It’s no secret that Facebook lacks original ideas. Their features are mostly copied from others in an attempt to elbow out the competition. Instagram was a purchase along with WhatsApp. Reels was them stealing Snapchat’s idea. Copying bad ideas is a new one for them. It has come to light thanks to Ben Mayo at 9to5Mac. Facebook will look to copy Twitter’s paid verification feature in the near future. A quick reminder: this is the paid feature that was a disastrous failure for Twitter. The subscription plan called Meta Verified will cost $11.99/month if bought on the web, and $14.99…
Tag: meta
In yet more proof (like we needed any) that Facebook Meta is still falling quite short in making their virtual reality world Horizon Worlds a thing, Wired reporter Eric Ravenscraft tells his tale of trying to hold a holiday party inside that system. Spoilers: it was a big mess. For starters, organizing an event using Horizon Worlds is far from intuitive. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to add people to a group—without having to add coworkers as friends on my personal Facebook account. I eventually found an obscure tool that lets you generate a…
It’s been… a week in the tech sphere. So much so that I felt the need to write about it all in a Lightning Round update because it stretches far and wide. For starters, there’s the trainwreck that is Twitter & Elon Musk. To call it a crisis is an understatement. A billionaire with thin skin is running his $44B company into the ground. From public firings to fights with advertisers to enduring shenanigans with their update to the paid “Blue” service that was incredibly foreseeable, Twitter is all over the place. I soooo want to write about it but…
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Lying Legs
As Facebook Meta continues its push to convince you that VR is really really really the wave of the future, they made an announcement last week that legs were coming to their Horizon Worlds experience. There was a whole demo around this feature. Avatars have only been floating torsos up to this point. It isn’t a stretch to think that adding the rest of a body would be desirable. Meta’s live tweets even had a tweet that only said “Legs”. I’m not even kidding. There’s only one problem: the demo was completely fabricated. Ian Hamilton at Upload VR has more.…
Facebook Meta has been hard in their efforts to get you to know about “the metaverse”. Basically it’s VR. That’s it. That’s their plan. Yes, this is a simplification of what Zuckerberg is doing, but they are investing a ton of time into this. Over at The Verge Adi Robinson, who usually handles anything related to VR, goes through all the prototypes that have been developed. There’s 24 in all. Most are just proofs of concept. None will ship. All are efforts to be a leader in what they think is the next “big thing”. Meta described Half Dome’s tech…
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Reggie Speaks
Whether we know what Facebook Meta’s “metaverse” is or not, it’s impossible to ignore their push into virtual reality. There have been lots of responses to what they’re doing, but this one strikes at the heart of what is going on. Reggie Fils-Amie, the former President and COO of Nintendo of America gave his take on the metaverse at the SXSW conference. “Facebook itself is not an innovative company,” Fils-Aime told Emily Chang. “They have either acquired interesting things like Oculus and Instagram, or they’ve been a fast follower of people’s ideas. I don’t think their current definition will be…
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Face The Drop
Seems like my latest edition of The Longform had impeccable timing, as Facebook Meta has reported its first drop in daily active users ever. During their quarterly earnings call with investors, Facebook delivered the bad news. Which then tanked its stock by about 20%. Alex Heath at The Verge has more. The massive stock drop, which instantly wiped out roughly $200 billion in market value, shows that Facebook’s corporate rebrand to Meta isn’t enough to distract investors from the problems in its core business of social media. Not only was user growth across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp essentially flat last quarter, but…