Heavy with fake news guilt, Facebook is rolling out new social channel benchmarking for publishers in the CrowdTangle tool it acquired and made free last year. CrowdTangle Intelligence lets news outlets compare their different accounts’ performance on up to five social accounts within any one social app, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. Publishers can […]
WhatsApp may be about to introduce peer-to-peer payments in India, which is its largest market with over 200 million users. A report from The Ken, an India-based subscription media company that we recently profiled, claims that WhatsApp plans to use UPI, a cross-bank payment system backed by the government, to begin enable payments between users […]
Facebook will reveal at its F8 conference a new class of group bots that work inside Messenger group chats. These group bots can keep users informed about real-time news such as a sports game’s progress, e-commerce deliveries and more, according to three sources familiar with the development of the feature. Facebook is already working with […]
Facebook today announced it’s expanding its set of online fundraising tools to include its own GoFundMe competitor, with the added support for personal online fundraisers, starting first in the U.S. The new tool will allow Facebook users to raise money for personal crises and other campaigns — like school or medical expenses, emergency situations, funerals and […]
Palmer Luckey is out at Facebook. The Oculus co-founder, who helped kickstart the recent VR craze with a prototype headset built out of his parents’ garage, has left the company after a year that heralded the launch of the consumer Oculus Rift but also a number of lawsuits and a pro-Trump meme scandal. Oculus has confirmed the […]
Ruben Harris is a professional cellist and a recovering investment banker who now leads partnerships in San Francisco for Honor, a healthcare startup focused on seniors. He is also a founder of the Breaking Into Startups podcast. More posts by this contributor: Companies are increasingly investing in workforce development to retrain their employees, but if […]
Facebook’s News Feed is getting a little more colorful today. Its “Goodwill” team — which is behind efforts like Friends Day and various messages at the top of the feed, including the recently added Weather greetings — is now rolling out new animations to denote the changing seasons. Starting today, people may begin to see an animated message with birds […]
I n his comments this week, Zuckerberg seemed to take a measured approach to address his accusers: “We need to make sure that we don’t get to a place where we’re not showing content or banning things from the service just because it hurts someone’s feelings or because someone doesn’t agree with it – I think […]
Internet accessibility in emerging markets is a huge challenge. Facebook and Alphabet have spent millions on internet-enabled drones, balloons, and other services to solve the last mile problem of connectivity in rural markets in developing nations, but that solves a problem that affects a smaller population than addressing connectivity in cities. Meanwhile, a new company called Tizeti, which is graduating […]
In response to pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change and the Center for Media Justice, Facebook announced today that it will clarify its developer policy to explicitly prohibit the use of Facebook or Instagram data in surveillance tools. The ACLU has revealed several instances of developers using information gleaned from Facebook’s […]