Facebook launches Context, WhatsApp will offer 'stikers' and Google will remove notifications from Nearby | Technology
Three popular applications announced on Friday renewals to control false news, in the case of the new Facebook Context button; expand messaging possibilities, with the new stikers by WhatsApp; and avoid the spam with Google's Nearby utility.
Context arrives in Spain to offer users information about the authors of the publications and the links that appear in the news, with the aim of help assess the credibility of publications.
This tool debuted in the United States last April and this Friday is also available in Spain and in other countries such as France, Germany, India, Poland and Italy.
With the Context button, Facebook offers information about the publication and the writer, among which are aspects such as related articles on the same topic, data relating to the number of times the publication has been shared on Facebook, where it has been shared , and options to follow the author's page.
Facebook also uses the new button to show the entry to the author's Wikipedia, and if he does not have one he also informs about it to provide more information.
The button is located in the bottom right of the publications, and when you click on it, the information is displayed. Facebook launched Contexto with the aim that "people can decide for themselves what to read, what to trust and what to share", as the company explains in the article.
To these initial functions, we must add other features introduced after its launch, such as a snapshot of recent stories published by the author or information about whether a friend has shared the same publication. In September the age of the site or web domain was added as a visible element.
Stickers
The WhatsApp messaging application has announced the possibility of sending and receiving stickers, a way of expressing oneself through images with designs of the company and other artists and with support to add packages created by other developers.
They will be available in the course of the next weeks in Whatsapp, both in its version for Android devices and for iOS, as the company has advanced through an official publication.
This form of communication, aimed at expressing feelings, will initially reach the messaging application through packages of designs created both by WhatsApp itself and by a selection of creations by other artists.
To use the new creations, WhatsApp will introduce a new icon that allows you to choose between the available designs and add new packages.
Likewise, the service owned by Facebook has added support for packages of stickers of third parties that allow other developers to create these types of designs.
For this, WhatsApp has included a series of programming interfaces (APIs) with which it is possible to develop applications of stickers to add to WhatsApp that can be downloaded through the Play Store or the App Store.
Spam in Nearby
For its part, Google has announced that it will eliminate support for Nearby's notifications, the tool that offered users information about content and applications related to their nearby environment, due to the increase in notifications of spam sent through it, although it will maintain its programming interfaces for developers.
The company has reported this decision through a press release hosted on its developer blog. According to the document, the growing appearance of locally irrelevant notifications caused that the function did not comply with the level of quality pursued by Google defends offer to its users, so finally the support will be interrupted.
The Nearby notifications service will no longer be available on December 6, the day that notifications will stop working through the web like the Eddystone beacons. Both are types of notifications that provide information to users, the first offer the URL of a website while the second send contextualized information to the devices via Bluetooth.
Although the notifications are interrupted, Google communicates to the developers of 'apps' that the access to the panel of transmitters will continue in operation, to offer "experiences based on the proximity similar to the notifications of Nearby", which will be possible through applications that use the Google Proximity Beacons user programming interface (API).
Google created Nearby notifications in 2015, which were used as the company defends to "inform users about free WiFi in their surroundings, provide guides while they were in a museum and access the list of transit times at bus stops ", and introduced the Nearby service in 2016.
