Social Networking, Internet Lifestyle And Security News
Passionate about net neutrality? Facebook privacy issues freaking you out? Want to know more about the latest security breach? Here we'll cover the headlines that matter in our ever evolving digitally-connected lives and lifestyles around the world.
Habitual complainers rejoice, Facebook may soon implement a "sympathize" button so that other users can send their virtual condolences. If you're like me, you probably loathe the idea of encouraging self-pity posts, and while a sympathize button will certainly lead to more of those, there are other scenarios where it...
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The concept of Facebook is pretty great. At its best, Facebook is a fantastic tool for staying in touch with friends and family scattered all over the world, as well as reacquainting yourself with high school buddies and college cohorts. This is the beauty of Facebook as its most basic, and as you peel away layers...
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Facebook CFO David Ebersman shook things up when he casually mentioned in a recent earnings call that the social network was seeing a drop in daily use among teens, but it’s possible that the reason he was didn’t make a big deal about it is that there’s nothing to be alarmed about. That’s the...
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Here's what isn't surprising: Facebook is trying to take over where the conventional text message left off. Here's what is surprising: that is has taken this long to get to this point. The tried-and-true phone number is a hangover technology from many generations ago, and it's actually quite unfortunate that it's...
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As I sit here writing this, I'm thinking, "Should I depressed that it's a newsworthy topic when Facebook changes its 'Like' button, or just accept that it's a sign of the times we live in?" I'm not sure of the answer, but as silly as it sounds, in this case, a revamped icon is kind of a big deal, and for a number of reasons. The first, of...
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Early this morning, Facebook experienced an outage, leaving many users unable to post status updates, leave comments, upload pictures, and more. According to Downrightnow, the site hit a service disruption, and as of the last update at roughly 8:15am EST, there were still widespread problems. There have been a couple...
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Up to now, viewability of kids’ Facebook accounts was set by default to “Friends of Friends”; now, those aged 13-17 start out with their audience set to “Friends” by default. However, they can also make their posts public, and they can turn on “Follow” to let their posts show...
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If you’re an avid Facebook stalker, here’s some good news: Facebook is removing the feature that formerly let users prevent others from finding them by searching for their name in the Facebook search bar. If you’ve been successfully avoiding old classmates, a crazy ex, your boss, or just the general public on Facebook, you...
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When fun, interesting, or mindblowing (or unfortunately, often mind-numbing) things happen on TV, the chatter about it ramps up on Facebook and Twitter. Names, TV shows, and topics trend, and those analytics help media companies gauge engagement. The old Nielsen ratings system is what it is, but instantaneous, global...
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Data privacy is fast becoming a running joke, and users are the punchline. Following the hoopla surrounding NSA's PRISM program, there's evidence to suggest that even link crawling robots can (and do) violate user privacy by sniffing out URLs included in private messages and emails. Not all sites are guilty of this...
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Facebook's search for new sources of revenues continues unabated -- and this time, the company wants to target your own profile phtoos for inclusion in its database. That's a change from the previous system, in which users were only scanned if other people tagged them first. Your own profile photos weren't...
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It's been less than a year since Facebook implemented its online gift giving system, which allows Facebook users to purchase and send physical gifts to their friends and family on the social networking site. However brief it might have been, Facebook has already decided it makes more sense to push digital gift codes...
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Logging into apps using Facebook instead of with yet another unique username and password combination is a boon to users everywhere. It’s simple and fast, and seriously--we don’t have room in our brains for remembering anymore login credentials. However, up to now the downside has been that Facebook knows...
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Look out, PayPal: Here comes Facebook. In what seems like a rather common-sense move for the company to make, Facebook will be launching its own payments service next month, with flash-sales site JackThreads becoming the pilot partner. The service's mechanics will mimic PayPal's, where you can pay for an item online...
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Thanks in part to the popularity of services like Siri and Google Now, voice recognition technology is a hot commodity these days. It should come as little surprise, then, that Facebook has agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, makers of Jibbigo, a speech-to-speech translation app for Android and Apple mobile...
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Buried deep within a blog post announcing Facebook’s new effort to promote discovery of mobile games for small- and medium-sized game publishers is a passing reference to the fact that the social behemoth will take a revenue share of a given game’s success. It’s humorous that Facebook is downplaying this aspect of the program,...
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As the story goes, Mark Zuckerberg tried to resist implementing ads in Facebook as long as he could, though for the world's most popular social networking site to make money, the inclusion of ads was always inevitable. Not only was it the right move from a financial standpoint, but so was focusing on mobile...
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If you ignored Facebook’s Graph Search when it was first announced at the beginning of the year, it’s time to give the controversial new search engine another look, because it’s rolling out to all U.S. accounts over the next few weeks. Whether you like the search engine will depend on how much you...
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As you're probably well aware by now, Asiana Airlines Flight 214 bound from South Korea crash-landed onto the runway at San Francisco International Airport yesterday, killing two passengers and injuring dozens more. Including the crew, there were over 300 people on board the flight, and had things gone to plan...
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Oh Facebook - couldn't this have come at a better time? Mere weeks after news of NSA's PRISM project being leaked, which is said to involve tight integration with the likes of Facebook and other popular Web entities, we learn of a bug that caused six million user's worth of phone numbers and email addresses being...
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As expected, Facebook dropped a big announcement today pertaining to Instagram and video: starting today, users can share up to 15 seconds of video in essentially the same way they share photos. When preparing to take a photo, there will now be a little movie camera icon you can tap to switch to video mode. Video on...
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Facebook is officially in the big leagues in terms of events. In fact, we're pretty sure the social networking company has held more events in 2013 than even Amazon. Who would've thought that just a year or so ago? As Facebook morphs into more than just a community of friends, the company is taking ever larger risks...
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