Facebook is taking a novel approach to its first smartwatch, which the company hasn’t confirmed publicly but currently plans to debut next summer. The device will feature a display with two cameras that can be detached from the wrist for taking pictures and videos that can be shared across Facebook’s suite of apps, including Instagram, The Verge has learned. A camera on the front of the watch display exists primarily for video calling, […]
WhatsApp is attempting to clarify changes to its privacy policy after immense backlash. The Facebook-owned messaging service has published a new FAQ page to its website, saying that the changes going into effect on February 8 only affect businesses who use WhatsApp, not individual users. Last week, a report suggested that WhatsApp would share user data with Facebook, without giving users a choice. In 2016, WhatsApp began sharing data with Facebook by default, but […]
Verizon is the latest, and far and away largest, company to join an ongoing advertising boycott of Facebook and Instagram, the cell carrier announced Thursday. The boycott, organized by the Anti-Defamation League, is in response to the social media giant’s handling of incendiary posts from President Donald Trump, as well as ongoing issues with misinformation that have intensified in recent weeks due to protests against police brutality and racism and other […]
Facebook is launching its Messenger Kids app in over 70 new countries today, the company has announced. A help page on Facebook’s website lists Brazil, India, Japan, and New Zealand among the countries where the kid-focused messaging service is now available. Facebook also announced a number of tweaks it’s making to how the app works. Facebook has taken its time to roll out Messenger Kids to new markets since its original US launch in […]
Facebook’s video-on-demand service Facebook Watch is getting a trio of familiar classics: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. The social network is teaming up with 20th Century Fox to bring every episode of the shows to Facebook starting today. The shows aren’t exclusive to Facebook — you can purchase episodes from a variety of places, and the episodes can be streamed on Hulu — but earlier this week, Facebook rolled out its Watch […]
It turns out, one of Facebook’s biggest News Feed experiments last year only made the service worse. Last October, the Guardian reported that Facebook was testing significant changes to its News Feed. For users in six countries, Facebook moved nearly all non-promoted posts from pages and publishers out of the main News Feed into a secondary feed, called the Explore Feed. Predictably, people didn’t want to have to bounce between two feeds, […]
Facebook is losing young users even quicker than expected, according to new estimates by eMarketer. The digital measurement firm predicted last year that Facebook would see a 3.4 percent drop in 12- to 17-year-old users in the U.S. in 2017, the first time it had predicted a drop in usage for any age group on Facebook. The reality: The number of U.S. Facebook users in the 12- to 17-year-old demographic declined […]
Facebook is currently testing a feature that allows users to "downvote" comments. In a statement to TechCrunch, Facebook said that the downvote button is being offered in a limited number of public Page post comments and can be seen by a small set of people in the U.S. only. The downvote test is currently running for only 5% of Android users with English set as the default language. And it will […]
There's no doubting the power social media has to help businesses expand their reach, and so far, no social media platform can compete with Facebook. One survey revealed that as of June 2017, Mark Zuckerberg's creation has more than two billion monthly users. Facebook's closest competitor is YouTube at 1.5 billion. Meanwhile, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger each boast 1.2 billion users. While Facebook is a virtual goldmine of prospects, using […]
