Telegram adds ‘delete everywhere’ nuclear option — killing chat history

Telegram has added a feature that lets a user delete messages in one-to-one and/or group private chats, after the fact, and not only from their own inbox. The new ‘nuclear option’ delete feature allows a user to selectively delete their own messages and/or messages sent by any/all others in the chat. They don’t even have […]

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This YC-backed startup preps Chinese students for US data jobs

In recent years, data analysts have gone from optional to a career that holds great promise, but demand for quantitative skills applied in business decisions has raced ahead of supply as college curriculum often lags behind the fast-changing workplace. CareerTu, a New York-based startup launched by a former marketing manager at Amazon, aims to close […]

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Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

Messaging platform Telegram claims to have had a surge in signups during a period of downtime for Facebook’s rival messaging services. In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov’s just wrote: “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” It’s probably not a coincidence that […]

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Google will bring its Assistant to Android Messages

It’s only been a few weeks since Google brought the Assistant to Google Maps to help you reply to messages, play music and more. This feature first launched in English and will soon start rolling out to all Assistant phone languages. In addition, Google also today announced that the Assistant will come to Android Messages, […]

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Rakuten’s Viber chat app plans to charge to operate chatbots in controversial move

Viber, the messaging app down by Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten, is poised to implement a controversial new strategy that will see it charge companies that run chatbots on its platform. The conventional wisdom is to work with content companies to help bring users to messaging platforms and keep them engaged but Viber, which has struggled […]

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Skype can now blur the background during video calls

Thanks to the rise of WhatsApp and other free calling and messaging apps, Skype is no longer the go-to service it once was for many people. But the company just added a new feature which might raise its appeal among users. The Microsoft-owned service’s latest addition is a screen-blurring feature designed to obscure your messy room […]

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Facebook warned over privacy risks of merging messaging platforms

Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in Europe has asked the company for an “urgent briefing” regarding plans to integrate the underlying infrastructure of its three social messaging platforms. In a statement posted to its website late last week the Irish Data Protection Commission writes: “Previous proposals to share data between Facebook companies have given rise […]

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Everything you need to know about Facebook, Google’s app scandal

Facebook and Google landed in hot water with Apple this week after two investigations by TechCrunch revealed the misuse of internal-only certificates — leading to their revocation, which led to a day of downtime at the two tech giants. Confused about what happened? Here’s everything you need to know. How did all this start, and […]

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Facebook to encrypt Instagram messages ahead of integration with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger

Facebook is planning to roll out end-to-end encryption for Instagram messages, as part of a broader integration effort across company’s messaging platforms, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. First reported by The New York Times, the social media giant said reworking the underlying infrastructure of its three messaging apps to allow users to talk to each other more easily. […]

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TikTok is giving China a video chat alternative to WeChat

ByteDance, the world’s most-valued startup, just launched a new social media product under its Douyin brand in what many people see as a serious attempt to challenge WeChat. Tencent has long dominated China’s social networking space with WeChat and QQ. WeChat claims to have one billion monthly active users worldwide, most of whom are in China. […]

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Google is killing off Allo, its latest messaging app flop

It’s official: Google is killing off Allo. The messaging app was only launched in September 2016 but it was pretty much flawed from the word go with limited usage. Google was, once again, painfully late to the messaging game. The company said it had ceased work on the service earlier this year, and now it has announced […]

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