networking

Tinder parent company Match Group acquires Hinge 

Feb 11, 2019 | ,

Right now, it looks like the near future will see every major dating app ending up in the same hands, just one of the many stories of industry consolidation we’re witnessing in what antitrust expert Tim Wu has called the second Gilded Age, which is maybe abstractly scary — but more tangibly so when you think about Facebook as the only company that could possibly stop it.

Source: Tinder parent company Match Group acquires Hinge – Vox

Regulators Are Figuring Out How to Make Google and Facebook Sweat

Feb 7, 2019 |

The Wild West era may be drawing to a close for tech corporations like Facebook and Google. New scrutiny from regulators abroad — and some closer to home — is resulting in fines that portend more substantial changes on the horizon. Soon, your data may rest a bit more squarely in your control.

Source: Regulators Are Figuring Out How to Make Google and Facebook Sweat

See also:  Facebook Doesn’t Care About You
             Scandal after scandal won’t change user behavior — and the company knows it

How U.S. Millennials are Shaping Online Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Shopping Trends

Feb 6, 2019 | , ,

According to the latest Nielsen Category Shopping Fundamentals study, as detailed in our recent Millennials on Millennials report, 60% of U.S. consumers’ FMCG decisions are still made at the shelf. This is a key insight for retailers, but so is understanding the influence that digital has on influencing consumers on their way to the shelf. Not surprisingly, Millennials are more active on social media than older generations, and this affects the way they look for information as they shop. For example, Millennials are significantly more likely than the broader population to conduct online research for common items like food and cleaning products.

Source: How U.S. Millennials are Shaping Online FMCG Shopping Trends

Facebook is a persuasion platform that’s changing the advertising rulebook

Feb 1, 2019 | ,

The way people interact with Facebook is changing how they can be persuaded to think about or do a particular thing.

With tons of information presented at the same time, your brain is forced to decide quickly what’s relevant or interesting. Facebook and other social media services take advantage of this – pushing you to slip easily from thought to behavior. It emphasizes your impulses and decreases the opportunities for you to think more thoroughly about your perceptions, attitudes and decisions.

Source: Facebook is a persuasion platform that’s changing the advertising rulebook

Facebook Is Combining Aspects of Its Messaging Properties: What It Means for Advertisers and Users 

Feb 1, 2019 |

The recent news that Facebook is in early stages of combining the messaging features of several of its properties, as reported by The New York Times last week, raises many questions about how advertisers and users will be affected. In this eMarketer Analyst Insight, Debra Aho Williamson and Jasmine Enberg explain what it could mean for these two groups.

Source: Facebook Is Combining Aspects of Its Messaging Properties: What It Means for Advertisers and Users – eMarketer Trends, Forecasts & Statistics

The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency 

Jan 30, 2019 | ,

Digital media has always been a turbulent business, but last week’s layoffs suggest a reason for panic. The cause of each company’s troubles may be distinct, but collectively the blood bath points to the same underlying market pathology: the inability of the digital advertising business to make much meaningful room for anyone but monopolistic tech giants.

Source: Opinion | The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency – The New York Times

Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them 

Jan 29, 2019 | ,

Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits.

Source: Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them | TechCrunch

Love in the Age of Data 

Jan 27, 2019 | , ,

Ours is the data-driven age. Arguments and claims made in the media and in the academy are backed up with harvested “empirical” information drawn from data collection technologies that make dystopian cybernetic dreams seem like relics from the ancient past. Data sets control what we see on our internet searches, social media feeds, and television screens, yet that process of selection remains deliberately obscured. Data as a methodology percolates through every area of the university, and new appointments (even in the so-called “arts”) reward scholars who apply data analytics software to understand everything from gender to poetry. Mobile apps manage everything from eating habits to menstrual cycles using data-formatted algorithms, while “smart condoms” collect sexual movements into large aggregated sets which set a new blueprint for the sexual future.

Source: Love in the Age of Data – Los Angeles Review of Books