Facebook 86’ed The Shade Room from its platform today for unknown reasons. The celebrity gossip and news publisher attracted about 4.2 million followers on Facebook. We reached out to The Shade Room and to Facebook to learn why its page disappeared. Facebook did not yet reply to our inquiry, but we’ll update this story as it develops. […]
Just when you were starting to get used to the way Facebook shows your News Feed, it’s time for another shake-up. This time, the social media mogul is updating the feed to highlight links to sites it thinks you’ll spend more time looking at. The update is part of Facebook’s “Feed Quality Program,” a much […]
How will Facebook video change the physics of news publishing, app downloads, commerce, and what we point our phones at? Find out at TechCrunch Disrupt NY May 9th to 11th when Facebook’s head of video Fidji Simo joins us on stage for a fireside chat. By now, Facebook’s likely hit 10 billion video views per day. […]
Ever found yourself wasting hours down a Facebook rabbit hole? Of course, it happens to us all here and there. If you’re addicted to Facebook or prone to getting lost in the bowels of your newsfeed, then Focusbook is a neat Chrome plug-in that might help. The concept is simple. You scale back your Facebooking by setting a specific purpose for […]
The number of people using the Tor anonymizing browser to access Facebook has passed the one million mark this month for the first time, Facebook has announced. Tor (aka The Onion Router) is a network technology designed to increase the privacy of web users by encrypting and randomly routing Internet connections via a worldwide network of volunteer relays — thereby […]
A comprehensive study of Brits’ usage of and attitudes to digital media, conducted annually by telecoms watchdog Ofcom, suggests there is growing concern among web and app users about the privacy of their personal data. The latest study, published today and based on responses gathered in 2015 — the tenth year the research has been carried out — […]
We’re excited to announce the launch of our cross-platform and personalized news recommendations bot on Facebook Messenger. The bot is part of Facebook’s Messenger program revealed at F8, and it will help our readers get the news they want from us in a more conversational way. You can activate the bot on our Facebook page, or click […]
In the scramble to build bots that live up to the hype, messaging app Telegram has just announced a $1M giveaway to developers to try to incentivize them to build cool stuff. The messaging startup launched its own bot platform back in June last year, long before Facebook started its photocopiers in case you’re keeping count. The Telegram botprize will […]
Oculus wants to let you go anywhere in the world instantly, look like yourself, and even take a photo while you’re there, and today it demoed how at F8. Watch the demo of Facebook and Oculus’ 360 photo spheres, virtual reality selfie stick, and personalized avatars below: To show how social VR could work, Facebook’s CTO […]
Probably the most impressive of Facebook’s connectivity projects is its solar-powered Aquila drone for enabling Internet access in remote areas. But while the technology behind Aquila is impressive, more traditional terrestrial connectivity systems are often still more practical. Today, Facebook announced two new connectivity projects at its F8 developer conference, Terragraph and Project ARIES, both of which focus […]