Earlier this year, TikTok was spotted testing a new Q&A feature that would allow creators to more directly respond to their audience’s questions using either text or video. Today, the company has announced the feature is now available to all users globally.

Facebook today announced an AI model called SEER, which stands for SElf-supERvised trained on a billion images that ostensibly achieves state-of-the-art results on a range of computer vision benchmarks. Unlike most computer vision models, which learn from labeled datasets, Facebook’s generates labels from data by exposing the relationships between the data’s parts — a step believed to be critical to someday achieving human-level intelligence.

After learning from these images, Seer correctly identified and categorized the dominant object in photos with an accuracy rate of 84.2%. Seer outperformed the best existing self-supervised systems by one percentage point, according to the study.

The future of AI lies in crafting systems that can make inferences from whatever information they’re given without relying on annotated datasets. Provided text, images, or another type of data, an AI system would ideally be able to recognize objects in a photo, interpret text, or perform any of the countless other tasks asked of it.

Google announced an important change in how the PageSpeed Insights tools gather information. The change is a switch to using the http/2 protocol for connecting to a web page. HTTP/2 allows faster transfer of data. That in turn improved the PageSpeed Insights scores across all metrics. The only hangup is if your server does not support HTTP/2, you can test your site here.

Google My Business has upgraded the new performance report, which was an upgrade from the Insights report, to add a section for people who viewed your business profile. This new section shows you how people found your local listing, either on desktop or mobile and either through Google Search or Google Maps.

This report for platform and device breakdown rolled out as a beta in late January, if you log into the insights panel you will have an option to See new profile performance to see this new report.

In the European Union and Switzerland, you may be required by local law to display unit pricing information for applicable products. For example, if you sell perfume in this region, it is required to provide the price per 10 milliliters in your ad or listing. Beginning in March 2021, we will show “Missing potentially required value” warnings when the unit_pricing_measure attribute is missing for products for which you may be required to display the price per unit. If a required attribute is omitted, your product(s) may be legally liable for non-compliance with applicable law.

If you receive this warning, either provide the missing attribute with a valid value or verify that your product is compliant without the attribute.

Google is rolling out two new features to the Google Ads mobile app to help you monitor and improve performance in real time.

account updates with custom notifications – you can now set up custom notifications. This makes it easy for you to get real time notifications about the performance and status changes you care about.

performance insights – you’ll receive a real-time notification if there’s a significant performance change, and an explanation describing why the change occurred. You may also see a recommendation to help you resolve the issue.

If rich results aren’t shown in the SERPs, and it’s set up correctly from a technical POV, then it is possible that Google’s quality algorithms are not 100% happy with the website according to Google’s John Mueller.

Gannett, which owns USA TODAY and more than 250 other daily publications as well as hundreds of weeklies, reached the deal with Snapchat parent company, Snap Inc., to sell the ads to its local business clients. Gannett’s LOCALiQ division, which provides digital marketing services, will offer Snap ads to its more than 100,000 small business clients.

Snap has been increasing its emphasis on local business advertising since it launched an initiative called Promote Local Place in June 2020. The program is aimed at helping Snapchat users connect with nearby businesses.

Arizona lawmakers recently won a battle against Apple in their bid to keep Apple and Google’s seemingly monopolistic practices in check. The landmark legislation prevents these companies from forcing developers to use their own payments system and also prevents retaliation if developers ask users to use an alternate payments system.

Arizona lawmakers still have two steps before the bill turned into law, the first of which requires the Senate to pass the bill which will then be sent to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey.

Reportedly, Apple and Google have already begun lobbying against the bill. As reported by Protocol, Apple tapped its own lobbyist, Rod Diridon, to begin lobbying in Arizona. The company also hired Kirk Adams who is the former chief of staff of Gov. Doug Ducey to negotiate with Arizona State Rep. Regina Cobb on its behalf.

Cloudflare Pages is a cloud platform for deploying and hosting JAMstack websites. The product could compete directly with Netlify and Vercel, two cloud hosting companies that let you build and deploy sites using Jamstack frameworks like Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Vue.js, Next.js, etc.

By default, Cloudflare gives you a your-website-name.pages.dev site but you can bring your own domain as well. The service was launched in beta to limited users late last year and now everyone has access to it.

If you are looking to up your Python game perhaps this Udemy course might help, get it for free.

What you’ll learn

• Automate tasks on their computer by writing simple Python programs.
• Write programs that can do text pattern recognition with “regular expressions”.
• Programmatically generate and update Excel spreadsheets.
• Parse PDFs and Word documents.
• Crawl web sites and pull information from online sources.
• Write programs that send out email notifications.
• Use Python’s debugging tools to quickly figure out bugs in your code.
• Programmatically control the mouse and keyboard to click and type for you.

Disclosure: This is an affiliate link and I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post, at no cost to you.

Now you can grant access to your Instagram messages for accounts who have access to Facebook Pages or Facebook Business Suite. This is relevant if you have more people in the team and if you want them to help with your incoming messages.

Microsoft has just announced several updates to their Bing Search Engine that make the search experience more visually immersive. Here is a quick recap:

• an updated recipes experience that extracts and aggregates the most relevant recipes content and presents it in a single view on the search results page. eg: fish tacos recipes
• this experience also applies to  home improvement or for creative projects eg: DIY coffee table . They have also integrated visual search into the experience, so you can quickly search using an image. For example, in the “DIY coffee table” result, you may see wicker baskets that fit the table’s look and feel. With just a click, you’ll get image results of similar-looking items, and can directly click off to retailer sites to purchase a particular basket if you’re sold on it.
• updates to our carousel experiences, with intuitive hover-over experiences that can help you, for example, quickly organize your book or movie lists. eg: chef documentaries
• infographic-inspired experiences eg: “Kenya” or “giraffes”.
• upgraded local answers results (USA only) – you’re trying to stay close to home and want to be a tourist in your own hometown. Search for things like “things to do in Seattle” or “Eiffel Tower”, and you’ll get aggregated information from a variety of sources. Instead of just a single carousel of images, or just a text summary of one aspect of what you’ve searched for.

As a searcher, I think these are really great at least in the examples shown and for general queries, I think Bing can work well. For example, if I want to learn more about “giraffes” I think bings’ SERPs looks better BUT when I am looking for specific things Google is still king at surfacing relevant content so my default search engine will stay as Google.

TikTok users can opt-in to view + rate the appropriateness of ads for other users and help advertisers improve their ads. TikTok users who choose to participate are shown an endless feed of ads. It asks you to answer a single question survey about the ad.

TikTok is also showing some users new sponsored surveys

This one is for @verynetwork pic.twitter.com/HfuEEKcTpz

— 🟣 Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) March 4, 2021