Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, January 12

• Instagram Puts Ads on Stories Feature as Users Reach 150 Million: Instagram will start to introduce advertising to its stories feature as it becomes more popular, stepping up competition with Snap Inc. Facebook Inc.’s Instagram said it now has 150 million daily users on the stories feature of its photo-sharing site that was inspired by a popular Snapchat product, which broadcasts short videos that disappear after they’re viewed, or after 24 hours. Instagram’s number for stories matches the statistic Snapchat gives for its total daily global audience. Advertisers “love vertical video and they love sound on,” Quarles said, noting that 70 percent of stories watchers do so with sound. “That’s where stories, from a format standpoint, is so interesting to them.” Snapchat was a pioneer in advocating for vertical video, which takes up the entire screen on a mobile phone, as opposed to horizontal video designed first for television screens -- the primary format in Facebook’s news feed. Instagram’s rival, owned by Snap Inc., is gearing up for an initial public offering, planned for as soon as March this year.

• How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers: For a brief while, from the 1950s to the late 1980s, broadcast television served cultural, social and political roles far greater than the banality of its content would suggest. Because it featured little choice, TV offered something else: the raw material for a shared culture. Television was the thing just about everyone else was watching at the same time as you. In its enforced similitude, it became a kind of social glue, stitching together a new national identity across a vast, growing and otherwise diverse nation. “What we gained was a shared identity and shared experience,” Mr. Strate said. “The famous example was Kennedy’s funeral, where the nation mourned together in a way that had never happened before. But it was also our experience watching ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘All in the Family’ that created a shared set of references that everyone knew.” As the broadcast era changed into one of cable and then streaming, TV was transformed from a wasteland into a bubbling sea of creativity. But it has become a sea in which everyone swims in smaller schools.

• Google’s parent has given up on one of its big, futuristic projects: Google's parent company, Alphabet, is scaling back its ambitions for Internet by drone. It has disbanded the team that had been developing the technology, according to the company. Dozens of employees in the group, known as Titan, have been reassigned to work on other projects. They include Project Wing, Alphabet's effort to develop a drone delivery service, and Project Loon, which seeks to deliver Internet around the world via floating balloons. That project is still going strong, Alphabet says. Many of the Titan workers came from drone maker Titan Aerospace, which Google purchased in 2014. Titan was folded into X, Alphabet's moonshot lab, in late 2015. “We ended our exploration of high altitude UAVs for internet access shortly after,” an X spokesman said in a statement. "… at this stage the economics and technical feasibility of Project Loon present a much more promising way to connect rural and remote parts of the world.”