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Skype upgrades its messaging feature with drafts, bookmarks and more
Skype is best known for being a video calling app and, to some extent, that’s because its messaging feature set has been a bit underdeveloped. Today, the company is working to change that image with a series of improvements to Skype’s chatting features aimed at further differentiating it from rival apps.
One of the most useful of the new features is support for Message Drafts.
Similar to email, any message you type up in Skype but don’t yet send is saved within the conversation with a “draft” tag attached. That way you can return to the message to finish it and send it later on.
It’s a feature it would be great to see other messaging clients adopt, as well, given how much of modern business and personal communication takes place outside of email.
People have wanted the ability to draft and schedule iMessage texts for years — so much so that clever developers invented app-based workarounds to meet consumers’ needs. Some people even type up their texts in Notepad, while waiting for the right time to send them.
In another email-inspired addition, Skype is also introducing the ability to bookmark important messages. To access this option, you just have to long-press a message (on mobile) or right-click (on desktop), then tap or click “Add Bookmark.” This will add the message to your Bookmarks screen for easy retrieval.
You’ll also now be able to preview photos, videos, and files before you send them through messages — a worthwhile improvement, but one that’s more about playing catch-up to other communication apps than being particularly innovative.
And if you’re sharing a bunch of photos or videos all at once, Skype will now organize them neatly. Instead of overwhelming recipients with a large set of photos, the photos are grouped in a way that’s more common to what you’d see on social media. That is, only a few are display while the rest hide behind a “+” button you have to click in order to see more.
Unrelated to the messaging improvements, Skype also rolled out split window support for all versions of Windows, Mac, and Linux. (Windows 10 support was already available).
As one of the older messaging apps still in use, Skype is no longer the largest or most popular, claiming only 300 million monthly active users compared to WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion, for example.
However, it’s good to see its team getting back to solving real consumer pain points rather than trying to clone Snapchat as it mistakenly tried to do not too long ago. (Thankfully, those changes were rolled back.) What Skype remaining users appreciate is the app’s ease-of-use and its productivity focus, and these changes are focused on that direction.
Outside of the expanded access to split view, noted above, all the other new features are rolling out across all Skype platforms, the company says.
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You can now share music from Spotify to Facebook Stories
Spotify this morning announced a new way for you to share music with friends (or fans, if you’re an artist) — by way of a new Facebook Stories integration that includes 15-second song previews. Viewers can also optionally tap on the “Play on Spotify” button in the Story to be redirected to the Spotify app to hear more.
The feature is designed largely with artists and their teams in mind, as it gives them another way to promote their new music across Facebook’s social network. Musicians and their managers often today use the Spotify app’s sharing feature to post their content across social media, including to Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and elsewhere.
Last year, Spotify introduced a way to share music to Instagram Stories, including their albums, tracks, and playlists, as part of Facebook’s announcement that it was opening up sharing to Facebook and Instagram Stories from other, third-party apps.
At the time, the company said an integration with Facebook Stories was coming soon.
Since its launch on Instagram, the sharing feature has been mutually beneficial for both Spotify and Instagram alike, as it made users’ Stories more engaging while also sending traffic back to the Spotify app for further music discovery.
Add some music to your story
Audio sharing to Facebook Stories is now available. pic.twitter.com/HSBgmxYd8G— Spotify (@Spotify) August 30, 2019
There’s likely not as much demand for sharing to Facebook Stories, however.
In order to share the 15-second clips to Facebook Stories, you’ll tap the “Share” button from the Spotify app and choose Facebook as the destination.
Side note: We’re not seeing the option to share to News Feed as the picture Spotify published shows (see above. Instead, tapping “Facebook” launches you right into the Story interface, as shown in the tweet above.
You can then customize your Story as you would normally using the Story editing tools and post it to your profile. Viewers will get to hear the 15-second song clip, and can then tap to go to Spotify to hear more.
Spotify had offered Facebook Story sharing in the past, but the access was later pulled.
These song previews only work when you’re sharing a single track to Stories. If you choose to share other content, like albums, playlists, or an artist profile page, viewers can click into that content, but won’t hear any preview, Spotify says.
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Instagram may allow creators to syndicate IGTV videos to Facebook
Following the departure of Instagram’s founders, Facebook is working to more closely integrate the photo-sharing app with its flagship social network. It’s already added its brand name next to Instagram’s, and is working to make both platforms’ messaging products interoperable. Now, Facebook is prototyping a means of syndicating Instagram’s IGTV video to Facebook’s video site, Facebook Watch.
In another find from noted reverse engineer, Jane Manchun Wong, Instagram was found to have under development a feature that would allow Instagram users to post their IGTV content to both Instagram as a preview, as well as to Facebook and Watch — the latter by toggling an additional switch labeled “make visible on Facebook.”
Wong says the feature is still in the prototype stage, as the buttons themselves aren’t functional.
This move, should it come to pass, could prompt more video creators to use IGTV, given that it would boost their videos’ distribution by also including Facebook as a destination for their content. The videos could also be part of an ongoing, episodic series, Wong had found.
This, in turn, could help IGTV — an app which hasn’t quite taken off as a standalone video platform. Today, IGTV takes inspiration from TikTok and Snapchat’s vertical video. It’s meant to engage Instagram users with longer-form, portrait mode video content but within Instagram and in a separate IGTV app. But IGTV has often been filled with poorly cropped and imported web video, rather than content designed specifically for the platform.
Meanwhile, the IGTV app has struggled to rise to the top of the App Store’s charts the way its parent, Instagram has. Today, it’s ranked No. 159 in the Photo & Video category on the App Store, and unranked in the Overall top charts.
To address some of the issues that creators have complained about, Instagram this week rolled out a few changes to the upload experience. This included the new ability to select the 1:1 crop of an IGTV thumbnail for the creator’s Profile Cover as well as the ability to edit which 5:4 section of the IGTV video shows in the Feed.
IGTV will also now auto-populate Instagram handles and tags on IGTV titles and descriptions, and will now support the ability to longer video from mobile. With the latter change, IGTV has increased the minimum threshold to upload on mobile to one minute, and is allowing mobile uploads up to 15 minutes.
Instagram declined to comment on the possible syndication of IGTV content to Facebook and Facebook Watch.
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Facebook rolls out new business tools for Messenger, kills the ‘Discover’ tab
Facebook today is formally rolling out a new suite of tools for its 40 million active businesses on Messenger, including appointment booking, lead generation, and others announced earlier this year at its F8 developer conference. As a part of these changes, Facebook will also begin to phase out the Discover tab in Messenger — a feature that became home to both games and businesses following last fall’s redesign.
Today, Facebook says the Discover tab will be pulled from the Messenger app over the next several months. Instead, it will invest in making sure Facebook users are directed to interact with businesses via Messenger in other ways.
“We want to make it more seamless for people to reach out to businesses on Messenger in places where they’re already looking to connect,” explains Facebook, of its decision to kill off the Discover feature. “We will put more investment into tools to connect people and businesses – including updates to m.me links, web plugins, various entry points across our family of apps, as well as ad products – that lead to Messenger,” the company says.
In terms of its new business tools, the lead generation product will launch as a Messenger template within Facebook Ads Manager this week. The template lets businesses create automated experiences to help qualify their leads in Messenger, then continue conversations in the app or integrate with existing CRM tools to track the leads further.
The feature has been in beta following F8, but will now be publicly available.
Appointment booking was announced at F8, too, but is only now launching into beta with select developers and businesses. This feature allows businesses to accept appointment requests and make bookings in real-time through Messenger. It also integrates with existing calendar booking software, and can help Messenger conversations be turned into in-store traffic, as well as online and phone appointments, the company says.
The feature will be launched globally to all developers later in the year.
Another update mentioned today involves plans to launch improved event reporting in Messenger later this year, which will allow businesses to report and track their Messenger conversations.
Plus, Facebook says it’s updating the Standard Messaging window for businesses to 24 hours (which is how long they have to respond to inquiries from customers.) This brings it in-line with WhatsApp’s window.
After 24 hours, businesses can still use sponsored messages to re-engage customers, and message tags (e.g. updates on purchases, event reminders, changes to their account, and now in closed beta, “human agent,” which will let agents respond to issues that need resolution after the standard messaging window closes.)
Messenger’s Subscription Messaging beta program, meanwhile, is changing today as well.
It’s now going to be limited to “vetted news organizations.” This came about because some businesses were using the feature in violation of Facebook’s guidelines, the company admitted. The feature is designed to send regular news updates to subscribers. The timing of this change is somewhat interesting, as Facebook is preparing to relaunch efforts to feature top news stories on its social network, this time vetted by journalists and featuring content Facebook pays for. There’s room for some interoperability here between the news product and subscriptions/updates, but it’s not clear if or how that will come to pass.
Of course, the biggest Messenger consumer news from F8 — a desktop app for Mac and PC — hasn’t yet come to pass, but is expected sometime this year.
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‘Behind the Screen’ illuminates the invisible, indispensable content moderation industry
The moderators who sift through the toxic detritus of social media have gained the spotlight recently, but they’ve been important for far longer — longer than internet giants would like you to know. In her new book “Behind the Screen,” UCLA’s Sarah Roberts illuminates the history of this scrupulously hidden workforce and the many forms the job takes.
It is after all people who look at every heinous image, racist diatribe, and porn clip that gets uploaded to Facebook, YouTube, and every other platform — people who are often paid like dirt, treated like parts, then disposed of like trash when worn out. And they’ve been doing it for a long time.
True to her academic roots, Roberts lays out the thesis of the book clearly in the introduction, explaining that although content moderators or the companies that employ them may occasionally surface in discussions, the job has been systematically obscured from sight.
The work they do, the conditions under which they do it, and for whose benefit are largely imperceptible to the users of the platforms who pay for and rely upon this labor. In fact, this invisibility is by design.
Roberts, an assistant professor of information studies at UCLA, has been looking into this industry for the better part of a decade, and this book is the culmination of her efforts to document it. While it is not the final word on the topic — no academic would suggest their work was — it is an eye-opening account, engagingly written, and not at all the tour of horrors you may reasonably expect it to be.
After reading the book, I talked with Roberts about the process of researching and writing it. As an academic and tech outsider, she was not writing from personal experience or even commenting on the tech itself, but found that she had to essentially invent a new area of research from scratch spanning tech, global labor, and sociocultural norms.
“Opacity, obfuscation, and general unwillingness”
“To take you back to 2010 when I started this work, there was literally no academic research on this topic,” Roberts said. “That’s unusual for a grad student, and actually something that made me feel insecure — like maybe this isn’t a thing, maybe no one cares.”
That turned out not to be the case, of course. But the practices we read about with horror, of low-wage workers grinding through endless queues of content from child abuse to terrorist attacks, while they’ve been in place for years and years, have been successfully moderated out of existence by the companies that employ them. But recent events have changed that.
“A number of factors are coalescing to make the public more receptive to this kind of work,” she explained. “Average social media users, just regular people, are becoming more sophisticated about their use, and questioning the integration of those kinds of tools and media in their everyday life. And certainly there were a few key political situations where social media was implicated. Those were a driving force behind the people asking, do I actually know what I’m using? Do I know whether or how I’m being manipulated? How do the things I see on my screen actually get there?”
A handful of reports over the years, like Casey Newton’s in the Verge recently, also pierced the curtain behind which tech firms carefully and repeatedly hid this unrewarding yet essential work. At some point the cat was simply out of the bag. But few people recognized it for what it was.
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Facebook will require political advertisers provide further credentials, or have their ads paused
Ahead of the 2020 elections, Facebook today announced it’s tightening requirements for groups buying political ads on the social network. The company last year began requiring advertisers get authorized to run ads about social issues, elections, or politics, which involves advertisers providing identification to confirm who they are and where they’re located — including a U.S. street address, phone number, business email and website matching the email. Starting in mid-September, Facebook says advertisers will now need to submit more information about their organization in order to run political ads.
Failure to submit this information will see their ads paused, the company says.
There are five options for submitting more information, three of which will confirm the advertiser is registered in some way with the U.S. government. This includes submitting a tax-registered organization identification number (EIN); a government website matching an email ending in .gov or .mil; or a Federal Election Commission (FEC) identification number.
By submitting this information, Facebook will label the advertiser a “Confirmed Organization” in its ad archive. The advertiser will also be allowed to use their registered organization name in the ad disclaimers and the “i” icon that appears on the upper-right hand corner of the ad will read “Confirmed Organization.”
For smaller businesses or local politicians who want to run ads about social issues, elections, or politics, they can choose to submit one of two other options instead: an organization name with a verifiable phone number, business email, mail-deliverable address and business website with a domain matching the email; or they can provide no organizational information and use the Page Admin’s legal name on their personal information document.
In either of these two cases, the “i” icon on the ad will read “About this ad” instead of “Confirmed Organization.”
Facebook says this “i” icon is how people will be able to see who is trying to influence them through the ad.
“Now, with one tap, people will not only see information about the ad, but they’ll be able to see the information Facebook confirmed, such as whether an advertiser used an EIN or FEC identification number. This will allow people to confidently gauge the legitimacy of an organization and quickly raise questions or concerns if they find anything out of the ordinary,” the company explained in a blog post announcing the changes.
Despite Facebook’s rule around political ads, the company admitted that there have been several cases where advertisers attempted to put out misleading “Paid for by” disclaimers on their ads.
VICE, for example, demonstrated how easy it was to manipulate the system by placing ads on behalf of VP Mike Pence, DNC Chairman Tom Perez, and the Islamic State, which Facebook approved. Business Insider also ran fake ads pretending to be Cambridge Analytica, which Facebook also approved.
More recently, Facebook banned conservative news outlet The Epoch Times from running ads on its platform because of ad policy violations. The organization had hidden under page names like “Honest Paper” and “Pure American Journalism,” to bypass Facebook’s ad transparency system in order to run some $2 million worth of ads promoting the president and spreading conspiracy theories about his opponents.
In addition to the changes around the advertiser requirements, Facebook is updating its social issues list in the U.S. to include 10 categories, instead of 20 distinct subjects. This doesn’t represent a narrowing focus, but rather makes the categories themselves broader to encompass more topics. For example, the “Civil and Social Rights” category would include sub-topics like freedom of religion, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights.
The new categories were based on the issue lists in countries who recently held elections, Facebook says.
Facebook also will no longer require some environmentally-focused ads to submit these additional requirements, based on user feedback. This includes ads that “discuss, debate or advocate for environmental issues,” those that encourage recycling, or those highlighting sustainable products.
In the months ahead, Facebook says it will be updating its Ad Library to make it easier to track and compare U.S. presidential candidate spending, and it will expand its policy to prohibit ads that discourage people from voting.
It will turn its attention to Pages, too, by requiring national candidates or elected officials to go through Page Publishing Authorization, to verify their Pages are using real accounts and are based the U.S. Facebook will then begin exposing more information about the Page, including the business or organization behind it.
“We know we can’t tackle these challenges alone. That’s why we’re calling for sensible regulation and working directly with governments, watchdogs and regulators,” the company wrote in the blog post, referring to Mark Zuckerberg’s pro-regulation op-ed, which called for rules on Facebook’s terms. “While our efforts to protect elections are ongoing and won’t be perfect, they will make it harder for advertisers to obscure who is behind ads and will provide greater transparency for people.”
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YouTube to reduce conspiracy theory recommendations in the UK
YouTube is expanding an experimental tweak to its recommendation engine that’s intended to reduce the amplification of conspiracy theories to the UK market.
In January, the video-sharing platform said it was making changes in the US to limit the spread of conspiracy theory content, such as junk science and bogus claims about historical events — following sustained criticism of how its platform accelerates damaging clickbait.
A YouTube spokeswoman confirmed to TechCrunch it is now in the process of rolling out the same update to suppresses conspiracy recommendations in the UK. She said it will take some time to take full effect — without providing detail on when exactly the changes will be fully applied.
The spokeswoman said YouTube acknowledges that it needs to do more to reform a recommendation system that has been shown time and again lifting harmful clickbait and misinformation into mainstream view. Though YouTube claims this negative spiral occurs only sometimes, and says on average its system points users to mainstream videos.
The company calls the type of junk content it’s been experimenting with recommending less often “borderline”, saying it’s stuff that toes the line of its acceptable content policies. In practice this means stuff like videos that make nonsense claims the earth is flat, or blatant lies about historical events such as the 9/11 terror attacks, or promote harmful junk about bogus miracle cures for serious illnesses.
All of which can be filed under misinformation ‘snake oil’. But for YouTube this sort of junk has been very lucrative snake oil as a consequence of Google’s commercial imperative being to keep eyeballs engaged in order to serve more ads.
More recently, though, YouTube has taken a reputational hit as its platform as been blamed for an extremist and radicalizing impact on young and impressionable minds by encouraging users to swallow junk science and worse.
A former Google engineer, Guillaume Chaslot, who worked on the YouTube recommendation algorithms went public last year to condemn what he described as the engine’s “toxic” impact which he said “perverts civic discussion” by encouraging users to create highly engaging borderline content.
Multiple investigations by journalists have also delved into instances where YouTube has been blamed for pushing people, including the young and impressionable, towards far right points of view via its algorithm’s radicalizing rabbit hole — which exposes users to increasingly extreme points of view without providing any context about what it’s encouraging them to view.
Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine if a YouTube viewer who sought out at a video produced by a partisan shock jock was suggested less extreme or even an entirely alternative political point of view. Or only saw calming yoga and mindfulness videos in their ‘up next’ feed.
YouTube has eschewed a more balanced approach to the content its algorithms select and recommend for commercial reasons. But it may also have been keen to avoid drawing overt attention to the fact that its algorithms are acting as de facto editors.
And editorial decisions are what media companies make. So it then follows that tech platforms which perform algorithmic content sorting and suggestion should be regulated like media businesses are. (And all tech giants in the user generated content space have been doing their level best to evade that sort of rule of law for years.)
That Google has the power to edit out junk is clear.
A spokeswoman for YouTube told us the US test of a reduction in conspiracy junk recommendations has led to a drop in the number of views from recommendations of more than 50%.
Though she also said the test is still ramping up — suggesting the impact on the viewing and amplification of conspiracy nonsense could be even greater if YouTube were to more aggressively demote this type of BS.
What’s very clear is the company has the power to flick algorithmic levers that determine what billions of people see — even if you don’t believe that might also influence how they feel and what they believe. Which is a concentration of power that should concern people on all sides of the political spectrum.
While YouTube could further limit algorithmically amplified toxicity the problem is its business continues to monetize on engagement, and clickbait’s fantastical nonsense is, by nature, highly engaging. So — for purely commercial reasons — it has a counter incentive not to clear out all YouTube’s crap.
How long the company can keep up this balancing act remains to be seen, though. In recent years some major YouTube advertisers have intervened to make it clear they do not relish their brands being associated with abusive and extremist content. Which does represent a commercial risk to YouTube — if pressure from and on advertisers steps up.
Like all powerful tech platforms, its business is also facing rising scrutiny from politicians and policymakers. And questions about how to ensure such content platforms do not have a deleterious effect on people and societies are now front of mind for governments in some markets around the world.
That political pressure — which is a response to public pressure, after a number of scandals — is unlikely to go away.
So YouTube’s still glacial response to addressing how its population-spanning algorithms negatively select for stuff that’s socially divisive and individually toxic may yet come back to bite it — in the form of laws that put firm limits on its powers to push people’s buttons.
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How to use Amazon and advertising to build a D2C startup
Entrepreneurship in consumer packaged goods (CPG) is being democratized. Every step of the value channel has been compressed and made more affordable (and thereby accessible).
At VMG Ignite, we have worked with dozens of direct-to-consumer startups trying to both find product-market fit and achieve scale through Amazon and online advertising.
This article focuses on customer acquisition, particularly Amazon and online advertising, for the direct-to-consumer (D2C) CPG venture. Selling on Amazon, specifically third-party (3P), has become an increasingly important component of the D2C playbook. About 46% of product searches start on Amazon, which makes it a compelling source of sales even for early-stage ventures.
Table of contents
- How to find product-market fit
- How to get started with Amazon
- Maximizing sales on Amazon
- Getting started with Facebook ads
- Growing sales after you have product-market fit
- What tools and technology to use for your D2C business
How to find product-market fit
People say that ideas are a dime a dozen. They aren’t valuable. But finding product-market fit? Now, that’s hard. The gap between an unexecuted idea and proven product-market fit can seem vast. Yet it’s a critical first step because, ultimately, marketing amplifies your product and value proposition.
If they aren’t compelling, marketing will fail. If they’re compelling, even mediocre marketing can often be successful. So start with a great product that people love.
How do you create a great product, you ask? A/B test your product configuration like you A/B test your landing page, copy, and design. Your product is a variable, not a constant. Build, ship, get feedback. Build, ship, get feedback. Turn detractors into your customer panel for testing.
Early-stage D2C companies typically get their first customers through three channels:
- Begging your friends and family to buy and promote your product.
- List it on Amazon as a 3P seller. Figure out the platform and start selling!
- Advertise on Facebook. Start with a daily budget of 10x your price point to get started and start tinkering with creative, audiences, and settings to minimize cost per order.
The companies that succeed are often the ones that iterate the fastest. In his book Creative Confidence, IDEO founder David Kelley and his co-author (and brother) Tom relay a story of a pottery class that was split into two groups.
The first group was told they would each be graded on the single best piece of pottery they each produced. The second group was told they would each be graded based on the sheer volume of pottery they produced.
Naturally, the first group labored to craft the perfect piece while the second group churned through pottery with reckless abandon. Perhaps not so intuitive, at the end of the class, all the best pottery came from the second group! Iteration was a more effective driver of quality than intentionality.
Don’t know how to manage Amazon or Facebook? Here are some best practices:
How to get started with Amazon
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Facebook succeeds in blocking German FCO’s privacy-minded order against combining user data
Facebook has succeeded in blocking a pioneering order by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office earlier this year that would have banned it from combining data on users across its own suite of social platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — without their consent.
Pioneering because the antitrust regulator had liaised with EU privacy authorities during a long-running investigation of Facebook’s data-gathering activities — leading it to conclude that Facebook’s conduct in the German market where it also deemed it to hold a monopoly position amounted to “exploitative abuse”.
The Bundeskartellamt (FCO) order had been likened to a structural separation of Facebook’s businesses at the data level.
Facebook appealed, delaying application of the order, and today’s ruling by the Dusseldorf court grants a suspension (press release in German) — essentially kicking the matter into very long legal grass.
The FCO has a month to lodge an appeal. A spokeswoman confirmed to TechCrunch is will do so. But with the order suspended pending what could be years of appeals there’s little near-term prospect of any change to how Facebook does business based on this particular regulatory intervention.
It’s undoubtedly a major victory for Facebook — to win at the very first appeals layer — and a major blow for regulatory ‘innovation’ (for what of a better word) which sought to evolve the interpretation of current competition law to respond to the outgrowth and dominance of surveillance-based digital business model via applying privacy-focused conditions to data processing.
Europe’s data protection regulators do have the power to order the suspension of infringing data processing, under the bloc’s updated privacy framework (GDPR).
But so far very such orders are as rare as hen’s teeth — barring a recent threat to Google also by a German privacy regulator. (Just the threat of an order in that case triggered a voluntary suspension of the data processing in question.)
This made the FCO’s order against Facebook all the more notable for boldness and forethought. And means Facebook’s success in cutting it down at the first legal hurdle is a depressing result for those in the EU hoping platform power linked to privacy-hostile surveillance of Internet users might be regulated in a meaningful timeframe via an existing antitrust lens.
The European Commission’s own ‘big tech’ antitrust interventions have so far focused their attention elsewhere, in addition to taking years to conclude.
Commenting on the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court’s decision today in a statement, FCO president Andreas Mundt said: “Data and data handling are decisive factors for competition in the digital economy. The Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has today responded differently than the Bundeskartellamt to key legal issues. These legal issues are highly significant for the future state of competition in the digital economy. We are convinced that we can act in this area based on the existing antitrust law. For this reason, we are going to appeal on points of law to the Federal Court of Justice to clarify these issues.”
We’ve also reached out to Facebook for comment.
Professor Rupprecht Podszun, a chair for civil law, German and European competition law at Heinrich Heine University, who has been following the FCO’s intervention, dubs the court ruling a “major blow” for the regulator.
“The FCO had accused Facebook of abusing its dominant position by unlawfully gathering and combining user data. Thus it had ordered Facebook to change its Terms & Conditions within a year. The judges from Düsseldorf have stopped enforcement of this decision now. They have serious doubts as to the lawfulness of the decision,” he said via email. “The case is regarded as a landmark case against the digital giants and it had gained worldwide recognition. To fail at the Düsseldorf court, at the very first step, is a bitter result.”
Podszun said the Düsseldorf court did not accept it follows from a possible violation of privacy rules that it is automatically a violation of antitrust rules if a dominant company is acting. That would require the court to see competitive damage — which it did not in this case.
Additionally, the court took the view that users decide autonomously whether they agree with Facebook’s T&Cs when signing up for the service. It also did not agree that consumers are exploited by Facebook’s data collection since they could continue to make the same data available to other companies.
From here on in he believes legal back and forth is likely to take years — hence, even if the FCO were to prevail at a higher court in future the impact on Facebook’s business at that point would likely be long out of date. (Meanwhile, earlier this year it emerged that Facebook is working on merging the back-end infrastructure of its three social networks — seeking to further collapse cross-platform user privacy, even as its scrambles discrete business units in a way that would complicate any regulatory order to break apart its business.)
“The Cartel Office had shown courage in its decision and had explored new paths. The Higher Regional
Court did not follow this reasoning. The FCO took a long shot by integrating a privacy investigation into the competition assessment. I have a lot of sympathy for that, because data has become a crucial competitive factor. Thus, I think that data collection must be a topic for antitrust law,” said Podszun.
“The law is at its limits with the internet giants. It is too slow. A final decision in a few years on the privacy terms of Facebook is too late either way. Before taking the decision, the FCO had investigated the case for three years. The Google Shopping procedure of the European Commission took seven years. You cannot tame these companies with such proceedings and lengthy litigation in court.”
“The decision is a wake-up call to legislators: If you want to regulate Google, Amazon, Facebook & Co., the existing tools are not enough,” he added. “A new version of the Antitrust Act is currently pending in Germany. This is an opportunity to change the legal bases. Also, the authorities for data protection need to step up their efforts – they seem to lack the bravery of the antitrust watchdog.”
Asked how legal bases need to change to enable local antitrust law to respond intelligently to data-mining platform giants, Podszun suggested four areas of focus — telling TechCrunch:
- Competition law needs to get away from traditional market definition. There should be a rule that the authorities can interfere with companies like GAFA [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon] in cases where they move into new markets where they are not yet dominant but can easily tip the market. Conglomerate effects and digital ecosystems currently are a blind spot in competition law
- There may be room for a new example of what constitutes an abuse in digital markets
- The German Competition Office should have powers in consumer law fields (currently, there is no public enforcement of economic consumer protection issues in Germany). An integrated approach with consumer and competition issues could be helpful (including privacy, possibly). Privacy enforcers are particularly weak in Germany
- Procedures need to be speeded up, e.g. by stricter time limits, less haggling over access to file, more technically savvy staff and more priority-setting by the authorities
“All very difficult – but it’s vital to have some fresh air here,” he added. “Whether this would have helped in the case under debate is a different question.”
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Facebook really doesn’t want you to read these emails
Oh hey y’all, it’s Friday! It’s August! Which means it’s a great day for Facebook to drop a little news it would prefer you don’t notice. News that you won’t find a link to on the homepage of Facebook’s Newsroom — which is replete with colorfully illustrated items it does want you to read (like the puffed up claim that “Now You Can See and Control the Data That Apps and Websites Share With Facebook”.)
The blog post Facebook would really prefer you didn’t notice is tucked away in a News sub-section of this website — where it’s been confusingly entitled: Document Holds the Potential for Confusion. And has an unenticing grey image of a document icon to further put you off — just in case you happened to stumble on it after all. It’s almost as if Facebook is saying ‘definitely don’t click here‘…
So what is Facebook trying to bury in the horse latitudes of summer?
An internal email chain, starting September 2015, which shows a glimpse of what Facebook’s own staff knew about the activity of Cambridge Analytica prior to The Guardian‘s December 2015 scoop — when the newspaper broke the story that the controversial (and now defunct) data analytics firm, then working for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, had harvested data on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge and/or consent, and was using psychological insights gleaned from the data to target voters.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s official timeline of events about what he knew when vis-a-via the Cambridge Analytica story has always been that his knowledge of the matter dates to December 2015 — when the Guardian published its story.
But the email thread Facebook is now releasing shows internal concerns being raised almost two months earlier.
This chimes with previous (more partial) releases of internal correspondence pertaining to Cambridge Analytica — which have also come out as a result of legal actions (and which we’ve reported on previously here and here).
If you click to download the latest release, which Facebook suggests it ‘agreed’ with the District of Columbia Attorney General to “jointly make public”, you’ll find a redacted thread of emails in which Facebook staffers raise a number of platform policy violation concerns related to the “political partner space”, writing September 29, 2915, that “many companies seem to be on the edge- possibly over”.
Cambridge Analytica is first identified by name — when it’s described by a Facebook employee as “a sketchy (to say the least) data modelling company that has penetrated our market deeply” — on September 22, 2015, per this email thread. It is one of many companies the staffer writes are suspected of scraping user data — but is also described as “the largest and most aggressive on the conservative side”.
On September 30, 2015, a Facebook staffer responds to this, asking for App IDs and app names for the apps engaging in scraping user data — before writing: “My hunch is that these apps’ data-scraping is likely non-compliant”.
“It would be very difficult to engage in data-scraping activity as you described while still being compliant with FPPs [Facebook Platform Policies],” this person adds.
Cambridge Analytica gets another direct mention (“the Cambridge app”) on the same day. A different Facebook staffer then chips in with a view that “it’s very likely these companies are not in violation of any of our terms” — before asking for “concrete examples” and warning against calling them to ask questions unless “red flags” have been confirmed.
On October 13, a Facebook employee chips back into the thread with the view that “there are likely a few data policy violations here”.
The email thread goes on to discuss concerns related to additional political partners and agencies using Facebook’s platform at that point, including ForAmerica, Creative Response Concepts, NationBuilder and Strategic Media 21. Which perhaps explains Facebook’s lack of focus on CA — if potentially “sketchy” political activity was apparently widespread.
On December 11 another Facebook staffer writes to ask for an expedited review of Cambridge Analytica — saying it’s “unfortunately… now a PR issue”, i.e. as a result of the Guardian publishing its article.
The same day a Facebook employee emails to say Cambridge Analytica “is hi pri at this point”, adding: “We need to sort this out ASAP” — a month and a half after the initial concern was raised.
Also on December 11 a staffer writes that they had not heard of GSR, the Cambridge-based developer CA hired to extract Facebook user data, before the Guardian article named it. But other Facebook staffers chip in to reveal personal knowledge of the psychographic profiling techniques deployed by Cambridge Analytica and GSR’s Dr Aleksandr Kogan, with one writing that Kogan was their postdoc supervisor at Cambridge University.
Another says they are friends with Michal Kosinsky, the lead author of a personality modelling paper that underpins the technique used by CA to try to manipulate voters — which they described as “solid science”.
A different staffer also flags the possibility that Facebook has worked with Kogan — ironically enough “on research on the Protect & Care team” — citing the “Wait, What thread” and another email, neither of which appear to have been released by Facebook in this ‘Exhibit 1’ bundle.
So we can only speculate on whether Facebook’s decision — around September 2015 — to hire Kogan’s GSR co-founder, Joseph Chancellor, appears as a discussion item in the ‘Wait, What’ thread…
Putting its own spin on the release of these internal emails in a blog post, Facebook sticks to its prior line that “unconfirmed reports of scraping” and “policy violations by Aleksandr Kogan” are two separate issues, writing:
We believe this document has the potential to confuse two different events surrounding our knowledge of Cambridge Analytica. There is no substantively new information in this document and the issues have been previously reported. As we have said many times, including last week to a British parliamentary committee, these are two distinct issues. One involved unconfirmed reports of scraping — accessing or collecting public data from our products using automated means — and the other involved policy violations by Aleksandr Kogan, an app developer who sold user data to Cambridge Analytica. This document proves the issues are separate; conflating them has the potential to mislead people.
It has previously also referred to the internal concerns raised about CA as “rumors”.
“Facebook was not aware that Kogan sold data to Cambridge Analytica until December 2015. That is a fact that we have testified to under oath, that we have described to our core regulators, and that we stand by today,” it adds now.
It also claims that after an engineer responded to concerns that CA was scraping data and looked into it they were not able to find any such evidence. “Even if such a report had been confirmed, such incidents would not naturally indicate the scale of the misconduct that Kogan had engaged in,” Facebook adds.
The company has sought to dismiss the privacy litigation brought against it by the District of Columbia which is related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal — but has been unsuccessful in derailing the case thus far.
The DC complaint alleges that Facebook allowed third-party developers to access consumers’ personal data, including information on their online behavior, in order to offer apps on its platform, and that it failed to effectively oversee and enforce its platform policies by not taking reasonable steps to protect consumer data and privacy. It also alleges Facebook failed to inform users of the CA breach.
Facebook has also failed to block another similar lawsuit that’s been filed in Washington, DC by Attorney General Karl Racine — which has alleged lax oversight and misleading privacy standards.
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Pew: mobile and social media users in emerging markets have more diverse social networks
The latest study from Pew Research Center takes a look at the impact mobile technology, including the use of smartphones and social media, is having on the diversity of people’s social network in emerging markets. For the purpose of the study, Pew surveyed mobile users in eleven key markets: Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, South Africa, Kenya, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Tunisia, Jordan, and Lebanon. It found that users in these markets had broader social networks than those without smartphones and social media.
In the U.S., we’ve been concerned with social media’s ability to create “filter bubbles” — meaning how we surround ourselves online with people who hold the same opinions as us, which is then reinforced by social media’s engagement-focused algorithms. This leads us to believe, sometimes in error, that what we think is the most correct and most popular view.
According to Pew’s study, emerging markets are experiencing a somewhat different phenomenon.
Instead of isolation, the study found that smartphone users in these markets, and particularly those who also used social media, were more regularly exposed to people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different religious preferences, different political parties, and different income levels, compared to those without a smartphone.
In Mexico, for example, 57% of smartphone owners regularly interacted with people of other religions, while only 38% of those without a smartphone did. And more than half (54%) interact with people who supported different political parties. They were also 24% more like to interact with people of different income levels, and 17% more likely to interact with people of different ethnic or racial backgrounds.
These sorts of trends help up across the nations studied, Pew noted, with a median of 66% saying they interacted with people with different income levels, 51% saying they interacted with a those of different race or ethnicity, 50% saying they interacted with those having different religious views, and a median 44% saying they interacted with those who supported a different political party.
The use of social media and messaging apps was found to be a huge contributor here, as it made people more likely to encounter people different from them, the study also said.
The report, however, isn’t claiming that smartphone and the related social media use are the cause of this increase in diversity in these people’s lives. There may be other reasons for that. Smartphone owners, in general, may have more resources and money — they own a smartphone, after all — and this alone could help expose them to a more diverse group of people.
That said, smartphones are helping people stay connected to distant family and friends, and build out online networks of people they don’t ever see in person.
More than half of people in most of the surveyed countries said that only see half — or fewer — of the people they call or text in person. 93% said they keep in touch with far-flung contacts. And a median of 46% said they see their few or none of Facebook friends regularly.
All this connecting isn’t seen as being fully positive, however.
An earlier Pew report found that users in these 11 countries believe the internet and social media are making people more divided in their opinions and only sometimes more accepting of different views. Exposure to diversity and acceptance of it are different things.
The new report also gets into how smartphones are used. For example, a median of 82% said they texted, 69% took photos or videos, 61% looked up health information, 47% looked up news and political information, and 37% looked up information about government resources.
It also examined smartphones’ impact on digital divides, noting that people with access to these devices and social media, as well as younger people, those with higher levels of education and men, were gaining more benefits than others.
The study is based on in-person interviews conducted by D3 Systems, Inc. and the results are based on national samples, notes Pew.
The full report is available here, with deeper dives on activities and data by individual countries.
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Tumblr’s next step forward with Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg
After months of rumors, Verizon finally sold off Tumblr for a reported $3 million — a fraction of what Yahoo paid for the once might blogging service back in 2013.
The media conglomerate (which also owns TechCrunch) was clearly never quite sure what to do with the property after gobbling it up as part of its 2016 Yahoo acquisition. All parties has since come to the conclusion that Tumblr simply wasn’t a good fit under either the Verizon or Yahoo umbrella, amounting to a $1.1 billion mistake.
For Tumblr, however, the story may still have a happy ending. By all accounts, its new home at Automattic is far better fit. The service joins a portfolio that includes popular blogging service WordPress.com, spam filtering service Akismet and long-form storytelling platform, Longreads.
In an interview, this week, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg discussed Tumblr’s history and the impact of the poorly received adult content restrictions. He also shed some light on where Tumblr goes from here, including a potential increased focused on multimedia such as podcasting.
Brian Heater: I’m curious how [your meetings with Tumblr staff] went. What’s the feeling on the team right now? What are the concerns? How are people feeling about the transition?
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Twitter picks up team from narrative app Lightwell in its latest effort to improve conversations
Twitter’s ongoing, long-term efforts to make conversations easier to follow and engage with on its platform is getting a boost with the company’s latest acquihire. The company has picked up the team behind Lightwell, a startup that had built a set of developer tools to build interactive, narrative apps, for an undisclosed sum. Lightwell’s founder and CEO, Suzanne Xie, is becoming a director of product leading Twitter’s Conversations initiative, with the rest of her small four-person team joining her on the conversations project.
(Sidenote: Sara Haider, who had been leading the charge on rethinking the design of Conversations on Twitter, most recently through the release of twttr, Twitter’s newish prototyping app, announced that she would be moving on to a new project at the company after a short break. I understand twttr will continue to be used to openly test conversation tweaks and other potential changes to how the app works. )
The Lightwell/Twitter news was announced late yesterday both by Lightwell itself and Twitter’s VP of product Keith Coleman. A Twitter spokesperson also confirmed the deal to TechCrunch in a short statement today: “We are excited to welcome Suzanne and her team to Twitter to help drive forward the important work we are doing to serve the public conversation,” he said. Interestingly, Twitter is on a product hiring push it seems. Other recent hires Coleman noted were Other recent product hires include Angela Wise and Tom Hauburger. Coincidentally, both joined from autonomous companies, respectively Waymo and Voyage.
To be clear, this is more acqui-hire than hire: only the Lightwell team (of what looks like three people) is joining Twitter. The Lightwell product will no longer be developed, but it is not going away, either. Xie noted in a separate Medium post that apps that have already been built (or plan to be built) on the platform will continue to work. It will also now be free to use.
Lightwell originally started life in 2012 as Hullabalu, as one of the many companies producing original-content interactive children’s stories for smartphones and tablets. In a sea of children-focused storybook apps, Hullabalu’s stories stood out not just because of the distinctive cast of characters that the startup had created, but for how the narratives were presented: part book, part interactive game, the stories engaged children and moved narratives along by getting the users to touch and drag elements across the screen.
After some years, Hullabalu saw an opportunity to package its technology and make it available as a platform for all developers, to be used not just by other creators of children’s content, but advertisers and more. It seems the company shifted at that time to make Lightwell its main focus.
The Hullabalu apps remained live on the App Store, even when the company moved on to focus on Lightwell. However, they hadn’t been updated in two years’ time. Xie says they will remain as is.
In its startup life, the company went through YCombinator, TechStars, and picked up some $6.5 million in funding (per Crunchbase), from investors that included Joanne Wilson, SV Angel, Vayner, Spark Labs, Great Oak, Scout Ventures and more.
If turning Hullabalu into Lightwell was a pivot, then the exit to Twitter can be considered yet another interesting shift in how talent and expertise optimized for one end can be repurposed to meet another.
One of Twitter’s biggest challenges over the years has been trying to create a way to make conversations (also narratives of a kind) easy to follow — both for those who are power users, and for those who are not and might otherwise easily be put off from using the product.
The crux of the problem has been that Twitter’s DNA is about real-time rivers of chatter that flow in one single feed, while conversations by their nature linger around a specific topic and become hard to follow when there are too many people talking. Trying to build a way to fit the two concepts together has foxed the company for a long time now.
At its best, bringing in a new team from the outside will potentially give Twitter a fresh perspective on how to approach conversations on the platform, and the fact that Lightwell has been thinking about creative ways to present narratives gives them some cred as a group that might come up completely new concepts for presenting conversations.
At a time when it seems that the conversation around Conversations had somewhat stagnated, it’s good to see a new chapter opening up.
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YouTube is closing its private messages feature…and many kids are outraged
People love to share YouTube videos among their friends, which is why in mid-2017 YouTube launched a new in-app messaging feature that would allow YouTube users to private send their friends videos and chat within a dedicated tab in the YouTube mobile app. That feature is now being shut down, the company says. After September 18, the ability to direct message friends on YouTube itself will be removed.
The change was first spotted by 9to5Google, which noted that YouTube Messages came to the web in May of last year.
YouTube, in its announcement about the closure, doesn’t offer much insight into its decision.
While the company says that its more recent work has been focused on public conversations with updates to comments, posts, and Stories, it doesn’t explain why Messages is no longer a priority.
A likely reason, of course, is that the feature was under-utilized. Most people today are heavily invested in their own preferred messaging apps — whether that’s Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage or others.
Google, meanwhile, can’t seem to stop itself from building messaging apps and experiences. When YouTube Messages launched, Google was also invested in Allo (RIP), Duo, Hangouts, Meet, Google Voice, Android Messages/RCS, and was poised to transition users from Gchat (aka Google Talk) in Gmail to Hangouts Chat.
However, based on the nearly 500 angry comments replying to Google’s post about the closure, it seems that YouTube Messages may have been preferred by young users.
Younger…as in children.
A sizable number of commenters are complaining that YouTube was the “only place” they could message their friends because they didn’t have a phone or weren’t allowed to give out their phone number.
Some said they used the feature to “talk to their mom” or because they weren’t allowed to use social media.
It appears that many children had been using YouTube Messages as a sort of workaround to their parents’ block on messaging apps on their own phones, or as a way to communicate from their tablets or via web, likely without parents’ knowledge.
That’s not a good look for YouTube at this time, given its issues around inappropriate videos aimed at children, child exploitation, child predators, and regulatory issues.
The video platform in February came under fire for putting kids at risk of child predators. The company had to shut off comments on videos featuring minors, after the discovery of a pedophile ring that had been communicating via YouTube’s comments section.
Notably, the FTC is also now following up on complaints about YouTube’s possible violations of COPPA, a U.S. Children’s Privacy law. Child advocacy and consumers groups complain that YouTube has lured children under 13 into its digital playground, where it then collects their data and targets them with ads, without parental consent.
Though some people may have used YouTube Messages to promote their channel or to share videos with family members and friends, it’s clear this usage hadn’t gone mainstream. Otherwise, YouTube wouldn’t be walking away from a popular product.
The feature also had issues with spam — much like Google+ did — as there were unwelcome requests from strangers, at times.
YouTube says users will still be able to share videos through the “Share” feature which connects to other social networks.
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‘This is Your Life in Silicon Valley’: The League founder and CEO Amanda Bradford on modern dating, and whether Bumble is a ‘real’ startup
Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are.
This is your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff in 2018. Rajaraman is a serial entrepreneur and writer (Co-Founded Scripted.com, and is currently an EIR at Foundation Capital), Kaykas-Wolff is the current CMO at Mozilla and ran marketing at BitTorrent.
Rajaraman and Kaykas-Wolff started the podcast after a series of blog posts that Sunil wrote for The Bold Italic went viral. The goal of the podcast is to cover issues at the intersection of technology and culture – sharing a different perspective of life in the Bay Area. Their guests include entrepreneurs like Sam Lessin, journalists like Kara Swisher and Mike Isaac, politicians like Mayor Libby Schaaf and local business owners like David White of Flour + Water.
This week’s edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley features Amanda Bradford – Founder/CEO of The League. Amanda talks about modern dating, its limitations, its flaws, why ‘The League’ will win. Amanda provides her candid perspective on other dating startups in a can’t-miss portion of the podcast.
Amanda talks about her days at Salesforce and how it influenced her decision to build a dating tech product that focused on data, and funnels. Amanda walks through her own process of finding her current boyfriend on ‘The League’ and how it came down to meeting more people. And that the flaw with most online dating is that people do not meet enough people due to filter bubbles, and lack of open criteria.
Amanda goes in on all of the popular dating sites, including Bumble and others, providing her take on what’s wrong with them. She even dishes on Raya and Tinder – sharing what she believes are how they should be perceived by prospective daters. The fast-response portion of this podcast where we ask Amanda about the various dating sites really raised some eyebrows and got some attention.
We ask Amanda about the incentives of online dating sites, and how in a way they are created to keep members online as long as possible. Amanda provides her perspective on how she addresses this inherent conflict at The League, and how many marriages have been shared among League members to date.
We ask Amanda about AR/VR dating and what the future will look like. Will people actually meet in person in the future? Will it be more like online worlds where we wear headsets and don’t actually interact face to face anymore? The answers may surprise you. We learn how this influences The League’s product roadmap.
The podcast eventually goes into dating stories from audience members – including some pretty wild online dating stories from people who are not as they seem. We picked two audience members at random to talk about their entertaining online dating stories and where they led. The second story really raised eyebrows and got into the notion that people go at great lengths to hide their real identities.
Ultimately, we get at the heart of what online dating is, and what the future holds for it. If you care about the future of relationships, online dating, data, and what it all means this episode is for you.
For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
Sunil Rajaraman: I just want to check, are we recording? Because that’s the most important question. We’re recording, so this is actually a podcast and not just three people talking randomly into microphones.
I’m Sunil Rajaraman, I’m co-host of this podcast, This is Your Life in Silicon Valley, and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is my co-host, we’ve been doing this for about a year now, we’ve done 30 shows, and we’re pleased today to welcome a very special guest, Jascha.
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff: Amanda.
Amanda Bradford: Hello everyone.
Amanda Bradford. (Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)
Kaykas-Wolff: We’re just going to stare at you and make it uncomfortable.
Bradford: Like Madonna.
Kaykas-Wolff: Yeah, so the kind of backstory and what’s important for everybody that’s in the audience to know is that this podcast is not a pitch for a product, it’s not about a company, it’s about the Bay Area. And the Bay Area is kind of special, but it’s also a little bit fucked up. I think we all kind of understand that, being here.
So what we want to do in the podcast is talk to people who have a very special, unique relationship with the Bay Area, no matter creators that are company builders, that are awesome entrepreneurs, that are just really cool and interesting people, and today we are really, really lucky to have an absolutely amazing entrepreneur, and also pretty heavy hitter in the technology scene. In a very specific and very special category of technology that Sunil really, really likes. The world of dating.
Rajaraman: Yeah, so it’s funny, the backstory to this is, Jascha have both been married, what, long time-
Kaykas-Wolff: Long time.
Rajaraman: And we have this weird fascination with online dating because we see a lot of people going through it, and it’s a baffling world, and so I want to demystify it a bit with Amanda Bradford today, the founder CEO of The League.
Bradford: You guys are like all of the married people looking at the single people in the petri dishes.
Rajaraman: So, I’ve done the thing where we went through it with the single friends who have the app, swiping through on their behalf, so it’s sort of like a weird thing.
Bradford: I know, we’re like a different species, aren’t we?
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