It's difficult to imagine a world without Facebook - as such, Facebook is releasing video ads to Messenger. Inside Messenger, a service which already has non-video ads, users will soon be a testing ground for video advertisements of all sorts. In creeps the most eye-drawing element on the internet, and there goes our sense of privacy even further down the garbage chute.
Facebook is about to get even more annoying, with the promise of autoplaying video adverts inserted into Facebook Messenger. The commercials are the latest attempt by the social network to squeeze ad dollars out of the eyeballs of its users, having run short on space in the regular app.
If you no longer want to be part of the connected world that's also the ad-supported world, there are alternatives. They aren't the same as the apps and social networks you use now, and it's not often that they get as big a celebrity following - but maybe that's not why you're on the internet in the first place. Today we're having a peek at a few alternatives to the major social networks as they roll right this minute.
Today Facebook's latest privacy flub is in the spotlight, and you might just want to check yourself before you get wrecked. The incident occurred some time ago - a few weeks, or so - and it affected probably.... 14 million users, more or less. The good thing is that posts written before May are still private. The bad thing is, everything else might not be.
Fewer likes on your Instagram selfies are probably just because they're bad photos, not because the app's algorithm is trying to neg you. At least, that's the takeaway from the Facebook-owned photo and video sharing service drawing back the curtain - at least a little - on just how it decides what and when to show content each time you open the app.
Facebook is developing its own chips that can analyze and filter video content in real-time, paving the way for potentially replacing human moderators as streaming on the social network grows exponentially. The site has been criticized in recent years for allowing users to share controversial or offensive content, including footage of people being assaulted or committing suicide.
YouTube is optimizing itself for views - more views, as many views as possible, at all costs. It begins with the changing of the chronology of the videos in YouTube subscriber feeds. This is real, it's happening, and for some users it's already happened. Instead of acting as a platform, as it should, YouTube is turning into Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It's becoming awful.
Instagram is adding a new mute feature to its feed, a more discreet way to oust bragging friends from your timeline without prompting unfollow arguments. It's being billed as a useful option to curate your timeline, and there'll still be ways to see content that muted friends share - or that you're tagged in.
Snap's Spectacles are set to become a lot more useful for video sharing, even if you're not much of a Snapchat user. While exporting video captured with Spectacles has been possible since the first generation sunglasses, until now it has always had some drawbacks.
Instagram is making it easier to flesh out your Instagram Stories, adding the ability to quickly share something there directly from the feed. The new feature further blurs the lines between the traditional Instagram timeline, and the more recently-introduced, ephemeral stories.
A new feature on Snapchat makes 6-second advertisements unskippable. They're real, they're here, and they're not going away any time soon. As such, it's time to discuss once again how to delete an app - namely Snapchat. It's actually pretty easy when it comes down to it. If you just want to get rid of notifications, we've got a guide for that too.
Facebook has suspended around 200 third-party apps, after its data misuse investigation found signs that they may have been acting improperly. The app audit was part of Facebook's grand mea-culpa earlier this year, after the part the social network played in the Cambridge Analytica scandal was revealed.