Meta Blue check marks go on sale✔️

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Good Afternoon: Did you love the long weekend? 1 in 6 employees would never return to a 5-day work week, according to a recent study in UK.

In today's edition:

• Meta introduces Blue check mark Verification service.

• Microsoft’s availability deal for Call of Duty is now official.

• Roblox’s new AI tool.

Reading time is 4 minutes. Let’s dive in!

Main Thing ☕️

Meta's Blue Verified check marks go on sale!

What: Meta is introducing a monthly subscription service that allows users to purchase blue badges that mark them as verified. Once reserved for celebrities and high-profile people, the blue check mark is now available to every one.

Key points:

• The service, available on both Instagram and Facebook, will offer a blue check mark, higher visibility and reach along with better customer support

• Subscription will cost ~$12/mo on the web and ~$15/mo on mobile.

• Unlike Twitter, Meta will need to see your government-issued ID in order to verify your account.

Zoom out: Meta is selling the service to increase 'authenticity and security' and will add a new revenue stream as its advertising growth slows. Verified users will have increased visibility and reach, aka, you no longer have to game the content algorithm, you could just pay!

Tech Roundup

Microsoft: The 10-year pact to make 'Call of Duty' accessible to Nintendo's Switch is now official. The new versions of game will be released at the same time on Switch with full feature and content parity. This deal is an important step to convince regulators to allow its $68.7B acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Twitter: Two-factor authentication (2FA) will only be available to accounts that pay for twitter's Blue subscription! 2FA, even with all its flaws, is significantly better for security of accounts than a simple username-password combination. The policy will take effect on March 20.

Bing: Microsoft is setting new limitations on Bing AI chatbot after nearly two weeks of letting Bing run wild! The chatbot will be capped at 50 chat turns per day and 5 chat turns per session, in effort to prevent Bing going into 'Sydney' mode.

Apple: Google has been paying Apple a portion of search revenue generated by people using Google Chrome on iOS, according a new report. Google's deal with Apple began at $1B per year and reached as high as $15B in 2021!

Roblox: Game generation using AI is here. Roblox created a new tool to let anyone create items such as buildings, avatars and change in-game appearance and behavior using simple text language. Under the hood, the tool uses generative AI to translate user's text-instructions into code to change the behavior.

Quick Bites

• Go: Human player defeated a top-ranked AI system at the board game Go!

• Section 230: Hearing starts this week in US Supreme court challenging tech platform's liability for user generated content.

• $63,000: Selling price for a first-generation factory sealed iPhone in auction. Check your closets.

Watercooler