Welcome back to our latest edition of Sunday Rundown #87 🙂 We share with you the latest digital marketing news!

Meta’s Twitter competitor app is set to be launched next month

Meta’s Twitter competitor is moving closer to launch. Selected creators are now being briefed on how Instagram’s text-based app – tentatively titled ‘Barcelona’ – will function.

As you can see in these images, shared by ICYMI’s Lia Haberman, the new app is essentially a simplified version of Twitter. It is more aligned with a chat-based feed.

That is deliberate because, over the last few years, more conversation on IG has switched to DMs. The main feed became a discovery platform, as users move away from public posting activity.

With this in mind, the new, separate app is designed to be like a giant group chat that anybody can join. This is similar to Twitter, in concept, but with a more Instagram-specific tilt.

“Users on apps [like Mastodon] will be able to search for, follow and interact with your profile and your content if you’re public, or if you’re private and approve them as followers. This allows you to reach new audiences with no added work. In addition, creators may be eligible to be recommended to people who don’t yet follow them.”

Meta

Google will disable third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users in Q1 2024

Google’s Privacy Sandbox aims to replace third-party cookies with a more privacy-conscious approach. This allows users to manage their interests and group them into cohorts based on similar browsing patterns. That is a major change for the online advertising industry. After years of talking about it and releasing various experiments, it is about to get real for the online advertising industry. Starting in early 2024, Google plans to migrate 1% of Chrome users to Privacy Sandbox and disable third-party cookies for them. Google’s plan to completely deprecate third-party cookies in the second half of 2024 remains on track.

In addition, with the launch of the Chrome 115 release in July, Google is making Privacy Sandbox’s relevance and measurement APIs generally available to all Chrome users, making it easy for developers to test these APIs with live traffic. Google doesn’t plan to make any significant changes to the API after this release.

Deprecating third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users doesn’t sound like it would have a major impact, but as Google’s Victor Wong, who leads product for Private Advertising Technology within Privacy Sandbox, told me, it will help developers assess their real-world readiness for the larger changes coming in late 2024. To get ready for this, developers will also be able to simulate their third-party cookie deprecation readiness starting in Q4 2023, when they’ll be able to test their solutions by moving a configurable percentage of their users to Privacy Sandbox.

Google boosts AI chatbot Bard with visual search, third-party plug-ins

More on the topic of Google, Google unveiled a slew of updates for its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard at its annual Google I/O developer conference on Wednesday, per a blog post, notably eliminating the waitlist for the tool and opening access to over 180 countries.

Forthcoming features include image-backed responses and a Google Lens integration allowing users to submit an image tied to text-based search prompts. Also in the pipeline is an integration with generative AI-backed Adobe Firefly to generate images from creative prompts.

Additional third-party plug-ins are in the works, including tie-ups with ZipRecruiter, Instacart, OpenTable, Kayak, Wolfram and Khan Academy. The new features arrive as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has garnered considerable attention in the marketplace.

Bonus links

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