This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection of previous columns.
Facebook will let you enjoy the Reels short video format whether you like it or not.
The bite-sized and repetitive videos started on Instagram in 2020 as a straight copy of TikTok, the most popular app then and now. If you haven’t noticed Reels yet, you will soon.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said this week it would show Reels in more places in its apps. Roles also take prime real estate at the top of the screen when people open the Facebook app. We may soon see reels of used cars listed on the Facebook version of Craigslist.
Pushing roles into our eyeholes is a little sad, a little brilliant — and worth looking at as a test of Facebook’s ability to continue popularizing itself. Leveraging success to become more successful is how dominant companies win – and it has worked for Facebook before – but it’s also how dominant companies lose.
Facebook may be the most interesting technology story to watch in 2022. The company may be on the cusp of the last days of an empire or about to reinvent itself and become even more popular and wealthy.
We may not want to admit it, but the fate of Facebook and its strategies affects us all. This company’s choices about which features to prioritize affect how billions of people interact with each other, the ways companies reach their customers, and the appearance of the rest of the Internet.
Reels is an essential part of Facebook’s strategy to confront the company’s worst fears of losing its appeal to young people and shrinking into irrelevance. Facebook wants some of that TikTok cool and has created its own version of that app for Instagram.
It’s not clear if Reels is a particularly effective copycat of TikTok, but that might not matter.
Facebook has said that Reels is catching on and that people who use its apps spend more time on the videos than almost anything else. The company expanded Reels from Instagram to the Facebook app and now to more places in those apps and in more countries. The company is also experimenting with financial incentives to force more professional Internet entertainers to create Reels.
We can’t really be sure how popular Reels are or why. Do people cling to Reels because they like them, or because they’re just there? Google recently said that videos from its own version of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, are viewed 15 billion times a day. The number is so great that I didn’t believe it at first, but I should have. Google has billions of users and that is a valuable asset to attract attention to new things.
The Facebook versions of TikTok, Zoom, or Nextdoor may not be great, but the company has many ways to encourage the billions of people who use its apps to try them. The company can see what people seem to like and dislike, tinker and keep making a new product better – and inevitably – until it catches on.
That’s pretty much what Facebook did about five years ago with Stories, the copy of the most popular feature on Snapchat. Facebook experimented with the video and photo chronicles of people’s days on Instagram and made them prominent in the company’s apps, and they won.
The playbook for Reels seems almost identical, and Facebook executives have essentially said to investors, Hey, we’ve made Stories catch on and we’ll do it with Reels too. Putting its power behind new products is not foolproof for Facebook. This isn’t even the company’s first attempt at copying TikTok.
Following the leads of other tech companies doesn’t make Facebook inventive, though it may not matter. Silicon Valley’s history is marked by companies that didn’t necessarily make a product first or best, but made it the greatest.
But the recent rise of younger companies like TikTok and e-commerce star Shopify may be proof that inventive startups can take advantage of unwieldy tech superpowers.
That’s what makes Facebook so appealing to watch. A Big Tech superpower may be using all its strength to stay on top, or it may wither for us.
Tip of the week
Automate your way to energy savings
Brian X. Chen, consumer technology columnist for DailyExpertNews, has helpful ways to cut your electric bill — and perhaps force yourself to stop mindlessly browsing your laptop.
For a recent column, I tested energy-saving technology to combat rising gas and electricity bills. I came to the conclusion that appliances like the Nest thermostat were helpful, but did less to lower my home energy bill than old-fashioned improvements like installing proper insulation and sealing air leaks.
Still, anything you can do to avoid wasting energy is worth it. One way to make it easier is to set a schedule to turn off electrical appliances in your home so that they use less power.
Some believe that putting a computer to sleep saves more power than turning it off due to the amount of power it takes to turn it back on. But that’s a myth: The Department of Energy recommends turning the device off if you won’t be using it for more than two hours.
Here’s how to do this using a Mac computer, a Windows PC, and a light switch.
On a Mac, you can program the computer to turn off at a specific time each day. I try to be out of work before dinner, so I opened the computer’s System Preferences app, found the option for ‘Power Saver’, then clicked ‘Battery’ and ‘Schedule’. There I checked the box to shut down my computer at 6pm every day
If you want to schedule the lights to go out, you can buy an internet-connected lighting product, such as TP-Link’s Kasa smart light switch. TP-Link’s app has settings to turn the lights on and off at certain hours.
Before we go…
The new weapons of war: As Russia prepared to attack Ukraine, cyber-attacks took the websites of a number of Ukrainian government agencies and banks offline. Researchers too said that they discovered malicious software that erases data on hundreds of computers in Ukraine.
Related: Russian companies can use cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to circumvent international bans on financial transactions intended to punish Russia for invading Ukraine, my colleagues Emily Flitter and David Yaffe-Bellany report. Also, the prices of cryptocurrencies fell on Thursday. When the world is unstable, investors tend to sell assets that are considered high risk.
“Anything uncomfortable and potentially harmful on the Internet can feel so much more powerful in virtual reality,” said Naomi Nix, a Bloomberg News writer, after she had a disturbing encounter with Facebook’s Quest virtual reality headset.
Football teams turn to the geeks: My colleague Rory Smith writes that a German football team’s silent hiring of a data scientist shows that the sport is embracing data analytics to assess players’ skills.
Hug for this
It is painful to watch the war in Ukraine unravel. If you need a dose of joy, especially today, I can recommend staring at these glorious photos of the pug celebrity Noodle wearing a colorful sweater. They’re from a few months ago, but I’m fine with that.
