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1,007 'Facebook' stories December 2010 - May 2014

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 announces TV Show and Music ID app updates for iOS and Android

Mark Gurman May 21 2014 - 8:49 am PT

3 Comments

According to multiple sources, Facebook will unveil a new service today that can identify television shows and music playing in the background. The new software, which will be available via an updated App Store app on iPhone and a Google Play app on Android, will work in tandem with your smartphone hardware’s microphone. Facebook is said to be integrating the feature so Facebook users can more easily share what music they are listening to or what TV show they are currently watching to their Timelines. In iOS 8, Apple will unveil a new Siri feature in partnership with Shazam to identify songs playing in the background. Update: Official announcement after the break…
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Facebook may try to take on Snapchat again with upcoming ‘Slingshot’ app

Mike Beasley May 18 2014 - 6:33 pm PT

5 Comments

If at first you don’t succeed…

Facebook may have recently pulled its Snapchat-like Poke app from the iOS App Store, but the social network is gearing up to take another swipe at the messaging giant later this month, according to a new claim by the Financial Times. Facebook’s new app, currently dubbed “Slingshot” interally, will enable users to send short video messages to one another.

In 2012, Facebook launched its own Snapchat rip-off called Poke, which borrowed its name from an entirely separate feature that had been available on Facebook’s website for years. When Poke failed to attract a significant number of users, Facebook forgot about it and let it sit idle for nearly three years before removing it from the App Store.

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EFF marks Apple’s ‘remarkable improvement’ in protecting customer data from governments

Mark Gurman May 15 2014 - 3:39 pm PT

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today published its annual “Who Has Your Back?” report that rates and compares how major corporations deal with government data requests. The EFF’s ranking of technology company data request transparency is notable because the organization is the “leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.” The report ranks companies based on six categories: requires a warrant for content, tells users about data requests, publishes transparency reports, publishes law enforcement guidelines, fights for users’ privacy in courts, fights for users’ privacy for rights in Congress. This year, Apple received a star for each of the six categories.

This compares to many other technology companies, including Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, that received stars across the board:

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Facebook Poke and Camera pulled from the App Store

Mike Beasley May 9 2014 - 2:49 pm PT

1 Comment

Even though Facebook seemingly wants to break as many of its functions out into separate apps as possible—see Messenger and Pages Manager, for example—it appears that not every function is worthy its own App Store listing. Earlier today the social network pulled two of its iOS apps from sale: Poke (a Snapchat-like photo messenger) and Camera (which is exactly what it sounds like).

Both apps launched in 2012 and didn’t see many big improvements after that. Camera got a few small updates, though they didn’t seem to be much of a priority for the company. At one point a bug left the app’s internal employee settings exposed to all users for several months before being fixed.

Poke, on the other hand, was virtually ignored by Facebook from the day it went live until it was removed from the store. Most of the Camera app’s features were eventually rolled back into the main Facebook app, but Poke was not so fortunate.

Facebook hasn’t provided any reason for pulling either app, but it’s safe to assume that neither was being used that much anymore. The company now seems more focused on its messaging platform, with the recent acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion and the announcement that soon messaging would be removed from the main Facebook client in favor of the free Messenger app.

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Photo editing pioneer Hipstamatic offers Vine-like video app, Cinamatic

Ben Lovejoy May 8 2014 - 4:13 am PT

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Hipstamatic led the way in offering a fast and fun way to edit and share photos from an iPhone, but has been a little slow to move into video. The company has now corrected this, launching the Cinamatic app designed to compete with Vine and Instagram.

Cinamatic lets you shoot short videos ranging from 3-15 seconds, apply filters to them and then share on Vine, Instagram and Facebook – or send them via email or Messages …
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Facebook open-sources ‘Pop’, the animation framework that drives the visual effects in Paper

Benjamin Mayo Apr 28 2014 - 11:08 am PT

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Facebook has open-sourced a lot of stuff recently, but this is what most developers have been waiting for. Developed originally at Push Pop Press, and refined by Facebook, the company has today released its Pop animation framework publicly. Developers can check out the code from the GitHub repository.

The library enables rapid development of rich animations for iOS (and Mac) apps. Although Core Animation, (Apple’s built-in framework) is well suited to fire-and-forget animations, Pop was created to work seamlessly with modern interactive physics-centric user interfaces.

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Facebook Messenger 5.0 adds video sharing, faster photo and sticker access, more

Zac Hall Apr 28 2014 - 10:49 am PT

2 Comments

Facebook today updated Messenger to version 5.0 bringing a list of feature improvements to the iPhone messaging app. The new version boasts a streamlined design for accessing and sharing photos as well as a new shortcut for downloading sticker packs (tap and hold a sent sticker to download the pack), but it’s main feature addition tackles video. Users can now access and share video clips to other users within the app. Previous versions were limited to only sharing photos and voice recordings. The update also includes improvements to searching people and groups by name.
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Facebook buys fitness app Moves as health race heats up

Zac Hall Apr 24 2014 - 7:19 am PT

5 Comments

There’s certainly no shortage of buzz around health tracking and fitness-related products and software these days, and Facebook is making sure it its not going to be left out of the race (there’s also no shortage of Facebook acquisitions).

Finnish company ProtoGeo Oy, the developers behind the iPhone and Android fitness app Moves (seen above), has been acquired by Facebook as it posted this on its site today:

Today, we’re delighted to announce that Facebook has acquired our company and the Moves app. Since we launched Moves, we’ve been focused on running a simple and clean activity diary that millions of people have enjoyed using.

Now, we’re joining Facebook’s talented team to work on building and improving their products and services with a shared mission of supporting simple, efficient tools for more than a billion people.

The company also rounded out its announcement with a thank you to customers for making its product a success and the standard promise that data gathered by the service won’t “commingle” with Facebook, but such promises are mostly “feel good” reassurances and surely have no legal merit especially with the “there are no plans” qualifier.

All of this is made much more interesting in the context of Apple’s plans to take a major step into owning the fitness category with the company’s upcoming Healthbook software first reported by 9to5Mac and widespread rumors of some sort of fitness-related band on the new product horizon (not to mention Nike reportedly stepping away from its FuelBand product).

Couple that with numerous fitness and health-related hires by Apple that continue as recently as this month and it’s easy to understand why Facebook would want to buy Moves: it doesn’t want to be the last one to the finish line.

Facebook for iPhone updated to version 9.0, allows replying to comments on certain pages and more

Mike Beasley Apr 17 2014 - 9:38 pm PT

12 Comments

Facebook has pushed out version 9.0 of its iPhone application today, adding new features to the commenting system among a few smaller changes. The biggest change in this minor update allows users to reply to comments on pages that have enabled that specific feature.

Aside from that, administrators will now be able to review and approve posts by group members, and everyone will see posts related to the site’s trending topics highlighted in the iPad version’s News Feed. This update follows the news from earlier today that the company is launching a “friends near me” feature within the app, similar to Apple’s “Find My Friends” service.

Facebook 9.0 is available on the iOS App Store. The full change log is below:

What’s New in Version 9.0

• Reply directly to comments on stories by Pages that have this feature turned on
• Group admins can easily review and approve pending posts by group members
• See posts about trending topics highlighted in News Feed on iPad

Facebook rolling out new location-sharing feature for iPhone called Nearby Friends

Zac Hall Apr 17 2014 - 10:30 am PT

19 Comments

Facebook announced today it will be rolling out a new social feature to its mobile app called Nearby Friends. The feature allows Facebook users to occasionally receive notifications when common friends are in similar locations similar to features offered by Foursquare and Apple’s Find My Friends service.

If you turn on Nearby Friends, you’ll occasionally be notified when friends are nearby, so you can get in touch with them and meet up. For example, when you’re headed to the movies, Nearby Friends will let you know if friends are nearby so you can see the movie together or meet up afterward.

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Vine adds private video messaging, profile theming in latest update

Benjamin Mayo Apr 3 2014 - 12:36 pm PT

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Vine has just released its ‘biggest update yet’ to the App Store, bringing one-on-one video messaging to the service for the first time. Analogous with Twitter DM’s, Vine’s VM’s work in the same way — hosting private conversations outside of the main stream. As you might expect, conversations can include short video clips as well as text messages.

You can start a conversation directly to a recipient, or bounce off a public Vine for inspiration. Just share the Vine to as many as friends as you want to start a message. It’s important to note you cannot have group conversations (yet). If you share a Vine to more than one person, a separate thread is created for each recipient.

Version 2 also adds some new customization options for your Vine profile. In Settings, you can theme your profile with a specific color which then shows to all other Vine users.

Vine can be downloaded on the App Store, for free.

Facebook Messenger for iPhone updated with free calling support

Zac Hall Apr 3 2014 - 12:07 pm PT

10 Comments

Just a week after Facebook added group management to its Messenger app, the social network is out with yet another update to the messaging service: free calls for everyone.

The feature allows you to call your Facebook friends who also have the app over WiFi for free (you can call over cellular as well, but this uses data, of course). Free calling is especially beneficial to users who communicate internationally as calling rates tend to get pricey in that area.

Messaging threads now include a phone icon for prompting calls from the app, and the actual phone user interface resembles the native iOS Phone UI prior to iOS 7.1 introducing a tweaked design to the Phone app.

Facebook-owned Whatsapp is poised to introduce VOIP support in an upcoming update as well. Screenshots of Whatsapp in-app calling leaked earlier this year.

Facebook Messenger 4.1 is available for free on the App Store.

Facebook Messenger updated to version 4.0 with groups and message forwarding

Mike Beasley Mar 27 2014 - 5:26 pm PT

1 Comment

Facebook has updated its Messenger app for iPhone to version 4.0. The new update introduces the ability to create and manage groups of contacts within the app. You can find all of your groups in a new tab and quickly select one to send a message to everyone at once.

Also new in this update is the ability to select a message to forward to a new recipient, much like you can do with an iMessage in the native Messages application. The usual general bug fixes and improvements round out the 4.0 update.

You can grab the app for free on the iPhone App Store. The full change log is below:

What’s New in Version 4.0
Groups: Now you can create groups for the people you message most. Name them, set group photos and keep them all in one place

Forwarding: Want to send a message or photo to someone who isn’t in the conversation? Just tap to forward it

Plus, continued improvements to make the app faster and more reliable

Facebook reaches 1 billion active mobile users, 200 million Instagram accounts

Mike Beasley Mar 25 2014 - 4:45 pm PT

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During a call with investors today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network had reached over one billion mobile users. That’s up from only 945 million active users in the last quarter of last year, putting the total gain since then at about 55 million mobile users.

The Facebook-owned photo app Instagram also announced a milestone today on its blog as it passed the 200 million user mark. A quarter of those users joined in just the last six months. Instagram also announced that users have shared over 20 billion photos on the network since it launched.

Facebook releases ‘Tweaks’ tool to help devs iterate on their apps faster

Benjamin Mayo Mar 25 2014 - 11:49 am PT

1 Comment

Facebook has today open-sourced its rapid prototyping tool ‘Tweaks’, a framework that helps application developers quickly iterate on their projects and test out different possibilities for their iOS apps.

The best way to improve an app is to use it every day. Even when ideas can be tested out in advance — for example, with Origami — it can still take some time with the app to see how it works in practice.

Occasionally, it’s perfect the first try. Sometimes, the idea doesn’t work at all. But often, it just needs a few minor adjustments. That last case is where Tweaks fits in. Tweaks makes those small adjustments easy: with no code changes and no computer, you can try out different options and decide which works best.

Tweaks makes it really simple for developers to adjust parameters and properties in their application and then test them out in realtime. This is particularly useful for rapid user interface development, which often consists of merely tweaking parameters (like colors or durations) than any involved work. Normally, developers have to recompile application binaries in order to change animation curves, durations or other parameters. This is relatively slow and inefficient.

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Profit machine: Interactive graphic shows Apple/tech company money making potential

Ben Lovejoy Mar 20 2014 - 5:35 am PT

2 Comments

Fortune drew our attention to a cool interactive graphic that lets you watch in real-time the revenues and profits made by a dozen tech companies. While Samsung wins the revenue race, Apple is by far the most profitable, at $71,000 a minute.

Apple is doomed …

Screenshots of WhatsApp’s upcoming VOIP feature surface, design similar to iOS 7’s Phone app

Benjamin Mayo Mar 14 2014 - 8:11 am PT

1 Comment

Shortly after being acquired by Facebook for $19 billion dollars, WhatsApp announced that it was planning to integrate VOIP into its messaging app in the coming months. Today, iPhoneItalia has picked up images of what it claims are screenshots of the VOIP feature in action.

In line with the iOS 7 redesign the app received in December, the VOIP functionality closely reflects the design of iOS 7’s native phone interface. The interface uses the same circular buttons and blurred background image; even copying the circular ‘end call’ button from iOS 7.1.

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Facebook updates Paper with new ways to share articles, added language support, more

Zac Hall Mar 4 2014 - 9:58 am PT

8 Comments

Facebook’s journey with Paper marches on with the first feature addition to the social network’s alternative app experience on iPhone and iPod touch. Although it’s not a major update, version 1.0.2 includes two additional features of note that could point to its future roadmap.
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Adobe VideoBite, a bite-sized video editor for iPhone, now allows titles, photos & music

Ben Lovejoy Jan 31 2014 - 6:06 am PT

10 Comments

Adobe VideoBite, an iOS app designed to make video editing as quick and easy as possible, has been updated to allow titles, photos and music to be added, turning it into a fully-fledged editor while retaining its simple user-interface.

Heartwarming Apple ads aside, I’ve always been rather skeptical of the real-world practicality of video editing on a phone, but I have to confess that VideoBite does make it a very slick process. Trimming clips, for example, involves nothing more than pressing a heart icon at the beginning and end of the bit you want to keep. Adding transitions and music is just as easy, and your finished masterpiece is saved to your camera roll, with exports to Facebook, YouTube and email also supported …
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New official Paper app aims to turn Facebook into a beautiful, magazine-style experience

Ben Lovejoy Jan 30 2014 - 4:54 am PT

11 Comments

Update: Now available

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhrbT9O6kW8]

Facebook has made many changes to its newsfeed over the years (each usually generating howls of protest on launch and then viewed as business as usual within a week or two), but the interface on web and iOS app alike has seen only minor tweaks. Popup photos aside, it’s essentially remained a clean but uninspiring scrolling layout.

All this is set to change with the launch of Paper, a new iOS-only app set to launch in the U.S. on 3rd February.

Paper makes storytelling more beautiful with an immersive design and fullscreen, distraction-free layouts. We’ve also made it easier to craft and share beautiful stories of your own …

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Facebook update allows you to hide certain stories and people from your news feed

Mike Beasley Jan 27 2014 - 4:01 pm PT

4 Comments

A Facebook for iOS update that was released earlier today includes the ability to hide certain people from your main news feed. To do so, just tap the downward arrow on any post and select the “I don’t like this post” option. From there you can select from a few different options for hiding the post or the user that posted it.

The iPhone version of the app also allows you to see all of your videos in a single album. This feature didn’t make it to the iPad version for some reason, but it might make the jump in a future update.

You can grab the updated app for free on the iOS App Store.

What’s New in Version 6.9

• Choose whose posts you see in News Feed
• See all the videos you’ve uploaded in one album (iPhone only)

New leaked docs show NSA collects personal data from smartphone apps

Jordan Kahn Jan 27 2014 - 11:47 am PT

5 Comments

New documents leaked by Edward Snowden and reported by The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica detail how the NSA and its British counterpart can collect users’ personal data through smartphone apps. The reports specifically mention popular apps like Angry Birds, Twitter, Google Maps and Facebook and claim the NSA is capable of intercepting information ranging from location, age, and sex of users to address books, buddy lists, phone logs, geographic data and more:

The N.S.A. and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. Since then, the agencies have traded recipes for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, phone logs and the geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services.

At least one of the app developers, Rovio, is not surprisingly unaware of any of the activity mentioned in the documents, but it will be up to the app developers, Apple, and Google to address the issue and clarify for users if their personal data is safe. In a recent interview with ABC, Apple CEO Tim Cook commented on the controversy over surveillance programs and promised he would press congress for more transparency:
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Review: Bubble Chat for iPhone is a colorful alternative to Facebook Messenger

Mike Beasley Dec 21 2013 - 12:30 pm PT

2 Comments

A few weeks ago, Facebook updated its Messenger app to match iOS 7’s visual design. Unfortunately, the update is a bit bland, with no real embellishments in terms of UI or animation. This week, a new Facebook chat client for iPhone was released that aims to address those complaints with a colorful interface and slick animations.

That app is Bubble Chat.

Bubble Chat is one of the most creative iOS 7 designs I’ve seen, leveraging the new OS’s physics to animate every transition and movement in the app. By default, most of the interface is blue, but a $.99 in-app purchase allows you to customize the background color for each contact individually or globally. You can also choose a photo from your device to use as the background.

The app has two main views for managing your conversations. The first is a list of your Facebook contacts. The other is a list of recent conversation threads. The contact list makes use of each friend’s photo not only as an avatar next to their name, but also as a background for each row in the list, providing a bit more texture than a standard blue background. The chat list provides a quick look at each thread’s most recent message.

Tapping a contact’s photo from the conversation list or with in a thread brings up a contact-specific settings sheet that allows you to customize the design of that conversation or mute all message notifications from that user. From with a conversation you can send photos and videos, plus custom drawings you can create with a variety of brushes and colors.

Speaking of contact photos, Bubble Chat has a clever trick that detects faces in photo and automatically centers them. No more oddly-cropped profile pictures where an off-center face gets cut off! In my testing, I found that the detection system worked every single time, showcasing my contacts automatically instead of whatever happened to be centered in the photo.

The app supports push notifications for new messages, though they seemed a bit unreliable in my testing. My first message came through the main Facebook app, but not Bubble Chat. After I opened Bubble Chat and viewed the new message, notifications started functioning normally for the most part. A few seemed to show up late or not at all.

Overall, Bubble Chat is a solid app that just needs a little work. Aside from the notification issue, I noticed a few graphical glitches, especially when quickly moving between conversation threads and the chat list. These always resolved themselves within a few seconds, though, so there’s no reason to worry about them right now. My single biggest issue with the app is that autocorrect does not seem to work when typing a message. The developers have informed me that several bug fixes and improvements are being made very soon.

If you’re looking to replace Facebook Messenger with something that has a little more personality, Bubble Chat is a great alternative. You can get it on the App Store for free. As mentioned before, theme customization options are available as a $.99 in-app purchase.

Photos+ debuts on iPhone with EXIF info support, improved grid view, more

Zac Hall Dec 18 2013 - 5:30 am PT

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Way back in May, Justin Williams’s Second Gear teased an unannounced app via Passbook using an in-house system called Pit Pass. The Passbook pass updated to reveal the icon and name of the app released by Second Gear today: Photos+.

What the app does is really simple but useful in a big way. Photos+ displays your images from your Camera Roll and other albums found in Photos.app, but it takes a different approach to displaying thumbnails and most importantly includes EXIF info like timestamp and location hidden in the native photo browser…

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