traffic

Undercover Project: Facebook Monitored Snapchat Traffic Without Users’ Knowledge, According to Confidential Documents

Mark Zuckerberg Meta Facebook Snapchat Project Ghostbusters
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. The newly released documents reveal how Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given that Snapchat encrypted the traffic between the app and its servers, this network analysis technique was not going to be effective. Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the program to Amazon and YouTube.

Unleashing Power: AddGlow’s Community-Building Software for Brands Rivals Reddit and Facebook

Inaherlihyaddglow Horizontal
Ina Herlihy believes e-commerce brands are losing out on organic traffic and potential revenue by relying on third-party community sites, like Reddit and Facebook Groups. By building an onsite community, brands are able to increase that retention and drive more organic traffic because the community is on their own domain. In addition, AddGlow integrates with a brand’s catalog so community members can tag products when mentioning them. “We started partnering with smaller brands, and now we’re building additional functionality to support larger brands, too,” Herlihy said. Our goal is to foster a safe space for community members to seek personal advice and build meaningful connections.”

“Navier Announces Exciting Collaboration with Stripe: Bringing Electric Boat Commuting Options to Remote Employees”

Navier N30 2
Electric boat startup Navier has landed the first official pilot program for its hydrofoiling watercraft, partnering with Stripe to bring passengers from San Francisco’s outskirts to the downtown area. Stripe will pay Navier to shuttle employees from Larkspur, where a number of them are concentrated, to its office near Oyster Point. But as a pilot program, the intent is not to operate at scale but to identify the means of and barriers to that scale. Other coastal cities with commute problems may take notice if the pilot program goes well. “We’re introducing a water shuttle service equipped with amenities that enhance on-the-go productivity, such as desks and Wi-Fi.

SmartNews battles retaining users while Rivals Twitter/X Surge

Smartnews
Some of the most important channels for news traffic — Google Search, social platforms like Facebook — changed how they focus on and surface news links, and that’s had an overall hit on traffic and ad sales. And consumer tastes have changed, too, and it appears that the app is also struggling to attract and retain users. Given the decline in downloads, Apptopia said a figure of 10 million active users today would now be “a stretch.”Another firm, Sensor Tower, added more insight, noting that SmartNews had, on average, roughly 1.7 million worldwide daily active users between Q1 2023 and Q3 2023. Sensor Tower’s estimates indicate the SmartNews app has roughly 5 million worldwide monthly active users from Q1–Q3 2023, down an average of 30% year-over-year, per quarter, it said. Sensor Tower also suggested that lapsed product iterations and feature launches likely contributed to falling consumer interest and interaction with the SmartNews app.