ESPN has announced a new deal with Facebook that will result in it bringing new content to the social network's Facebook Watch platform. Under this agreement, ESPN says it will offer some exclusive content and digital shows on the video platform, including exclusive versions of its Fantasy Focus Live and Countdown to GameDay.
Facebook released a statement this morning about a privacy investigation of Facebook app developers. This is what Facebook calls their "ongoing App Developer Investigation" in which they've begun taking a closer look at apps with access to "large amounts of information." This is part of the overarching privacy disaster going on at Facebook since March of 2018. Today Facebook said this investigation is "part of our response to the episode involving Cambridge Analytica."
Facebook has announced a big refresh for its Portal lineup, today announcing three new devices for the family of devices. The first is a device with a 10-inch display that's taking up the standard "Portal" moniker. It's joined by the 8-inch Portal Mini and a new device called the Portal TV.
Facebook isn't giving up on Portal, with the social network reportedly readying a Portal TV device for the holidays that would expand its controversial hardware into greater content consumption, potentially in the hope of bypassing skepticism around how trustworthy the company is. Launched last year, Facebook Portal is a pair of video calling smart displays, which was debuted right in the midst of a privacy crisis.
The NFL is continuing its partnership with Facebook, bringing select content to the Facebook Watch platform. This isn't the first time the NFL has made football content available on Facebook Watch; the two began working together in 2017 with a deal that, at the time, offered recaps from all regular-season games. Looking forward, the latest deal between the two will result in a variety of original video content, game clips, and more.
Facebook was always about friends. But now it’s also about love. The social media giants have launched Facebook Dating in the U.S., their answer to Tinder, Coffee Meets Bagel, Bumble and other dating apps. The new feature brings together Facebook’s networking infrastructure and data to help find matches that suit you.
Over the past 3 years, my relationship with Facebook changed in several drastic ways. In the year 2015, I discovered the "Unfollow" button, and my journey away from Facebook reliance began. I was a Facebook addict for longer than I care to think about. I lived in fear of getting away from the social network, my former primary source of stress in life. I thought I'd never be able to stop - how could I?
Facebook already knows plenty about you, and now it wants to help you find love, with Facebook Dating launching today. Available in the US among 20 countries initially, the new dating profile service takes on existing rivals like Match, Bumble, and Tinder, with the promise of easier profile creation so that you don't get stuck trying to think of hobbies outside of "reading" and "running gleefully along beaches."
Today Facebook released an off switch for facial recognition in their social media system. Today, a Facebook representative by the name of Srinivas Narayanan, Applied Research Lead, Facebook AI said that Facebook has "only used face recognition technology to automatically suggest tags for your friends in photos."
Back in May, Instagram began testing something of a controversial feature: it started hiding like counts on a public basis, meaning that content creators could still see their total number of likes on individual posts but those who were simply viewing them couldn't. Now, it seems that Instagram parent company Facebook is gearing up to test the same exact thing.
Spotify has made it easier to share tracks on Facebook, the company announced this week. With the update, tracks from Spotify shared on Facebook Stories will offer 15-second previews of the audio before the user taps to listen to it. The feature is particularly useful for creators who share their music to an audience on Facebook, but viewers will need to tap through to Spotify to hear the entire track.
A potential new Snapchat alternative app "Threads" was tipped in-the-making at Facebook and Instagram. The app seems to be part of Mark Zuckerberg's vision for a private messaging tie between each of the company's main social ecosystems. That'd likely include account connections between Facebook and Instagram, but mention of WhatsApp integration was notably absent from report details.