The ongoing Covid pandemic stretches us to our limits. During the last months, many of us have been quarantining or (self-)isolating and working from home. The Aspen Institute has studied the effects and published several reports with the telling titles: “Lessons in Loneliness” and “Artificial Intimacy.” Bascially, there is no one size fits all technical […]
Category Archives: Social Media
WhatsApp will let you shop directly from chats | Engadget
Facebook is extending WhatsApp with shopping features. While WhatsApp has had cataloge features in the past, they appear to be limited to that what Facebook’s now previewing. It’s not yet clear, how the system works, but it could be something along these lines: A user messages a business The business replys with a link to […]
WhatsApp Phone Numbers Pop Up in Google Search Results — But is it a Bug? | Threatpost
The WhatsApp feature “Click to Chat” exposes mobile phone numbers on the web and Google’s search engine is able to index them. You can try it using the search string site:wa.me “+43” The phone numbers are simply as part of an URL string (https://wa.me/<phone_number>) and available in plaintext. Facebook claims that this not a bug: […]
Instagram changes embedding API ToS
In an surprising announcement, Instagram stated that the platform does not provide users the copyright license to embed images to other websites: While our terms allow us to grant a sub-license, we do not grant one for our embeds API. Our platform policies require third parties to have the necessary rights from applicable rights holders. […]
Facebook cancels physical events through June 2021(!)
Facebook canceled all physical events with more than 5o people through June 2021. They will replace some of them with virtual events, but Mark Zuckerberg didn’t provide further details in his post. This outlook is certainly a bit grim since Facebook could set an example for the IT business. We might see other tech organizers […]
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It – The New York Times
How do you feel about the end of privacy on public places? In public transport? When you can identfy every stranger that passes by? When every stranger can indentify you without your knowledge? While this might be still a bit away, the NY Times reports that a start-up called Clearview AI is using a massive […]
Why your App is no replacement for WhatsApp newsletters
The WhatsApp newsletter ban has huge impact on businesses. While some businesses will just abandon their WhatsApp audience, others will try to convert users into their apps. This might work for some users, but there are several reasons this might not work very well: Users value the WhatsApp newsletter style. It gives them quick access […]
Five reasons not to abandon your WhatsApp newsletter audience
After WhatsApp basically killed newsletter services, companies face a difficult situation in dealing with it. Some companies will just shrug and move on to another social media platform. However, your WhatsApp newsletter audience is special: they prefer a condensed info overview and value the direct access to information and services. Now simply abandoning your WhatsApp […]
How the biggest decentralized social network is dealing with its Nazi problem – The Verge
After the neo nazi network Gab migrated to Mastodon, the alternative social media network tries to deal with internet’s Nazi problem head-on. The distributed nature of the network (federation) makes it almost impossible to respond with a single strategy. Instead, individual instances as the nodes of the network are called, have taken different measures. For example. […]