In the podcast this week, Duncan McLeod and Regardt van der Berg discuss why Facebook is planning to make WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram interopable and the implications of the move.
Browsing: WhatsApp
There will be grumbling about Facebook unifying its apps. But it was an obvious decision by a company that now has to try much harder to continue to lure more people and advertisers to its digital empire.
Facebook is planning to integrate parts of WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, as part of a huge technical operation across the social network’s collection of messaging apps.
WhatsApp is to limit the number of times users can forward any single message to five in an attempt to stop false information spreading on the platform.
Reports emerged on Tuesday that Zimbabwe’s government has moved to block citizens’ access to social media – and, in some instances, access to the Internet altogether – as violent protests spread across the troubled Southern African nation.
Australia is set to pass legislation giving police and intelligence agencies access to encrypted messages on platforms such as WhatsApp, despite protests.
South Africa’s MTN Group and France’s Orange announced this week that they will bring “smart feature phones” to Africa costing as little as US$20. The phones will run an operating system called KaiOS – but what is that?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting the company’s future on video and disappearing posts called “stories”, not the company’s famous news feed. Investors are buying into the vision for now.
It wasn’t a dream or an exaggeration by cautious Facebook executives. The company’s financial results are weakening, just as executives warned they would a few months ago.
Facebook is losing another long-tenured founder from an acquired company: Brendan Iribe, who was the CEO of Oculus VR when Facebook bought it in 2014.