Advertise here with Carbon Ads

This site is made possible by member support. โค๏ธ

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

๐Ÿ”  ๐Ÿ’€  ๐Ÿ“ธ  ๐Ÿ˜ญ  ๐Ÿ•ณ๏ธ  ๐Ÿค   ๐ŸŽฌ  ๐Ÿฅ”

Facebook announced some things, including Clear history

Oculus Go

People at The Verge have taken the time to attend Facebook’s F8 and selected the five biggest announcements. Like more Instagram stories, a cheap Oculus Go headset (according to Fowler at the WashPo, it’s the one VR gadget you might buy), and Facebook dating.

Facebook will soon offer a dating feature that allows people to browse potential matches at inside groups or events you’re interested in attending. The feature will allow people to message each other using only their first names, and start conversations that are separate from the core Facebook or Messenger app.

I’m sure there will be no unintended consequences at all, since Facebook is always so reliably cautious about people and not breaking anything. Right?

Instagram

By the way, not unexpectedly, Facebook is using our Instagram pictures to train AIs.

[U]sing Instagram images that are already labeled by way of hashtags, Facebook was able to collect relevant data and use it to train its computer vision and object recognition models. “We’ve produced state-of-the-art results that are one to two percent better than any other system on the ImageNet benchmark.”

WhatsApp will also be getting some minor updates like group video calls and stickers, while CEO Jan Koum is heading out to collect rare air-cooled Porsches, work on his cars and play ultimate frisbee.

The only announcement I’m truly interested in wasn’t mentioned in the piece though; the “Clear history” functionality. Zuck posted about it himself.

In your web browser, you have a simple way to clear your cookies and history. The idea is a lot of sites need cookies to work, but you should still be able to flush your history whenever you want. We’re building a version of this for Facebook too. It will be a simple control to clear your browsing history on Facebook โ€” what you’ve clicked on, websites you’ve visited, and so on.