Items tagged with message
Facebook has been testing a pay-to-message service in the U.S. since December, and now the trial has expanded to include some 36 countries, including the UK. According to the Guardian, about 10% of UK Facebook users can now message their favorite celebrities--for a price. The cost is on a tiered scale depending on the popularity of the celebrity in question--about $1, $5, or $15 USD. (How exactly Facebook determines a celebrity’s relative popularity is a little unclear--it apparently has to do with a person’s number of Facebook followers and number of weekly messages--but we get a chuckle imagining them getting irate or fretting over their rating.) "Time for my weekly Kardashian trio...
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Facebook sure is a different company now that it's on the stock exchange. Now that it's a for-profit entity with stockholders, the company has completely changed course, and it's having a serious impact on user experience. News feeds are now loaded with ads, and even video ads could be en route. But ads are a fact of life for the media business. That said, the company's newest trial may cross more than a few lines. A recent blog post from Facebook notes that it's trying out a new messaging option for a select few in the U.S. Right now, Facebook users have an Inbox and an Others box, two places where Facebook "emails" are filtered into. As of today, Facebook is "starting a small experiment to...
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It's an obvious statement that mobile messaging is growing, but some recently released numbers from VeriSign indicate just how fast mobile messaging is growing and how it is generating staggering revenue for mobile service providers. You might be familiar with VeriSign as the company behind secure networking solutions for SSL, identity authentication, and domain name services. Perhaps less known is that VeriSign also manages mobile messaging networks that serve "more than 600 carriers and reach over 2.4 billion wireless subscribers... It powers inter-carrier mobile messaging for seven of the top ten wireless carriers in North America and other major operators throughout the world." Credit:...
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Gasoline costs four bucks, but a gallon of it will get you twenty or thirty miles farther away from your mother-in-law, so it's worth it. Printer ink is famously expensive, going for upwards of $8000 a gallon, but at least you can use it to print a letter to the editor of your newspaper complaining about high gasoline prices. Lots of things are expensive, but we're hard pressed to come up with anything that seems to costs so much for how little you get than a text message. All the major carriers are raising their price for a single text message to an astonishing twenty cents. 140 bytes of data for twenty cents. If the same pricing was applied on a per-byte basis to downloading one 4MB song it...
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When it comes to ISPs throttling Peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, the denials fly as quick as the accusations. First the FCC contradicts Comcast's claims that it only throttles P2P traffic when there is network congestion; now, as News.com reports, AT&T rebuffs claims from BitTorrent client developer, Vuze, that AT&T uses false reset messages to impact P2P traffic: "In response to your specific question about AT&T's network management practices, AT&T does not use "false reset messages" to manage its network. We agree with Vuze that the use of the Vuze Plug-In to measure network traffic has numerous limitations and deficiencies, and does not demonstrate whether any particular network...
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As any readers of the comic strip Zits knows, text messages are the bane of parents of teenagers. However, it's also increased the amount of repetitive stress injuries people get (in their thumbs anyway), created new (and lame) ways of firing people, and even contributed to fatal accidents. At any rate, the SMS or text message celebrated its 15th anniversary earlier this week.Airwide Solutions, which helped pioneer the technology, claims it was the first message to be sent via the mobile GSM airwaves. 15 years ago in the first week of December, Airwide engineer Neil Papworth sent the test message to Vodafone's Richard Jarvis.Now, according to the BBC, British people are sending SMS messages...
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YouTube users are starting to gripe about spam being sent over the messaging system. Considering that Google owns YouTube, and has had a working spam filter for their own e-mail service, G-Mail, it makes one wonder why the software hasn't been adapted to work on YouTube.After all, a message is a message, and most of the techniques for identifying e-mail text as spam should still work with minimal re-coding.“Unfortunately even if the sitemail spam was brought under control there will always be content spam on any social media platform. Witness the once proud brand of Tivo and its reported use of the insipid service PayPerPost to amass video testimonies on YouTube. I'm a believer that commercial...
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Good morning everyone. I know I said I would see you next week, but I wanted to stop by and give you another news update. We also wanted to ask that we all take a moment to honor our armed forces and recognize the hard work and sacrifices they've made since 9/11. It's hard to believe it's been 3 years since that day. Surely the world has changed since then, going down a very dark and uncertain path. Thankfully we have the men and women of United States Armed Forces out there trying keep us safe. We should pray for each and every one of them overseas, hoping they make it home safe and thank the others who patrol our homeland so we can go about a "normal" life safely. Thank you! Kingwin...
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