Year: 2018

Facebook today announced an update to its Safety Check feature that expands the tool from simply allowing you to mark yourself as safe to sharing a bit more information about what’s happening on the ground. Facebook says it has activated the Safety Check feature, which launched back in 2014, over 1,000 times

These new first-person accounts will allow users to share information about road blockages, fires, flooding, electricity outages and other dangers during a disaster.

In addition to this, Facebook is also launching an update to its existing blood donation program. The company is launching a new hub today that will make it easier for clinics, blood banks and donors to find each other. Using this tool, a blood banks can notify potential donors (who can share their blood type) of a blood shortage, for example, and steer them toward their location.

This is an expansion to the existing “Blood donations on Facebook” service is now live on India, Bangladesh and Pakistan and so far, over 8 million people have already signed up for the service.

Workplace, the enterprise version of Facebook that competes against the likes of Slack, Microsoft Teams and Hipchat as a platform for employees to communicate and work on things together, says that it today has tens of thousands of organisations using its platform.

Now to pick up more, and to bring more of customers into the paid premium tier of Workplace, Facebook today is announcing a couple of new developments at F8. First, it’s expanding the premium tier of the service with several more integrations — apps that it says have been the most requested by the “tens of thousands” of organizations using Workplace — including Jira, Sharepoint, and SurveyMonkey, bringing the total now to just over 50. And second, Facebook is now taking applications for app developers who want to integrate with the platform.

The latter is a significant shift: up to now, Facebook had been handpicking third-party integrations itself.

The new apps that are being announced today roughly fall into three categories, as outlined by Facebook. Those that let users share information; those that let users get daily summaries; those that let users speed up data entry and data queries by way of bots.

New integrations for JIRA, Cornerstone OnDemand and Medallia allow users to bring in previews of content from these apps so that they can discuss them in Workplace. Users of Sharepoint from Microsoft can now also share folders from that into Workplace groups.

Meanwhile, users of SurveyMonkey, Hubspot, Marketo, Vonage and Zoom can get notifications from those apps to update on how campaigns and other work is running within those services.

Lastly, it looks like Workplace is now bringing bots into its platform to help manage queries from apps outside of it. A new integration with ADP for example will let employees start a chat with it to request a payslip, book and get updates on vacation time and more. Others that are launching bots for querying their apps include AdobeSign, Kronos, Smartsheet and Workday.

The idea behind both is to continue to expand the usefulness of Workplace. When the service made its official debut in closed beta back in January 2015 (when it was called Facebook at Work), it was little more than a basic version of Facebook that could be used in a more closed environment. It changed to Workplace when it officially left its closed beta in October 2016, nearly two years later. The subsequent addition of apps and features like chat (which came a year after that) have also been very gradual. Even today, there is a big gulf between the 50 or so apps that you can use with Workplace and the 1,400+ that are available on a platform like Slack.

Julien Codorniou, who leads the Workplace effort at Facebook, describes the company’s slower approach to adding apps and features as very intentional.

“We don’t need 1,000 apps on Workplace,” he said. “Our customers ask for an application like Sharepoint or Jira. We wanted to keep the integrations meaningful, and to keep them beautiful in the news feed.”

In 2017 Workplace snapped up retail giant Walmart as a customer, and in a way that deal is indicative of how Workplace has positioned itself as a product: Facebook is targeting businesses that have a mix of employees that range from those who sit at desks to those who never sit at a desk. And as a result, it wants to keep the number of apps and IT noise low to avoid putting off those users. “We try to connect people who have never had access to software as a service by making products like ServiceNow easy to use.”

So there is a common touch, but it only goes so far. Ultimately, the full set of app integrations is only available for those users who are on the premium tier of the product. Pricing is $3 per active user, per month up to 5,000 users. More users are negotiated with Facebook. Those who are standard users get a much more limited range of apps, including Box, OneDrive and Dropbox and RSS. Codorniou would not comment on whether Facebook had plans to add more apps into the free tier.

 

 

Facebook today announced that Instagram, its popular photo sharing platform, is getting support for video chats, among a couple of other new features.

As Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted in his F8 keynote today, quite a few Instagram users already use the platform’s live video feature to chat with friends. “People use live video to just hang out,” he said. “It’s amazing how many of these tools are about brining us together.”

We haven’t seen the new video chat in action, but chances are it’s a pretty straightforward feature that will expand on the existing messaging tools in Instagram.

In addition to these video chats, Instagram is also getting an improved Explore tab that, according to Zuckerberg, is “more focused on the things you are interested in.”

Instagram is also getting a new filter to protect users from bullying comments. “This new filter hides comments containing attacks on a person’s appearance or character, as well as threats to a person’s well-being or health,” the Instagram team writes today. In addition to the automatic filtering, Instagram will now also get alerts when there are repeated issues with an account.

But that’s not all, Instagram is also getting support for Facebook’s AR features with AR features from third parties.

The company made the announcement at its F8 developer conference in San Jose today, where the company also announced a somewhat related new feature: group video chats in WhatsApp.

These new features will roll out over the course of the next few weeks.

Facebook is recruiting help to make its Stories more interesting than Snapchat’s. Starting with Spotify, SoundCloud, and GoPro, third-party apps can now let their users share to Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories. Rather than screenshotting, users will be able to hit a button to share a photo or video of a playlist, song, or mini-movie from another app into Facebook or Instagram’s Stories camera, where they can embellish it with effects and post it to their friends. GoPro’s integration actually lets you edit your movies inside Facebook’s apps, while you can immediately start listening to songs shared from Spotify and SoundCloud.

Facebook’s CPO Chris Cox announced the feature at Facebook’s F8 conference, saying that he’s excited to see what developers build. Other launch partners include selfie editor Meitu, lipsyncing app Musically, Indian streaming music service Saavn, and more.

While this new wing of the Facebook platform is opening to all developers, only approved partners that go through a review process like the three mentioned will have attribution watermarks added to the shares.

This platform move mirrors what Facebook did with its Open Graph launch 7 years ago at F8 2011. That let developers push stories about your in-app activity to Facebook’s ticker and News Feed. Eventually Facebook dropped the Ticker and phased out these Open Graph auto-shares in favor of explicit sharing where the user is in full control. Facebook is taking this more cautious approach with Stories too rather than make users worry their guilty pleasure listening or private imagery could be unknowingly shared to their Story.

The plan deviates significantly from Snapchat’s strategy, which has shunned third-party developers like music video-maker Mindie in the past. Now Snapchat lets developers create augmented reality lenses and geofilters that users can unlock, but the content creation happens in Snapchat’s app. Facebook hopes that by recruiting developers and getting them to build special content users can share to their Stories, it will avoid the feature growing stale from the same old selfies and sunsets.

Facebook is rolling out a new Groups tab and plugin, announced CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his opening keynote at Facebook’s F8 developer conference this morning. The addition of the new Groups tab on Facebook will make groups a more central part of the Facebook experience, the CEO explained.

“In a community, you can meet new people who share your values – for some, this might be a support group for new parents. For others, it might be about a disease you have. Fo others, it might be about finding people to come together and volunteer,” he said.

“People want to be a part of meaningful communities,” Zuckerberg added.

The company also shared how large the Groups community on Facebook had become.

Today, 1.4 billion people on Facebook use Groups every month, and 200 million or so of the Facebook Groups are those the company deemed “meaningful.”

But as the number of groups available to Facebook users has grown, it’s become harder to keep up with those you interact with. Facebook previously offered a standalone Groups mobile app to address this problem, but shut it down last year. The Groups tab is the replacement, of sorts.

Like the app once did, the new tab will help people find all their Facebook groups in a single place.

Also like the now defunct app, Facebook is adding features that enable better discovery of new groups in this experience. But one feature that’s new to the tab that wasn’t in the standalone app is the addition of the “Watch Party” feature that lets group members watch video together.

“This is just the experience of watching the same frame of the same video at the same time with thousands of people all around the world,” said Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.

Group leaders, video creators or audience members will also be able to take advantage of a new feature called live commentating that will let them put their face on the screen and narrate whatever it is they want to say about what’s being watching. The feature will make co-watching more social, the company says.

In addition to the new tab, the company is launching a new Groups plugin that admins and developers can add to their websites and emails that solicits people to join their Facebook group.

“Every great community has engaged leaders,” noted Zuckerberg of the new Groups features. “So a lot of what we need to do is just give more people the tools to be community leaders,” he said.

Alongside the launch of the Oculus Go headset today, Oculus announced that it is working on a new element of its in-headset experience that will appeal to users interested in binging TV inside VR.

It’s called Oculus TV and the company hopes that it will evolve to become a quick-and-easy way for VR users, by themselves or with friends, to dive into video content from streaming partners. The app puts a TV experience into your virtual environment with specially adapted on-screen controls, which essentially turn the virtual screen in the virtual room into a sort of Chromecast or Apple TV-like experience.

It’s still early for the streaming service, which will support Facebook Watch, Red Bull TV and Pluto TV directly integrated at launch. The company says it is currently working with networks to bring native integrations, but given that Netflix, Hulu and Showtime already have standalone apps in the Oculus store, this could be a challenge as VR viewership for them is likely quite tiny. You’ll still be able to dive into these apps from the Oculus TV interface, but it’ll just send you to that app rather than being an on-screen interface.

Oculus didn’t have this feature quite ready for F8, but the company says Oculus TV will be launching later this month for Oculus Go.

Today, at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, the company announced that its cheap and capable Oculus Go virtual reality headset will be going on sale today. The headset costs $199 for the version with 32GB of onboard storage, and $249 for the 64GB variety.

We also finally have eyes on the full hardware specs, which only make it more clear that the Oculus Go is the best deal in VR.

• 190mm x 105mm x 115mm, 468g
• 5.5” 2560 x 1440 WQHD fast-switch LCD screen running at 60Hz or 72Hz
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 Mobile VR Platform
• Integrated speakers and microphone
• Battery Life: 1.5-2 hours for gaming, or 2-2.5 for video-watching.

I’ve had about a week to play around with the headset, and this really feels like a game-changer in a lot of ways. There’s something so much more rewarding about just being able to hit a power button and dive into VR without navigating phone and PC menus, fumbling with hardware and dealing with constant updates. The Oculus Go minimizes friction and promotes a surprisingly capable baseline for bringing new consumers into VR for the first time.

The Oculus Go fundamentally feels like a miniature Oculus Rift. The headset’s design echoes that and the experience once you jump into the headset often mirrors it as well. The headset is, of course, more comparable to the Gear VR when it comes to actual gameplay (they share the same game library), but Oculus has managed to make a number of improvements that make the cheap headset feel deeply luxurious to those familiar with mobile VR offerings to date.

The company has long maintained that bringing your hands into VR is more important than getting your head there. And while this headset does not have tracked controllers,  Oculus has done a lot to create software that understands how to translate some lateral hand movements from a fixed elbow position so that the interactions you get here feel deeper. It’s still a 3DoF controller but it feels more robust than the laser pointer with buttons that mobile headsets have had previously.

Another item that I love about this headset is the way they’ve built in-headset stereo audio into the design while still keeping the headset straps fabric and portable. They’ve done this by building vents into the plastic headset strap arms on the sides of the headset, the audio isn’t great and they leak a lot of noise but I’m so glad the company did this, it makes getting people set up in VR that much easier. You can still attach some headphones to the Go via a 3.5mm jack, but in most of my early testing I’ve been fine just using the integrated audio.

There are definitely some quality sacrifices that had to be made in order to arrive at the $199 price point. Mainly, the Snapdragon 821 chipset that this device has definitely feels sluggish at times and while I haven’t had any lagging with the Oculus UI elements on the home screen,  some of the experiences I demoed on the Go took as long as 30 seconds to boot up. In the course of showing it to a friend, that was enough time for him to decide that maybe he didn’t want to try that app that much after all.

The display does a fine job, but is nothing to write home about. What I did love was the fact that Oculus enlarged the space inside the headset to account for users who wear glasses, taking a way yet another small point of friction and making the Go friendlier to more users.

Overall though, the headset is far more high-quality than any other on-the-market standalone headset I’ve tried to date, costing hundreds of dollars less than most of that competition as well. This is a testament to Facebook’s willingness to make tight or nonexistent profit margins in order to ensure it remains the leader of the VR market, it also speaks to the fact that Oculus understands mobile VR software better than any competitor by a country mile.

Facebook could use more evidence that it brings the world together rather than tearing it apart. Luckily, technology is finally catching up with the dream of letting people become friends across language barriers. Today at its F8 conference, Facebook announced it will begin rolling out chat translation within Messenger through its M Suggestions assistant.

Facebook’s head of Messenger, David Marcus, also announced that Messenger now has more than 200,000 active developers and 300,000 active bots, which facilitate 8 billion messages between people and businesses each month — up 4X since last year. Messenger is also getting hooked up with augmented reality for marketers.

Translation is starting super slowly with just English-Spanish conversions for users in the U.S. who start a conversation through Facebook Marketplace, its peer-to-peer commerce feature. But in the coming weeks, all U.S. Messenger users will get access, and over time Facebook says it will “launch this functionality in additional languages and countries.”

While users spend most of their time talking with offline friends who typically share a common language, Marketplace and Groups are too areas of Facebook where people are often exposed to strangers. Eradicating the language gap could let Group members get to know each other across cultures, and realize how much they have in common. Translation could also expand the potential customer base for Marketplace posts, helping people sell quicker and giving them more reasons to ditch Craigslist and other low-tech alternatives.

Amidst the recent Cambridge Analytica, fake news and election interference scandals, Facebook has started to take on a less savory public image. That could lead to less trust and less sharing. But in 2016, Facebook got serious about translation, switching from Microsoft Bing’s technology to its own stack. Advances in neural machine learning have made phrase-based translation more accurate, and M Suggestions started recommending Messenger features like payments or location sharing in Spanish to Spanish language users based on their chat text. Facebook already offers translation for News Feed comments and posts, but the expansion to Messenger could make for a great PR talking point.

Messenger embraces marketing AR

Facebook made two other significant Messenger announcements today. They could encourage businesses to invest more in creating content and customer service on Messenger by making the experiences more efficient and better at driving sales.

Businesses can now build augmented reality experiences directly into Messenger. Marcus tells me, “If you’re a brand and you want people to experience AR at scale, there’s really no way to do that.” Snapchat might offer branded AR, but there’s no way for a business to message you about it or pull you back into a conversation afterwards to turn your excitement into sales.

Now when people interact with certain businesses on Messenger, they can be prompted to open the app’s camera and use a pre-populated brand-specific AR effect. They can then return to the conversation, or shoot a photo or video of the experience and share it with friends.

Branded AR in Messenger is launching in closed beta. Launch partners include a way to drop a virtual Kia car onto your driveway and try out customizations, an ASUS phone unboxing experience, a Sephora AR make-up try-on demo and a chance to check out Nike’s newest Kyrie Irving shoes. Users will then be able to make purchases, like buying the new Nikes, straight from within Messenger using their payment info on file with Facebook. That payments feature is still in closed beta too, but Marcus says it will open to more partners soon.

Smarter Bots

Facebook Messenger is letting businesses use its “built-in natural language processing” feature that launched last year within their Page inboxes. That way, when their followers message their Page, Facebook can automatically cobble together previously given answers to respond automatically. For example, if a Page is frequently asked questions like “what are your hours” and “when are you open,” they might create a “store hours” entity via the Page inbox training that can be sent when a question about store hours is recognized.

Simpler Design

And finally, users will get the promised simplifications to Messenger’s interface. The app’s quest to embrace businesses, bots, Stories and visual sharing have made it bloated. Marcus wrote in January that “The app became too cluttered” and they will be paring it back, but we’ve only seen more features stuffed inside for Messenger’s 1.3 billion users.

Today, though, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a stripped down new design for Messenger that cuts out the games and camera tabs from the navigation bar. This cleaner look should help keep the focus on the core utility of chat while giving the other new features more room to shine.

Facebook is invading Tinder’s space with a new set of dating features. It will let people opt in to creating a dating profile on Facebook. It will only be visible to non-friends who also opted into dating. Facebook will match you by a slew of preferences. And since it has more data on you than any other app, it could deliver more relevant matches. The feature will start testing later this year.

Facebook explains that “potential matches will be recommended based on dating preferences, things in common, and mutual friends. They’ll have the option to discover others with similar interests through their Groups or Events.” TechCrunch suggested that Facebook build a feature like this in February.

Here’s how Facebook dating will work.

1. Opt in to a create a profile with just your first name. Your profile won’t be visible to friends, users who aren’t on the dating feature, and it won’t show up in the News Feed.
2. You’ll browse Events in your city and Groups that match your interests. You can select to ‘unlock’ one for dating. You’ll then see the profiles of other dating users who’ve unlocked that surface.
3. You can browse through people’s profiles that show off a few of their photos plus some basic information about them. You’ll be shown people based on mutual interests and friends, plus other data Facebook has on you.
4. If you both are interested, you’ll be able to start a conversation with someone in a special inbox that’s separate from Messenger and WhatsApp. For safety, only text can be sent for now.

Tons of marriages start on Facebook already, so there’s a big opportunity for the company to build long-term relationship-focused matching — opposed to apps like Tinder that focus on quick hookups. Investors clearly think Tinder is in danger, considering shares of its parent company Match Group fell 17 percent after Facebook announced its entry into dating.

Still, the question is whether Facebook has built enough barricades between its social network and new dating feature. Users might find it creepy to do it all in one app. And if they get burned by a bad experience either in the dating chat or offline, they could blame Facebook. Still, as Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox explained, dating was always a natural fit for Facebook thanks to its ubiquity, data, and trusted platform for identity.

At the very least, you’ll be a lot less likely to get catfished on FaceDate.

We explored how this could work in a feature piece earlier this year:

Onstage at Facebook’s developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be re-opening its app review process following the pause it took in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica crisis.

“Now, I know that it hasn’t been easy being a developer these past couple months, that’s probably an understatement. What I can assure you is that we’re hard at work making sure people don’t misuse this platform so you can all keep building things that people love, and today I’m happy to share that we’re reopening app reviews so you can all keep moving forward,” Zuckerberg said onstage.

This is certainly welcome news for developers who build on the platform who have had to deal with Facebook making major changes without their input as the company has tried to navigate its latest scandals.