📲 Meta Is Developing a Search Engine to Power Its AI Chatbot
#News #Insta

🔹 Could Meta build its own search engine, and if it did, what would that look like? Reports have emerged that Meta is looking to build its own search tool for Meta Al, in order to reduce its reliance on Google and Microsoft's Bing for web searches within its Al chatbot. There are a couple of potential angles to the news, but it seems like Meta is looking to expand its data-gathering process in order to continue to build more powerful, real-time Al data tools. Which could result in a broader Meta search tool, powering real-time insights for its apps.

🔹 This is something that could have particular value for Threads, in providing up-to-the-minute notes on evolving news stories to complement engagement in the app. When Meta first announced its Meta AI chatbot in September last year, it explained how it would be using web search results from Bing to help expand its responses: "In text-based chats, Meta Al has access to realtime information through our search partnership with Bing and offers a tool for image generation." When Meta Al responses utilize Bing for information for context, Meta provides a web link to the search query. Then in April this year, Meta announced an additional partnership with Google to expand its web search responses even further, providing a similar web link on Google-powered replies.

🔹 And now, according The Information, Meta is looking to build its own web crawler to power search queries independently, in order to reduce its reliance on its search partners for Meta AI. As per The Information: "As Meta Platforms tries to keep up with OpenAl in developing artificial intelligence, the Facebook owner is working on a search engine that crawls the web to provide conversational answers about current events to people using its Meta Al chatbot." Conceptually, this would give Meta an alternative, in case Microsoft or Google, both of whom are competing with Meta on generative Al development, decided to end their search deals.

🔹 But that would also mean that Meta would need to build a complex search system, which crawls the web in a similar way to both Google and Bing. Which is a big undertaking, and why Meta went with these partnerships in the first place. But could Meta actually create a web crawler that functions in a similar way and would that be good enough to provide adequate answers in Meta's chatbot? Meta already has various web crawlers that gather information from external websites, and those crawlers have been ramping up activity in recent months, as Meta looks to gather more data for its Al projects.

🔹 They could also already be gathering data for this new search engine, but a dedicated Facebook search engine, again, would be a big project. Though a dedicated search engine is a logical move in the broader information gathering sense that would also give Meta more data for its AI language models moving forward. Maybe, that's actually the bigger picture here, as opposed to simply powering in-stream search. It's more likely that Meta's shoring up its data sources to power its Al tools and utilizing its existing crawlers to scrape whatever data it can from external providers who haven't updated their robots.txt protections. That would help Meta build upon its already vast data stores, and if it's already gathering that info, it makes sense to also reduce its reliance on external search providers where it can. So maybe it's likely less about building a competitor to these providers and more about making best use of its own data gathering processes. But even so, it's a significant undertaking, which could provide expanded opportunities for Zuck and Co., if they can get it right.
Really, though, it's not an unexpected move, given the competition in the space. Again, Meta is battling with these two providers for Al supremacy, and as the race continues to heat up, it'll come as no surprise if they stop helping Meta in this regard.

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📲 Instagram Unveils Annual ‘Creators of Tomorrow’ Listing
#News #Insta

🔹 Instagram has announced its annual "Creators of Tomorrow" listing, which highlights some of the top emerging creators in the app who are helping to shape cultural and usage trends. And while some of the categories and descriptions feel a little trite, it may be worth checking out the selected creators to see what it is that they're doing right, and whether you can learn anything from their success. This year, Instagram has highlighted 25 creators in five different categories, which are designed to recognize the key emerging movements that are gaining traction in the app.

🔹 The five categories for 2024 are:

🔹 "The Creator's Inspo" - Highly creative users who are tapping into the latest editing tools and tricks

🔹 "AI Accelerators" - Creators who are utilizing the latest AI tools to great effect

🔹 "IG Besties" - Creators that make you think "you're so real for this" whenever they share content."

🔹 "DM-Worthy Icons" - Creators who post some of the most shareable content

🔹 "The Vibe Curators" - Creators who "set the vibe, take you on a journey and spark emotion."

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📲 Meta Posts Strong Revenue Result in Q3
News #Insta

🔹 Meta has shared its latest performance update, showing a small increase in active users across its apps, and a big increase in revenue, in relative terms. Though its investments in next-level projects remain significant. Here’s a look at the latest numbers from Mark Zuckerberg’s tech behemoth.
First off, on active users. Meta reports that it now has 3.29 billion people using its apps (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads) every day, which is a small increase on the 3.27 billion it reported in Q2.

🔹 Though we’re talking about 3 billion plus people, the scale of which is difficult to truly comprehend. The population of the world is estimated to be around 8.1 billion, so Meta’s apps are used by almost 40% of the entire planet, every single day. Minus the 1.4 billion Chinese residents (where Meta is banned), and that’s closer to 50%, so the breadth of Meta’s operation in this sense is pretty amazing.

🔹 And it’s still growing. Despite its apps presumably reaching saturation point in many markets, Meta’s still seeing more users sign up to its apps, which bodes well for its ongoing potential, and its core ads business. Indeed, Meta’s also driving more revenue, on average, from those users. Meta doesn’t break down its ARPP results by market like it used to, but as you can see here, Meta’s overall revenue per user is rising, and will increase again amid the holiday rush in Q4. Which will help Meta continue to improve its revenue intake. Meta remains reliant on North America and Europe for the majority of its revenue intake, though it’s steadily increasing its Asia Pacific market intake as well.

🔹 That’s seen it post a strong revenue result for the period of $40.59 billion. So while Meta is spending a stupid amount on VR and now AI development, it continues to rake in the cash from its main cash cow, by showing people more ads in its apps. On that front, Meta also reported that ad impressions delivered across its apps have increased by 7% year-over-year. The average price per ad is also increasing (+11% YoY), though the math there is probably not ideal for social media marketers.

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📲 Instagram Adds DM Filters to Assist Creators
News #Insta

🔹 Instagram has added some new messaging filters for creators accounts, which will make it easier to sort through your message requests, and find the most relevant inquiries in your inbox. As you can see in these examples, creators will now be able to sort and filter their message requests via various qualifiers, including reordering them based on the sender's follower count, listing DMs from verified accounts only, from brand accounts only, from other creators, and more. There's also a new, dedicated "Story replies" folder, which will make it easier to scan through your actual messages, as opposed to Story replies.

🔹 That should make it easier for creators to manage their often cluttered inboxes, and get to relevant requests, especially brand collab queries. Which, evidently, is a major headache for big creators. As explained by IG chief Adam Mosseri: "When you go to the requests inbox, sometimes it can be really overwhelming, and I've heard this a lot from creators I've talked around the world. So what we've done is we've added ways to filter down those requests to just see the ones that you're looking for." So while regular users likely don't have a lot of trouble dealing with their DM traffic, this becomes a bigger problem for creators the larger their audience reach gets. Remember when T-Pain discovered that he had a heap of DM requests for collaborations that he didn't even realize were coming through IG?

🔹 I guess that's the type of challenge Instagram's looking to address with these new filters, making it easier for big creators to make sense of their DMs quickly, and ensure that they don't miss anything important coming in. And with DMs becoming the primary interaction option across all social apps (with feeds switching to entertainment-focused content), it makes sense for Instagram to lean into DM activity, and ensure that it's helping creators to maximize their opportunities.

🔹 Because Mosseri and Meta also know that they need creators to keep posting to keep IG relevant, while they'll also need those creators engaged in their apps to lead into the next stage, being the metaverse. Improving DM connection is another way to increase creator reliance on the platform, and these changes could be valuable in the broader scheme. Instagram also notes that it's "continuing to invest in improvements that will simplify DMs and make it easier for creators to navigate their messages." So there could be further DM improvements coming soon.

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📲 Instagram Now Has More Users Than Facebook in EU
#News #Insta

🔹 Last week, in addition to reporting its Q3 performance update, Meta also shared its latest EU user numbers for Facebook and Instagram as part of its Digital Services Act (DSA) obligations. And the numbers show that Instagram has now surpassed Facebook's active user count in the region. Instagram now has 269.1 million monthly active users in EU, versus 260.6 million for Facebook. In Meta's first EU user report, covering the period between April to September 2023, both platforms had the same user count, at 259 million MAU.

🔹 But now, IG has superseded the company's flagship app, with Facebook seeing much slower growth, and even slightly declining in usage over the most recent measurement period (April to September this year). Could that be a more common trend around the world, with Facebook potentially losing audience, as Instagram continues to add more users? Well, we don't know for sure, as Meta stopped reporting Facebook's monthly active user counts this year, in favor a combined audience measurement for its entire "Family of Apps" (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads). But based on the last time that it reported Facebook's monthly actives (Q4 2023), it does seem that this is more likely confined to EU, and potentially U.S. audiences.

🔹 Facebook's EU user count was in decline throughout 2023, and really, had been on a downward trend since 2022. Its U.S. user count had also been fairly stagnant, but Facebook usage was still growing in other markets. As such, it seems like this shift would be more confined to EU, and not reflective of broader trends. But even so, it is interesting to see IG potentially taking the mantle from Facebook as Meta's main app, even if only in selected markets. The other question then is: "Why is Facebook losing traction with European audiences?" Well, some of that can be attributed to the implementation of improved data privacy regulations in Europe, which have revealed more about the data that Facebook takes in, and can use in its various applications. That, some suggest, has seen more users turn away from the app, while other reports indicate that more EU users now find Facebook to be outdated versus other apps.

🔹 Whatever the reason, it is also important to note that Facebook remains hugely popular in the region, with 260 million active users. TikTok has 150 million EU monthly actives, while X has 66 million, so on balance, even with a slight decline, Facebook is still a key interactive platform for European users. It's just not as popular as IG now is, which likely suggests that Facebook isn't catching on with younger audiences as well as it used to.

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📲 Meta’s Rolling Out More Variable Ad Display Options
#News #Insta

🔹 Meta's rolling out a new ad option called "Flexible Media", which is its next step in enabling variable ad delivery approaches based on its systematic predictions of user response. Okay, that was a bit of a jargonistic explainer. The more simple explanation is Meta's looking to maximize ad performance by having more creative options that it can then display to different users. On this front, Meta's already pushing advertisers to utilize its automated Advantage+ campaign tools, which effectively choose which of your ads to show different users.

🔹 It also has several ad options that can customize and personalize ad display, with Flexible Media playing another part in this. As you can see in this example, posted by Bram Van Der Hallen, "Flexible Media" is showing up as an option to some advertisers on some Meta Ads campaigns. As per the description: "We'll deliver the media you choose for placement groups across placements when it's likely to improve performance." To be clear, this is different from "Flexible Ads", which enable you to submit 10 images for an ad, with Meta's system then able to pick and choose which images to show to each user.

🔹 Flexible Media looks to be another variation on this, which would enable Meta's system to use different images for different placement groups. So, essentially, you'd be giving Meta's system permission to use different images for different ad types, as it sees fit. As noted, it's another step towards Meta fully automating ad campaigns, and displaying different ads to different users, relative to how its systems determine likely response. In other words, Meta's seeking to automate more and more elements of your ad process, so that eventually, you won't even need to come up with any element of your ad. You'll just enter a URL, and Meta will do the rest.

🔹 Which likely feels like you're giving over too much control to the system, but given that Meta's ad targeting process is based on its system Al, which measures and tracks ad responses, it makes sense that it would also be able to help you reach a more receptive audience. And you're likely restricting that by manually choosing your audience.
So while it may feel wrong, and like you're not utilizing your audience knowledge for ad targeting, it's likely worth experimenting with Meta's automated ad options, and seeing whether they drive better results. Flexible Media looks to be another part of this, giving Meta's systems more options on which ads and ad displays it can show to users.

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📲 Australia to ban TikTok, Instagram, and X for under 16s.
#News #Insta

🔹 Australia's government says it will introduce "world-leading" legislation to ban children under 16 from social media. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the proposed laws, to be tabled in parliament next week, were aimed at mitigating the "harm" social media was inflicting on Australian children. "This one is for the mums and dads... They, like me, are worried sick about the safety of our kids online. I want Australian families to know that the government has your back," he said. While many of the details are yet to be debated, the government said the ban would apply to young people already on social media. There will be no exemptions on the age limit for children who have consent from their parents.

🔹 The government says that the onus would be on social media platforms to show they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access.
Albanese said there would be no penalties for users, and that it would be up to Australia's online regulator - the eSafety Commissioner - to enforce the laws. The legislation would come into force 12 months after it passes and be subject to a review after it's in place. While most experts agree that social media platforms can harm the mental health of adolescents, many are split over the efficacy of trying to outlaw them all together. Some experts argue that bans only delay young people's exposure to apps such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, instead of teaching them how to navigate complex online spaces. Previous attempts at restricting access, including by the European Union, have largely failed or faced backlash from tech firms.

🔹 And questions remain over how implementation would work given there are tools which can circumvent age-verification requirements. One of Australia's largest advocacy groups for child rights has criticised the proposed ban as "too blunt an instrument". In an open letter sent to the government in October, signed by over 100 academics and 20 civil society organisations, the Australian Child Rights Taskforce called on Albanese to instead look at imposing "safety standards" on social media platforms. The group also pointed to UN advice that "national policies" designed to regulate online spaces "should be aimed at providing children with the opportunity to benefit from engaging with the digital environment and ensuring their safe access to it".

🔹 But other grassroots campaigners have lobbied Australia's government for the laws, saying bans are needed to protect children from harmful content, misinformation, bullying and other social pressures. A petition by the 36Months initiative, which has over 125,000 signatures, argues children are "not yet ready to navigate online social networks safely" until at least 16, and that currently "excessive social media use is rewiring young brains within a critical window of psychological development, causing an epidemic of mental illness". When asked whether there should be broader efforts to educate children about how to navigate the benefits and risks of being online, Albanese said that such an approach would be insufficient because it "assumes an equal power relationship". "I don't know about you, but I get things popping up on my system that I don't want to see. Let alone a vulnerable 14-year-old," he told reporters on Thursday. "These tech companies are incredibly powerful. These apps have algorithms that drive people towards certain behaviour."

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📲 Instagram stops the ‘rug pull’ that disappears videos while you’re watching them
#News #Insta

🔹 You know that thing where, just after you've opened Instagram and become invested in whatever video was already loaded, a new video pops in and seemingly yeets the old video into the void, never to be seen again? That's a thing of the past, according to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who says in an AMA from his Instagram Story yesterday that the app now waits for you to scroll to show you the new stuff.

🔹 That behavior - which Instagram apparently called "rug pull" internally - wasn't just some weird bug. Mosseri says the app did it "because we were trying to load new content, and it was taking a while, so we showed you something that was already downloaded in the meantime, and it is generally good for engagement." But that's "really annoying," he acknowledges,
"so we stopped doing it." Instagram has taken "a little bit of an engagement hit for this," Mosseri concludes, saying it's a much better experience for those of us using the app.

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📲 Instagram could let AI generate a profile picture for you
News #Insta

Reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi dug up a menu within the app showing the option to “create An AI profile picture.” While you can already upload an AI-generated profile picture to Instagram, this would streamline the process.
Meta’s other apps — Facebook and What’sapp— have been spotted working on a similar feature.

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📲 In Europe, Instagram Ads Are About to Get Less Personal
News #Insta

🔹 Meta Platforms plans to give European users of Instagram and Facebook the option of receiving what it says are less “personalized ads” a concession to regulators that risks hitting the company’s revenue in one of its largest markets.  
The social-media company plans in coming days to begin prompting users in Europe with the choice of the new ad format, without paying a fee, according to people briefed on the plans. 

🔹 The new ads option comes as frustration has built at Meta over the EU’s efforts to regulate tech companies. The company recently spearheaded an open letter saying that the bloc’s laws threatened to squelch the artificial-intelligence boom in the region.

🔹 A major source of tension has been whether and how Meta must ask users for consent to use the data it collects—not just for targeting ads but also for training AI. Meta delayed release of its AI chatbots in the EU after privacy regulators in the bloc had suggested the company may need to seek consent to train models based on adults’ public posts on Instagram and Facebook in Europe. 

🔹 Meta said Tuesday that it is introducing less-personalized ads to comply with demands from EU regulators—and that the changes could harm small businesses. “If EU regulation makes digital advertising less efficient, the entire European business community suffers,” Meta said. 

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📲 Meta must face FTC trial that could separate Instagram and WhatsApp
#News #Insta

🔹 Meta must face the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit that accuses the company of dominating the social media industry through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, a DC District Court Judge ruled on Wednesday. The FTC filed a lawsuit against Meta in 2020, alleging the company bought up rivals - Instagram and WhatsApp - in an attempt to stifle competition. Judge James Boasberg initially dismissed the FTC's lawsuit in 2021, but the agency filed an amended complaint, which he ultimately let proceed.

🔹 Meta once again asked the court to dismiss the FTC's case in April. Boasberg has now ruled largely in favor of the FTC, though he dismissed a claim that Meta acted anticompetitively by preventing developers from accessing its API unless they agreed not to compete with its apps. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Christopher Sgro said the company is "confident" the trial will show its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were "good" for consumers.

🔹 "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared these deals, and despite the overwhelming evidence that our services compete with YouTube, TikTok, X, Apple's iMessage, and many others, the Commission is wrongly continuing to assert that no deal is ever truly final, and businesses can be punished for innovating."

🔹 Even though the FTC's antitrust lawsuit was filed while President-Elect President Donald Trump was in office, his upcoming administration is expected to take a more lax approach to mergers and acquisitions - and major companies are taking notice. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with other Big Tech leaders, has already started to cozy up to Trump, who's expected to replace FTC Chair Lina Khan.

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📲 Threads is testing custom feeds for your favorite topics
#News #Insta

🔹 Threads is testing a way to create custom feeds for certain profiles or topics, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday. The upcoming feature should make it easier to keep tabs on different interests, such as your favorite sports team or even technology-related news. It sounds similar to the custom feeds feature Bluesky rolled out last year — but Threads' version seems a lot simpler.

🔹 To create a custom feed, just search and tap into a topic. From there, select the three-dot icon beside the search term and choose "create new feed." You can also add profiles to your custom feed by selecting the three-dot icon above someone's profile photo and tapping "add to feed." Threads will then let you choose which feed you'd like to add the profile to. Your custom feeds will then appear in the same main menu bar as your "For You" and "Following" tabs.

🔹 There still isn't a way to set these custom feeds or your "Following" feed as your default view, though. Bluesky's current feed creation process requires some technical skill, but third-party tools, like SkyFeed, make it easier. "Custom feeds will display a combination of posts from the profiles you've added and the search results for the selected topic," Threads spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge. "These are displayed in reverse chronological order."

🔹 The test is rolling out to a small number of people globally, but Booker says Threads hopes to bring it to more users "soon." Both Bluesky and Threads are seeing growth as people seek out alternatives to X. While Bluesky recently crossed the 15 million user line, Threads head Adam Mosseri said the platform grew by 15 million in just one month.

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🚨 Instagram’s Testing Simplified AI Profile Image Generation
feeds for your favorite topics
#News #Insta

🔹 Instagram is experimenting with a new option that would make it easier to generate an Al version of your profile image, facilitating a more stylized, artistic depiction of yourself in-stream. As you can see in this image, shared by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, Instagram is currently working on a new option that would enable you to generate an Al profile picture direct from your profile editing options, so you could quickly and easily tap into Meta's Al image generation tools to update your pic. Which would be new for IG, but isn't really new for social media users.

🔹 Instagram's sister app Facebook has also been experimenting with Al-generated profile images, while both TikTok and Snapchat have similar, in their respective "Dreams" and Al avatar creation options. So in some ways, this would be bringing Instagram into line with other social apps, in providing a simplified Al profile image generation option. But it also feels a little disingenuous, right? For years, social media users have complained about bots and bot profiles infecting the experience, and duping unsuspecting users with doctored images and made-up depictions of seemingly real people. For example, earlier this year, Meta removed a network of over 900 profiles that had used fake, Al-generated headshots to depict themselves as real people.

🔹 Yet, now, the platforms are actively encouraging this. And while I realize these more stylized versions of Al headshots are not the same thing, in that they're designed to enable more artistic, creative variations of your depiction, it's still not you. And with anonymity masking the activity of some of the worst actors on the web, and as noted, enabling scammers and misinformation peddlers to dupe people within social apps, surely enabling and encouraging the use of such tools is not really a benefit, on balance. At the same time, IG, like every other social app, is keen to incorporate Al elements, in order to ensure that it rides the latest tech trend, and keeps up with the competition in this respect.

🔹 It’s not obvious how generative Al tools are overly beneficial in a social media context, when considering the core use case of social apps, in connecting humans for "social" purposes. Al-generated images are not a real depiction of your lived experience, which is what social platforms have traditionally been used for. Sure, Al art is another element, and showcasing your Al creations is a separate element from an artistic standpoint. But the majority of regular users are not artists, and as such, these Al-generated depictions are just fakes, and it's odd to see social platforms looking to re-package these as a positive, and not just more false depictions in their apps.

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