By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
22.09.2023 - 17:05 / pcmag.com / Adam Mosseri
Remember when Facebook made a big deal about using your real name years ago? It's been so long that it might be hard to remember when usernames were king and real identities were hidden for privacy. Facebook is now walking that back, though not entirely, as it rolls out support for multiple profiles.
To be clear, Facebook says your main profile still needs to be your real identity: "Our longstanding policy on Account Integrity and Authentic Identity states that your main Facebook profile must be in the name you go by in everyday life — and this is not changing. You can choose any name for your additional profiles, but not for your main profile."
Yes, everything is fair game once you get past that main profile. And to some extent, that makes sense. You may want to keep your personal life and professional life separate, after all. Facebook's announcement showed someone with a personal profile under "Benta Othman" and a secondary account called "Bente Bakes." That's clear enough on which is which.
And in that scenario, you could easily share personal updates and photos with family while sharing the latest about your small business with customers. In that respect, it almost mirrors Pages, which—when set up correctly—can act similarly to personal profiles.
But there's nothing in Facebook's announcement to suggest you can't use a fake name for your additional profiles, and indeed, as quoted above, it's only holding you to a real name on the main profile. Facebook's suggestion for a secondary profile is one to interact with friends and another to interact with the "foodie scene you love." It's easy to imagine a second profile with a fake name for worse uses.
Each profile has its own notification and privacy settings, and when you create a new identity, it will start with defaults instead of inheriting your main profile's choices. And there are some limits on what you can do with the additional accounts to start. Dating, Marketplace, Professional Mode, and payments won't be available at launch.
Multiple profiles are rolling out globally now, and Facebook says it will reach everyone in the next few months.
Over on Meta's Threads, meanwhile, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri this week announced that the Twitter alternative now supports easy switching between accounts on mobile.
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By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
Life may be full of regrets, but if one of those regrets is that you decided to call your Baldur's Gate 3 character Bumfart the Third in a moment of weakness, there's some good news: the game's latest hotfix will finally let you change their ill-conceived name.
Baldur's Gate 3 hotfix nine is officially here, and it'll let you create an army of messed up Hirelings.
New World's first paid expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, has officially launched today, bringing the next chapter of the Amazon MMO to players.
New World's first paid expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, has officially launched today, bringing the next chapter of the Amazon MMO to players.
Creating playlists on Spotify seems simple enough, select a few songs from your favourite genres, give it a name, and voila! However, this isn't nearly the case. We've all spent hours making playlists for an upcoming party or a trip, painfully searching each song and then adding it to a new playlist. But what if the process was as simple as entering a few prompts and your playlist was ready to go? This may soon become a reality as Spotify is reportedly testing a new feature that lets you create playlists through artificial intelligence (AI) prompts.
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
For ages, we have been creating long playlists on CDs, phones, iPods, and whatnot, to share our favourite music with our loved ones. However, we never thought of listening to music together while they were away. Now sharing playlists and listening to music together will get easier with the new Spofity feature called “Jam.” This feature will enable users to tune in on the jamming session as they will be able to listen to music in real-time with their Long-distance friends or their close ones. Sounds amazing right? Know how the Spotify Jam feature will work.
Spotify has a new shared listening option for Premium users: Jam, which lets people contribute to a shared queue.
The campaign of Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is an intense, high-octane spy thriller, with plenty of twists and turns to keep you on your toes until the end. If that sounds like a bit too much for you to handle, CD Projekt has also offered an easy way to say “no, thank you” and leave it, for good.
Not that Bethesda ever left the limelight, but the Starfield and Elder Scrolls studio is the talk of the town at the moment. That could be why there’s a sale going on that allows you to purchase some games developed or published by the Maryland-based company.
Gone are the days when Facebook used to be a chaotic space where users would try and fit a dozen different things onto the same profile. Facebook is a diverse social media platform that caters to all the different needs of the members. Its features include text posts, photos, long videos, Reels, groups and communities, a marketplace, instant messaging, interest-specific pages, events, and more. These tools enable users to fully immerse themselves in different experiences as per their liking. However, it can often lead to a cluttered experience when a person is posting about new recipes, movie reviews, and basketball at the same time. It also can lead to chaotic experiences for their friends who may have connected to one of those interests. But now, Meta is letting users create multiple personal profiles in order to organize this experience.