facebook

As if Facebook didn’t have enough headaches, here comes one from what many see as its one untarnished property. Although it isn’t official yet, insiders report that Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the duo that created and, until now, ran the social networking marvel that is Instagram, have resigned and will be leaving the company in the coming weeks. In addition to putting into question the future of Instagram itself, it also casts doubts on the stability and sustainability of that other social network giant, Facebook.

Continue Reading

Facebook wants to put a camera in your home, and I can't decide if the company is tone-deaf, supremely confident, or some odd combination of the two. The delayed Facebook "Portal" smart speaker will take on Amazon's Echo Show and Google Smart Displays, so the rumor mill would have it, delivering video calls and more as the latest incarnation of the social network's attempt to encourage communication.

Continue Reading

Facebook’s smart speaker may still be MIA but if this latest insider leak is true, it will skip that product entirely. Instead, it will jump directly into the smart display market with a product that, according to sources, will be called “Portal”. The company delayed the product’s debut and incorporated one unplanned privacy feature due to recent scandals, but it remains to be seen whether a device dedicated mostly to video chat will actually sell despite or in spite of Facebook’s brand.

Continue Reading

Back in May, Facebook made an interesting announcement that wasn't entirely unexpected: it wanted to break into the dating space. Today, a few months after that first reveal, Facebook Dating is rolling out to a select number of users as part of an early test. Assuming this test goes well, it may not be long before Facebook Dating goes live for all 2.2 billion Facebook users.

Continue Reading

Facebook has a new pilot program designed to help protect political candidates and their campaign staff from "bad actors." With the pilot program comes new tools, namely the ability to ask Facebook for "additional security protections" that can be added to accounts and Pages. The program is something admins for Pages associated with political campaigns will need to apply for.

Continue Reading

Following a leak alleging as much, Instagram has officially launched a new e-commerce feature in its main app. A new experience and an update to an existing one has arrived, the first involving a new Shopping channel located in the Explore tab; the other is an expansion of Shopping in Stories. The new shopping experience will be available globally.

Continue Reading

Instagram has started displaying a pop-up notification that appears when users search for certain drug-related hashtags. The message is a proactive way of encouraging users who potentially have a problem to get help. Included with the pop-up message is a direct link to support services, though users also have the option of viewing posts related to the hashtag.

Continue Reading

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a commonly used technology to pull text from images, such as scanned pages, without the time consuming burden of manually transcribing. As great as the technology is, Facebook is seeking something better: the ability to pull text from images and understand the text. That's where the company's Rosetta machine learning system comes in.

Continue Reading

Facebook Lite, the social network's slim app for low-end devices and developing markets, has just received access to important community crisis tools. Called Community Help, the feature launched early last year as a way for Facebook users to offer (and find, when necessary) help from their community following disasters. Mobile users no longer have to use the regular Facebook app to access this feature.

Continue Reading

Facebook has slapped BlackBerry with a lawsuit accusing it of patent infringement. The legal spat follows BlackBerry's own lawsuit against Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp over allegations of "mobile messaging intellectual property" infringement, an issue that has boiled over into Facebook's own complaint. In it, the social media company claims BlackBerry has violated some of its voice messaging patents, among other things.

Continue Reading

Facebook decided some time ago that it wanted a slice of the video streaming pie, but it took a while for those desires to coalesce into one coherent strategy. Last year, Facebook's dive into video finally started to come together as it began testing a new service called Facebook Watch. Fast forward to today and Facebook Watch is launching around the world.

Continue Reading

Twitter users who prefer to keep things simple had the option of authenticating Facebook on their account, which would result in tweets being cross-posted to the latter social network. Recent API changes removed that ability, meaning new tweets can't be cross-posted onto Facebook automatically. However, it appears the change has resulted in all past cross-posted tweets disappearing from Facebook timelines, as well.

Continue Reading