As if we don’t have enough annoying distractions vying for our attention these days, Facebook (FB) is apparently testing out a beeping notification sound that rings out every time someone likes your status or comments on a post. VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig was one of the unlucky duckies who got to try out this new feature early and he already says it’s driving him up the wall. In particular, Ludwig says that the sound effects have made it “a gamble” to leave his Facebook page “open in a tab.” Since this is clearly not the sort of thing that Facebook wants its users to feel, it’s unlikely that these notification sounds will become a permanent fixture. And even if they are, Ludwig says that they’re very easy to shut off by adjusting user settings. A short video of the new notification sounds is posted below. More →
Facebook (FB) is hooking businesses near its Menlo Park, California headquarters with routers to test a free Wi-Fi program, according to the Los Angeles Times. To access the free Wi-Fi, users simply have to use the social network’s “Check-in” feature. Once that’s done, they will be brought to the business’ Facebook page and then allowed onto the network. The LATimes reports that the businesses have to pay for the Internet service on their own, but Facebook is giving out the routers for free. Facebook’s experiment is intriguing because it’s a very smart way to lure people over to Facebook pages to see promotions and most importantly, advertisements. It also gets more people into physical stores. It isn’t Google Fiber, but if more stores start offering free Facebook Wi-Fi, their foot traffic could see an uptick. More →
President Barack Obama was re-elected on Tuesday evening after defeating republican candidate Gov. Mitt Romney 303 to 206 and winning an estimated 50% of the popular vote. Shortly after the president’s win was secured, an image was posted from his Twitter account along with the text “Four more years.” According to a report from BuzzFeed, that tweet became the most popular tweet in history after just 22 minutes, amassing a record 226,249 retweets. The post had more than 300,000 retweets after just 45 minutes and more than 635,000 retweets at the time of this writing. Obama’s personal thank you message has been retweeted more than 150,000 times, and The Atlantic reports that his celebration photo is the most liked photo of all time on Facebook with more than 3.1 million likes. More →
Facebook (FB) pushed out another big update to its iOS app on Monday that combines the best elements of its standalone Camera app and Messenger app. Beating Twitter to the punch, the Facebook iOS app now lets users muck around with 13 filters before uploading photos and also lets them batch upload multiple photos at once. Other new additions to the app include a chat pane that can be activated by sliding a finger from the right side of the screen to the left, Facebook Gifts (U.S. only) and the ability to see if your friends are available on chat in real-time. Users can also add friends they talk to frequently to the top of their Favorites section. Facebook 5.1 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad can be downloaded here or through the App Store.
Who needs exit polls when you have Twitter and Facebook (FB)? Pew Internet has found that an estimated 22% of all registered voters in the United States have already spilled the beans about whom they supported in the 2012 presidential election. Pew says that roughly 25% of Obama supporters and 20% of Romney supporters have used either Twitter or Facebook to tell others about their votes. Broken down by age group, 29% of registered voters under the age of 50 used social media to broadcast their votes while just 17% of voters 50 years or older did the same. People desperate for Election Day predictions shouldn’t read too much into this result, however, as Pew says that its findings in this case are statistically insignificant for projecting final vote counts.
Twitter seems set to directly take on Instagram. The New York Times is reporting that the social network with over 500 million active users will soon be targeting Facebook’s (FB) Instagram with photo filters of its own. The report states Twitter plans to update its mobile apps to allow users to bypass Instagram and get straight to editing photos before they share them with their followers. More →
There are two kinds of Facebook (FB) users out there: Those who use their pages as political soap boxes and those who are sick of people using their pages as political soap boxes. For the latter group, the folks at Buzzfeed and Unbaby.me have helped create a new extension for Google (GOOG) Chrome that blocks political messages from both your Facebook and Twitter feeds and replaces them with happier things, such as pictures of cute cats. The extension is free to download and promises users that it will help them “enjoy an Obama AND Romney free life.”
Despite many hits in the genre, social gaming is a relatively risky business. A company can have a hit one day and then the next day it’s suddenly worth nothing as bored users flee en masse. OMGPOP’s Draw Something is a textbook example of how a social game rose to popularity literally overnight and then became the anchor to Zynga’s (ZNGA) sinking ship. Audience management firm Playnomics released some interesting data on social gaming that reveals the major nail in the coffin for most social games: 85% of social gamers do not return after their first day.
Twitter is reportedly mulling over creating its own video hosting service, unnamed sources have told AllThingsD. The addition of a home-grown video hosting solution would further cement Twitter as a content company as opposed to a channel for quick-fire communication. The social network has already moved to allowing photos to be immediately uploaded on its own servers, so allowing videos next would be a logical next step. The only difference between hosting photos and video is that the latter would require much more bandwidth, which could prove challenging if Twitter doesn’t have the proper infrastructure to support it.
There’s a perfectly good reason why the majority of mobile Facebook (FB) users are choosing to get their social network fix through the mobile website instead of through apps: the apps stink. Well, at least for Android, it still stinks. The Facebook app on iOS received a much-needed speed and stability boost when the company dumped HTML5 for re-written native code. Engadget has learned that a native version of the Facebook app for Android is in the final phases of internal testing and should be released very soon. Just like the iOS Facebook app, the new Facebook app for Android will scrap HTML5 for native code, which should result in a smoother user experience and less crashing. More →
The engineering minds at MIT have concocted a new invention that will bring warm feelings to lonely Internet nerds. The Atlantic has discovered a new computerized jacket called Like-a-Hug developed by researchers at MIT and designed to replicate a hugging sensation by gently inflating whenever someone “likes” something you’ve posted on Facebook (FB). Like-a-Hug engineer Melissa Chow describes the jacket as a “wearable social media vest” whose goal is “bringing us closer despite physical distance.” Hopefully no one will give this jacket to Star Trek and Facebook legend George Takei as a gift since it would suffocate him within 20 minutes. More →
Beware: Making fun of Nickelback on Facebook (FB) could suddenly make you a member of their fan page. Gizmodo reports that there’s a new algorithm on Facebook that scans through users’ posts and private messages, finds frequently-used words and matches them up with pages that are automatically “liked” on their behalf. As Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle points out, this new practice could have bothersome consequences since users who are “talking about something disgusting, loathsome, and offensive” among friends may soon see that they’ve become “fans” of that thing. So a word of advice this Halloween season: Don’t talk about the devil costume you’re making while on Facebook, or you may find yourself “liking” the World Satanist Society fan page.
UPDATE: Facebook has clarified this issue with TheNextWeb and is flatly denying that it is “liking” third-party fan pages on users’ behalf if they simply send around an article or post a message about a particular subject. However, the company does say that links shared through private messages can indeed add a user’s “like” to the article in question, although this “like” is only used for counting purposes and will not show up on a user’s timeline. So for example, if you send a “Nickelback is Awesome!” article to a friend, that article will record an extra “like” on its share count. However, no one will know that you specifically liked the article itself. So it sounds as though it’s OK to secretly like Nickelback on Facebook for now.
