Beyond Facebook: What you need to know about texting apps
If you live in the United States, you might’ve been surprised when Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion — or, in other words, thing-you’d-think-you’d-have-heard-of money. Facebook identified what those of us in the US with texting plans and Apple Messages haven’t noticed: There are whole ecosystems of social networking and instant messaging separate from those we customarily use.
There are a number of advantages services like Line and WhatsApp have over basic texting: They’re cross-platform and international, allowing people to talk to other users in other countries, on other devices and other networks, with no extra cost. Of course, for individual users, there’s only one thing that distinguishes one service from others: the presence of their friends.
What are the major services?
WhatsApp claims the largest user base of any mobile messaging app, with 700 million active users worldwide as of January. Of that group, the largest concentration (approximately 70 million monthly active users) is in India. Anecdotally, it’s also extremely popular in the Middle East. “Everyone in the Middle East uses WhatsApp,” said Mohammed Taher, president of Brave Wave Productions, the company behind WhatsApp, which was eventually bought by Facebook. “I use it mainly to keep in touch with my family and work colleagues. You can’t really escape it.”
The app, created in 2009 by former Yahoo employees Brian Acton and Jan Koum, allows users to send text, images, video and audio messages. Users create accounts by entering their phone numbers, then have the option to search their contacts for other WhatsApp users.
It’s not free: After one year of use, WhatsApp charges 99 cents a year. But that’s a lot less expensive than a texting plan, especially for users who frequently send messages internationally. WhatsApp announced last year that this fee will be waived in India, due to low credit card adoption and other “ecosystem issues.”
Line is a cute, bright-green messaging app with 50 million users in Japan, as of February 2014. Over 560 million users worldwide have memberships, of whom 181 million are considered monthly active users. It also claims the largest market share among messaging apps in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand. Thirteen countries, including the US, have over 10 million Line users each.
The app offers text, voice and video chat, as well as photo sharing, but its trademark feature is also its monetization method: stickers. Line sells packs of “stickers,” emoji-style images that can be sent in chat. Sticker packs range from popular anime and pop culture licenses, to Line’s original characters, to user-created collections from the Line Creators Market. It’s possible to communicate using only promotional Linkin Park cartoons, animated Hello Kittys and farting bears.
It’s possible to communicate using only promotional Linkin Park cartoons, animated Hello Kittys and farting bears.
Line also offers separate apps that connect to the messaging service, including the Line Game portal and standalone games like Disney Tsum Tsum, a camera app, drawing tools, e-cards and others. The company plans to launch a streaming-music option and recently started a payment service to enable users to link their credit cards and pay for goods and services online through Line. Meanwhile, outside of the virtual world, Line is opening a store in Harajuku, Japan, that sells exclusive merchandise of its popular characters, in case one of your friends needs a Swarovski-encrusted doll of Cony the rabbit. There’s even a taxi service.
Telegram is a project of Berlin’s Telegram Messenger, a company founded by Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who created the Russian VK network. Its user base is more diffuse than the other services; there doesn’t seem to be a particular “hotspot” among its 50 million users. And it’s likely that the ambiguity about location is by design: Telegram’s selling point is privacy. Users have the option to set up end-to-end encryption with each individual to whom they connect, and can set up self-destructing messages as well. The claim of security is bolstered by a $300,000 bounty for anyone who cracks the app’s encryption.
All Telegram clients (the service is, as of now, available on iOS, Android, Mac, PC, Windows Phone, Linux and as a Chrome browser app) are open source, and the service is free. The Telegram Messenger company is a nonprofit, not just in the sense of “not for profit,” but also as in “not really looking for any money.” As the FAQ on the website puts it: “Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation through his Digital Fortress fund, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we’ll invite our users to donate or add non-essential paid options.”
WeChat, originally Weixin, is a product of China’s Tencent, a massive company that also runs the QQ chat network and many online games, and owns the majority of League of Legends developer Riot Games. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the service’s 468 million users are in China, but the WeChat app is available worldwide, with around 70 million users outside of China as of last year. The app, available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian and Blackberry, offers voice and text chat, a “broadcasting” ability, photo sharing and a “walkie-talkie” feature for instant group voice chats. It also features a Line-like sticker shop.
KakaoTalk also resembles Line, with cute cartoon stickers along with voice, video and text chat — and even a suite of connected apps for music, games and other services. But whereas Line is a Japan-native app from a Korean company, KakaoTalk is used mostly in South Korea, and is shockingly prevalent there: A reported 93 percent of smartphone users in the country use KakaoTalk.
Part of the popularity stems from its connection to popular online games: many free-to-play games for the Korean market, like the mobile DJMax rhythm games, use Kakao accounts. As with the other apps, of course, the main draw of KakaoTalk is access to friends in Korea, since they’re extremely likely to be using it. There are some concerns about security and privacy around both WeChat and KakaoTalk. In October, WeChat censored public messages in mainland China containing photos related to protests in Hong Kong, not the first instance of censorship. Depending on the content of your messages, it may bother you to have the Chinese government potentially looking over your shoulder.
Privacy concerns
For KakaoTalk, there is a concern on the part of some users about privacy — specifically, privacy from the government of South Korea. In late 2014, the government announced a crackdown on false information posted online, partly in response to rumors spread about President Park Geun-hye. That crackdown officially included monitoring of public posts on social networks, but many KakaoTalk users also received notification that their personal accounts had been investigated. Daum Kakao co-CEO Sirgoo Lee apologized to users for violating their privacy. As a result of this issue, an estimated 610,000 had visited Telegram, the privacy-focused network, as of October. KakaoTalk implemented end-to-end encrypted “secret chats” to address the concern.
Chances are, if you’re in the US, you already use at least one messaging service, probably many. But these services all offer something different: Unlike Apple’s Messages app, they aren’t tied to one company’s products. Snapchat offers self-destructing messages like Telegram or KakaoTalk, but veers heavily toward images instead of multimedia or text messaging, and it’s possible to retrieve messages even after their time limit elapses. Facebook has stickers now, like Line, but it also has the people you went to high school with.
As far choosing one over the others, however, these services are all roughly equivalent feature-wise; you can voice chat with other users, send text messages and share photos no matter what you use. The choice of which chat app you use comes down to what chat app your friends use, and that’s likely decided by geography.
Or just put them all on your phone. They’re (mostly) free.
[Image credits: Line (Pricing map); AP (WeChat, KakaoTalk)]
Suicide hoax lands Facebook user in psychiatric institution
A user from California recently put Facebook’s suicide prevention feature to test. According to a report, Shane Tusch shared his frustrations about his bank on the social network and posted a fake-threat to hang himself from the Golden Gate Bridge. A reader swiftly reported his post. As per the prevention service update last month, Facebook locked Tusch out of his account. He should have been in conversation with a crisis worker soon after, but instead he was arrested and placed in a psychiatric institution for a total of 70 hours.
At a time when people are perpetually signed into social networks, online intervention could prove to be a crucial tool in saving lives. According to the CDC, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death across all ages in the US. Facebook first stepped in to help with its reporting tool in 2011. In partnership with suicide prevention organizations, the network eventually found a way to get friends involved beyond likes and comments. Through the service a concerned friend (or, as Tusch claims, a relative stranger) can report a suicide threat to generate a concerned email from Facebook.
Advocates root for the program. But Tusch’s experiment underscores the fact that it’s hard to tell a hoax from the truth on social media. He contacted Consumer Watchdog to share the repercussions of his Facebook post. And the non-profit sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter last week, asking him to discontinue the “ill-conceived” feature until it was better equipped with safeguards for users.
Facebook’s “you matter to us” service is not fool proof. Apart from hoaxes, trolls who thrive in the loopholes of online features could misuse it. But for those who take to social media as a last resort in life, perhaps the benefits of the service trump its potential for being trolled.
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Source: BBC
White House names top Facebook engineer as first director of IT
The White House has gone shopping for talent in Silicon Valley again. This time, it’s plucked David Recordon from Facebook to become its first Director of Information Technology. Before accepting the government position, Recordon served as the social network’s engineering director for five years, leading teams behind Facebook’s internal productivity, HR and video conferencing tools, among many other projects. As the IT director, he’s expected to “build on the Administration’s Smarter IT Delivery efforts to ensure that the technology utilized by the White House is efficient, effective, and secure.” He also has to “[modernize] software used to collaborate, and [bring] use of new technologies in line with private sector best practices.”
Recordon is joining a growing list of Silicon Valley alumni now employed at the White House, including former Google Site Reliability Manager Mikey Dickerson who led the efforts in fixing the Healthcare.gov fiasco. Dickerson and his personnel now form the first US Digital Service team, which is in charge of overhauling government websites and making sure they’re in working order. Former Google X VP Megan Smith is another entry in the list as US Chief Technical Officer, followed by ex-Twitter lawyer Alex Macgillivray who’s working under her as Deputy CTO. There’s also DJ Patil from eBay, PayPal and Skype, who’s now the Chief Data Scientist and Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy.
If the White House’s proposed fiscal budget of 2016 is approved, its aggressive hiring of top tech talents from the Valley won’t stop with Recordon. After all, the administration is asking for a $105 million budget to form a digital team for each of its 25 agencies.
[Image credit: Tantek/Wikipedia]
Source: Yahoo, The White House Blog
Glextor AppManager & Organizer Review
Glextor AppManager & Organizer is the organizer you never knew you needed. Android has endless ways to customize your phone and allow you to have key app access quickly. With home screens, widgets, folders, and phone search you are a short tap away from you favorite tools. Glextor takes this idea and adds even more personal customization. The stock app drawer in android is limited to a few organization features and is generally a place I hardly use. Many apps get lost in the mix of hundreds of applications on your phone. This organizer allows you to have multiple folders all in one place with personal tags to navigate your apps faster.
The saying ” I forgot I even had that” has been said numerous times by me as a power user. My phone has become my life with tie ins to home, finance, games, work, and fitness. Your phone allows for some organization with limited folders and custom home screens but they fall short on capabilities. Glextor takes custom organization to a whole new level giving you dozens of possibilities. The application allows for personal naming of groups but also has generic groups names. You can also tag your favorite apps to have them display first when you open the app. Taking customization into overdrive you can also add your groups on your home screen and change the icon color, size, border, and name. There is also options to back up your settings to keep everything the same when you upgrade your device or operating system.
This organizer lets you customize just about everything from the layout to the look making it easy to highlight important applications. You can also hide applications that you do not use often such as holiday themed programs or icons for wallpaper packages. To add even more to this useful tool you can also revert back to old versions of applications if you find the update is not to your liking. At first glance this just seems like another organizer in the long list of organizers but Glextor has made it stand out among the rest by giving the user endless customization. The only negative found was the amount of options makes initial setup take a long time for picky users. The app has an auto setup at first to gives users a solid foundation to start with. Glextor AppManager & Organizer is free from the play store but also has a paid version allowing for even more capabilities. This is a must have app for anyone using Android that wants to further enhance their experience.
Google Play, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter
The post Glextor AppManager & Organizer Review appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Facebook will soon let you send money to friends through Messenger
Facebook has just announced a new service that allows you to easily send money to your friends through Facebook Messenger. Once the feature rolls out to everyone, all you’ll need to do is start a conversation with your friend, tap the “$” icon and enter the amount you want to send. After that, tap Pay on the top of your screen, then proceed to enter your debit card information. In order to receive money from your friend, you’ll need to tap the Add Card button in a chat in order to receive the transfer.
The money sent through the Messenger app will be transferred instantly, though depending on your bank, there may be a one to three day delay before the money becomes available to you. Also, credit cards aren’t supported, and you’ll need either a Visa or MasterCard to set up the payment service. On the security front, Facebook explains:
Once you add a debit card, you can create a PIN to provide additional security the next time you send money. On iOS devices you can also enable Touch ID. As always, you can add another layer of authentication to your account at any time.
Additionally, Facebook will use secure systems that will encrypt your connection, and will use “layers of software and hardware protection that meet the highest industry standards”. A team of anti-fraud specialists will help monitor for suspicious purchase activity to ensure your account is kept safe.
The new payment feature will begin to roll out on Android, iOS and desktops across the U.S. in the coming months.
Facebook announces money transferring for Messenger
Soon, Facebook Messenger will expand to a messaging service that allows money transferring. The social network announced today that users will be able to conveniently and securely send or receive money between friends. Simply add a Visa or MasterCard debit card and setup a PIN to start transferring money. Since security has become increasingly important, especially when it comes to financial items, Facebook says that login approvals can be added for another layer of authentication.
To send money:
- Start a message with a friend
- Tap the $ icon and enter the amount you want to send
- Tap Pay in the top right and add your debit card to send money
To receive money:
- Open the conversation from your friend
- Tap Add Card in the message and add your debit card to accept money for the first time
The money transferring feature will be rolled out in the United States over the coming months. It will work on web, Android, and iOS platforms.
Source: Facebook Newsroom
Come comment on this article: Facebook announces money transferring for Messenger
Facebook clarifies what you’re allowed to post on its social network
Facebook’s content guidelines have sparked confusion, to put it mildly — a lot of people are unsure as to whether or not they have to use their legal names, or whether it’s safe to post breastfeeding photos. At last, though, the social network is clearing the air a bit. It just posted new Community Standards that don’t change the company’s stance, but should remove some of the gray areas. For one, it’s emphasizing that you only have to use your “authentic identity,” not the name your government recognizes — important if you identify with a non-traditional gender. Facebook also clarifies that you can mention hate speech for the sake of social commentary, and refines its views on harassment, nudity and what happens to your account when you die. A few sections are completely new, such as one explicitly forbidding revenge porn and other forms of sexual exploitation.
The updated standards won’t make you happy if you took issue with Facebook’s broader policies in the first place. The site won’t pull content worldwide solely because it’s banned in a given country, for example, but it still won’t defy those bans if they’re questionable. Even so, this could help allay fears that you’ll get kicked out for making a controversial (but well-intentioned) post.
[Image credit: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu]
https://player.vimeo.com/video/122138817?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Source: Facebook Newsroom
Facebook faces another class-action suit, this time over kids’ purchases
Facebook isn’t exactly a stranger to the courtroom, but it’ll soon have another legal headache to deal with thanks to a recent court ruling out of San Jose, California. You see, US District Court Judge Beth Labson decided on Tuesday that in spite of the company’s best efforts, Facebook will have to deal with a brewing class action lawsuit involving kids, credit cards and the company’s long-dead virtual currency.
If you don’t remember Facebook Credits, well, you’re probably not alone. The company tried for about three years to transform Credits from a not-so-wild-eyed idea into a viable way for people to convert cold hard cash into, erm, Farmville renovations. The entire Credits initiative got the boot in mid-2012, but somewhere along the way two kids used their parents’ credit and debit cards to buy said Credits… and lots of them. Facebook basically balked (potentially in violation of Calfornia law) when said spawnbearers argued for hundreds of dollars in refunds, so the parents promptly filed suit against Facebook in April 2012. Coincidentally, Credits died an ignominious death in a post on Facebook’s Developers blog just two months later. That’s the thrust of Facebook’s latest legal odyssey, but the juiciest parts of the story have yet to be written — Labson estimated that hundreds of thousands of potential plaintiffs could surface in search of their financial comeuppance when this whole thing comes to trial on October 19.
Source: Reuters
Campaigners get Facebook to banish ‘feeling fat’ emoticon
On top of not being an actual emotion, “feeling fat” is no longer a Facebook emoticon. Following a campaign from anti-body-shaming group Endangered Bodies, Facebook has removed the emoji from its list of status update options, according to the Washington Post. The social network said “we’ve heard from our community that listing ‘feeling fat’ as an option for status updates could reinforce negative body image, particularly for people struggling with eating disorders.” In a Change.org petition that garnered 17,000 signatures, Endangered Bodies said the emoticon is “making fun of people who consider themselves to be overweight… all (we) ask is that it stop endorsing self-destructive thoughts through seemingly harmless emojis.”
Following the emoji’s removal, the woman who spearheaded the campaign said “this success shows us that people together can challenge the cultural messages that are so damaging to our ability to love ourselves and live comfortably in our bodies.” However, while “fat” is now gone from the status update section, Facebook seems to have kept the double-chinned emoticon and replaced “fat” with “stuffed.” Since there’s already a “feeling full” emoticon, we’re not sure about the need for both.
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Via: Washington Post
Source: Facebook
Report shows that two-thirds of mobile traffic comes from just five apps
A recent report by Ericsson shows that two-thirds of app data traffic over mobile networks comes from just five apps. Depending on the country, the five apps changed but overall it was clear that video streaming and social networking apps dominated countries around the world.
Facebook took home top ranking as the app that used the most data in each country studied. In the United States during December 2014, Netflix and YouTube rounded out the top three while South Korea had peer-to-peer TV app AfreecaTV and home-grown search portal NAVER.
The report also notes that total mobile video traffic over the next six years will be around 17 times greater than that of last six years. Some of the reasons given for the expected growth were an increased number of video-enabled devices, larger screens, and better picture quality.
Streaming services were also a big winner in this report. As has been reported previously by many, the numbers of people watching broadcast TV is decreasing while streaming services are seeing increased numbers. Ericsson found that 2015 is expected to be the first year in which more people will watch streamed on demand video than broadcast TV over a weekly period for a number of major markets.
Other notable findings include:
- LTE technology achieved the highest quarterly additions with 110 million new mobile subscriptions.
- In 2014, 800 million smartphone subscriptions were added worldwide taking the total number to 2.7 billion, up 40% from a total of 1.9 billion smartphone subscriptions in 2013.
AIVAnet 
