WhatsApp will see a massive change by 2020 with the introduction of adverts into the instant messaging app.

It’s been rumoured for a while and now WhatsApp looks set to finally bring adverts to its popular messaging app.

The Facebook-owned firm revealed the news during its annual Marking Summit in the Netherlands, with a rollout expected next year.

Photos of the way these new adverts will look have even been posted online with attendee Olivier Ponteville, giving fans a closer look at what’s to come.

The image, which can be seen on Twitter, shows how ads currently appear on Facebook and Instagram with a WhatsApp screenshot then revealed with a full-screen advert.

According to technology website BGR, once the message appears users will be able to “swipe up when an ad appears for more information about the product or service being advertised.”

Adverts in WhatsApp have been spoken about for a while but this is the first evidence that things are changing within the popular service.

How fans react is yet to been seen but it’s unlikely to go down well with its billions of users.

The bad news is that it seems there’s nothing that can be done to stop this new feature from arriving within the app.

It seems almost certain that there will be no way to switch them off or hide these paid-for messages which may prove to be hugely irritating.

Source: https://www.thenewsguru.com/technology/internet/article/massive-change-coming-whatsapp-introduction-ads/

Today Facebook Messenger has added a sorely missing feature – quoted replies. This allows you to reply to a specific message in a conversation, and is incredibly helpful when you’re engaged in chats that have a big range of topics. Using the new feature, the people you’re talking to will now know exactly what you were replying to with that “LOL”, for example.

This has been a feature in WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, for a very long time, and it’s always been sort of a baffling omission in Messenger. So it’s good to finally see it there too.

In order to quote a specific message, long tap on it and you’ll see a new Reply button to the right of the reaction emojis. Tap that, write your reply, and, just like in WhatsApp, the message you’re replying to will appear above your reply. Easy. This potentially means you’ll have less misunderstandings with your friends as to which message was referencing what.

The feature is rolling out now on both iOS and Android.

• Facebook finally plans to launch its “clear history” privacy feature in 2019.
• It was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg back in May 2018.
• CFO Dave Wehner talked about it at a conference on Tuesday and warned that it could damage Facebook’s capacity to target users with ads.

Facebook says its long-awaited “clear history” privacy feature will finally launch at some point in 2019 but it could prove problematic for its business.

Back in May 2018, as the Silicon Valley social networking giant battled with the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company was building a “clear history’ feature that would let users instruct the social network to delete its records of what websites it had visited and links it had clicked.

Since then, the company has said little, but at a Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, CFO Dave Wehner confirmed that it’s still in the works. And, he added, it could damage some of Facebook’s efforts to target users with adverts.

Wehner brought up the pending feature after being asked about privacy headwinds facing Facebook. “Later this year, we’ll be launching clear history which will also affect our ability to do third-party targeting for those who would clear history,” he said.

The exec added: “So I think broadly, it’s going to give us some headwinds in terms of being able to target as effectively as before.”

It’s not clear here if he’s specifically talking about the feature or the consequences of privacy issues more broadly; a Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for clarification.

“That being said, I think we’ve been able to navigate relatively well so far, and we’ve had some headwinds … we’ve been able to do better than expected in Q4, so I’d say the landscape is definitely changing in a direction that make sit more difficult for us to grow, and gives us a little less visibility in how this will actually play out,” he said.

The remarks indicate that the feature is, to some extent, a gamble: Facebook is betting that the goodwill the privacy measure is taking will offset any damage it does to its revenues.

In May 2018, as Facebook battled with the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social network was building a “clear history” feature that will let users instruct the social network to delete the info it holds on them. The extent to which it is a reactionary PR move was revealed by BuzzFeed News last week, when it reported that Zuckerberg decided to announce it in response to the Facebook’s mounting scandals, and that it “didn’t exist; it was barely an idea” at the time.

If Facebook has underestimated the popularity of the tool, of the damage it does to its ad targeting capabilities, it could be another self-inflicted black eye for the company.