Microsoft and Facebook may not be as cool as SpongeBob, but they do now have a mighty cable under the sea which is almost as impressive as a pineapple. The two companies has completed its Marea subsea cable, a groundbreaking - or should that be seabreaking? - infrastructure project that will funnel vast quantities of high-speed data more than 17,000 feet under the Atlantic Ocean.
Facebook has revealed that it will provide Congress with the advertisements that were purchase by the Russian entity Internet Research Agency throughout 2015 to 2017. The advertisements came to light a couple weeks ago when Facebook revealed that the Russian agency had bought in excess of 3,000 ads targeting both political and social issues in the United States.
Depending on how many friends you have on Facebook, your News Feed might be a fairly crowded place, filled with stuff you may not necessarily want to see. In an effort to let us manage what we see and what we don't, Facebook is testing a new feature called "Snooze." This allows you to temporarily mute your friends for a pre-determined amount of time, giving you a little more flexibility when it comes to hiding posts you don't want to see.
Facebook's user data is being called into question (again) after an analyst noticed that the social network's metrics don't add up with U.S. census data. Of note, Facebook claims to have more reach in particular age brackets than U.S. census data indicates is possible. In one case, the discrepancy between Facebook's metrics and U.S. census data is ten million people.
WhatsApp is unquestionably one of the most popular apps in the world, but thus far, it hasn't been all that great at actually making money for parent company Facebook. Facebook, of course, has enough money in its coffers to let some apps and services mature a bit, but generally speaking, not making any significant money from a $19 billion purchase isn't really a winning strategy. Now it looks like WhatsApp and Facebook may have figured out a way to make money by offering new services to enterprise customers.
Taking a panoramic photo with your phone is easy, but taking a high-quality 360-degree panorama with your phone isn't. The process typically involves opening an app and slowly rotating the phone in a circle while holding the handset steady. Though these apps provide a straight line and on-screen guidance to encourage users to maintain a proper horizon, most people fail to do that. The results are tilted, crooked panoramas that make VR viewing less than comfortable.
Facebook is blocking advertisements from Pages that dish out fake news, taking away the financial incentives that drive some to create these faux news bits. This is the company's latest effort to rid its service of fake news, whether it's the variety designed to manipulate public opinion or simply garbage that individuals use to rake in ad revenue. The ad-blocking action will only apply against a Page that repeatedly shares such stories, however.
Facebook executive Andrew "Boz" Bosworth was given leadership over all of Facebook's future hardware projects as of this week. The first item up for release - so rumors suggest - is the codename Aloha device. This "Aloha" device is quite likely the Android tablet reported not too long ago - an Android tablet made specifically for video chat with Facebook Messenger.
Facebook is set to launch a subscription service for publishers, allowing news organizations sharing their stories through the social network to charge for content. The move comes as Facebook tries to address both rising news media concerns that the site's algorithm has too much control over their long-term fate, and issues around the propagation of "fake news" in the timeline. According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, moves are underway to address both of these things.
There's a new Facebook app in town, and it's far better than the original, more basic version. This is my own opinion of course - there's no objective way of knowing whether one way to access Facebook is better than the other. But if there were, I feel like this app would win the award real, real easy.
China and its strict censorship laws have banned western internet media and social platforms like Twitter, Google, and especially Facebook, but the latter has recently managed to work its way through the country's "Great Firewall." How? It seems the social media giant created an app called Colorful Balloons, which functions just like its own photo-sharing app Moments, and released it to Chinese users through a local company.
They all try to kill the age-old TV but end up themselves becoming one. Sort of. Facebook has just taken a major step forward that puts it at odds not just with YouTube but with every tech company that is trying to become the TV of the future today. More than just one single place to find videos on Facebook (it already has a Video tab for that), Watch is a platform that brings order and consistency amidst the randomness of Facebook videos. In other words, episodic content or regular shows that revolve around a theme or personality. This, folks, is Facebook TV.
