Facebook Plans To Turn Messenger Into A Platform

Next week at its F8 developer conference, Facebook will announce new ways for third parties to offer experiences through its Messenger app, according to multiple sources. Facebook hopes to make Messenger more useful, after seeing Asia’s chat apps WeChat and Line succeed as platforms that go beyond just texting with friends.

At first, Facebook will focus on how third parties can build ways for content and information to flow through Messenger. Depending on the success of the early experiments, Facebook may then mull bringing more utilities to Messenger.

While the Messenger platform is said to be a major part of F8 by all the sources, it’s unclear exactly what form the third-party integrations will take. Considering what WeChat and Line have done, there are plenty of opportunities including ways for businesses to communicate or share content directly with users, or options for richer friend-to-friend content sharing.

The platform is likely to start slow, with Facebook working with preferred partners, but it may eventually open to more developers. Facebook declined to comment on this story.
Avoiding Spam

Facebook is looking to recreate the best parts of its earlier web platform efforts without repeating its mistakes.

Facebook’s web canvas thrived with games, as it let users quickly bring their identity and friends to third-party experiences. And its Open Graph protocol connected people’s apps back to their Facebook profiles. Both were popular because they helped developers find an interested audience. That’s something especially tough now in the mobile era, as the app stores have become highly competitive and overcrowded.


Facebook Game Spam, circa 2010

The problem was that the web platform became so overrun with game spam that Facebook had to reduce its virality. Eventually, it withered as engagement shifted to phones during a time when Facebook was confused and slow moving on mobile. Open Graph got a rotten reputation for over-sharing, as it auto-published news, music and video consumption to the News Feed Ticker.

Learning from those experiences, Facebook is likely to be careful not to let spam slip into its relatively pristine Messenger app.
Inspired By Asia’s Monolithic Chat Apps

Until now, Messenger has been almost entirely a Facebook experience. Websites can integrate a Send button that lets users send the URL privately to a friend. But otherwise, Messenger focuses on letting users send and receive texts, phone calls, photos, videos, stickers, voice clips and money, all through Facebook’s own systems.

Facebook subtly hinted new developer capabilities for its chat app would be in store for F8, as it told me that Messenger would have announcements at the conference. And Messenger head David Marcus told Wired last year that he’s intrigued by how businesses and people communicate directly, citing the poor experience many have with touch-tone phone numbers and airline customer service. Facebook previously offered a little-known way for users to send private messages to Facebook business Page admins.

For Messenger’s platform, Facebook is said to have eyed Line and WeChat. They were pioneers in using their frequently used instant messaging apps as the centers of mobile interfaces that act as monolithic portals. Snapchat is another messaging app that’s recently explored a platform approach.



Line’s platform page

Japanese messenger Line includes a “More” tab with access to a Sticker Shop for buying premium emoji to share through Line, Line Pay for making quick transactions in brick-and-mortar stores, and featured collections of Line companion apps and games. Those apps range from homemade emoji makers that let you send your face to friends, Line Toss for photo sharing, Line Brush for drawing, Line Card for sending greeting cards, Line Camera for making collages, B612 for jazzing up selfies, and Line WebToon for reading manga.


Snapchat Discover

Line also lets users follow Official Accounts that let them receive content directly from celebrities, entertainment properties, news organizations, and brands like Paul McCartney, The Walking Dead, Manchester United, and the BBC. Compared to the constant barrage of posts to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, Line Official Accounts are designed for lower-volume, higher-signal, direct communication with fans.

Snapchat has pursued a premium, glossy content strategy with its Discover page. Major media outlets like Comedy Central, CNN, Vice and ESPN can offer up Snap-formatted photos, articles, and videos with interstitial ads. Meanwhile, WhatsApp has seen its Send buttons drive massive traffic for media properties by letting users push URLs to friends through WhatsApp messages.

Facebook could take inspiration from any of these apps. An option would be for Facebook to let third-parties help people create and share richer content like embellished photos through Messenger. Facebook already released its own Stickered For Messenger companion app for slapping stickers on photos and sending them to friends.

Alternatively, Facebook could allow users to follow or visit official accounts. That might help them stay current with things they love that might get lost in the News Feed, or communicate with businesses directly in a way that’s more efficient than a phone call. One more possibility is that Facebook might try to make it easier for web and mobile content properties to gain viral traffic via Messenger. Facebook’s own News Feed could get better ways for people to push stories they see to Messenger.


Facebook Stickered For Messenger

China’s WeChat platform has centered more around commerce. Users can buy movie tickets, pay for taxis and more through the messaging app.

While content is said to be the focus of Facebook’s initial Messenger platform efforts, it could expand into commerce eventually if third-party experiences gain traction. Just this week, Facebook added a way to make freefriend-to-friend payments through Messengerby adding a debit card. With a native payment interface already in Messenger, it would be easier for Facebook to build in more commerce opportunities.


China’s WeChat offers commerce experiences in its app. Via Benedict Evans

With well over 500 million users, Facebook Messenger has become one of the most popular apps in the world. While Facebook’s main app is essentially a version of its website ported to the small screen, Messenger was built for mobile. Facebook is something you lazily browse with little intent, whereas Messenger is designed for taking action and getting things done. For some around the world, Messenger has become the primary way they use Facebook. Improving content inside it could make sense for users who aren’t glued to the News Feed.

Facebook’s mission for Messenger as of late has been to make it “more useful, expressive and delightful,” according to its payments feature’s product manager Steve Davis. Now it’s ready to ask for some help from outside the walls of 1 Hacker Way.

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Medium Now Lets You Write Posts From Its iOS App

Popular blogging platform and publisherMedium has announced that the latest update to its iOS app will finally let users compose posts from their iPhone or iPad.

It’s a feature that many fans of the platisher (publorm?) have been begging the company for from day one. It’s landing in the wake of another recent update, which let you start writing an outline or short post in an editor located at the top of the page. Both changes encourage more writing by lowering the bar for how much work is “expected from” the person writing a post.


In fact, one of the use cases most frequently mentioned with regards to a theoretical (until this point) compose feature in the mobile app is that it could be used in place of the infamous “tweetstorms” plaguing Twitter since Marc Andreessen introduced them when he joined the service in early 2014.

Instead of manually stringing together a series of tweets to make a larger point, one could jump into Medium (which is already built on Twitter identities), put 150-250 words together, and quickly come back to Twitter with a beautifully formatted post.

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This Box Bruteforces Your iPhone PIN Without Triggering The 10-Guess Limit

A simple PIN might keep your iPhone safe from the prying hands of a curious toddler or a drunk friend. But slap that thing in a robot that exists for no reason but to try every possible PIN one-by-one, and it’ll crack it right open.

These machines have existed for a while, but this one is particularly crazy: if you’ve got your iPhone set to clear all of its data after 10 failed guesses, it’ll try to exploit its way past that.

Note the “try” in that last sentence: while we’re still waiting on confirmation from Apple on this one, there’s a good chance that the trickery at play here only works if you’re on a build of iOS older than iOS 8.1.1 (Shipped November 2014). Apple’s notes for 8.1.1mention patching a bug (CVE-2014-4451) that could circumvent the “the maximum number of failed passcode attempts”; it’s not clear if that’s the same bug at play here, though it seems likely.

Here’s the device in use, via MDSec, who was able to obtain the bruteforcer for around $300:







It can be a bit hard to tell what’s going on in the video, so here’s what you’re looking at:
On the left is the iPhone, splayed open for direct access to its internals
On the right is the bruteforcing box.
The iPhone’s internal battery appears to be disconnected, giving the bruteforce box the ability to cut the iPhone’s power instantly
Each time the device makes a guess, it sends it to the iPhone over USB. (It makes its first guess in the video above at 0:30)
If the guess fails, an optical sensor strapped to the screen recognizes it, and…
In a split second, the bruteforce box cuts the power and forces the iPhone to shut down before it can write the failed attempt to memory.
The iPhone resets, and the box is free to try again.
When the optical sensor detects a successful entry (like the one at 1:53 in the video above), the box stops guessing, logs the correct PIN, and starts beeping to get the attention of whoever was using it.

Because each failed attempt requires a reset, each run takes roughly 44 seconds. If it fails until the very last try on a 4-digit password, that’s 4.5 days of bruteforcing. That’s not exactly Hollywood spy movie speed hackery — but if they’ve outright stolen your phone and really want to see what’s inside, it’s plenty quick.

So, how can you protect your device from this?
Update. If this isn’t fixed in iOS 8.1.1 or 8.2 (and it seems likely that it is), you can bet that Apple is rushing to patch this one now that this video is floating around.
Use a longer password. As JWZ points out: at 44 seconds per try, a 4-digit pin take up to 4 1/2 days to crack. A 7-digit pin takes up to 12 years.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the status of the exploit at play in the video, but have yet to hear back.

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Apple Researching Taptic Feedback For Keyboards With No Physical Keys

Apple has a new patent application that modifies one of their existing inventions based on one of their newly announced techs: Taptics. The application, published by the USPTO today (via Patently Apple) features a virtual keyboard design that resembles the current Magic Trackpad accessory in its construction, with a smooth piece of aluminum used instead of physical buttons. Virtual buttons without touch-based input are used instead, and Apple employs haptics to provide feedback for key presses.

Its own taptic version of haptic feedback could theoretically be used in the way it’s employed with the new Force Touch trackpadApple has created for its MacBook and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. This would allow users to get the sensation that they were actually pressing physical keys, even though the keyboard itself would have no mechanical movement, which would answer one of the biggest criticisms users have of virtual keyboards.

Apple could also then offer up user customizations for the input device, configurable via software, the way it has on the Force Touch trackpad. You might be able to select different “depth” of key press sensations, depending on preference, or use Force Touch (secondary, deeper presses) to activate features like special characters, accents for other languages, or for triggering function keys.


Virtual input for things like standalone or MacBook keyboards has a lot in the way of potential benefits – imagine a keyboard that never needs dusting, or even thinner MacBooks thanks to the elimination of the need to build-in key travel. It’s also just less mechanically complex, which should make for longer life without failure. Apple’s recent advances with taptics could finally mean that this kind of keyboard is possible without the drawbacks of eliminating the physical typing sensation, which would differentiate it from other efforts to do the same.

We’ve already seen many predict that taptics will come to the iPhone and iPad next, but Apple’s tech is also a logical next step for its hardware keyboards, too.

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Apple Researching Taptic Feedback For Keyboards With No Physical Keys

Apple has a new patent application that modifies one of their existing inventions based on one of their newly announced techs: Taptics. The application, published by the USPTO today (via Patently Apple) features a virtual keyboard design that resembles the current Magic Trackpad accessory in its construction, with a smooth piece of aluminum used instead of physical buttons. Virtual buttons without touch-based input are used instead, and Apple employs haptics to provide feedback for key presses.

Its own taptic version of haptic feedback could theoretically be used in the way it’s employed with the new Force Touch trackpadApple has created for its MacBook and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. This would allow users to get the sensation that they were actually pressing physical keys, even though the keyboard itself would have no mechanical movement, which would answer one of the biggest criticisms users have of virtual keyboards.

Apple could also then offer up user customizations for the input device, configurable via software, the way it has on the Force Touch trackpad. You might be able to select different “depth” of key press sensations, depending on preference, or use Force Touch (secondary, deeper presses) to activate features like special characters, accents for other languages, or for triggering function keys.

Virtual input for things like standalone or MacBook keyboards has a lot in the way of potential benefits – imagine a keyboard that never needs dusting, or even thinner MacBooks thanks to the elimination of the need to build-in key travel. It’s also just less mechanically complex, which should make for longer life without failure. Apple’s recent advances with taptics could finally mean that this kind of keyboard is possible without the drawbacks of eliminating the physical typing sensation, which would differentiate it from other efforts to do the same.

We’ve already seen many predict that taptics will come to the iPhone and iPad next, but Apple’s tech is also a logical next step for its hardware keyboards, too.

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Quid Raises $39M More To Visualize Complex Ideas

Quid just announced that it has raised $39 million Series D.

Quid describes itself as “the artificial intelligence company that accelerates research and insights to address the world’s most complex issues.” More specifically it points to its ability to process millions of documents and create a visual map of the results — for example helping a business visualize the online response to a product launch.

The company, by the way, was once the owner of what we called the most pretentious startup website ever — by now, though the typeface descriptions have now been replaced with a marketing pitch for the technology, and quotes from customers like Hyundai, Microsoft, and the Boston Consulting Group.

When we wrote about the company back in 2010, it was focused on tracking emerging technologies, but it seems to have broadened its scope since then. Quid now says it has signed up 80 clients since launching the current platform at the beginning of last year.

The new funding was led by Liberty Interactive Corporation, with participation from ARTIS Ventures, Buchanan Investments, Subtraction Capital, Tiger Partners, Thomas H. Lee Limited Family Partnership II, Quid board member Michael Patsalos-Fox and Quid chairman Charles Lho.

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Tesla Says It Will Now Be “Impossible To Run Out Of Range Unintentionally” In A Model S

A few days ago, Elon Musk pledged to “end range anxiety” for Model S owners by way of an over-the-air software update.

Today, he’s detailed how he plans to do that.

The short version: the Model S will now run constant calculations (regardless of whether or not you’re using the built in turn-by-turn system) on how far you are from a supercharger.

If you are about to drive too far from a supercharger to make it back to one, the car will warn you. “This makes it effectively impossible for a driver to run out of range unintentionally”, says Musk. “You’ll have to confirm you want to, actually. Twice.”

The Model S already tries to estimate how much charge you’ve got left on your battery; it’ll also tell you how far you are from the nearest supercharger. This update really just ties those two points together, as well as some outside data, to put a big ol’ warning sign up when you’re about to drive just a littletoo far.

The system will also now have a built-in trip planner, which allows you to route long distance trips with superchargers in mind. The range estimator here will factor in things like the additional energy needed for climbing up windy mountain passes, as well as real-time data like high-wind speed.

Story developing

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