META TO REMOVE FACEBOOK LIVE SHOPPING

META TO REMOVE FACEBOOK LIVE SHOPPING

Social metaverse firm Meta announced that they will remove the Live Shopping feature on Facebook starting on October 1, 2022.

“Beginning on October 1, 2022, you will no longer be able to host any new or scheduled Live Shopping events on Facebook,” Meta’s statement read.

However, Meta assured the Facebook users that they can still broadcast live videos without creating product playlists or tag products.

“You will still be able to use Facebook Live to broadcast live events, but you won’t be able to create product playlists or tag products in your Facebook Live videos,” it added.

Meta made the move as they wanted to shift their focus to Reels on both social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram.

According to Meta, netizens can still tag their products using Reels on Instagram and broadcast a Live Shopping as well.

Nokia is reviving the Nokia 3650

Another year, another classic Nokia phone resurrected from the grave. Since its revival, Nokia, helmed by HMD Global, has slowly revived its lineup of classic phones. The new lineup is a perfect match for the nostalgia and the budget-conscious market. According to a new report, Nokia is reviving another classic, the Nokia 3650.

Classic Nokia 3650

According to a Russian source, the company will modernize the brick phone for the new generation. Given how it looked, this comes as no surprise.

Back in its day, the classic brick phone presented a controversial form factor for the industry. Instead of the iconic numpad, it had a circular keyboard reminiscent of the old rotary phones. If you had a brick phone, you should have muscle memory of texting with a numpad without looking. Because of its weirder format, the Nokia 3650 is harder to memorize.

In 2003, the Nokia 3650 had a rare rear-mounted camera, albeit a VGA one. With a redesign on the horizon, Nokia can definitely make the brick phone more adaptable to the modern market.

However, since it’s only a rumor, we don’t know when the modern Nokia 3650 is coming out. If anything, a new classic Nokia phone is something to look out for this year.

New Release

Facebook launches drop-in video chat Rooms to rival Houseparty

MessengerRooms_50PeopleView

Facebook  is co-opting some of the top video chat innovations like Zoom’s gallery view for large groups and Houseparty’s spontaneous hangouts for a new feature called Rooms. It could usher in a new era of unplanned togetherness via video.

Launching today on mobile and desktop in English speaking countries, you can start a video chat Room that friends can discover via a new section above the News Feed or notifications Facebook will automatically send to your closest pals. You can also just invite specific friends, or share a link anyone can use to join your Room.

For now, up to 8 people can join, but that limit will rise to 50 within weeks, making it a more legitimate alternative to Zoom for big happy hours and such. And more importantly, users will soon be able to create and discover Rooms through Instagram,  WhatsApp, and Portal, plus join them from the web without an account, making this Facebook’s first truly interoperable product.

“People just want to spend more time together” Facebook’s head of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky tells me. One-on-one and group video calling was already growing, but “Now in the time of COVID, the whole thing is exploding. We already had a plan to do a bunch of stuff here [so people could] hang out on video any time they want, but we accelerated our plans.” There’s no plans for ads or other direct monetization of Rooms, but the feature could keep Facebook’s products central to people’s lives.

Choosing to create a separate and extremely prominent space for discovering Room above the News Feed reveals how seriously Facebook is taking this product. It could have marooned Rooms in a standalone app or made them just another News Feed post that’s timeliness would get lost in the algorithm. Instead, it was willing to push the feed almost entirely off the start screen beneath the composer, Rooms, and Stories. Clearly Facebook sees sharing, ephemeral content, and synchronous connection as more key to its future than static status updates.

Facebook Goes All-In On Video

The launch of Rooms comes alongside a slew other video-related updates designed to shore up Facebook’s deficiency in many-to-many communication. Messenger and WhatsApp now see 700 million people using audio and video calls each day, while Facebook and Instagram Live videos now reach 800 million people per day. Facebook already owns the many-to-one feeds and has emerged as a leader in one-to-many livestreaming, but “the middle piece needed way more investment” Chudnovsky says.

Here’s a rundown of the other announcements and what they mean:

  • Virtual And 360 Backgrounds with mood lighting – Facebook will soon launch the ability to choose a virtual background to cover up what’s behind you on a video call, including 360 backgrounds that look different as you move around, plus mood lighting to make you look better on camera
  • WhatsApp expands group calls from four to eight max participants – Encompassing larger families and friend groups makes WhatsApp a more viable competitor to Zoom
  • Facebook Live With returns – It’s tough to be the center of attention for long periods, so being able to bring a guest on screen during Live calls keeps them interesting and low pressure
  • Donate button on live videos – This makes it much easier for musicians, activists, and normal people to raise money for causes during the coronavirus crisis
  • Live via audio only – With more musicians bringing their tours to Facebook Live, now you can listen while still going about your day when you can’t watch too or want to conserve data, and you can use a toll-free number to dial in to some Pages’ videos
  • Instagram Live on web – You can now watch Live videos and comment from desktop so you can multi-task during longer streams
  • Live on IGTV – Long live videos won’t have to disappear since they can now be saved to IGTV, encouraging higher quality Instagram Lives meant to last
  • Portal Live – You’ll now be able to go Live to Pages and Groups from Portal devices so you can move around while streaming
  • Facebook Dating Video Chat – Rather than going on a date where you have no chemistry, you’ll be able to video chat with matches on Facebook Dating to get a feel for someone first.

How To Use Facebook Rooms

Facebook strived to make Rooms launchable and discoverable across all its apps in hopes of blitzing into the space. You can launch a Room from the News Feed composer, Groups, Events, the Messenger inbox, and soon Instagram Direct’s video chat button, WhatsApp,  and Portal. You’ll be able to choose a start time, add a description, and choose who can join in three ways.

You can restrict your Room just to people you invite, such as for a family catch-up. You can make it open to all your friends, who’ll be able to see it in the new Rooms discovery tray above the News Feed or inbox and eventually similar surfaces in the other apps. In this case, Facebook may notify some close friends to make sure they’ll see it. Or you can share a link to your Room wherever you want, effectively making it public.

Facebook apparently watched the PR disaster that emerged from Zoombombing, and purposefully built security into Rooms. The host can lock the room to block people from joining via URL, and if they boot someone from a Room, it automatically locks until they unlock it. That ensures that if trolls find your link, they can’t just keep joining from the web.

Naturally, Chudnovsky tried to downplay the influence of Zoom and Houseparty on Rooms. “We’re glad there are many other apps people can use when they want to see each other and stay close to each other. I don’t think we necessarily learned anything that actually became part of this product” he insisted. It’s also convenient that Rooms is essentially a non-exclusive video version of Clubhouse, the voice chat app that’s the talk of Silicon Valley right now

The Uncopyable Copier

Facebook has been quietly working on Rooms since at least 2017, exploring how to make group chats discoverable. It tried a standalone app for group video chat discovery called Bonfire that year. In fact, Facebook launched a standalone app called Rooms back in 2014 for anonymous forums.

The genius of this launch is how it combines three of Facebook’s biggest strengths to build a product that copies others but is hard to copy itself.

  • The ubiquity of its messaging apps and web compatibility make Rooms highly accessible, without the friction of having to download a new app.
  • The frequency of visits to its feeds and inboxes where Rooms can be found by the family of apps’ 2.5 billion users plus Facebook’s willingness to bet big by sticking Rooms atop our screen like it did with Stories could unlock a new era of spontaneous, serendipitous socializing.
  • The social graph we’ve developed with great breadth across Facebook’s apps plus the depth of its understanding about who we care about most allow it to reach enough concurrent users to make Rooms fun by intelligently ranking which we see and who gets notifications to join rather than spamming your whole phone book.

No other app has all of these qualities. Zoom doesn’t know who you care about. Houseparty is growing but is far from ubiquitous. Messaging competitors don’t have the same discovery surfaces.

Facebook knows the real engagement on mobile comes from messaging. It just needed a way to make us message more than our one-on-one threads and asynchronous group chats demanded. Rooms makes video calls something you can passively discover and join rather having to actively initiate or be explicitly pulled into by a friend. That could significantly increase how often and long we use Facebook without the deleterious impacts of zombie-like asocial feed scrolling.

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How to transfer all your Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos

You have probably uploaded tons of photos and videos on Facebook, and you probably have forgotten most of them until they show up as Memories. But what if you want to download all those content and store them on a free cloud storage platform like Google Photos for safekeeping? Let us show you how.

The method can be done via the web browser or from the app. But for this guide, we’re going to use the former.

Step 1: Log in to your Facebook account and go to Settings.

Step 2: Click on the ‘Your Facebook Information’ tab on the left.

Step 3: Look for ‘Transfer a Copy of Your Photos or Videos’ then click on ‘View.’

Step 4: Enter your password to continue.

Step 5: Choose a destination where a copy of your photos or videos will be transferred to. In this case, click on Google Photos.

Step 6: Choose to transfer a copy of either your photos or videos you’ve uploaded to Facebook. After selecting, click on ‘Next.’

Step 7: Log in to your Google account and give Facebook access.

Step 8: Confirm transfer.

At this point, Facebook will proceed with uploading a copy of your photos or videos to your Google Photos. The photos are organized based on the name of the albums you have on Facebook. The transfer time might take a while depending on how much photos or videos are being transferred, so check back on this later.

You can also choose to stop the transfer. Take note that it will not pause the transfer so if ever you want to resume, you’ll have to start all over again.

And that’s it. We hope that you find this guide helpful. If you have tips or recommendations, let us know in the comments below.