Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Google In Jeopardy As DOJ Finalizes Requests For Forced Sale Of Chrome In Search Monopoly Case

The Google monopoly case continues to haunt the tech giant after the US Department of Justice made a list of structural remedies for the company.

This includes recommendations for the forced selling of the Chrome browser to the judge overseeing the case. Spinning off Android was another suggestion to help prevent the company’s monopoly behavior in the world of online search.

As per Bloomberg, these recommendations hit the top of the list because they represent a pivotal access point where the majority of users reach the search engine. There were so many queries about how it works and how it would affect the Chrome codebase. This includes the top question of allowing Google to carry out a new open-source project which so many browsers use.

The government did lay down the options about whether such a sale is needed or not at a later date because it all depends on whether the other remedies prove to be good enough. The company hopes to appeal the decision and was also against the notion of a sale because it says splitting both these projects would tear them apart.

At the moment, the DOJ pulled back from the more significant option of Android being sold off. Still, anti-trust officials would like the tech giant to uncouple operating systems for Android from other products like Search and Google Play in the app store. This is currently on sale as a bundle.

Other options put forward as remedies include licensing the company’s Google Search data and all search results. Another option is enabling websites that are indexed on Google Search to opt out of any form of training of AI systems.

Only time will tell which rulings come into place but for now, we can only wait for the hearing that’s expected in April next year and the final verdict to arrive in August.

Image: DIW-AIgen

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Is 2025 the Year Social Media Changes Forever? Here’s What’s Coming Next

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Monday, November 18, 2024

Is 2025 the Year Social Media Changes Forever? Here’s What’s Coming Next

It’s that time of the year again when predictions from experts are coming in about what we can expect for the year ahead. Today, we’re looking at what to expect in terms of the social media landscape. Will it shift?

There’s no surprise here that AI will certainly be a major part of the trends seen online in 2025 as it’s clearly here to stay. However, experts do predict the changes to be more measured and less drastic.

FACEBOOK

Let’s look at Facebook for starters. It’s still holding the title of being the world’s biggest social media app. It might not be cool for some but it still hosts the greatest number of active users today and that too by a huge margin.

Meta vows to continue going strong with its commitment to AI. It’s spent billions on the infrastructure and Mark Zuckerberg will continue to do the same for 2025 to get that AI push. They plan to lead the AI race after taking the backseat for too long. This includes better AI and hopefully those serving a greater purpose than the ones we are seeing in use today.

While the goal of Meta in the past was to promote human interactions, now it’s more linked to talking to a bot. The tech giant also wants to make AI versions of creators that can be shared on the app. So yes, you can expect more AI-based pictures circulating that some find hard to decipher between reality and fiction.

You can also expect to see a greater degree of AR experience as the company hopes to roll out its much-talked-about AR glasses product. While there won’t be any immediate release, Meta will set the tone for more wearables that combine this with other apps. The same is true for VR where non-VR users can interact with VR ones in domains like online gaming.

We can expect to see Meta go big with digital avatars where the classic characters get a revamp. Meta hopes to add a more realistic touch while ensuring they are customizable. So far, Meta has made most of its gains through video content so that isn’t going to be slowing down anytime soon next year. After all, there’s some logic as to why Facebook included a video tab right? Clearly, TikTok is the driving force in this regard.
As far as advertising is concerned, Meta wants to better ads with the addition of AI. Stats prove how those automated ads are doing better than those pushed into the system manually. The assistance from in-app data will give the platform the chance to perform better and see what users are interested in.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram is predicted to include more filters to better enhance users’ images, thanks to AI. So do expect images to be brighter, better, and clearer. We’ve already discussed how Facebook is keen on integrating wearables so the same would be the case for Instagram. This includes the addition of cross-platform content through the Ray-Ban glasses for instance where users can engage in live streams better.

THREADS

Meta has made it very clear from day one that it plans on taking a step back from current affairs and politics. This is what experts predict for 2025, a drama-free platform that hopefully promotes and discusses anything but politics and propaganda. And now that the US Elections are over and done with, this restriction will work in the app’s favor.

In 2025, Threads is expected to fully separate from Instagram, carving out its own unique space for niche, conversation-driven content.

SNAPCHAT

Snapchat is in a difficult position these days as it wouldn’t be wrong to mention how the app is struggling to get the right kind of appeal. With the right figures and engagement can it be expected to maximize advertising opportunities.

We do expect the app to scale its efforts on AR glasses and work more on better AR development. Who knows, it just might partner up with the likes of iPhone maker Apple to get a deal going because launching something big on its own might not bring it profits.
Other than that, more features for Snap will include a more diverse Snapchat+ subscription and more offerings that link users to the real world like indicators for Snap Map. It might also wish to rethink the addition of ads to users’ inboxes as that’s not going well. In fact, it could soon backfire as people get irritated very soon.

LINKEDIN

The platform might not be famous for its social interactions but it’s doing great in terms of professional social networking opportunities. We might see the app in terms of using AI tools for communication and profile enhancement. The response hasn’t been great.

People use this as a reliable place to hunt for talent and skills that depend on their competency and not the use of generative AI. But it might wish to devise a new use of AI like developing AI career paths where users utilize AI tools to find the best job or career.

We might see more videos on the platform as consumption of this format is going great so far. Experts do predict more live events taking place that could attract professionals to get more knowledge of what’s happening in the industry like trends.

TIKTOK

TikTok has had a successful 2024 so far and plans for 2025 will certainly be huge. But that does come with the big question of whether or not it’s going to be up for grabs to US users or not, thanks to the law in place.

TikTok does hope to push further into e-commerce as it seems like it does want people to make purchases through the app. It’s clearly inspired by its Chinese counterpart Douyin who attained massive success in this regard. Other than that, live-stream avatars that work to sell products, better engagement, and increase interest might be another thing to watch out for.

TikTok might also play around with in-video searches or AI-assisted searches which are yet to arrive on the platform.

PINTEREST

Again, Pinterest has had a great year and we’re not sure if the app is going to be changing too much. We do expect to see Body Type filter searches that look for options that suit a specific body type of a user. This customizes searches and provides exactly what the user wants.

It already has plenty of these AI-assisted tools like hair type discovery, and skin tone search filters so we can only expect it to be bigger and better in 2025.

X

Last but not least, it’s X. Elon Musk can do anything and everything so we might be able to predict exactly what 2025 will look like for the platform. However, he’s keen on introducing payments through the platform so that’s one thing we can certainly hope to see.

Other than that, a greater focus on video content format might be on the cards as Musk is yet to attain the dream of making the platform ‘video first’. This might come with dedicated tabs for Video Focus that show what’s trending via short clips.

Again, these are all predictions. Only time will tell how true they prove to be so stay tuned!

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

October 2024’s Highest-Earning and Most Downloaded Apps: TikTok Earns $269M, Instagram Leads Downloads

As we approach the middle of November, it’s now time to rewind and see how apps did in October.

Last month was very interesting because some of the highest-earning apps across the globe crossed the $1 billion mark in terms of net revenue. This is all thanks to data from App Intelligence that confirmed this milestone with stats supporting the endeavor.

It’s a huge deal because the journey to reach this point was truly at large this year and every month, the apps were racing ahead to attain this position. But who ranked the highest in terms of earnings? We’ve broken down the results for you below.

As per AppFigures revenue estimates, TikTok hit the top spot for getting the highest earnings last month. Not only did the app reach the top spot, it also rose in revenue by $17 million. This means October ended with $269 million in regards to net revenue as per estimates. That is major news!

Other apps which rounded the top five included YouTube, Disney+, Tinder, and Max. They stood in the exact same place as what was witnessed in the past. As a whole, the group revenue for all of them grew well last month. To be exact, it’s a combined revenue figure of $39M. When you include this to TikTok’s $17M, you’ve got a huge chunk of the new revenue coming in.
Experts do expect Disney+ to come out of the top five categories as it continues its battle with Apple in terms of halting any new subscriptions through the App Store. We can see the results of this on the Top Grossing Chart for America.

CapCut made the list in October and did not just inch the list up but actually skipped right ahead to the sixth position with $57 million. Meanwhile, TikTok’s video editor grew at a thrilling rate and is now making up 40% of overall revenue in this domain.

The App Intelligence shows all of these results together. The net revenue of the top 10 biggest earning apps in the world grew by 6% to hit the one billion dollar mark last month. Net is what’s left after the fees are removed. This is the first time that this total crossed the billion mark.


Moving on to the most downloaded platforms for mobile apps in October, the results were not as exciting as above. Still, it’s great to see several new faces make the list that need to be highlighted.

Instagram became the world’s most downloaded app in October. It remained at the top of the list for nearly the whole year, except for one month. As per App Intelligence, it was able to reach nearly 52 million more people via Google Play and Apple’s App Store last month. This figure fell a little short of what was seen in September of 2024.

Meanwhile, arch-rival TikTok hit the second spot with 48 million downloads as per these estimates. It’s a little bit higher than the month before but still not enough to remove Instagram’s leading position.

To complete the top five, it was Facebook, WhatsApp, and Temu. All of these platforms had more downloads than what was seen the month before. If you’re an avid user of the Threads app, we must confirm that this platform did not fall far. It was out of the top five by only a single spot thanks to the growing popularity of Temu which rose 13% in this time.
ChatGPT did rise by one position to hit the 7th position on combined downloads last month. Its downloads rose to 32 million which is major as the previous results stood at 24 million. Now the question is if this growth will remain, considering how popular Google’s Gemini chatbot has become with its own app on iPhone devices.

Another shopping app that’s quite similar to Temu from India is yet to hit the App Intelligence charts. It did reach the tenth position with 21 million downloads. Meesho is similar to Temu but its transactions take place over social media apps and not by direct means.

It does feature mega sales which ran in this period, probably the reason for its sudden growth in September and October. As a whole, the top 10 mode-installed platforms around the globe hit 339 million last month which is more than September.


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Can AI Be a Better Poet Than Humans? New Study Reveals Stunning Results!
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Sunday, November 17, 2024

New Survey Shows Women are More Likely to Get Negatively Impacted by Social Media than Men

A Media & Technology Survey by Boston University finds that women get more impacted by social media than men. On the other hand, traditional media equally helps both women and men. The survey was taken by 1,005 American respondents and 52% agreed that social media negatively impacts more women than men, while 17% disagreed. 32% of the respondents agreed that traditional media gives equal attention to issues about men and women, while 35% disagreed with that.

It was surprising to see that most respondents didn’t have any stance about how they see women and men’s issues being portrayed on traditional media. The survey also talked about how fake news can harm women more than men. 51% of the Democrats said that this is very true, while 25% of the Republicans agreed that fake news affects women more than men.

33% of the respondents also said that fake information is more likely to harm women than men and 20% disagreed with that statement. Misrepresented information can also harm women more than men (42%) and reinforcing gender stereotypes also have more chance to become harmful to women than men (50%). 45% of the men agreed that social media is one of the biggest reasons for gender stereotypes but 20% of respondents disagreed.

The survey also found out which age group is most critical while using traditional media. People of ages 35-54 are more likely to point gender inequalities on media (41%), as compared to people of ages above 55% (33%) and people of ages 18 to 35 (31%). This is because older generations haven’t seen much talk about gender equality, while middle aged people are more likely to consume traditional media and talk about inequalities between men and women.



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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Can AI Be a Better Poet Than Humans? New Study Reveals Stunning Results!

A study in Nature found that people prefer AI-generated poetry over famous human poets, across several qualities. Many participants in the study couldn't differentiate between an AI generated poetry from a human generated one. The lead author of the study, Brian Porter, says that poetry is a unique form of art and AI is good at imitating it. Poets convey deepest human emotions through poetry and the fact that AI can do it too is really surprising.

For the study, the researchers included ten famous English poets including Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson and asked ChatGPT 3.5 to generate five short poems similar to the style of those poets. The study included 1,634 participants who were given one poet and a randomized list of ten of their poems, including the AI generated one. The participants had to guess which poem is original and which is AI generated.
Another group of 696 participants had to do assessment on five poems of genuine poets and five AI generated poems. The results showed that AI generated poems beat the human written poems. It was because AI generated poems used a proper structure and had specific styles of meter, rhyme and vocabulary. The researchers concluded that AI generated poems were easier to understand, even without context. In the case of human poets, readers need context sometimes to understand what is being said.

Another interesting thing was that even though most participants couldn't recognise AI generated and human written poems accurately, they still preferred human poets over AI. Ratings decrease across board if it's revealed that the poem is AI generated. This shows that poets aren't going to lose their jobs anytime soon because people still prefer reading poems written by humans.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Saturday, November 16, 2024

2024’s GDP Per Capita Rankings: Which Countries Are On Top and Who’s Falling Behind

In this post, we examine how countries rank by GDP per capita, based on 2024 IMF data. There is some difference between GDP and GDP per capita. While GDP indicates total economic output of a country, GDP per capita indicates the average economic output per person by dividing it with the population of the country. The population factor makes countries with lesser populations appear at the top.

Luxembourg leads 2024 GDP per capita rankings, followed by Macao and Ireland, according to IMF data.

That is the reason Luxembourg is the country with the highest GDP per capita in 2024, while it was ranked third in 2014. It has a population of 669,000 and has $144K GDP per capita in 2024. It is followed by Macao and then Ireland in second and third position respectively.

The USA is the only top ten economy with the highest GDP per capita in 2024. Ranking at ninth position, it has GDP per capita of $85K. There are only two countries with more than 10 million population being ranked in the top 14. These two countries are the USA and Taiwan.

In the 2014 ranking of countries with the highest GDP per capita, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Kuwait and Andorra were present. But they have left the top 14 list. The countries which have been added in the top 14 list are Guyana, Denmark, Ireland and Taiwan.

Rank Country GDP per Capita 2024 Population
1 Luxembourg $144K 669,000
2 Macao SAR $134K 704,000
3 Ireland $134K 5,200,000
4 Singapore $134K 5,900,000
5 Qatar $112K 2,700,000
6 United Arab Emirates $97K 9,500,000
7 Switzerland $92K 8,900,000
8 San Marino $87K 33,000
9 United States $85K 334,000,000
10 Norway $83K 5,500,000
11 Guyana $80K 813,000
12 Denmark $78K 5,900,000
13 Brunei $78K 452,000
14 Taiwan $77K 23,900,000

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Study: 36% Use Password Managers, 79% Opt for Free, and Google Leads with 32% Adoption
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

2024 Study: 36% Use Password Managers, 79% Opt for Free, and Google Leads with 32% Adoption

In the fourth annual study of the Password Manager Industry by SecurityOrg, it was found that very little has changed about people’s habits when it comes to managing their online accounts and passwords. The study was done among 1,000 Americans and explored different factors when it comes to adoption of password managers, its impact and what area of digital security do people prioritize the most.

According to the study, 36% of the respondents are using a password manager in 2024 to simplify their personal cybersecurity, and store and auto-fill their passwords. It is a 2% increase from 2023 and 15% increase from 2022. The study also found out that 29% of the US adults had their login details or online identity stolen in the past year.

There are different methods adults are using to manage their multiple passwords in 2024. The most used method is memorization of passwords (51%), followed by using a password manager (36%). Some people also have their passwords saved in browsers (34%) and some have noted them down on their computers or mobiles (26%).

The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has given some guidelines about making a strong password. They say that a password made up of a collection of unrelated words without space is stronger than a password which uses unusual characters. Many people are also saving their passwords in browsers which is an unsafe way as most of the times it lacks encryption and versatility. The least used method to manage passwords is using security passkeys. 10% of Americans are using this method and it has a low adoption rate right now as it is a newer method to save passwords.

The study also talked about most popular password managers in 2024. Google Password Manager is dominating right now with 32% of American adults using it in 2024, followed by Apple’s iCloud Keychain or Passwords app being used by 23% of people. Other password managers like LastPass, Bitwarden, NordPass and 1Password are declining right now. The respondents were asked why they chose the password managers they are using right now. The majority answered that the password manager they are using right now is easy to use and has user-friendly integration. Some said that their trust and familiarity with password managers/companies is the reason they are using it while some used password managers because of recommendations and reviews from other people. Some also use their chosen password manager because of extra security and synchronization they provide to its users.


Respondents were also asked how much the password manager they are using costs them. 79% said that the password manager they are using is free, while 7% pay $1-$20 per year for their password manager. Only 1% of the respondents were paying $60 for a password manager per year. The study also covered the reasons why people use password managers. Most people use password managers because they have more passwords than they can remember correctly (78%). 67% said that they use password managers to login across different devices. 55% also used password managers to generate complex passwords.

They also found that people without password managers are twice as likely to experience identity theft than people with password managers. Most of the people are also using password managers on laptop or desktop computers (90%) while 83% are using it on mobile phones in 2024. Only 36% are using password managers on their tablets. In 2024, 61% of the people are using password managers for their work and personal use, 38% are using it for personal use only and 1% are using it for work only. It is seen that people have started using password managers for their work as well over the past years, instead of just using them for personal use. 76% said that they will consider using a password manager in the future, while 24% answered with no.

Upon asking the reason why some people are not using password managers, 37% said they don't think that they need one, 23% said that they don't believe that they are secure, 16% are not sure about how they work and 9% believe that they cost too much. Some also think that password managers are confusing or complicated.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World