Facebook puts privacy at the heart of its 2018 F8 Conference
At Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the two-day session by addressing the data privacy elephant in the room – dishing out a series of apologies and detailing initiatives and product adjustments to help the platform better protect user data. Zuckerberg also acknowledged that he believes it will take around three years to get the social network on the right track. Amongst the talk of privacy and data also came a few new product launches. The CEO announced a wave of new updates across the network’s platforms, including: a new dating feature for Facebook; Spotify and GoPro integrations for Instagram Stories; and a group video call functionality for WhatsApp. Read the full story here for all the updates announced at the conference.
Instagram introduces native payments Instagram has quietly launched a native payments feature to a select number of users in the US and UK, it was revealed last week. The new feature allows those select users to register a debit/credit card with their profile, set up a pin and begin “booking appointments at restaurants or salons” with a limited number of partners. The platform has confirmed plans to expand this to purchases such as cinema tickets in the future. It’s hoped that this smoother checkout experience will help increase conversion rates, as less users back out mid-purchase due to switching sites and re-entering payment details.
Instagram Stories music feature – SPOTTED!
An eagle eyed user has spotted within the code of Instagram a new music feature, which will let people add soundtracks to their Stories. Music will be added using Listenable Stickers, and could lead to the platform being used more for music discovery.
Snapchat has slowest user growth quarter ever Bad times for Snapchat as its Q1 earnings report reveals that user growth has slowed to 2.13 percent – its slowest ever, compared to 5.05 in Q4. Low user rates also caused the share price to fall by 15% in after-hours trading.
