Meta adds its AI chatbot, powered by Llama 3, to the search bar across its apps Meta’s making several big moves today to promote its AI services across its platform. The company has upgraded its AI chatbot with its newest large language model, Llama 3, and it is now running it in the search bar of its four major apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp) across multiple countries. Alongside this, the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

Ten years later, Facebook’s Oculus acquisition hasn’t changed the world as expected Every year, Time Magazine issues a list of the 200 best inventions of the past 12 months. Frankly, I don’t know how the editors do it. The dirty secret of this job is that true, game-changing inventions rarely cross your desk. In fact, you’re extraordinarily lucky if you average one a year. Oculus’ Rift prototype […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

WhatsApp was down in Meta’s second big outage this year For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps, including WhatsApp, and to some extent, Messenger and Instagram, faced outages and intermittent issues. While it’s rare for services as large as those operated by Meta to go down entirely, Meta’s status page detailed disruptions to key business services, including its Ads Manager, Messenger […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

Facebook takes on TikTok with a new, vertical-first video player This gives Facebook a way to better compete against other popular video platforms that rely on algorithmic recommendations. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

Meta (again) denies that Netflix read users’ private Facebook messages The document alleges that Facebook even cut spending on original programming for its Facebook Watch video service so as not to compete with Netflix, a large Facebook advertiser. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

Facebook is trying to make ‘poking’ cool again Remember when you would “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, annoy them or just start a poke war? Well, Facebook is trying to bring back that experience with some small updates to the poking feature. The company announced on Tuesday that it recently improved the platform’s suggestions on who to poke and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

Meta is trying to distance itself from news media-related regulations and payment complexities as it plans to remove the news tab on Facebook in the U.S. and Australia. The company said today that it will sunset the product in April 2024. Last year, Meta discontinued Facebook News in the U.K., Germany, and France, saying that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

Meta tests cross-posting from Facebook to its Twitter/X competitor, Threads Threads may be about to get another big boost from parent company Meta…at least in terms of sources of new content. The company has been spotted testing a cross-posting feature that would allow Facebook users to post to both platforms at the same time, using the same feature that was originally available for cross-posting from […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

Instagram and Threads will no longer ‘proactively’ recommend political content Meta doesn’t want its new app Threads to become another Twitter, full of heated political debates and the resulting toxicity that entails. In an announcement today, the company detailed how it will approach the recommendation of political content across both Instagram and its sister app, Threads, a competitor to Elon Musk’s X. In short, it […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more