Items tagged with Facebook
One of the quirkiest aspects of the amazing success that many relatively new Internet tech companies enjoy is the fact that the free services don’t actually bring in a lot of cash, at least not compared to the scale of their popularity. Thus, inevitably, something has to give, and for Instagram that something is the placement of ads...
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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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When confronted with something that is both massive in scale and completely quantifiable, it does something to your brain. That “something” is hard to explain, but we feel it when we look at The Faces Of Facebook, which is a web page--a single web page--that contains the thumbnail images of all 1.2 billion (and counting) Facebook...
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Following the initial leaks against the NSA by Edward Snowden this past summer, there was speculation that what was being exposed would end up hurting the business of US-based tech companies overseas. It's easy to understand why - when it's discovered that a country has been literally spying on those in friendly...
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A study from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University examining the factors that cause people to be more susceptible to phishing attacks found strong correlations between gender, certain personality traits, and openness orientation to social networking and being more vulnerable to such an attack. The three...
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Years ago, privacy never stuck me as being a truly hot topic online, and if there's a reason for that, it's likely because many of us didn't realize the extent that some companies go to, to make it almost nonexistent. As has been proven time and time again, your privacy online is almost nil if you make use of any social networking site, but...
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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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Some people are just gluttons for punishment. A pair of self-professed online distraction addicts, Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff, have created a tool called “Pavlov Poke” that will zap them if they spend too much time on Facebook and not enough time working on their dissertations. The Pavlov Poke works...
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Facebook said that it would enable Instagram to remain independent, and that it wouldn't ever cross any lines that would impact the user experience. Keeping true to that promise, Instagram itself (and not parent company Facebook) has just made a big acquisition: Luma. It's a video sharing app that almost no one has...
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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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Is Internet access a human right? That’s the question Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was wrestling with--”was”, because he stated in a long document that he’s come to believe that it is. And Facebook is doing something about it. Zuckerberg and Facebook, in collaboration with “technology...
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Well, that’s one way to prove a point. One Khalil Shreateh (pictured), after discovering a bug in Facebook that allows users to post on someone else’s Timeline even if they’re not friends, failed to get Facebook’s attention regarding the matter. So he used the exploit he found to post on Mark Zuckerberg’s wall....
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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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It has not been a great year for casual game maker Zynga. The company axed a pile of games that weren’t bringing in enough cash, broke up with Facebook, saw its stock price plummet, dealt with a lawsuit from Electronic Arts, and lost a top employee or two. However, Zynga’s fortunes looked as though they might turn around if it...
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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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Intel unveiled a number of new data center initiatives this week as part of its broad product strategy to redefine some of its market goals. In the past, Intel's efforts in this area have boiled down to giving customers more of what they wanted, where "more" was defined as higher clock speeds or more processing cores...
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If you believe everything that took place in the docudrama The Social Network, then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was originally opposed to the idea of implementing ads into his social network, claiming they're not cool. Today, Facebook has ads, supposedly targeted ones, though we often we run into sponsored posts...
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Edward Snowden's leaks have shaken something loose in the IT industry. For years, companies have been afraid to talk about the requests and data sharing procedures the NSA and FBI have forced upon them as a result of the Patriot Act. Companies that went to court to fight these demands lost, and lost in silence...
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