Items tagged with Social Network
The day of reckoning has arrived for the Google+ social network. Like scores of Google apps and services that have come before it, Google+ never quite achieved the critical success and adoption as originally envisioned. In the case of Google+, a 2018 security breach simply escalated the inevitable. As outlined in an announcement in late January, Google+ account deletions begin today. According to Google, all of your comments and pages will be deleted, and your account will simply vanish into that big digital “cloud” in the sky. Google had high hopes for Google+ when it launched in 2011 as a counter to the incredibly popular (at the time, and still to this day)...
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Facebook has found itself facing the ire or many users and even the federal government with a potentially record-breaking FTC fine coming for the social network over privacy violations. Facebook also found itself accused of using the viral Facebook 10-year challenge to feed its AI, something it denies. A new report is making the rounds that Facebook is working on something new to woo younger crowds that flock to the web just for laughs. A new meme service called LOL is reportedly in the works as an attempt to reach teens and lure them to the social network. The social media giant has faced an increasingly difficult time luring in younger users who instead turn to alternatives like Instagram....
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Instagram wants to eliminate bullying on its platform and has announced new tools to do so. The service already has tools that allow people to report bullying, and when reported, the content is removed from the network; the new tool that Instagram is rolling out brings a way to detect bullying in photos. Instagram's new head, Adam Mosseri, says that most of the photos on the network are positive and meant to bring people joy, but on occasion, a photo is shared that is unkind or unwelcome. Instagram is using machine learning technology to detect bullying in photos and captions on photos proactively, and then send the content to the Community Operations team to review. Mosseri says that this change...
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Facebook, the largest social network on the planet, has been criticized for not doing a better job at thwarting fake news. That criticism is unlikely to subside Facebook's Safety Check feature altered users in Bangkok to an "explosion" in the Thai capital that turned out to be nothing more than fireworks. However, the spread of fake news and bad information led Facebook astray on this one.A protestor on Tuesday threw firecrackers at a government building in Bangkok. The incident triggered Facebook's Safety Check feature at around 9:00 PM local time, which in turn created a page titled "The Explosion in Bangkok, Thailand." People in the area started marking themselves as safe so that friends and...
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More high ranking officials are leaving Twitter to pursue other opportunities. The latest to jump ship is Twitter CTO Adam Messinger, a five-year veteran at the microblogging company who spent the last four years in the role he is now abandoning. Messinger announced his decision to leave Twitter in a tweet in which he thanked the company's co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter VP of product Josh McFarland has also decided to leave the company. He will remain in his role until the end of the first quarter, then step into a full-time role with Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley that primarily invests in startup companies and growth stage ventures that operate in...
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It looks like our would-be robot overlords aren't quite up to the task of running things all by themselves. In what could be considered a test run, Facebook recently announced less human intervention and more reliance on a computer algorithm to its Trending topics feature, a decision it made following a report alleging that its team of news editors had been suppressing stories that would be of interest to a conservative audience. That's fine and dandy, except the algorithm used its newfound power to promote a fake news store about Well, less than a week after slapping the algorithm on the backside and letting it run free, it promoted a false story about Megyn Kelly, a high profile journalist...
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Two years ago Mark Zuckerberg and the gang introduced an advertising platform called Facebook Audience Network. It was designed to help publishers and developers support their services through targeted ads, which are ads that are determined to be relevant and of interest to the person viewing them. Up until now the Facebook Audience Network was used only to show ads to people with Facebook accounts who visit specific websites and apps, but now they'll follow you across the web. The Facebook Audience Network is also expanding to include those who don't use or aren't connected to Facebook. Through the use of browser cookies, integrated Like buttons, and various plug-ins on non-Facebook portals,...
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It's difficult enough trying to decipher simple text messages—it's tough to account for tone and sarcasm—but when you throw emoji into the mix, it takes things to a whole new level. Nevertheless, it's the online language of the day, and one middle school student could end up paying a hefty price for posting the wrong combination of emojis to Instagram. The 12-year-old student from Fairfax, Virginia, is being charged with threatening her school after local law officials said she posted a message on Instagram containing emojis of a gun, bomb, and knife. Part of her message also used the world "killing" and "meet me in the library," which ultimately prompted an investigation once the school found...
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As any parent of a newborn can attest, the overwhelming desire is to be home with your newly minted version 2.0 (or 3.0 or 4.0, etc.), not toiling away at work staring at the clock in hopes of making it speed up. Some companies are keenly aware of this, like Facebook, which just extended its parental leave policy for to cover all full-time employees, daddies included Both moms and dads, including ones in same sex relationships, can take a generous four months of paid time off to be at home with their newborn child, if they're a full-time employee at Facebook. It's a global policy -- it doesn't matter where the employee lives. "This expanded benefit primarily affects new fathers and people in...
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There's too much fuzzy math involved in figuring out exactly how many people are on Google+, but whatever the actual figure is, Google would like it to be higher. To help achieve that goal, Google is giving its social network a total overhaul, one that will put the focus squarely on two distinct features, Communities and Collections. "Today, we’re starting to introduce a fully redesigned Google+ that puts Communities and Collections front and center," Google stated in a blog post. "Now focused around interests, the new Google+ is much simpler. And it’s more mobile-friendly—we’ve rebuilt it across web, Android and iOS so that you’ll have a fast and consistent experience whether you are on a big...
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In what Mark Zuckerberg described as a "good quarter," Facebook reported $4.5 billion in revenue during the three month period leading up to September 30, 2015, up from $3.2 billion in the same quarter a year prior. That's a hefty jump and it led to the world's largest social playground posting a profit of $896 million, up from $806 million a year ago. "We had a good quarter and got a lot done," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. Some would call that an excellent quarter, one that was propped up by advertising dollars. Almost all of the revenue Facebook generated came from ads -- just shy of $4.3 billion. That represents an impressive 45 percent year-over-year jump from the $2.96...
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Ever wonder why some stories show up on your Facebook News Feed while others get buried beneath the pile? It largely has to do with user engagement. When you like, comment on, or share a post, Facebook's algorithm takes note and posts more of that type of content on top of your News Feed. The downside to that approach is that it doesn't into consideration stories of interest that you didn't interact with, and to address that, Facebook is making a change. Going forward, the algorithm will also take note of how much time you spent on a story. It stands to reason that if you consistently spend more time reading about motorcycle stories or games, then you have an interest in those subjects. However,...
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Shares of Twitter initially rose 7 percent in after hours trading after it was announced that its CEO Dick Costolo had decided to step down, a decision that will go into effect less than three weeks from now (July 1, 2015). Twitter co-founder and chairman of the board Jack Dorsey will step into Costolo's shoes as interim CEO while the microblogging service searches for a permanent replacement."I am tremendously proud of the Twitter team and all that the team has accomplished together during my six years with the company. We have great leaders who work well together and a clear strategy that informs our objectives and priorities," Costolo said. "There is no one better than Jack Dorsey to lead...
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Social networks are no longer solely about communicating with friends and family, they're also platforms for digesting news. You can even subscribe to daily news feeds from Facebook to help stay current on what's happening around the world. However, as we increasingly turn to social networks for news and civic discussions, are we also creating so-called "echo chambers" in which we're only seeing information from people who share the same views as us? Facebook says no. The world's largest social playground conducted research in hopes of answering that very question, and one of the things it found, generally speaking, we have Facebook friends who claim opposing political ideologies, and the content...
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