Category: Social Media

When Facebook removed messages from the main app, I swore then and there that I would never download Messenger. That’s been a pretty easy promise to keep, especially since they introduced the lovely idea of enormous ads that take up half your screen while you try to use the service. Today Facebook redesigned them as… Continue reading Facebook’s Messenger ads are bad and must be destroyed

Oh Snap. The Snapchat parent had a difficult day on the stock market, closing at $16.99. It’s officially fallen below its $17 IPO price for the first time. This is significant because it means that overall, public investors have lost money on the company since its March IPO. A money-losing reputation can be hard to… Continue reading Snap falls below its IPO price for the first time

Pippin Barr, Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, has released a game that I’m sure you’re all going to enjoy. It’s called It is as if you were doing work and it simulates the day-to-day activities of the average knowledge worker. Need to write a document?… Continue reading New game simulates the old grind

While the world waits for Instagram to launch a location-sharing feature à la Snapchat, it’s worth wondering about the potential arrival of something far more simple and obvious: user-preset filters. Instagram now allows you to prioritize your favorite filters at the beginning of the list and leave the ones that you don’t use often at… Continue reading Instagram should let users set, save and share their photo preferences

Almost fifteen years ago I’d wake in a cold sweat almost every day. In the early-morning murk I’d stumble down to my basement office, still in my pajamas. Proper ablutions – a shower, a shave, clothes – would come later, after I confirmed the world had not disappeared overnight. I’d wake up my computer and… Continue reading Internet Stone Soup

After more than a year in beta testing, AdHawk has opened its doors to all advertisers. The company helps businesses manage their Facebook and Google advertising campaigns. It’s a world that co-founders Todd Saunders (AdHawk’s CEO) and Dan Pratt (its COO) know well, having formerly worked on the AdWords team at Google. AdHawk brings the data… Continue reading AdHawk aims to take the complexity out of Facebook and Google advertising

Snap Map is Snapchat’s plan to tie together its online content with ways to augment your offline reality, and its got the patent to back it up. Augmented reality location startup Drop tells TechCrunch that Snap Inc acquired its intellectual property in 2015 including its “Location-based messaging” patent. In 2013, Drop developed an app that would… Continue reading Snapchat bought the AR location intellectual property of startup Drop

Facebook’s task is unenviable. Two billion people, all yammering on about literally everything in the world. And hidden in that unending torrent are an unknown number of abhorrent, hateful utterances that would be better off unuttered. But the method Facebook has applied to this problem, a tangled system of ethical arithmetic revealed in a report… Continue reading Manufacturing civility

Facebook is expanding one of its newer features designed to help mobile users find accessible Wi-Fi networks. The company had begun testing a “Find Wi-Fi” option last year on mobile, which highlighted free, public Wi-Fi networks nearby. At the time, the option was only available on iOS in select countries, as something of a test.… Continue reading Facebook is rolling out its “Find Wi-Fi” feature worldwide

Twitter is continuing to grow its live streaming business, with a series of new deals announced over the past week or so, including a partnership that will bring live streams from the floor of the San Diego Comic-Con in July, as well as behind-the-scenes action and news from Wimbledon, among several other efforts. You may recall… Continue reading Twitter inks live stream deals for Wimbledon, Comic-Con coverage, and more