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If MySpace Had a Facebook Look Back Video

Facebook’s look-back videos are a delightful—if sentimental—look at the last few years of your social media existence. But that’s because you’ve had a great decade! What about the less fortunate? What would, say, MySpace’s look back video be? Oh, right, it would be hilarious. The only thing this lovely parody on Funny or Die is…

What Was the First Facebook Message You Sent or Received?

This is mildly embarrassing, but if we’re going to be embarrassed, we might as well do it together here in the trust tree. Today is Facebook’s tenth birthday, so show us the first Facebook message you ever sent or received. Warning: lots of cringing ahead. Messaging pre-dated a lot of the features of Facebook as…

The Most Important Facebook Redesigns in Its 10-Year History

Ten years ago today, Mark Zuckerberg gave birth to The Facebook and launched an online social revolution in his Harvard dorm room. We all know what happened next—thanks in no small part to an eight-time Academy Award-nominated film. With such humble beginnings, no one could have predicted the wild success (and cries of outrage) the…

Facebook Made You a Sentimental Video to Celebrate Its 10th Birthday

Did you hear? Facebook is ten years old today. To celebrate, Zuckerberg & Co. have decided to send each and every one of us a personalised video of our time on the social network. Aww. Each “Look Back” compilation contains 15 or so of your most-liked photos, statuses, and life events, set to music. Be…

Paper Review: This Could Be Your Only Facebook App… Someday

Paper may not be a total Facebook replacement yet. But it does have the potential to change the way you interact with Facebook as a whole. In other words, it’s everything that Facebook Home wasn’t. And that’s a great thing. What Is It? Facebook’s new, standalone app that places your timeline and everything in it…

Definitive Proof That App Store Search Is the Absolute Worst

One of the most exciting new apps in months has hit Apple’s App Store today: Paper, an app that provides a refreshing new Facebook experience. This is an app that, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of people want to download today. Good luck finding it. It’s well-known that Apple’s app-discovery chops are lacking. The company itself…

Paper, Facebook’s new standalone reader app, is now available for download. It’s more than just a reading app, providing the kind of content you’re actually using Facebook for on the daily, in quite a beautiful package. [App Store]

Facebook’s Reader App, Called Paper, Is Official–and It’s Beautiful

After much speculative rumor, Facebook this morning announced the arrival of a new standalone iPhone app called Paper. https://gizmodo.com/rumor-facebook-could-launch-a-flipboard-like-reader-th-1501734936 Available February 3rd on iOS, it looks like it’ll be rather more than just a plain old reading app. Rather, it looks to provide most of the content that people use Facebook for day-to-day, but in…

Mark Zuckerberg Talks Fragmenting Apps, Anonymous Facebook and… Poke

Ahead of Facebook’s 10th anniversary on February 4th, Bloomberg Businessweek scored an interview with Mark Zuckerberg to chat about the company’s future. Here are some choice cuts from the social network’s head honcho, before you go read the whole thing. On a shift towards fragmenting Facebook’s apps: “We just think that there are all these…

Facebook’s New Cold Storage: 10,000 Blu-Ray Discs, 1 Petabyte of Data

Facebook has a whole heap of data to store, but much of it sits so deep within our profiles that it rarely need to be served. So the social network has been trying to develop cold storage systems to file older content away—and a new prototype uses Blu-Ray discs. Whilst talking at this year’s Open…

Facebook Could Die Out Like an Infectious Disease By 2017

If you view Facebook as a plague on social dynamics, you might not be far wrong. Researchers from Princeton University claim that the social network’s popularity has spread like an infectious disease—but, as we slowly become immune to its charms, it will die out. By comparing the uptake of Facebook to growth curves of epidemics,…

Researchers predict Facebook will die out “like a disease”

By drawing similarities between Facebook’s rapid adoption and the proliferation of an infectious disease, researchers at Princeton have devised a model that predicts Facebook will lose 80% of its users by 2017. “Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,”…

Facebook Now Shows You Personalized Trending Topics In Your News Feed

Facebook will start showing you trending stories to the right of your News Feed, just under where you’re used to seeing notifications about your friends’ birthdays and upcoming events. Twitter has been showing trending topics for years, but Facebook’s trends promise to be personalized to your interests, so maybe they’ll be better? Not everyone on…

Rumor: Facebook Could Launch a Flipboard-Like Reader This Month

Rumors have swirled for some time about the fact that Facebook might be developing a Flipboard-style news reader. Now, a report from re/code suggests that the social network might launch such a service, called Paper, this month. According to “sources familiar with the matter” that spoke to re/code, the service will be “similar to Flipboard”…

How ignoring a Facebook friend request actually works

Poorly Drawn Lines has become my favorite internet cartoon. Wonderfully quirky and absurd, beautifully designed, it always hits a sweet spot. Like this one, explaining the mental processes at both sides of a Facebook’s ignored friend request. I confess I click ignore all the time. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us…

How Conservatives Hijacked a Pro-Obamacare Facebook Meme

We all have those Facebook friends—friends with Very Strong Political Opinions they just can’t keep to themselves. While the political memes popular on Facebook pander shamelessly to people who already agree, sometimes the memes get twisted. And mutated. And even co-opted by the opposite party. Facebook’s data science team has a fascinating post about the…

Everyone You Should Unfollow and Unfriend for 2014

There’s no better time than the new year to start afresh, and today, we ask you to turn your attention not within but without. More specifically, it’s your Twitter and Facebook friends we need to talk about. That’s right—it’s time to trim the fat. You’ve been racking up social media accounts for years now, and…

T-Mobile’s GoSmart brand of plans is about to get a new trick: looking at Facebook without chewing up your mobile data. Starting next month, folks on GoSmart plans will get unlimited access to anything and everything on Facebook, no data plan required. [AllThingsD]

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet has ruled that Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and dozens of banks must face a lawsuit, accusing them of misleading investors about the social network’s economic health during its IPO. Ouch.

What Facebook Tells Us About the Hidden Paths of Mass Migration

The basic shape of urban growth is easy to spot; we look at the fastest-growing cities, for example, or immigration numbers. But yesterday, Facebook’s Data Science team revealed a less obvious pattern: Mass coordinated migration, where a group from the same city moves to another. Who are the winners and losers in this urban game?…