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Facebook’s changes under the hood are a power grab.
My colleague Mike Isaac wrote about Facebook’s latest step in making its apps, its main social network, Instagram, and the Messenger chat app, blend more seamlessly behind the scenes. Facebook’s products would remain separate, but over time they would interact in ways they hadn’t before.
For example, Facebook is starting to allow people to use Instagram to send a photo to someone using Messenger, and vice versa. In the future, you may be able to text a friend who only uses WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, from your Messenger account.
Could there be … possibly? – useful things as a result of joining these applications, especially for companies. But the more Facebook operates as a unified empire rather than a constellation of apps, the more difficult it becomes for a government to break through Facebook and the more difficult it may be for rivals to undermine the company’s dominance.
What is happening now shows the difficulty of controlling the power of superstar companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. By the time the impact of the small changes you make becomes obvious, it may be too late to do anything about it.
On Facebook, the more the company ties together its family of apps, the harder it becomes to unravel the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. Some academics and others have said that Facebook should abandon those apps because they saw those acquisitions as illegal tactics to isolate the company from the competition.
The other risk is that a more unified Facebook makes it harder to unseat the company. Could any new messaging app be successful if Facebook seamlessly funnels its 3 billion users to Messenger and convinces people not to bother going anywhere new?
This is not a theoretical risk. There is a history of technology companies that bundle their products or customer information to make them invulnerable. Sometimes it works.
Over the years, Google has brought together what were once separate parts of its Internet advertising business into a largely unified system that makes it difficult for anyone to buy or sell ads online without going through Google. A generation ago, Microsoft got into trouble in part for trying to expand its domain by linking its new Internet browser to Windows. (That didn’t work, largely because governments and courts said no to this practice.)
Facebook weaving its applications is technically different from what Google and Microsoft did, but the practical effect is largely the same. Both Google and Microsoft said, as Facebook is saying now, that combining their products was helpful to customers. Perhaps. It definitely helped expand the power of those companies.
(Side note: Is it really useful to message someone on Instagram from Messenger or whatever? People tend to use Facebook apps in different ways.)
One change in the history of technology is that people are now aware of the risks of companies bundling their products. As soon as Mike first wrote about Facebook’s app integration plan in early 2019, some lawmakers and regulators began to wonder if it was a ploy to isolate Facebook.
The question is what to do with the risk that Facebook is slowly taking hold. Regulators might say no to Facebook linking its apps, but Facebook could bet that lawmakers and regulators move more slowly than it does. And Facebook’s cynicism is probably right.
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Technology cannot fix everything. Sometimes it makes things worse.
I encourage you to read this article from Reveal, a nonprofit investigative news organization, on Amazon’s high rates of injury at warehouses and how Amazon’s public defense of its worker safety record is sometimes contradicted. with company documents and private administration discussions.
One of the strident and disturbing conclusions that I have from this research is that technology cannot hide faulty systems built by humans. In fact, technology sometimes makes them worse.
One of Reveal’s findings was that in Amazon parcel warehouses that used more robots and other automated human helpers – technology Amazon said was intended to make work safer and more efficient – rates of serious injuries on the job they were significantly higher than the traditional ones. warehouses.
The Reveal report found that this happened because the company used robotic warehouses to increase productivity quotas to such high levels that it led to more cases of Amazon workers taking shortcuts, repeating the same movements, and doing other things that led to more injuries. . The article said that none of the dozens of Amazon safety initiatives reviewed by Reveal suggested lowering production quotas to try to reduce injuries.
Amazon did not respond to Reveal’s questions about the company’s injury data, but told the news organization that it had made significant investments in workers’ health and safety.
This report adds to my concerns that all too often we have the wrong hopes that automation and other types of technology will solve complex problems. Too many Americans lack the Internet? Wait for the new wireless technology to magically fix it. Are cities full of cars? Wait for the robot powered cars to magically fix them. No and no.
That is not to say that technology can never help solve problems, but it is not a magic wand. If humans set unrealistic expectations for moving goods quickly, then those same humans could use technology to absolve them of responsibility for fixing the problem.
Before we go …
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GAH, INTERNET! Well, the US presidential debate was quite chaotic, and my colleagues have explanations for some of the misleading information that went crazy online about it, including false rumors that Joe Biden received advance questions and the jubilation of a far-right group that has endorsed the violence at the mention of President Trump.
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The software is watching you: The students spoke with my colleagues at the Times about what it’s like to use software designed to detect cheating in online exams by tracking people’s eye movements through a webcam and other steps. Spoiler alert: these students didn’t love it.
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Ah, the innocent days when the internet was to judge people by their appearance: Mashable makes a compelling argument that HOTorNOT, one of the first internet sites to go viral and allow people to rate the attractiveness of strangers, became a model for internet activity in the 20 years since it started, and not just in a bad way.
Hugs to this
This kitty seems to love being carried in a backpack.
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