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Facebook is the most popular social media service in the world with 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018

Facebook is the most popular social media service in the world with 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018. It also averages 1.52 billion daily active users as of December 2018.

Facebook was launched in February of 2004 (as The Facebook) for college students and then rapidly grew as it opened the service to more than those with a .edu email address. It was the subject of the 2010 movie called “The Social Network“.

In 2012, the social media giant offered its IPO and Facebook earned the title of the fastest company to grow to $250 billion market capitalization in the S&P 500.

In recent years, the company has been at the center of attention related to its role in the Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Since then, it’s been a continual stream of negative news for the company. They recently had all of their enterprise certificates for iOS revoked after it was discovered they had repackaged Onavo VPN as a ‘Research’ app and were paying teens $20/month to sneakily sideload it.

In early 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a “privacy shift” for the company. He outlined a detailed vision for the future of the social media platform, specifically its messaging services. Notably, in contrast to how the company operates today, he says the future of the platform will be privacy-focused with features like end-to-end encryption, interoperability between its various apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reducing how long it holds data, secure storage of personal data, and more.

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Facebook working on an Android-based video chat device

Last year, Facebook poached Regina Dugan, the head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects, to lead a new hardware group. Building 8’s first products are now coming into light as a new report notes the development of a HomePod smart speaker competitor and a video chat device. For those that remember Mark Zuckerburg’s security advice from last year, the rumors of these new products come with some irony.


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Instagram Stories now at 250M users & adds Live Video replays, will expand to other services

After deciding to clone Snapchat’s Stories feature and roll it out to Instagram last August, today the company offered an update on progress, confirming the feature now has 250 million daily active users. That’s up from the 200 million it announced back in April when it officially surpassed Snapchat. In comparison, Snapchat was at around 166 million daily active users as of its last announced numbers in May.

The company is also announcing a new video replay feature that allows users to share clips of videos that were previously available as live video on Stories:


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Facebook fined €110M ($122M) for misleading EU over WhatsApp acquisition

Antitrust regulators in Europe have fined Facebook €110 ($122M) for misleading them over its acquisition of the secure messaging service WhatsApp.

The European Commission said that the fine would have been more than twice as high but for Facebook’s acknowledgement of wrong-doing and cooperation with the investigation …


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