Social Media

Uber’s $3 Billion Google Snub, And Everything Else You Missed

Technology is filled with all kinds of rumors, real and fabricated. It gives us a look at what might be and will be. BitStream gathers the whispers all in one place to divine what the future has in store. Nokia, which recently staunchly said it’s out of the smartphone business for good, is now tightening…

A New Study From Facebook Reveals Just How Much It Filters What You See

A few years ago, I gave a talk about how algorithms and social media shape what we know. I focused on the dangers of the “filter bubble” — the personalized universe of information that makes it into our feed — and argued that news-filtering algorithms narrow what we know, surrounding us in information that tends…

Say Hello to the Final Oculus Rift—Coming 2016

Virtual reality is coming—and now, we finally know when. You will actually be able to buy a real, consumer version of the Oculus Rift in the first quarter of next year. You’re looking at it right now. Let me repeat: this is not another prototype. Shit is getting real. What do we know about the…

Please Don’t Call Me on Facebook Messenger 

Facebook Messenger just introduced video calling. Since Messenger is supposed to be a full-fledged communication plaform, this feels a little overdue. But overdue doesn’t mean welcome: Now our Facebook friends have the ability to cold video-call us whenever chat is turned on. The built-in Facebook friend contact list makes Messenger video chats a potentially fraught…

Facebook Messenger Adds Video Calls 

Facebook’s relentless push to make Messenger happen is still happening, and you can now make video calls over data and Wifi with with Facebook’s messaging app. Messenger’s new video feature debuted today in the US, UK, Canada, and a variety of other countries. If you see a little video icon in the top right corner…

Facebook’s Latest App Is a Dialer With Caller ID For Android 

Facebook’s quest to conquer your phone continues with Hello, a new dialer app that replaces the one that comes natively installed on your Android phone. And if you’re not partial to anything, it’s probably worth a try. Facebook’s endless app proliferation is tedious. (Tedious people call this proliferation “unbundling.”) But the new Facebook dialer app…

Mark Zuckerberg Is Just Plain Bad at Net Neutrality

Mark Zuckerberg means well. Or at least the billionaire says he does in a recent blog post about net neutrality and the Facebook-backed initiative Internet.org. Long story short, publishers in India are pulling their content from the Internet.org app over apparent net neutrality violations, and well, Zuck’s reaction is pretty much: ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Obviously, it’s more…

Facebook’s Messenger App Is Now a Full-Fledged Social Network

Facebook just checked off another step in its plan to turn Messenger into its own separate service— launching a distinct web version of its messaging app. If you go to Messenger.com today, you’ll see all your Facebook messages without dealing with Newsfeed. When Facebook spun Messenger off into its own mobile app, it felt like…

You Can Now Serve Divorce Papers on Facebook

What to do if you need to serve divorce papers to a spouse that’s nowhere to be found, or dodging your calls and visits? Send them a Facebook message, of course. This is now an accepted way to start the process of ending a marriage. A Manhattan Supreme Court Justice recently ruled that a 26-year-old…

If You Could Only Use One Social Network, What Would It Be?

Few of us have the mental bandwidth to care about the latest hot new social thing. When Foursquare split its app, I never downloaded Swarm in protest. I never signed up for Ello. Do I sound too get-off-my-lawn when I say screw Snapchat? The never-ending influx of new platforms makes me wonder: If I had…

Facebook Is Using Famous Instagrammers To Show Off Its New Office

Facebook’s fancy new digs designed by Frank “Architecture Is Shit” Gehry opened today, delivering the latest architectural smackdown in the ongoing space race between various Silicon Valley corporate campuses. And they’re sharing it with the world in a very unorthodox way. While there haven’t been any official photos released, as Co.Design discovered, Facebook let some…

What Makes You Block Someone? 

People have varying thresholds of tolerance for putting up with ignorance, dickishness, and other crap online. What does it take for you to head straight for the “Block” button on social media? Each major platform has a slightly different concoction of options to let you digitally delete someone from your life. Twitter and Facebook both…

Oculus Used These Optical Illusions to Prove Everything We Know Is Wrong

Virtual reality isn’t ready yet. Oh, it’s damn good—but it can’t quite fully convince you that you are someplace you’re not. But how sure are you of the “real world,” anyhow? Today, Oculus guru Michael Abrash used these kickass optical illusions to show how fake our reality can be. Remember The Matrix? Would you choose…

Facebook is gunning hard for YouTube with its new embeddable video feature, which lets people take videos posted to Facebook and put them on other sites. Before, if you decided to put a video on Facebook and wanted to share it elsewhere you basically had to re-upload it to another site or simply link back…

Facebook Is Finally Getting Messaging Right

Facebook wants to be your everything, and the next step in its long and deliberate journey to subsume the entire world is here. Messenger, Facebook’s separate (and now genuinely useful) messaging app, is growing up and you have every reason to be excited. Up until now, Messenger and its growing list of functions were entirely…

Facebook Will Put 360-Degree Spherical Videos Right In Your News Feed

I think that 360-degree video is going to be a big deal. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg agrees! He just announced that Facebook will be able to embed spherical videos right in your News Feed, much like YouTube 360. So what’s spherical video, anyhow? I could tell you, but why not just show you instead? Here’s a…

An App That Turns Your Texts to Songs Is a Wonderful Disaster

What if the worst possible text messages you could receive were delivered as singing telegrams? We decided to use an app that turns text into song to find out. Ditty is a new app that rides on top of Facebook’s Messenger app, and takes whatever messages you write and attempts to crush them into the…

Facebook Clarified its Policies. Now How About Fixing Them?

Facebook recently updated its community standards. As the company noted in the announcement accompanying the change, their “policies and standards themselves are not changing,” but that they wanted to provide more clarity to a set of existing rules that have often been misunderstood by users. While some of the changes provide significantly more detail as…

Instagram’s New “Layout” App Lets You Cram Your Feed Full of Collages

Instagram is the photo-sharing app that also created the timelapse-creating app, too. Now, Instagram is looking to conquer another corner of the mobile photography world with Layout, an app for making Instagram-friendly collages. Launching today for iOS (and for Android in the coming months, as per usual), Layout basically does what third-party collage apps have…

Facebook Is Making a Phone App Because We All Need More Facebook Apps

Facebook wants to be so much more than just a social network app. It wants to be your go-to SMS with Messenger. It wants to be a Reddit replacement with Rooms. You can even overlay Android with Facebook Home. Now your dialer is in Zuck’s crosshairs. The screenshot above is courtesy of David Ruddock at…