Lifehacker: Where to Find the Best Reddit Chat Rooms. “Reddit chat rooms are here. As if you didn’t spend enough of your 9-to-5 workday browsing /r/aww, /r/explainlikeimfive, /r/bestof, or /r/SubredditDrama, you can now share your thoughts about posts (and life) with real Redditors in real time! Mashing the F5 key to refresh a static comments page is so last year.”
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Digital Trends: Relive 1998 as live chat rooms roll out across Reddit in a limited beta
Digital Trends: Relive 1998 as live chat rooms roll out across Reddit in a limited beta. “Reddit is slowly rolling out real-time chat rooms across a limited number of subreddits. Currently in beta, Reddit Chat went live in the summer of 2017 for about 7,000 Reddit users. Now, Reddit is expanding this service, keeping users locked to the website instead of conducting real-time chats on external clients like Slack, Discord, and even IRC.”
The Next Web: The $24 billion chatbot industry sucks because it needs better AI
The Next Web: The $24 billion chatbot industry sucks because it needs better AI. “In 2014, WIRED would profile a ‘boring’ company called Slack beginning a media and venture-based obsession with bringing chat to every corner of our work lives. Somewhere along the way, the growth of chat-based enterprise communication was conflated with a preference for doing everything in a chat window, and thus we were given chatbots. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would go on to call them ‘the new interface,’ and by 2017 over $24 billion in funding had gone into chatbot companies. A year later, and the landscape of chatbot funding is desolate. And it’s because they were never truly built to solve the many, many problems they were supposedly created to fix.”
CNET: Instagram’s new 4-way group video chat lets you browse, too
CNET: Instagram’s new 4-way group video chat lets you browse, too. “Instagram could be worth more than $100 billion, and has one billion users a month. So it’s not surprising that the company would roll out its own group video chat service separate from its owner Facebook.”
MakeUseOf: WhatsApp Rolls Out Group Chat Improvements
MakeUseOf: WhatsApp Rolls Out Group Chat Improvements . “WhatsApp has made a number of improvements to the way group chats work. Most of the improvements are on the admin side of things, but all of them are designed to help people use WhatsApp group chats more effectively. Or at least that’s the hope.”
Google’s new chat service won’t be secure like iMessage and WhatsApp: Amnesty International (Indian Express)
Indian Express: Google’s new chat service won’t be secure like iMessage and WhatsApp: Amnesty International . “Google has been slammed by Amnesty International’s Technology and Human Rights researcher Joe Westby for a new ‘Chat’ feature that will not be encrypted. Westby called the decision to launch a messaging service without end-to-end encryption ‘baffling’ and said the move aims to show Google’s ‘utter contempt for the privacy of Android users’ as it easily allows cybercriminals and government spies to access to take control of users’ private communication.”
Digital Trends: Hang out via video chat, then tag friends in Stories with Snapchat’s new tools
Digital Trends: Hang out via video chat, then tag friends in Stories with Snapchat’s new tools. “Snapchat is pushing to become the most popular virtual hangout destination. On Tuesday, April 3, Snapchat announced new group video chats. The tool allows up to 16 friends to join in and chat via video. The announcement comes alongside a wider rollout of the previously tested mention that allow users to tag another Snapchatter.”
