Keeping a Facebook business page was about to come with a much bigger claim on your website’s content. Meta has paused that change indefinitely, which buys business owners some breathing room.
Meta pauses its website scraping terms
Meta’s proposed commercial terms are on hold, and the company says its existing terms remain in effect. The changes were originally scheduled for October 30, then pushed to November 20.
For anyone maintaining a Facebook page for work, this reached well beyond what you post there. Ars Technica’s analysis found that keeping a business page would require allowing Meta to crawl linked external websites, with no opt-out. Publishers would even have to provide test credentials so Meta’s bots could get past paywalls. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the broad language could permit extensive collection for AI training.
A welcome pause, in my book. This matters even if you never touch an AI tool: the proposed permission was attached to a business account you might already depend on.
Meta says it is continuing discussions with stakeholders. It also says its crawling practices remain unchanged and website owners can still signal crawling preferences through robots.txt, the file that tells automated visitors what they may access. Meta has given no replacement implementation date.
Spaces gives Muse a project room
Spaces adds dedicated places inside Meta’s Muse interface for ongoing projects. Meta says you can describe an idea in chat and Muse will build a tracker, planner or project board.
If you already use Muse, this is relevant when a task needs a place you can return to, such as an event tracker. Meta says connected apps can keep a Space updated in the background, including changes to concert dates, prices or savings progress. That makes the connected-app behavior the part to look at before deciding whether it fits your work.
Mark Zuckerberg says he has made an event tracker, a BBQ game and a home control dashboard. During Meta’s October earnings call, he said Muse had reached 10 million users in the U.S. and Canada.
GitHub coding moves into team chat
@GitHub in Slack and Teams became generally available November 6. GitHub says teams can investigate bugs, create issues, implement changes and open pull requests, the proposed code changes someone reviews before accepting them, without leaving the conversation.
This is for readers whose work already involves a GitHub project, including operators coordinating changes with a developer. In Teams, Canvas lets participants review implementation plans, code changes and previews alongside the discussion.
GitHub says the integration now identifies the repository from a message without making you select it again. Issues and pull requests also identify the person who started the work with “Created from a Slack/Teams conversation with @username.”
Also
- Shorter agent-written descriptions. Simon Willison now puts a human-curated introduction above a collapsible section containing the full agent-written pull request description.
- AI speeding up AI research. After an 11-week investigation inside Anthropic, METR estimates its models are improving roughly twice as quickly as a year ago.
- A cooking assistant’s butter mix-up. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy found NYT Cooking’s assistant gave her a modified recipe’s butter quantity when she was making the original.
- Speech in 32MB. Underdog says its downloadable Woof speech-generation model can run on most devices without an internet connection.
Pass it on