新闻推送的智能化

编者按

2015年岁末，清华大学爱泼斯坦对外传播研究中心联合美国哈佛大学尼曼新闻实验室（Nieman Journalism Lab）约请世界各地的新闻学院院长、知名教授和媒体一线人士对2016年全球新闻传播的新趋势发表了看法。我们对访谈记录进行了整理，编译成中文以飨读者。

摘要

“苹果手表的用户会告诉你，它的主要功能是各种推送而非应用。这个腕上的设备会让你明白，目前的大部分推送是多么地愚蠢。”

几周前，在一个紧张激烈的工作会上，手腕上的苹果手表（Apple Watch）忽然震动，提示我收到了一条通知，我查看了这条通知，确定女儿一切正常以及这个世界并没有陷入更混乱的境地。

这是条通知来自“《纽约时报》厨艺（NYT Cooking）”APP的推送，推送上写着：“下周你需要来些自制的松软饼干。”

我感到又好气又好笑。但最重要的是，我意识到了，要让这些推送真正了解自己显然还有很长的一段路要走。

我喜欢“《纽约时报》厨艺”上面的内容，我也喜欢他们的推送，当然我也喜欢制作饼干。但我不应该在工作时间被所谓的“自制饼干”推送打扰。脸书（Facebook）显然知道我有工作，我生活在美国东海岸，所以它们应该不难推测出下午4点52分我正处于工作状态，这种非突发性事件的信息完全可以晚一点再推送。

虽然目前大部分消息还没达到根据用户地理定位、时间表、阅读习惯及好友关系来推送的程度，但我预测在2016年，这方面一定能取得突破。

随着新闻及其他形式的内容从APP或其他分发平台被独立并分解成越来越小的部分，更加智能化的推送就成了重中之重。寄希望于用户根据自己的偏好去选择订阅内容，那还是Web 1.0时代的想法。事实上，媒体知道我们爱读什么内容，所以媒体APP在推送内容时应该把用户的阅读习惯考虑进去。

而且随着可穿戴设备的兴起，智能化的推送显得越来越重要，尽管目前来看，可穿戴设备的普及程度及其必要性还未赶上此前的预测（作者曾在2014年尼曼新闻实验室预测可穿戴设备会渐成主流）。苹果手表的用户会告诉你，它的主要功能是各种推送而非应用。这个腕上的设备会让你明白，目前的大部分推送是多么地愚蠢。

正如Intercom副总裁保罗·亚当斯所言：“二十年来技术进步很大，但消息推送的水平却依旧停留在1999年。”

但是这些年来某些技术进步应该能够促进消息推送的发展。举例来说，推送消息已经开始成为我们获取资讯的主要来源，就像搜索引擎和社交平台一样，它已经逐渐成为一个相对独立、具备差异化功能的主体。我一直在等待iPhone的消息中心停止推送那些浪费我手机空间的无用消息。随着Slack（一款企业沟通协作平台应用）和Notify（Facebook推出的一款新闻客户端）的出现，我终于如愿以偿。现在，我会经常打开iPhone消息中心查看那些我错过的消息推送。这比登陆Twitter或Facebook查看新闻要快得多，而且也更安静。

Facebook产品总监迈克尔·切尔达说过，Facebook会把消息推送从其他新闻产品平台独立出来，并将其视作一个自有的媒体平台。如果Facebook认为消息推送依旧有市场并值得关注，那么考虑到其拥有庞大的数据库和强大的技术团队，我们可以期待在消息推送方面会有重大突破。

从我个人经验来说，消息推送智能化，说比做容易得多。在Meetup，我们有个专门的团队开发出了一个以用户为中心的消息推送系统，确保我们的用户免受各种消息推送的“狂轰滥炸”，就像我们之前在邮件推送时代做的那样。我们的系统会对每条推送消息进行记录评分，而且还会将用户过去处理推送消息的行为考虑进去，而这些将决定我们下次推送的内容和时间。最重要的是，这个系统可能会降低你在自己房间里怒摔手机的概率，确保自己不被推送消息打断或被垃圾推送干扰。

我们的产品经理和工程师会告诉你，以上提到的这些都是复杂而且不容易解决的问题。

消息推送潜力巨大，我们正在重新设计Meetup应用，以期在信息中心获得更好的用户体验，而非在事后再来谈这个问题。鉴于媒体已经看到消息推送带来的流量剧增，我希望他们也在做着同样的事情（指改进推送的用户体验）。仅仅推送更多的消息并没什么用处，必须要更加智能化。

费欧娜·斯普瑞儿是Meetup副总裁，曾就职于《纽约时报》。

注：本文由饶庆星编译，系清华大学新闻与传播学院2014级硕士生。

转载请注明：来自微信公号“清华全球传播”

清华大学爱泼斯坦对外传播研究中心主办

来源网址：

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/notifications-that-know-me/

原文

Notifications That Know Me

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a rather intense meeting at work. My Apple Watch tapped me on the wrist and, as I usually do when I receive a notification, I checked to make sure everything was okay with my daughter and the world wasn’t collapsing into further chaos.

The notification had come from NYT Cooking via Facebook’s new app, Notify. It said, “You’re going to need — and eat — a lot of these, tender homemade biscuits next week.”

I was somewhat amused, somewhat annoyed. But most of all, it was abundantly clear to me that we have a long way to go before notifications feel like they know me.

I love everything that NYT Cooking produces. I love their notifications. I even love making biscuits. But I don’t need to be bothered by biscuits in the middle of the workday. Facebook knows that I’m employed and that I live on the East Coast of the U.S., so it’s not a huge stretch for the app to assume I’m at work at 4:52 p.m., and to know that an alert about something other than breaking news can wait until later.

We’re not at the point yet, though, where most notifications use our location, our schedule, our reading habits, and our friends to present themselves in smarter ways. I predict that 2016 will be a year where we see breakthroughs on this front.

As news and other forms of content are broken down into smaller and smaller atomic units, separated from the apps or publishers that produce them, it becomes more and more important that the notification layer becomes smarter. Expecting people to spend time editing preferences for what they want and don’t want is very Web 1.0. News organizations know what we read, so those reading habits should be taken into account when their apps decide to push us something.

This becomes even more important with the rise of wearables, even though, despite predictions to the contrary right here, they still haven’t broken through to the mainstream or proven their necessity yet. As anyone with an Apple Watch will tell you, though, it’s all about the notifications, not the apps. The taps on my wrist make it abundantly clear just how dumb most notifications are.

As Paul Adams, vice president of product at Intercom, wrote recently, “Despite all of the advances of the past 20 years, notifications are still stuck in 1999.”

But there are some developments that should help spur advances. For example, notifications are starting to become a standalone destination where you go for information, just as search and social stand on their own. I’ve been waiting for the Notification Center on my iPhone to stop feeling like wasted space. It has finally begun to happen for me with Slack and Facebook Notify. I now find myself going to the Notifications Center to catch up on what I’ve missed. It’s quicker and less noisy than checking the news on Twitter or Facebook.

Michael Cerda, product director at Facebook, has said that Facebook views notifications as their own medium, separate from other news consumption platforms. If Facebook thinks the notifications medium is still evolving and worth focusing on, then one can assume we’ll see big improvements from them, given their vast array of data and engineering talent.

From personal experience, I know it’s easy to say notifications should be smarter, but it’s decidedly not easy to make that happen. At Meetup, we have a team building a member-centric notification system to ensure that members aren’t bombarded with notifications, as we’ve been known to do with email. We want to make sure we’re sending notifications at the specific time when they’re most useful, like right before or right after a Meetup. Our system scores each notification and will take into account how a member has engaged with notifications in the past, allowing us to determine the contents and timing of the next one we send. Perhaps most importantly, this system will increase the chances you won’t want to hurl your phone across the room because you feel interrupted or spammed.

Our product managers and engineers will tell you these are hard, complicated problems to solve.

The potential is huge, though, and we’re redesigning the Meetup apps with the notification experience at the center, not as an afterthought. Given the serious boost in traffic that news organizations see from push notifications, I would hope they are doing the same. Just sending more notifications isn’t going to cut it. They have to get smart.

Fiona Spruill is vice president of product at Meetup and a former editor at The New York Times.

本文由清华全球传播订阅号授权网易新闻学院发布。