Facebook add-ons save and share stories in Chrome
Facebook’s save-for-later feature just got much quicker if you’re a Chrome fan. The social network is releasing a Save to Facebook extension for Google’s web browser that lets you preserve that news story or recipe for posterity. There’s a Share to Facebook add-on, too, so you don’t have to copy-and-paste outside links. Both should be available in the Chrome Web Store today.
Also, don’t be surprised if Facebook’s seemingly ubiquitous Like button looks different. The company is ditching the old “F” button in favor of one with the signature thumbs-up icon — apparently, a 6 percent improvement in engagement was all it took to make the switch. You should notice other buttons (like Save or Share) getting a flatter, more consistent look. You’ll see Like, Comment and Share buttons appear below some Instant Articles as well. These are all minor touches, of course, but they’ll add up if you routinely share your tastes with your Facebook friends.
Source: Facebook
Facebook Promises That Location Data is ‘Only One of the Factors’ in Friend Suggestions
Facebook has never specified the exact methods it uses to present friend suggestions within its “People You May Know” tab, but a new report by Fusion suggests that a shared GPS data point could be a bigger factor in curating friendship than Facebook wants users to know.
An anonymous source told the site that he suspected the social network of digging into his location information to curate potential friendships with parents who had attended a meeting for suicidal teenagers.
When a fellow parent appeared on his People You May Know section — without any shared contact information or interests — he double checked the privacy settings of Facebook in his iPhone to prevent the app from “always” sharing his location. As far as he could tell, the sole factor in common between the two Facebook users had been the similar GPS location at one of the meetings.
Still, when Facebook was reached out to provide a comment, the company confirmed that location data, by itself, is never used for the purpose of presenting friendships on the social network. While this could be potentially useful for connecting with people you might forget to exchange contact information with, Facebook also realizes the potential for a breach of security if you happen to be visiting somewhere more private.
“People You May Know are people on Facebook that you might know,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We show you people based on mutual friends, work and education information, networks you’re part of, contacts you’ve imported and many other factors.”
“Location information by itself doesn’t indicate that two people might be friends,” said the Facebook spokesperson. “That’s why location is only one of the factors we use to suggest people you may know.”
Although the company has given no suggestion at making its use of geolocation more overt, law professor Woodrow Hartzog believes its automatic setting is something “that people should be given explicit and multiple warnings about.” If you want to double check your own iPhone’s privacy settings, visit the Settings app > Privacy > Location Services > and scroll down to find Facebook. Three options are available for security customization, including “Never,” “While Using the App,” and “Always.”
Tag: Facebook
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Facebook App Takes on Movie-Making Feature in iOS 10 With ‘Slideshows’
Facebook is shifting the movie-making Slideshow feature from its Moments app to its flagship iOS app in an attempt to counter Apple’s Photos update in iOS 10.
For those unfamiliar with Apple’s big addition to its Photos app coming in iOS 10, a new feature called Memories uses facial- and object-recognition to automatically cluster photos based on people, scenes, dates, and locations, and intelligently creates mini-movies of occasions like vacations, birthdays, and weddings.
Similarly, Facebook’s Slideshow feature, which originally appeared in August as part of its photo-centric Moments app, combines user photos and videos into a short clip that can be customized with transitions, themes, and music soundtracks.
In its new manifestation in Facebook’s flagship app, the feature will now do this automatically whenever users take at least five photos or videos in the last 24 hours. And if users come upon a slideshow in the News Feed, they can tap a “try it” option to make their own. Images can be edited to add or remove images, and themes include Nostalgic, Playful, Night Out, Birthday, Epic, Thankful, Tropical, Bollywood, and Amped.
The move represents a direct attempt by the company to take on Apple’s movie-making feature in iOS 10, which is coming this fall, although both companies are actually playing catch-up to Google, which offered a similar feature last year as part of Google Photos Assistant.
Earlier this month, Facebook attracted the ire of users by forcing account holders to download its Moments app if they wanted to keep synced photo albums uploaded from their mobile devices.
Users were informed by email and via app notifications that these albums will cease to exist on July 7, and that they should either download the albums, or install the company’s photo-centric Moments app to keep them in the cloud.
Facebook is free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. [Direct Link]
Related Roundup: iOS 10
Tags: Facebook, Moments
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Facebook debuts hand-picked event listings in 10 cities
In its latest attempt to seem a little more human and a little less algorithmic, Facebook debuted a new feature Monday that suggests interesting events picked by real, live humans in 10 major US cities — even if those events aren’t on Facebook. As TechCrunch reports, iOS users in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and elsewhere will see the cleverly named “Featured Events” listings at the top of the events tab starting today. Unlike “suggested” events, which are based on your friends’ interests and RSVPs, Facebook has actually built out a team of curators to hand-pick events in each city.
According to Facebook Events product manager Aditya Koolwal, the new feature is meant to be “like a weekend or weekly digest of cool stuff that you can do in your city,” and is designed to give people enough lead time to spot an upcoming event and invite their friends. For this initial rollout, the cities include Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The listings will also focus on large, public events with broad appeal so there’s no fear that your 10-person backyard cocktail party will suddenly get featured and go viral. Although it won’t be selling the listings just yet, it’s possible that Facebook will monetize the listings in the future. And, after that whole Trending Topics mess, Koolwal says the new Events listings won’t feature anything political or religious in nature either.
Finally, as Recode points out, this is a relatively minor change for Facebook, but it could put another huge dent in print media and smaller city blogs where event listings never quite disappeared.
Source: TechCrunch, Recode
Facebook Slideshow livens up your photos and videos
It’s easy to post a ton of photos from your weekend adventures to Facebook, but let’s face it: there are only so many people willing to flip through your photos one at a time. Facebook might just have a way to spice things up, though. It’s trotting out a Slideshow feature that turns your photos and videos into themed clips that will be easier to watch. All you need to do to get one is take five or more photos or videos in 24 hours — Facebook will create an initial clip all on its own. After that, it’s a matter of customizing the slideshow by adding or removing shots and choosing the theme. The feature is only reaching iOS users this week, but it’ll be a big help if it gets friends to check out your vacation gallery.
Facebook for iOS Now Features Human-Curated Events List in 10 Cities
Facebook today announced plans to add human curation to its Facebook Events feature on iOS devices, with designated curators set to highlight notable events in a select number of cities.
Facebook Events, for those unfamiliar, is the Facebook feature that allows users to create dedicated Facebook event pages for parties, festivals, and more, and sign up to attend those events. Event pages are a useful way to share event details with a large number of people, including time, location, and information on others who are attending.
According to TechCrunch, iOS users in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. will see a new “Featured Events” option on the Events section of the app. Some users, described as “highly engaged,” will also receive push notifications for interesting events.
Facebook’s curators will cull through each city’s top art, entertainment, family, festival, fitness, food & drink, learning, community, music, and sports events, and select a few with the capacity to accept some extra foot traffic.
“You can think about it like a weekend or weekly digest of cool stuff that you can do in your city” Facebook Events product manager Aditya Koolwal tells [TechCrunch].
Curated Featured Events will join existing event suggestions Facebook users receive, which have included events based on interest, past attendance, and friend attendance. Facebook’s goal with Featured Events is to surface events early enough to give people time to plan to attend.
Facebook is also enhancing its Events section with new event categories that include things like “Music,” “Food,” “The Weekend,” and more. While Facebook’s new Curated Events feature is only available in a limited number of cities, Facebook may consider expanding it in the future should it prove popular.
Tag: Facebook
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Reuters: Big tech companies are auto-purging extremist content
YouTube, Facebook and other big internet companies are using automated systems to find and remove terrorist content, according to Reuters. Prior to this, they mostly relied on users to report extremist videos, which human employees review and delete. The publication’s sources wouldn’t specify how the systems work and if humans play a role in the process. But these huge entities reportedly took the technologies they use to scour their domains for copyright-protected posts and tweaked them for this purpose.
The altered automated systems can identify beheading videos, as well as ones that incite violence and spread extremist propaganda. They do so by comparing the unique digital identifiers or “hashes” that internet companies assign to videos people upload against a database of previously banned content. A good example of a tech that works like that is Microsoft’s child porn-detecting program PhotoDNA.
It’s unclear how the companies assembled that database, and we doubt we’d hear from any of them. Reuters’ sources said they’re not talking about this project, because they’re worried that terrorists might figure out how their content-blocking systems work. They’re also wary of governments pressuring them to use their technologies to censor critics and opponents.
Google, Facebook, Twitter and other huge players in the industry apparently discussed various ways to combat the growing number of pro-terrorist posts on their websites during a call back in April. It has recently become such a huge problem for them that Twitter had to ban 125,000 users in February. One teenager was even sentenced to 11 years in prison for running a popular pro-ISIS Twitter account.
While none of the companies wanted to talk about the initiative, Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, has at least revealed that they’re working together. She told Reuters that they’re “exploring with others in industry ways [they] can collaboratively work to remove content that violates [their] policies against terrorism.”
Source: Reuters
Facebook hires Google Fiber co-founder Kevin Lo
As Facebook continues its plan to help connect people around the world to the internet, it’s finding help from Google. Recode reports that former Google Fiber exec and co-founder Kevin Lo has been hired to help Facebook make infrastructure deals for its connection efforts. Facebook told the outlet Lo will not be working on Free Basics, and that it has no plans to start an ISP of its own, but even wireless tech like Terragraph nodes or drone-delivered internet will need to connect to a backbone somehow. In a Facebook post confirming the move, Lo said he’s going “help shape our strategy and investments with partners to build wireless technologies and ecosystems that improve global connectivity.”
Source: Kevin Lo (Facebook), Recode
Oculus stops preventing VR games from working with HTC’s Vive
In a big more for openness in the VR landscape, Oculus has stepped back from its position of blocking its games from working on the HTC Vive. The company quietly issued an update for its desktop software today which strips away the headset exclusivity check that has caused VR fans so much consternation, Ars Technica reports. That limitation pushed the developers of the Revive tool, which lets Vive owners play Oculus games, to completely crack Oculus’s DRM last month. But in response to today’s news, the Revive devs have dumped their DRM cracking technology.
“I’ve only just tested this and I’m still in disbelief, but it looks like Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5,” a Revive developer wrote on GitHub. “As such I’ve reverted the DRM patch and removed all binaries from previous releases that contained the patch.”
While console gamers are used to games being exclusive to certain hardware, that’s new territory for PC gamers. It’s hard to blame PC fans for getting annoyed, though — even Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has said he doesn’t want to lock games to the Rift. Given that the VR landscape is so young, it makes more sense to encourage cross-compatibility. Oculus came under fire at E3 for striking deals to land exclusive games, but today’s update shows it’s actually listening to its critics.
Oculus confirmed to Ars that it removed the headset in today’s update, and it also added “we won’t use hardware checks as part of DRM on PC in the future.” Still, the company doesn’t plan to give up entirely on copy protection. “We believe protecting developer content is critical to the long-term success of the VR industry, and we’ll continue taking steps in the future to ensure that VR developers can keep investing in ground-breaking new VR content,”
Via: Ars Technica
Tune in to watch President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg live at 1:45 PM ET
This afternoon, President Obama will meet with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a panel of other young entrepreneurs at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit on Stanford’s campus in Palo Alto. While the discussion is scheduled to focus on business, Zuckerberg has recently been celebrating the power of live video to bring “more openness to the political process.” Earlier this week, Facebook Live and its competitor Periscope proved invaluable for bringing a sit-in on the House floor to millions of people.
The stream goes live at 1:45 PM ET. And you can watch via WhiteHouse.gov or the embedded YouTube stream below.
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