Travis Bernard says, “Snapchat’s current geofilter product is a nightmare for event managers, brands, and any commercial business because anyone can coat-tail or hijack the space. Let’s say you’re holding a political rally at City Hall, and you want to buy a geofilter for the augmented Snapchat space at the event. When you go to purchase it from Snapchat, your plan gets rejected. Why? Someone else has already bought the augmented space. Snapchat’s current policy is “first come, first served,” and you can’t reserve a geofilter more than 30 days in advance. The first person to... [...]

Sarah Perez says, “Consumer watchdog groups, CCFC, Public Citizen, and the Center for Digital Democracy, are again targeting the deceptive advertising practices of “influencer marketing” in a new complaint filed with the FTC on Friday. The groups specifically call out Google’s YouTube and YouTube Kids, Disney-owned Maker Studios, Dreamworks’ AwesomenessTV and others, as being involved in this damaging practice. “Influencer marketing,” by way of background, is referencing the way popular content creators and video stars will distribute ads and other commercial material, without... [...]

Josh Constine says, “Snap Inc.’s quest to earn enough money to IPO sees it flip-flopping after pledging not to use “creepy” ad targeting. Snap will now allow advertisers to use Oracle’s Data Cloud (formerly Datalogix) third-party data about what users buy offline to target ads on Snapchat, according to The Wall Street Journal. Snap tells TechCrunch that this rolled out over the last few weeks, and will allow targeting to 100 different customer demographics like “cosmetics shopper” or “consumer tech shopper.” That’s a 180 from what VentureBeat reported Snap CEO Evan Spiegel... [...]

Megan Rose Dickey says, “Since Google+ is still alive and kicking, Google is rolling out three updates to the product over the next couple of weeks. For one, those who still use Google+ will be able to hide low-quality comments so that they can focus “on the comments that matter most,” Google+ Product Manager Danielle Buckley wrote on the company’s blog today. Another update entails zoom capabilities on photos and making it so that you’ll see less white space on the screen. Back in the day, when I dabbled with Google+, I do remember seeing a bunch of beautiful photos on the site,... [...]

Lucas Matney says, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees virtual reality as a future computing platform that his company has a chance to own, though he admits it may take 5 – 10 years to bring it to the masses. Members of the press had a rare opportunity to get a more unfiltered view into the future of Facebook’s virtual reality ambitions as Zuckerberg took to the stands today to testify in a $2 billion lawsuit surrounding the origins of Oculus, a VR company it acquired in March of 2014. At the heart of its case is the claim that Oculus acquired information from former ZeniMax employee and... [...]

Ingrid Lunden says, “There have been rumors for a while about Twitter preparing to retire its commerce operation. Now it looks like the company has finally started to wind down its partnerships in confirmation of that fact. Customers of e-commerce platform Shopify are receiving notices informing them that the Twitter sales channel is getting shut down “as a result of the Twitter team pivoting way from their ecommerce focus.” We have confirmed the note as legitimate. The short message, shared by TC reader Brody Berson, is at the bottom of this post. From what we understand, Twitter is... [...]

Josh Constine says, “Facebook basically locked Notes in the basement for the past half-decade. Its bare-bones blogging feature launched in 2006 as a place for writing missives that wouldn’t fit in a status update. After a few tweaks like the ability to insert photos, Facebook left Notes to languish. The launch of Timeline in 2011 buried the feature so deep in the interface that one could conclude Facebook didn’t want to deal with Notes any more. It seemed like people were satisfied with short-form social media posts, and few needed a place for long-form blogging. But then there was Medium.... [...]

Jordan Crook says, “Confide, the app that lets you send self-destructing messages, is now transitioning to the desktop. Confide launched 18 months ago as a mobile app on iOS and Android, offering users the chance to send messages to each other that are only readable a few words at a time. When the user tapped on certain words in the message, they would appear and disappear again as the user’s finger moved across the entire message. Once the user chose to reply or exit out, the message disappeared forever. Now, that same functionality is coming over to the Desktop for both Mac and Windows... [...]

Drew Olanoff says, “Welp, not today. The team clearly listens to its users, as the company announced a new integration (for Standard and Plus plan customers) that’ll make them extremely happy. Email will probably never completely die; it’s how organizations communicate with the outside world. Now you can bring email into your Slack channels: Email remains ubiquitous and is quite useful for getting updates from pretty much every service on the Internet. Today we’re launching a new feature: all teams on the Standard or Plus plans can have email directed into Slack channels. If you don’t... [...]

Anthony Ha says, “While businesses have plenty of options if they want to push their employees to do more social media sharing, CultureSphere founder and CEO Danny Gordon said the existing tools all take a similar “top down approach” — senior marketing and social media executives decide what’s worth sharing, then everyone else just shares it, or doesn’t. Gordon said CultureSphere, on the other hand, is “the first social media platform that’s 100 percent inspired by employees.” CultureSphere launched at the end of last month, and today it’s announcing the members of its... [...]