After Facebook and Instagram went down around the world for about an hour earlier today, the social media giant announced that despite the claims of hackers on Twitter, it’s placing the blame squarely on itself, saying it was a self-inflicted outage. [More]
Facebook Launches Effort To Cut Down On Those Annoying Hoax Stories Your Friends Can’t Stop Believing
By 1.20.15
No, Betty White is not dead (and neither is Eddie Murphy, Celine Dion, Jon Bon Jovi, etc). No, a bunch of worms didn’t burst out of a woman’s chest. But because your friends on Facebook are easily fooled and don’t know about the existence of Snopes.com, it’s up to you to run through that gauntlet of idiocy on your news feed. Since those gullible folks will never learn, Facebook says now it’s going to help crack down on bogus, hoax and otherwise fake Internet stories clogging up what you read on the social media site. [More]
Facebook Is Now Moving To Invade Your Workplace With New App
By 1.14.15
While many employers complain about their employees using Facebook too frequently during work hours, a new app actually seeks to integrate the Facebook experience with the workplace. [More]
Facebook Introduces AMBER Alerts That Appear In News Feeds Of Users In The Search Area
By 1.13.15
Facebook is continuing to dip its toes into the real life world of emergencies and natural disasters with another new safety feature: Whenever the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children issues an AMBER Alert for a missing child, users in the targeted search area affected will automatically see that alert in their Facebook feeds. [More]
Crayola Apologizes After Hackers Post NSFW Pics To Kid-Friendly Facebook Page
By 1.12.15
Visitors to the Crayola Facebook page were seeing Brick Red, or perhaps blushing in shades of Carnation Pink on Sunday when they realized that some nogoodniks had taken over the account and decided to have a laugh by juvenile but not kid-friendly updates for the crown company’s 2.45 million fans to see. [More]
Instagram Fixes A Loophole That Allowed Public To See Private Pics
By 1.12.15
Some 300 million people have accounts on Facebook-owned photo-sharing service Instagram, and while many of those users are fine with letting the world see every image they post, some Instagrammers prefer to keep their pics private. However, until this weekend there was a loophole that could give people unauthorized access to private images on Instagram. [More]
Study: 58% Of All American Adults Are On Facebook
By 1.9.15
While you’ll still bump into your share of people who prefer to abstain from maintaining a social media presence, there are a whole lot of us signed up and freely sharing inspirational quotes wrongly attributed to famous people. According to a new study looking at adults who use the Internet in the U.S. (81% of the entire population), a new study found that 71% have a Facebook account, which means roughly 58% of all American adults are on the social media site. [More]
From Samsung To Razer To Oculus, Our Experience With The Latest In Virtual Reality
By 1.6.15
Virtual reality has been a holy grail of sorts for tech developers for several decades, but previous generations’ attempts were too clunky, heavy, and unconvincing. The dream hasn’t died, and judging by what we saw at International CES this week, the field is ready to explode (in a good way). [More]
Facebook Is Considering Adding A “Dislike” Button
By 12.12.14
You know you’ve had that thought — “I OPPOSITE OF “LIKE” THIS, FACEBOOK!” — whether it was on the eleventy trillionth gushing baby photo post or whatever ridiculous political thing that person from high school is posting this time. And while Facebook has long stood firm against a “dislike” button, it seems the negative Nellies out there have some sway with The Zuck, nevertheless. [More]
Pasting A Copyright Notice On Your Facebook Timeline Still Won’t Work
By 12.2.14
It’s like an annual tradition: Facebook announces revisions to its privacy or data use policies, and the people of Facebook Nation respond by copying and pasting a boilerplate notice warning Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies that their political rants and snapshots of their kids’ drawings belong to them, thank you very much. The problem: this does not actually work. [More]
Swedish Hotel Offering Free 7-Night Stays For People With More Than 2,000 Facebook Friends
By 11.24.14
We already know the value companies place on attracting new fans on social media, which is part of the reason using sites like Facebook and Instagram is free: Advertisers want your attention and they want the attention of your friends. So in order to harness the power of social media, one Swedish hotel is offering up a tasty bit of bait in the form of free stays for the big hitters on Facebook and Instagram. [More]
Report: Facebook Planning “At Work” Version For Networking On The Job
By 11.17.14
Stop whatever you’re doing at work — talking to Joanne in accounting about her weekend or crunching those numbers — and get on Facebook. Seriously, your boss might want you to do that in the future if the new reported “Facebook at Work” test becomes a workplace reality.
Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why Facebook Forced Everyone To Download A Separate Messaging App
By 11.7.14
Whether you were dragged, kicking and screaming into downloading Facebook’s standalone messaging app when the time came, went quietly or straight up refused to do it at all (take that, The Man!), no one was really quite sure why Facebook was so into the mandatory move. Until now [cue suspenseful music]… [More]
Facebook Is Raising Money To Fight Ebola
By 11.6.14
You may have heard the news recently that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a $25 million donation to Ebola relief efforts. Most of us don’t have that kind of money sitting around to donate, even to important causes, but Facebook wants us to check our metaphorical couch cushions and make our own donations to help treat Ebola patients in western Africa, and to prevent the disease from spreading further. [More]
Secure Messaging Scorecard Shows Just How Unprotected Your Online Chats Are
By 11.5.14
The Internet is a place where hundreds of millions of people go to write things they wouldn’t — or can’t — say in public, and many of the most private and secretive communications occur via the many instant messaging services available to consumers. But what you may not realize when sharing your personal thoughts (and images) with someone online is that the level of privacy and security on these services varies wildly from one to the next. [More]
Facebook: Govt. Requests For User Data Up 24% In First Half Of 2014
By 11.4.14
The whole notion of companies being transparent — or at least as transparent as they are allowed to be — about governmental requests for personal data is still quite new, so it’s too soon to identify trends based on the little bit of information we’re given, but today Facebook said that governmental requests for user data during the first half of 2014 were 24% higher worldwide than they were during the six months previous. [More]
Facebook’s Next Big Thing: Bringing Back That AOL Chatroom Feeling
By 10.23.14
A few weeks ago, we all heard that Facebook — the site where your real name and offline social connections are meant to rule supreme — was planning to launch an app that supported anonymous use. Today, Facebook announced their new product for real… and it sounds an awful lot like a phone-focused version of the chat rooms and message boards AOL brought into our living rooms 20 years ago. [More]
Facebook Adds New Safety Check Feature To Let Loved Ones Know You’re Okay After A Disaster
By 10.16.14
I’ll never forget the one time I’ve felt an earthquake in New York City. Not because it was anything scary — it was only a brief, jarring moment in an elevator — but because it seemed like every person I knew outside of the area was reaching out whether through text, phone call, email or social media to make sure I was okay (I was totally fine, but it was nice anyway). Facebook has a new feature called Safety Check that it says will make that whole process a lot easier. [More]
