In recent months, we had heard rumours that Meta was now working on a Twitter competitor, which would be tied to Instagram in some form. This week, Zuckerberg's latest social media platform, Threads, officially launched – it is indeed very similar to Twitter, so Elon Musk is suing. Threads officially …
Read More »Octi makes the first people powered AR social network available for iOS
Octi has launched the world’s first social network that uses augmented reality to connect people in real life. The Octi social network is built on cutting edge technology that has been tested by thousands of students across Southern California. Already launched on Apple’s iOS platform, Octi claims its new social …
Read More »Facebook advertising explosion leads to tripling net income
Like a real world game of Agar.io, Facebook is swallowing up everything around it as it expands into new fields of advertising and absorbs old ones. With the release of its second quarter financials, we've learned that its net income has tripled year on year, thanks to a huge expansion …
Read More »Black Mirror? Admiral wants to use your Facebook posts for quotes
A recent episode of Black Mirror that addressed the idea of social networking ratings affecting the real world, could be closer to reality than you might think. Admiral is currently looking to use analysis of Facebook posts, searching for triggers like exclamation points and confident statements, as a bearing on …
Read More »Twitter said to be in talks to sell entire company
Twitter may be in talks with a number of technology firms to see if it would be viable to sell off its entire social media platform. Although unconfirmed, Twitter has struggled with monetisation over the years and it's not a move that would surprise many analysts. Reuters is reporting a …
Read More »Facebook board creates non-voting shares for Zuckerberg charity
Mark Zuckerberg might not be everyone's favourite person when it comes to privacy, but he has pledged to give away 99 per cent of his Facebook shares throughout his lifetime – worth an estimated $24 billion. To help him do that without losing control of the company, Facebook's board has …
Read More »Twitter may soon be able to clean up crappy videos
Twitter might have helped push the livestreaming model forward with its Periscope platform, but it's brought us more vertical, shaky video than perhaps any source gone before. That may change in the future though, as it's just acquired a London start up which could help clean up terrible quality footage …
Read More »Killing the King: Facebook to curb Zuckerberg power if he leaves
The Facebook of today is much more than the evolution of Mark Zuckerberg's Facemash. It has fingers in all sorts of pies, from free internet to virtual reality, so in-case Zuckerberg goes off and heads one of these other projects, the Facebook board wants to curtail how much say he …
Read More »Oculus digital platform now supports Facebook
Although the specifics of how Oculus VR's digital store and home-hub platform will work are still mostly unknown, we do know that it can support Facebook. Although unsurprising considering the social network is the parent company of the VR startup, this is something that could really separate Oculus' Rift headset …
Read More »Facebook takes down Syrian groups selling ‘CIA’ weapons
Facebook is playing whack-a-mole with a number of specific groups on its social networking site that claim to be selling weapons in the Middle East. There's even a suggestion that they were supplied by agencies like the CIA. The pages offered everything from small arms to grenade launchers, with admins …
Read More »New EU laws could kick under-16s off of social media, email
Being connected as a teen is pretty important. As much as older generations may have adopted social networking, children of today have grown up with it – it's in their blood. But it may not be for much longer, as a new change to EU data protection laws could make …
Read More »Zuckerbergs pledge 99 per cent of Facebook shares to charity
Mark Zuckerberg is one of this millennium's biggest success stories. In less than a decade he went from a college kid to one of the richest people in the world, running a website with a bigger audience than any other medium ever. But now with a net worth closing in …
Read More »Facebook accused of snooping in the EU
The Commission for the Protection of Privacy (CBPL), Belgium's data authority, has been investigating Facebook and has now accused it of NSA-style snooping. The Commission has been looking in to the social network for quite some time now and things have only gotten worse since the Snowden revelations. Back in …
Read More »Twitter goes after site network that saved politicians’ deleted tweets
Twitter has gone ahead and shut down a network of sites that were dedicated to preserving and archiving deleted tweets from politicians. The network was run by the Open State Foundation, which has revealed that Twitter suspended their API access last Friday. The social network stated that the suspension was …
Read More »Spotify swiftly apologises following privacy concerns
Earlier today, Spotify updated its terms and conditions and thanks to the wording, it sounded like the streaming service wasn't taking user privacy very seriously at all. Fortunately, the company's CEO, Daniel Ek, is eager to clear things up a bit and try to stop people from freaking out. In …
Read More »Facebook denies reports that it is building a music service
This week, there have been rumours floating around stating that Facebook would be joining the likes of Apple, Spotify, Google and Microsoft in the music streaming game with a service of its own. The service was touted to launch at some point over the next few months however, it seems …
Read More »Facebook wants to share ad revenue with video posters
It looks like Facebook might be taking notes from YouTube as the social network has come out and said that it wants to share more videos and offer posters a cut of the ad revenue generated from them. The move would likely challenge YouTube's dominance when it comes to video …
Read More »Facebook to hand over accounts to loved ones after death
One of the emerging problems of a site like Facebook, is that the longer it's around, the more of its members die. This leaves the site operators in a strange position of what to do with the old profiles. Do they lock them? Delete them? Traditionally, the site has allowed …
Read More »Woman receives five year sentence for Facebook terrorism
35 year old Runa Khan from Luton, has been jailed for five years and three months, after being found guilty of promoting terrorism over Facebook. The mother of six was found to be disseminating information on secretive routes into Syria, as well as owning a phone containing images of children and …
Read More »Researchers say social networks not good gauge of public opinion
It seems now that almost every news show, every radio show and indeed, every news site – ourselves included – solicits opinion from their readers, viewers and listeners via social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It's a great way to find out what your audience thinks, or so we thought. …
Read More »Facebook logins top 1.35 billion a month
Facebook now officially has over 20 per cent of the world's population as regular members, as its active logins this month topped 1.35 billion people. Daily visitors weren't far behind, with around 864 million people logging in every day – that's more than the entire population of Europe. Revenue and …
Read More »Facebook to allow the use of pseudonyms
For the first time in a long time, it looks like Facebook, the king of social media, is a little worried about the competition. Ello, the social network that is advertiser free and lets users register under false or made up names if they choose, is gaining traction and Facebook …
Read More »Facebook has managed to sue spammers for around $2 billion
Facebook is apparently in a constant legal battle against spammers abusing its network and so far, the company has managed to obtain around $2 billion by suing companies selling ‘fake likes' to page owners. According to a Facebook blog post, the social network has tools in place to render fake …
Read More »Reddit to fire any employees that don’t move to San Fran
Following on from its announcement of a successful $50 million round of funding and a pledge that 10 per cent of that money would go to rewarding the site's community for making it what it is, the “front page of the internet,” Reddit, has told all remote workers that if …
Read More »Twitter enters retail game with ‘buy’ button
Evidently fed up with driving sales to every corner of the web without being able to take much credit, Twitter has implemented a way to buy products directly through the social network, thereby scoring itself a small portion of the profit. Not for every product mention though and not for …
Read More »Facebook to crack down on clickbaiting
You've seen those headlines in your news feeds and dotted around the less reputable news sites out there: “the top X most Y things you've won't believe,” or “one quick secret that helped me lose/make belly fat/money.” They're irritating, vapid and never worth reading and Facebook knows it as much …
Read More »Facebook to stop you looking silly, introduces [Satire] tag
How many times have you felt a little ridiculous after hitting that like or share button next to a story that seemed too good to be true, or too awful not to be? I think we've all done it. There's a reason sites like Cracked do well talking about all …
Read More »Twitter sees sharp increase in government data requests
Governments around the world have shown much more interest in gathering the details of Twitter users over the past six months, according to the social network. In a recent report, it announced that year on year, data requests have increased by almost half. As The Telegraph explains, in 2014 so …
Read More »Facebook to shut down gift shop
Facebook has announced that it's going to shut down its voucher filled gift shop after just a few years of operation. However, that's not the end of the experiment, with the social network stating that it has plans to improve on what it's offered before. “We'll be using everything we learned …
Read More »Facebook buys video ad-firm Liverail for half billion
Facebook has been throwing its financial weight around this week once again, announcing the purchase of yet another firm, this one a video advertising company called LiveRail. Costing the social network a reported $500 million (£291 million), it's expected that Facebook will leverage its content matching technology to add relevant adverts …
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