having that? Nothing? Right now, your car knows how fast you're going, so does Google Map, so does.

put in your little review. Producer Bobby. Tell folks how they can find you and your podcast. They can find me on Instagram. I'm at sounds like Bobby and all our podcasts are at KTLA dot com, slash podcast I do Spoken Dreams. You can find that on the website or on Apple podcast, Google podcast, Stitcher, everywhere that you find this podcast, you can find all our kt l

A podcasts. And thanks for that. I'm looking at some of the reviews and Tony the Great One said, Wow, one of the greatest tech guys out there and absolutely must listen to, even if you're not tech savvy. He explains it in English. Kudos to you, Rich, thanks for all that you do. That'll probably be better if you read that, Bobby right.