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**BREAKING NEWS**
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Hello, geeks! 👋
I woke up this morning to the rumour about Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom being approached by TikTok to be its next CEO… If there is ever to be a sequel to The Social Network movie, that would make for an epic plot twist!
Anyway…
Earlier this week, Facebook held its annual AR / VR event (Facebook Connect). Lots of geeky, cool new bits of hardware were revealed, including Oculus Quest 2 and a preview of Facebook’s AR glasses. Facebook REALLY wants to own and dominate the AR / VR space, much like Apple achieved with iPhone, its App Store, and Apple Pay. Facebook is well placed to do this right now, however, Apple’s also rumoured to be working on its own AR device which we may hear more about in the year ahead. Watch this space.
As for the big TikTok vs. Trump farce… See BREAKING NEWS above. I’ve just had to rewrite bits of today’s newsletter literally minutes before I was about to hit ‘Send’ when I spotted today’s significant developments. More analysis on Trump’s decision to block downloads of TikTok in the U.S from Sunday can be found below.
For the people asking me what I thought about the Netflix documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’: Mostly that it oversimplified the complexities of the issues it was highlighting, and placing a lot of blame for a lot of problems at the doors of Facebook and other big tech companies. I have no doubt it felt like a bit of an eye opener for some, but for tech savvy or geekier types, much of it was more a reminder of what we already knew or suspected. I enjoyed watching it, but I did not leave feeling enlightened or woke by the points it was trying to hammer home.
Right, let’s dig into this week’s big stories and another fresh batch of new tools and features for you lovely lot to go play with. 👇
— Matt