Peter Kafka, Recode:

Facebook built one of the most amazing money machines the world has ever seen. Then Apple came and threw a wrench in the gears.

That’s one of the narratives that sprang from last week’s news, when Facebook’s parent company Meta delivered an alarming earnings report to Wall Street, which promptly cut an astonishing $250 billion out of the company’s value in a single day — a 26 percent drop.

Obviously, the goal was better privacy, not a move against Facebook specifically. But Facebook did get hammered. But they are still healthy enough:

Facebook is still making an enormous amount of money from advertising — analyst Michael Nathanson estimates the company will generate $129 billion in ad revenue in 2022. But that would mean its ad business will only grow about 12 percent this year, compared to a 36 percent increase the previous year.

A specific sign of the drop:

Alex Austin, the CEO of Branch, a company that helps advertisers figure out how their campaigns are working: After Apple introduced its anti-tracking changes in the spring of 2021, advertisers who used Branch’s services to measure paid ads on iOS dropped by 20 percent.

And this, on the push to grow Facebook’s Marketplace Platform, with digital storefronts on Insta and Facebook:

Facebook can’t tell a shoe store if someone saw their ad on the app, then clicked through to the store’s site or app and bought something — but it can tell them if a Facebook user saw the ad on Facebook and then bought the shoes on Facebook.

Obviously, that depends on building traffic to Facebook and Instagram, having people view those platforms as a trusted shopping option.

Follow the headline link, click on dailydordle or freedordle. Both will display a Wordle-like word guessing setup, with two words being guessed in parallel.

Once you get one of the words (all green), that word will lock and you’ll be left working on the other word.

Nice twist.

Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider:

A nursing student in Australia is encouraging Apple Watch owners to enable heart rate notifications, after the wearable device detected symptoms of a thyroid condition months before being diagnosed.

And:

“Instead of me waiting for the symptoms to get really bad, I could have gone to the doctor back in October, when there was this dramatic drop in a matter of days,” Lauren adds, alongside a screenshot of a graph from the Health app. “It dramatically dropped, which means my cardiovascular system wasn’t working as well as it once was.”

The drop also correlated with other symptoms, including fatigue, a sensitivity to heat, gaining weight, dry skin, and increased irritability. In December, she was diagnosed with thyroid hemiagenesis, and is undergoing treatment.

Here’s a link to Lauren’s video. Sound on.

A few years ago, I had a long conversation with a cardiologist about the future of Apple Watch and the patterns that indicate various health conditions. I walked away from that conversation feeling that the potential for Apple Watch as diagnostic tool is massive, far beyond the benefits we already see, especially as more sensors are developed and integrated with Apple’s Health infrastructure. Lauren’s video made me feel this even more strongly.