The Adblock Plus crowdsourced hacker militia can’t keep up with Facebook’s disciplined army of engineers. When Facebook first announced it would circumvent ad blocking software, Adblock Plus (ABP) built a workaround in two days, boasting that “We promised that the open source community would have a solution very soon…This time that community seems to have gotten the […]
Facebook today filled the biggest hole in its chatbot platform. Messenger bots can accept payments natively without sending users to an external website, Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus announced today onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016. Finally, the credit card info people already have stored in Facebook or Messenger can be used to instantly […]
Earlier this summer, Facebook began to disable messaging in its mobile web app in order to push people to use its mobile Messenger app. However, this morning at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016, Messenger head David Marcus said that the option to use the mobile web experience isn’t going away entirely. Instead, the company is selectively disabling the […]
Facebook makes value judgements about what can appear in News Feed and what’s censored, but insists its a tech company not a media editor. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, writer Josh Constine sat down with Adam Mosseri, a VP at Facebook and head of News Feed, to hear more about how policies control what you see. The talk […]
Following the controversial firing of the editorial team who managed the Trending Topics that appear next to Facebook’s News Feed, the company is now actively working on technology that will help prevent fake news stories from showing up in the Trending section. Similar systems have been rolled out to News Feed in recent months, and […]
Europe’s top court, the CJEU, has been asked to rule on whether a privacy-related legal action brought against Facebook can be treated as a class action or not. The suit kicked off in Austria back in 2014 with European privacy campaigner and lawyer Max Schrems calling for non-commercial Facebook users located outside North America to join the class action — thousands of whom quickly […]
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said today that the company faced “difficult decisions” when it deleted a post by a Norwegian journalist containing an iconic photograph of a girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. Sandberg expressed regret at her company’s decision to repeatedly delete the photograph and said Facebook would do better at […]
Too much choice makes it harder to make a decision (a phenomenon that was detailed in “Modern Romance” from Aziz Ansari). So at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon, a team of hackers developed PickMe, a Facebook-integrated chatbot that helps you decide which local restaurant to go to. Just message the bot with what you’re looking […]
Independent publishers are terrified of platform dependency these days, and for good reason: According to Parse.ly, Facebook is the No. 1 source of traffic to their sites. Facebook and Google together account for 65 percent of digital ad revenue, according to Pew’s State of the News Media 2016 report. To put that in perspective, that’s up […]
Here come the fashbots, and this time they might actually be useful. Facebook’s seemingly half-baked chatbot platform soured many on the potential of conversation user interfaces. The first bots built by outside developers back in April were clumsy and more trouble than just using a website. So Facebook’s Creative Shop is getting involved, working with […]