TechCrunch Newsletters - Week in Review - Facebook's last stand

Saturday, October 23, 2021 • By Lucas Matney

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review!

Last week, I dug into what was really going on with the NFT craze. This week, we’re looking at the pivotal few days that Facebook has ahead of them.

If someone forwarded you this message, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny

the big thing

This very well might be Facebook’s last week ever…

Well, the corporate entity by that exact name I mean. Facebook, owner and operator of a suite of internet applications and virtual reality hardware products, has an awfully pivotal week ahead of it. The brand value tied to the product that started it all is in its death throes and, rather than dramatically revamping the Facebook platform itself, it appears the company is poised to revamp its own branding.

This week, The Verge reported that Facebook will announce a name change next week at its Facebook Connect AR/VR conference. I have not independently verified this, but given the percentage of bad press tied to the Facebook app compared to the company’s other products, it doesn’t seem surprising that they’d like to jettison some of that baggage from their core entity.

The company seems to have discovered that toxicity of its company name is leaking to its other products. This week, The Information reported that the “Hey Facebook” phrase that is used to summon its virtual assistant on its hardware devices is being phased out of future hardware due to low usage relative to other testing phrases according to a leaked memo.

How the company managed to let it get this far is one thing, but that story has been written in more detail elsewhere and I think typing that novella here might break the formatting of my newsletter entirely. What I’m interested in is how much worse things could get in the next few days before that change even (potentially) gets announced.

A barrage of press articles are set to be released in the next several days detailing what journalists have found in the documents leaked by the Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen. We already saw a handful in reports by the Wall Street Journal in recent weeks.

A pair of stories published Friday afternoon from NBC and The New York Times which appear to be the first releases. The NBC story details how researchers hired by Facebook built dummy accounts to track which directions the algorithm sent them, and they chronicled how one dummy account made for a Republican Christian woman with moderate tendencies was soon served recommendations to join QAnon groups. The New York Times piece digs into how the “Stop The Steal” campaign slipped through the cracks of Facebook’s emergency election safeguards.

Several more articles are poised to be released in the coming days across a number of publications digging into the trove of leaked documents.

After what will likely be an incredibly challenging several days for Facebook’s brand, they will assemble their most future-focused team at Connect and detail what the company’s path towards the “metaverse” looks like. In past years, Facebook has shown off new hardware or prototypes and detailed major software partnerships. We will likely see much of those same announcement types on Thursday when the AR/VR event kicks off, though I’d imagine there will be a heavier air hanging over the Facebook’s rhetoric as their public image continues to suffer setback after setback.

Whether or not Facebook — or perhaps soon the company formerly known as Facebook — chooses to respond to this saga by apologizing or showing defiance, one thing that’s clear is that we’ve seen this show before and it’s getting stale.

Shortcut puts the agile in Agile and the “can” in Kanban

Here are a few stories this week I think you should take a closer look at:

Apple turns it up a notch
Apple debuted its newest, most powerful Macbook Pros this week, dropping high-end 14-inch and 16-inch varietals with super-charged processors, redesigned internals and, oddly, an iPhone-like notch right on the screen.

It was a design move that sent the TechCrunch hardware team into a tizzy in our Slack group, with some defending the move and other wondering how on earth this made it through to a final production design. I generally fell in the latter camp. You can’t be a design-forward company that also occasionally makes some functional choices with egregiously dumb looks.

Would you scan your eyeball for a share of cryptocurrency?
This week, I wrote about a startup that is truly wild, a crypto company called Worldcoin, which is aiming to give everyone on the planet a share of their cryptocurrency, but in order to do so users need to get their iris scanned by one of the company’s proprietary scanners. It’s a weird concept with a bold goal, creating a system for ensuring every user on their service is a single unique human being.

I published my story this week, and the reaction from the tech community wasn’t very warm. Though the startup seems to have addressed a good deal of the potential privacy concerns, others wondered whether cryptocurrency startups are equipped to build a currency for normal human users in every corner of the world.

Apple’s app-tracking changes have screwed Snap’s growth
Many assumed that like most doomsday scenarios, the effects of the “Do Not Track” change in iOS would be less severe than anticipated, but that hasn’t been the case. On Thursday, Snap reported their quarterly earnings and missed revenue targets, specifically highlighting the Apple tracking changes as a central cause. Their stock tanked more than 20%.

Snap’s stock had been trading at a price well-above what many analysts felt was justifiable, so the crash this week was largely more of a return to economic reality rather than an outright collapse in investor faith. Nevertheless, the earnings miss signals both the everlasting heft of Apple’s power within the adtech ecosystem and Snap’s over-reliance on certain indicators to sell those ads.

Image Credits: Apple

added things

Some of my favorite reads from our newly-renamed TechCrunch+ subscription service this week:

The Automattic TC-1
“It’s hard to build a publishing empire, and it’s just as easy to lose one. Newspaper magnates were mostly replaced by broadcast moguls, first radio and then TV and cable, and now of course, they are all fighting against the social media tycoons and streaming impresarios who want to capture our attention. Each generation of media titans dies off and is replaced, just as each medium finds its niche only to be supplanted by something novel. So when it comes to Automattic, the leading commercial complement to the open-source WordPress publishing platform, time and longevity have a rather peculiar meaning in an industry littered with the gravestones of media sites of yore…”

Facebook’s next chapter just might make sense
“…I could never really figure out why Facebook spent heavily on VR when the market for virtual reality was still figuring its shit out. It felt extraneous, to a degree, when stacked next to the company’s product mix at the time. But contrary to my pessimism, the move may have actually been pretty brilliant from a strategic perspective…“

Inside Expensify’s IPO filing
“…The Portland, Oregon-based expense management company had a tough COVID-19 cycle. As we’ll see, COVID impacted the company’s growth rate as well as its retention metrics. But things have since turned around, fortunately….”