Technology

Facebook is entering the home services market. Starting today, U.S. Facebook users browsing the Facebook Marketplace will be able to search thousands of home service professionals through a new feature that helps users locate top-rated and vetted professionals like house cleaners, plumbers, contractors, and others, as well as receive quotes.

The services experience will show up on FacebookMarketplace, but is populated with data from Facebookpartners on this effort: Handy, HomeAdvisor, and Porch.

The company says the idea to launch a home services resource came about because people were always asking for recommendations for home pros on the network.

In fact, the number of people asking for home service recommendations in the U.S. is already well into the millions for the year, Facebook notes.

&More people ask for recommendations related to home services on Facebook in the U.S. than any other topic,& said Bowen Pan, Product Manager at Facebook, in a statement about the launch. &By partnering with Handy, HomeAdvisor, and Porch, people will now have a place on Marketplace to find the right professional to help with their next home project,& he said.

Through its partners, Facebook is able to provide access to hundreds of thousands of professionals, while also allowing users to see the professionals& ratings, reviews, credentials, and location. Users can additionally request a quote right on the social networking site itself by describing their project, and sending it out to multiple professionals at once. The home service pros who respond can then communicate with the customer through Messenger to follow up on the lead.

The feature itself offers more than just a bunch of listings for users to sort through.

Instead, the main &Marketplace Services& page in Marketplace organizes pros into categories based around tasks, like &deep clean your home& or &get your backyard summer ready,& for example.

When users click on one of the prompts, they&re walked through a form to fill out other relevant data in order to find matching home pros. In the case of house cleaning, to continue the above example, a user would say how often they want a cleaning, how many bedrooms, the homesquare feet, and when they want the cleaning, along with other details. From the search results, they can then read all the service pro profiles and click a &Send& button to share their project request with those they choose. The service pro who follows up will respond on Messenger.

This is similar to what happens on Facebook today, though not in an organized a fashion. If you participate in any local group, you know itcrammed with recommendation requests from other users & often the same request, repeatedly entered by different people at different times. (As no one ever thinks to use the Facebook Groupsearch feature!).

The addition of home services to Marketplace may at least shift some of those inquires over to Marketplace. (Not all, though & personal recommendations from neighbors and friends will still be highly desired, even if pre-vetted home pro listings are available.)

The new offering is one of several category expansions for the Facebook Marketplace which is becoming one of the more viable challengers to Craigslist, thanks to other recent additions like home rentals and cars. And like those earlier expansions, Facebook pursued a similar strategy of working with partners to bring in these new listings.

Facebook, however, is not the only major tech company dabbling with home services.

Amazon expanded into this category several years ago, Walmart recently partnered with Handy on this front, and Google is also working with both HomeAdvisor and Porch in order connect its voice assistant users with home pros nearby.

But this is not the first time Facebook has taken aim at the home services market, either & back in December 2015, the company launched a local business search site at facebook.com/services which let users look for local businesses and organizations that met their needs, including across home services. This site was still live as of yesterday, but it never really took off or was known to most Facebook users. It seemed to be more of an experiment on Facebookpart, and was focused on surfacing businesses with Facebook Pages & not a true home services destination.

The new effort involving third-party data from partners means home pros may start finding more of their leads come from Facebook. And as result, they may feel compelled to set up a Facebook Page if they haven&t already.

We&ve asked Facebook for further details as to if or how itsharing revenue from bookings with its partners, but the company declined to comment prior to publication.

As of last year, Marketplace had been growing at a rate of 18 million new listings per month. And search volume had increased threefold as of last October.

Facebook says the new feature is rolling out today, and will become available to all U.S. users in the weeks ahead in the Facebook app.

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Consider that there are millions of Okta users out there using the service to sign into their company applications with a single set of credentials. Yet getting customers to work together using Okta authentication was an enormous task for developers. Okta wanted to simplify it, so they created a service they are calling it ‘Sign in with Okta.&

The new API allows developers to add a few lines code and give Okta customers the ability to sign into one anotherwebsites in a similar way that OAuth allows you to use your Google or Facebook credentials to sign onto consumer sites.

Frederic Kerrest, COO and co-founder at Okta, says the ‘Sign in with Okta& uses an extension of OAuth called OpenID Connect, which his company has been supporting since 2016. He says the new service gives customers the ability to expand the use of their Okta credentials beyond their own set of internal applications to sign into customer and partner sites. This extends the Okta functionality and brand and helps to make it a kind of standard way of logging in (or thatthe hope).

When developers add this functionality, the user sees a &Sign in with Okta& button on the website or service they are accessing. They can then use their Okta login to get into these sites under whatever rules the site owner has defined.

While Okta has provided APIs for developers prior to today, they didn&t provide a package like this that simplifies the process. This forced developers to use the SAML standard to make it work. While therenothing wrong with this approach, it can be time-consuming and put a lot of burden on developers to write software and connectors, while updating and maintaining them, Kerrest explained. This removes all of that complexity from the process.

This means that when two businesses are on Okta, they can trust one another because they do business together, and instead of setting up the SAML connection, a process that could take days, they can do it an hour with the Okta API tool, according to Kerrest.

&[Sign in with Okta] is a much easier way for customers or partners to seamlessly integrate into our environment. They could do it before, but we are ‘widgetizing& it now,& he said.

From Howeycoin to a Chinese study that found 421 fake token sales, governments and researchers are finally shedding light on bad actors in the token sale space.

Take, for example, Operation Cryptosweep. According to an North American Securities AdministratorAssociation, regulators in the US and Canada are looking into 70 token sales and may be taking action against as many as 35. They write:

NASAA members from more than 40 jurisdictions throughout North America participated in &Operation Cryptosweep,& which to date has resulted in nearly 70 inquiries and investigations and 35 pending or completed enforcement actions related to ICOs or cryptocurrencies since the beginning of May. NASAA members are conducting additional investigations into potentially fraudulent conduct that may result in additional enforcement actions. These actions are in addition to more than a dozen enforcement actions previously undertaken by NASAA members regarding these types of products. Many NASAA members also are conducting public outreach initiatives to warn investors in their jurisdictions of the risks associated with ICOs and cryptocurrencies.

&The persistently expanding exploitation of the crypto ecosystem by fraudsters is a significant threat to Main Street investors in the United States and Canada, and NASAA members are committed to combating this threat,& said NASAA President, Joseph P. Borg. &Despite a series of public warnings from securities regulators at all levels of government, cryptocriminals need to know that state and provincial securities regulators are taking swift and effective action to protect investors from their schemes and scams.&

Further, regulators in China have compiled a page detailing scams including products that are clearly pyramid schemes featuring &dynamic (rewards in proportion to money invested)& and &static (fixed)& incentives. After all, anything that claims to offer regular returns is probably suspect.

Other scams include over-the-counter tokens & OTC & that are only available from a certain site and are difficult to trade. Any token without a sufficient & and difficult-to-build & market is ripe for abuse.

Ultimately, crooks follow money. The Washington Post found hundreds of ICOs that featured spurious teams and claims including one site that featured Prince Charles and Jennifer Aniston & under fake names & as members of the advisory board.

Whatthe bottom line There is not nearly enough oversight and far too much fun being had at the expense of the uneducated investor. The financial equivalent of script kiddies are breaking the markets that others are taking time and money to create and there is little recourse. Ultimately, this does little more than damage the perception of ICOs and hurts folks who are trying to legitimately use the techniques to raise cash and build projects. It is, in short, as messy as the early Internet with no fix in sight.