Instagram Stories now lets you reply with photo, videos

When you view your friend's’ Instagram Stories and you want to send them a comment or a message, don’t you sometimes wish you could do more than just type words?


With today’s update, a camera icon now appears right beside the text box at the bottom of each story. After tapping it, Instagram’s camera will come up and let you craft a reply just like it were any other story entry, complete with face filters, stickers, hashtags, and so on. In a neat touch, a still of the story you’re replying to will appear on top of your photo, a
With today’s update, a camera icon now appears right beside the text box at the bottom of each story. After tapping it, Instagram’s camera will come up and let you craft a reply just like it were any other story entry, complete with face filters, stickers, hashtags, and so on. In a neat touch, a still of the story you’re replying to will appear on top of your photo, and you’ll be able to reposition it just like a sticker, sizing it up and down and spinning it around.

The update doesn’t present a huge new feature on its own, but it very much sounds like something that could kick off a whole lot more engagement with Instagram Stories. As Snapchat has shown, people love to send goofy photos back and forth, and this new feature helps to enable that. The update also shows Instagram pushing ahead with the format that Snapchat pioneered: while people can send snaps back and forth to one another, Snapchat Stories can only be replied to with text right now.

Facebook 'Find Wi-Fi' goes global

Facebook is rolling out a feature that should help you stay connected when you're on the go.

The feature, dubbed Find Wi-Fi, isn't technically new, but it will be new to most people. Facebook launched it in a handful of countries last year, and now the tool is going global. As its name suggests, Find Wi-Fi helps you locate available Wi-Fi hotspots nearby by displaying hotspots that businesses have shared with Facebook from their Page.

Facebook is now rolling out Find Wi-Fi everywhere on iPhone and Android. In a blog post, Facebook Engineering Director Alex Himel said users with access to the feature have found it helpful when traveling, and especially when they're in areas where cell data is scarce.

"Wherever you are, you can easily map the closest connections when your data connection is weak," Himel wrote.

Google Gives Up Scanning Personal Gmail

 Google yesterday announced the end of its policy of scanning user emails for targeted advertising purposes -- a controversial practice that riled privacy advocates and spurred legal challenges.

Gmail is the world's most widely used email provider, with more than 1.2 billion users.

Google attributed its decision to gains it has made in the enterprise. Its G Suite business over the past year has more than doubled in size to 3 million paying corporate customers, who are not subject to the scanning process.

"G Suite's Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer email service," said Diane Greene, senior vice president at Google Cloud. "This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products."

Ads are based on user settings, and users can disable personalization, Greene noted.

G Suite will continue to be ad-free, she said.

"EPIC opposed Google scanning email from the start and won several significant battles, including the 2014 decision to end scanning of student emails," which raised problems under federal wiretap law and was the frequent target of lawsuits."

Enterprise Concerns

As Google makes further inroads into the cloud business, it recognizes that customers are going to be very wary of anything that threatens their privacy and security when compared against incumbent cloud services providers, noted Jeff Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies.

"Google has always assumed that its users accept the implicit cost of using its free app," he told Afriteche, which is "that they will be targets of its ads and other search engine marketing mechanisms.

"However, as it tries to build its enterprise business, Google has recognized it must abandon this tactic to remain competitive with other enterprise and collaboration alternatives, such as Microsoft Office 365," Kaplan said.

It's not likely that the new privacy objective will harming Google's ability to generate revenue, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.