Facebook is introducing a new, full-screen video player on Wednesday, which offers a more consistent design and experience for all types of video lengths, including short-form Reels, long-form videos, and even Live content.
These improved recommendations will also appear outside the player, on the Facebook Feed and Video tab.
Facebook says its upgraded player will also offer new controls like a full-screen mode for horizontal videos and a slider to skip around in longer videos.
TikTok, by comparison, has also tested horizontal videos and long-form content of 30 minutes as it looks to compete with YouTube and other sites.
The timing of the video player change also comes at a time when U.S. lawmakers are weighing a possible TikTok ban, which, if enacted, could increase video consumption on other social platforms.
Instagram is developing a “Blend” feature that creates a private feed of Reels recommended for you and a friend.
According to a screenshot posted on X by Paluzzi, a Blend would include “Reels recommendations based on Reels you’ve shared with each other and your Reels interests.”In other words, if you invited a friend to a “Blend,” Instagram would generate a personalized feed of Reels that it believes the two of you would be interested in.
#Instagram is working on Blend: #Reels recommendations based on reels you've shared each other and your reels interests 👀 ℹ️ Private between the two of you.
Since people already send each other Reels via DMs, Instagram would now be using that data to proactively recommend and display Reels that it believes a pair of users would enjoy.
If released, Blend would give Instagram Reels users access to a fun and collaborative feature that isn’t available on its rival platform, TikTok.
Google will let you swipe right or swipe left on clothes to get better fashion recommendationsGoogle is rolling out a new update that makes it easier for users to find personalized shopping results, the company announced on Wednesday.
The new feature lets users rate different products in order to get style recommendations when shopping for apparel, shoes and accessories.
After you have rated a selection of products, Google will display personalized results for you to parse through.
Google will remember your preferences, so if you ever search for men’s polo shirts again, you will see style recommendations based on what you liked in the past.
The company says people shop on Google more than a billion times a day and see more than 45 billion products in their results.
ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced today that it raised $18.5 million.
To date, creators have earned “tens of millions in commissions” on the platform, the company tells TechCrunch.
“He observed a significant disconnect in the social media ecosystem: influencers struggled to monetize their product recommendations effectively, and their followers didn’t have an easy path to purchase.
Chris viewed ShopMy as the solution, a bridge that transformed how influencers share and monetize their product recommendations,” Rein explains.
Even Instagram has embraced creator marketing, launching a marketplace tool for paid partnerships in 2022.
But Karma3 Labs is hoping to change that with $4.5 million in fresh capital backing its decentralized reputation protocol OpenRank.
This is the protocol’s first capital raise, Sahil Dewan, founder and CEO of Karma3 Labs, told TechCrunch exclusively.
“We are really obsessed with solving trust and safety issues for crypto,” Dewan said.
“We wanted to create a protocol and generalized system, not as a source of trust, but for anyone to come and build reputation systems,” Dewan said.
The OpenRank protocol allows any developer to use its “Reputation Graphs” for ratings, ranking or recommendations for applications or communities.
Amba Kak is the executive director of the AI Now Institute, where she helps create policy recommendations to address AI concerns.
She was also a senior AI advisor at the Federal Trade Commission and previously worked as a global policy advisor at Mozilla and a legal advisor to India’s telecom regulator on net-netruality.
How do you navigate the challenges of the male-dominated tech industry and, by extension, the male-dominated AI industry?
The tech industry, and AI in particular, remains overwhelmingly white and male and geographically concentrated in very wealthy urban bubbles.
By exposing the power dynamics that the tech industry tries very hard to conceal.
Substack is updating its peer-to-peer recommendation system, the company announced today.
With this new update, Substack is helping writers aid other writers in expanding their reach and potentially getting more subscribers and followers, as the company is now allowing writers to curate and share a list of publications for their readers to subscribe to.
Most social media networks currently leverage algorithms for their recommendation systems, but Substack is instead focused on allowing writers to curate their own networks of recommendations.
Substack says the new update will help writers build up goodwill with other writers by helping them reach more people, while also helping readers curate a worldview.
The platform will show writers how many subscriptions and follows they have driven for people in their network.
OpenAI is expanding its internal safety processes to fend off the threat of harmful AI.
In-production models are governed by a “safety systems” team; this is for, say, systematic abuses of ChatGPT that can be mitigated with API restrictions or tuning.
Frontier models in development get the “preparedness” team, which tries to identify and quantify risks before the model is released.
So, only medium and high risks are to be tolerated one way or the other.
For that reason OpenAI is making a “cross-functional Safety Advisory Group” that will sit on top of the technical side, reviewing the boffins’ reports and making recommendations inclusive of a higher vantage.
Since Facebook launched its one-stop shop for creative content creators called Reels, time spent on its platform has grown more than 24%. This is likely due to the AI-powered content…
ChatGPT is a new shopping service that allows customers to easily buy items online, without leaving the chat interface. The service is integrated with Klarna, one of the leading payments…
