There is life after Facebook: these are the best Facebook app alternatives
Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting anything as earth-shattering as quitting Facebook. Just quitting the official Facebook app. Among tech aficionados, the Facebook app is the one app you would never put on a new device because of how bloated and resource-hungry it is, but there are plenty of folks out there that do have it installed. However, a recent ground-swell of anti-Facebook sentiment is seeing more and more people try life without the official app, and liking what they see.
See also: 9 best Facebook apps for Android
The main things Facebook is accused of doing is taking up too much space (the official app is 40 MB), consuming too much RAM, causing persistent wakelocks, background processes draining battery and generally being the root of all evil. There’s surprisingly little factual evidence around for all these claims, but there is certainly no shortage of anecdotal evidence that Facebook is the primary cause of a sluggish Android experience. For every one of these claims there’s usually another that states uninstalling the app leads to near-instantaneous performance improvements.
Whether you find your system performance to be so bad that something must be done, you simply want a faster and more streamlined Facebook experience or you just want to know the truth for yourself, there’s certainly no harm in uninstalling Facebook for a while.
Facebook app alternatives
The first thing you’re going to need to do is find yourself a Facebook app alternative. Assuming the main reasons you uninstalled Facebook was to kill its battery-draining, background process-using, resource-chewing habits, then you’re probably going to want something lighter, leaner and faster. Considering how bad the Facebook app is, that isn’t very hard to do. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to find an equivalent Facebook experience elsewhere.
Google Play is full of alternative Facebook apps, but in all honesty, most of them are not very good. I’ve tried pretty much all of them and generally return to the same three or four solutions, which I’ll list for you below. The good news about all of these is that none of them auto-play video ads in your stream either.
Google Chrome
[Price: Free]
Using a Google Chrome “web view” shortcut is probably the lightest and fastest option around. Since September last year, when you sign into Facebook in Chrome, you’ll see a popup requesting permission to let Chrome send you Facebook notifications. Saying yes to this request means that you can now get Facebook push notifications via the browser, making the Facebook app redundant.
Simply open Facebook in Chrome on your device and log in. When the Chrome request appears at the bottom of the screen, tap Allow. Now, tap the Chrome overflow menu button and tap Add to Home screen. You’ll get an admittedly large Facebook icon added to your home screen that will take you straight to your web version of Facebook in Chrome and you’ll still get push notifications like normal.
Metal for Facebook and Twitter
[Price: Free]
Metal is one of the few Facebook alternative apps I’d recommend. The best thing is it works for both Facebook and Twitter, so you can kill two birds with one stone. Metal is a web wrapper app, meaning that it isn’t so much of an app itself as a skin for the web version of Facebook.
Like the Chrome solution above, Metal can also send you push notifications but it improves on the Chrome fix by adding a huge array of extras. Metal including various themes, a floating mini app-window for FB updates on the fly, a navigation drawer, Twitter support, fingerprint access, interface options (like full screen mode and fixed toolbar while scrolling), proxies, pinned pages for a custom shortcut menu, floating action button and forced mobile or desktop site view. It’s pretty brilliant.
Tinfoil for Facebook
[Price: Free]
If Metal sounds all a bit too complicated, the old dinosaur of Facebook alternative apps is Tinfoil for Facebook. Again, Tinfoil for Facebook is just a web wrapper app, but it’s super fast and has its own handy navigation drawer and shortcuts. It’s nowhere near as feature-packed as Metal, but it is even smaller and faster.
Tinfoil doesn’t sync in the background, use any more resources than the Chrome shortcut or cache data, so it’s very battery and system friendly. Tinfoil doesn’t include push notifications though, but you can simply use Chrome notifications to keep up to date or install IF by IFTTT and add the Facebook notifications recipe. You’ll just need to go to your Facebook notifications settings page on a computer and grab your RSS feed URL so you can plug it into the IF recipe.
Facebook Lite
[Price: Free]
If you like the main Facebook app but can’t put up with its battery-draining, performance killing nature anymore, you could also try Facebook lite. If you haven’t heard about it, Facebook Lite is an official Facebook app originally designed for markets where fast-flowing internet connections are not always available. But folks anywhere can use it as a faster, leaner alternative to Facebook that consumes less data and requires less system resources to run.
Facebook Lite offers a similar, if pared down, experience to the main Facebook app, but it is much, much smaller: just half a MB compared to 40 MB for the normal app. Facebook Lite also has native push notifications and chat, so there’s no need to keep Facebook’s Messenger app installed if you take this option. Unless you’re in a supported market you can’t search for Facebook Lite in Google Play, but you can get it via the Play Store link below.
Have you tried the “no Facebook app” challenge? How do you access Facebook?
Report: Facebook is deleting medical marijuana pages
NJ.com reports that Facebook has deleted the business pages of medical marijuana dispensaries — three in New Jersey so far as well as a handful of others across the nation — for violating the site’s terms of service. In their place, the dispensaries found note reading “We remove any promotion or encouragement of drug use. Your page is currently not visible on Facebook. It looks like content on your page does not follow the Facebook Community Terms and Standards.”
New Jersey law strictly regulates what information can and cannot be displayed on a dispensary’s website, which has led many of the organizations to use Facebook as a supplemental information source. Strain names, for example, cannot be listed on a New Jersey-based dispensary website. The move has left many patients that rely on these Facebook pages angry. “It seems high-handed to simply shut down important resources for sick patients without even saying why or giving organizations a way to ask for reconsideration,” Peter Rosenfeld, a NJ medical marijuana patient told NJ.com.
When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Engadget, “These pages have been removed for violating our Community Standards, which outline what is and is not allowed on Facebook. Here is a link to our standards.” However, the community standards appear to only “prohibit attempts by unauthorized dealers to purchase, sell, or trade prescription drugs, marijuana, or firearms.” Given that these organizations are legal within the states that they operate, they don’t technically meet that standard. However, going by federal law they would.
Via: FastCo
Source: NJ.com
You are just 3.5 Facebook friends away from anyone else
The longstanding figure regarding degrees of separation has been six. This has been popularized by the game-slash-social-media-phenomenon Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, a concept that attests that no actor currently working in Hollywood is more than six associative steps from prolific actor Kevin Bacon. However, the internet is making the world smaller these days. Recent data from Facebook claims that the average user is no more than 3.5 friends away from everyone else in the world.
That means that even though I don’t know you from Adam or Eve, the odds are good that you know a guy who knows a guy who in turn knows a guy who is friends with me on Facebook. Considering there are seven billion of us running around on the planet, that’s a pretty astounding degree of interconnectedness.
See also: Facebook’s Like button alternatives launching ‘in the next few weeks’
Facebook has calculated this figure using the Flajolet-Martin algorithm. The task was gigantic, considering the social network’s massive usership, but researchers concluded that the world is figuratively getting smaller, considering the number of steps required to get from one person to another was 3.74 on average back in 2011. As it stands today, the average user ranges from 2.9 to 4.2 degrees of separation from everyone else with a Facebook account.
What are your thoughts regarding this interconnectedness? Are artificial relationship exaggerating how close we are, or is this the next step in becoming a global community? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
There are 3.57 degrees of separation between you and all of Facebook
The world’s population continues to expand, but we’re closer connected to everyone else on the earth than ever before — at least, if you’re a Facebook user. Today, the company’s research team released a blog post claiming that the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook are connected to every other Facebook user by an average of 3.57 other people. In the US, that number shrinks to 3.46.
And that number is shrinking as more and more people join Facebook. Back in 2011, a study computed that the 721 million people using Facebook at the time were connected to everyone else on the site by an average of 3.74. “With twice as many people using the site, we’ve grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world,” Facebook’s research team writes.
If you’re logged into Facebook, you can see where you’re at on the bell curve of connectivity to the rest of the site’s population (I’m at 3.41, just slightly above average). It also shows you how connected CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg are (3.17 and 2.92, respectively).
Of course, if you’re anything like most Facebook users out there, you’ve collected a ménagère of random “friends” on the site — old high school companions you don’t really like, co-workers from four jobs ago you haven’t talked to since your last day, super-distant family members and the like. Those “connections” might not be all that meaningful, but they’re nonetheless contributing to the data that’s making us look more connected than ever.
Source: Facebook
Instagram multiple account support available to some iOS users
If you’ve been clamoring for multiple account support in the Instagram app, you might soon be in luck. Some iPhone users, including our own Mat Smith, are seeing the feature pop up on iOS. If you’ll recall, the ability to sign in to multiple accounts and toggle back and forth when posting made an appearance back in November on the Instagram Android app.
You had to manually download an APK to take advantage then, but that’s not necessary in iOS. Since multiple account support is only available to a few, it appears to still be in the testing phase. Hopefully that’ll change soon as Instagram is one of the few social apps that doesn’t allow you to easily switch between accounts.
Via: Latergramme
Instagram introduces 60-second video ads
Instagram’s toolset is beginning to diverge for users and advertisers. Since September businesses have been able to upload 30-second video ads — double the length available to regular users — and starting this week that limit is being increased to a minute. Warner Bros. and T-Mobile are among the first brands to utilize the extra time, injecting extended film trailers and Drake-centric Superbowl ads into people’s feeds. Neither are particularly innovative, but it’s notable that the extra time makes them feel more like traditional advertising and less like shareable, social snippets.
For Instagram, this is an obvious move to further monetize its popular photo and video-sharing platform. The way the company handles ads isn’t as intrusive as something like YouTube — as a user, you don’t have to wait to scroll past and see what your followers have been posting — but the nature of the feed means it’s still hard to ignore them completely. That, combined with its 400 million users, makes Instagram an attractive place for companies to spend their ad dollars. For normals, however, it means the service might feel just a little more commercialized than before.
Via: AdWeek, TechCrunch
Facebook’s latest feature is a supercut of your friendships
Today is Facebook‘s 12th birthday, or as CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it, Friends Day. To celebrate the occasion, the social network is introducing a new personalized video experience that essentially automatically collates together your friendships and memorable moments in a video that you can share with your Facebook brethren. And in case you want to change out a photo or two in the clip, you’re free to edit it as well. Facebook users will start seeing these pre-populated clips starting today at the top of their News Feed and you can also click a “Watch Yours” link underneath a friend’s Friends Day video to see it.
On top of the new video product, Facebook also announced that its community is growing closer. In a blog post, the social network announced today that despite having doubled in size over the past five years, the degrees of separation between Facebook users have decreased from 3.74 degrees to 3.57 degrees. The company says this is a “significant reflection of how closely connected the world has become.” And last but not least, Facebook is also introducing a couple of new friendship-themed sticker packs called “Best Friends” and “Friendship” today.
Source: Facebook
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