Apps

Opening an email could become a thing of the past, if 'Inbox' can get the right information up front

Google launched a new email app called “Inbox” Wednesday that strips essential information from your incoming messages, displaying it in a stream similar to a social media newsfeed.

Rather than display messages by subject line, Inbox cuts straight to the body of your emails and attempts to prune out everything but the essential bits, such as flight times, event invitations and attached photos. A flight, for instance, will have your flight times clearly displayed up front without the airline’s preamble. The app can also draw pertinent information from the web, such as your flight’s status. The app also attempts to automatically populate to-do lists and calendar appointments, sparing you from copying the details, flipping to a new app and pasting the information into all of the related fields.

The question remains how well a machine can gauge “pertinent” information to a human user. Early hands-on demonstrations suggest an intuitive user experience. For now, only a select group of users will get to use Inbox by invitation only, who, in turn will be able to invite friends and collectively will decide whether this app will replace regular email for good.

The once women-only app is doing some serious male outreach

Lulu — an app that allows women to rate men as if they were consumer goods, including hashtags ranging from the good (#SelfMadeMan) to the gross (#PornEducated) — has now opened up the lines of communication between female and male users. After three weeks of beta testing, the two-year-old app launched its Truth Bombs feature Wednesday, which allows men to anonymously ask women questions. This feedback just might be what they need to raise their Yelp-like score.

“This is the first time we are doing any messaging,” said Lulu co-founder Alison Schwartz. “How it works is guys can ask an anonymous question or test out a theory they want to test out with women, some sort of query, and then they get instant feedback from millions of girls.”

The new feature pointedly marks the evolving relationship Lulu has with its million-plus male users. When the app launched in Feb. 2013, it was advertised as a secret, ladies-only space to swap information about former male relations. Bros stole glances at female friends’ phones and attempted hacks to see how they were doing. After a slew of Internet backlash (and anti-Lulu petitions) deriding the app for inciting bullying and gender-based double standards, Lulu made the experience more male-friendly in 2014 by having a policy where men had to opt-in and give their full permission to be reviewed. In May, the male-outreach went a step further and Lulu allowed men to check their scores, giving them tips and affirmations. (“Girls love your kissing.”)

And now, men can go straight to the source and ask women questions. But what have the men been asking? During the beta test, these were the most popular questions verbatim (there are some pretty bad typos), some of which led to 2,500 responses, although most questions average 15 replies:

1. How many guys have you slept with and how old are you… GO !
2. What age did you loose your virginity?
3. Do women like abs or arms more?
4. How frequently do girls masterbate?
5. Do girls find it attractive if a guy claims p***y is being thrown at him left and right?

Um, woah. Some of these misspelled questions about “loosing” virginity (“Freudian slip?” asked Scwhartz) are just the type of sophomoric musings you’d expect from a dude who gets to anonymously crowdsource information from anonymous women. But when asked how the women were responding to the questions, Schwartz said, “They are meaningfully answering what the guys are asking about. They are trying to be really helpful.”

And there are moderation protocols — “we have designed a product against bullying,” said Scwhartz — to keep things clean, relatively. Although of the 60,000 Truth Bombs that were asked during the three week beta test, averaging some 100 Truth Bombs an hour, only 800 were flagged.

For now, the messaging option is all anonymous and each thread is limited to one guy (the one who posed the question) and millions of female users. Although other men can view the threads, they can’t participate in the conversation.

“But we see on the app that there’s interested in moving to a one girl one guy dynamic,” said Schwartz. Could the next step in Lulu be one-on-one communication, perhaps enabling dating? “Anything is possible, but we would do that in a way that this is very true to Lulu.”

See Also:

This Map Shows What Guys Are Like in Each Major City

Rate The Date Online: Lulu App Lets Women Review Hookups

Viewing the ads will be optional

The app instantly updates loved ones of your status

Facebook announced a new app Wednesday that asks users in the proximity of a disaster zone if they’re safe and instantly notifies anxious loved ones of the user’s response.

The new app, Safety Check, was the brainchild of Facebook’s Japanese engineers, who noticed a surge of communication across the social network after the 2011 tsunami battered coastal communities. The new app streamlines that process by taking note of the user’s home city and reaching out in the event of a natural disaster in the area with the text message, “Are you Okay?” A “yes” will be instantly communicated out to loved ones via their Facebook News Feeds.

“We hope it’s a tool that helps you stay connected to those you care about,” Facebook said in a statement announcing the new feature, “and gives you the comfort of knowing your loved ones are safe.”

Revamped for a bigger screen

The Xbox marketplace launched a new app Wednesday that brings Vine’s hypnotically looping 6-second videos to a bigger screen: the living room TV. The Vine app, now available for download, displays the most popular clips in channels such as Art, Music & Dance and Comedy. Users can swipe through clips by making air gestures at Kinect’s motion sensor or giving voice commands from the couch.

They can also reduce the viewing screen to a panel that “snaps” alongside gaming or TV apps for a full-blown sensory overload, or they could just quietly watch the leaves turn.

Digital payments in 140 characters or less

A new digital payment service in France will let people pay each other via Twitter for free.

French banking group BPCE announced details Tuesday about the new app, S-Money, which can be downloaded from iTunes or Google Play and allows users with a French credit card and phone number to link their card information to Twitter to begin making payments to other individuals or organizations and companies that have downloaded the service.

Payments are capped at 250 euros (about $317) for individuals and 500 euros ($635) for charities in times of crowd-funding. Users also have to use a specific format for their payments to be accepted. S-Money has opted for € rather than the written version of euros, for example.

While other digital payment platforms have the option of privacy for payments, all Twitter payments are visible to the public–so discretion is advisable.