Pinterest president Tim Kendall, who has since joining in 2012 overseen the growth of the startup’s advertising business and launch of a wide array of ad products, is leaving the company at the end of the year. Kendall oversaw the company’s business operations for the past five years as it sought to grow from a niche advertising product in experimental budgets to something worth… Read More
Twitter is rolling out its “Lite” version, after a successful trial in the Philippines. The Android app will become available in two dozen countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. Not too different from Facebook Lite, Twitter has also built a version of its app that’s optimized for developing countries. Twitter Lite minimizes data usage,… Read More
Facebook has been under fire for its practices and policies that enable advertisers to exclude “multicultural affinity” groups from the audiences they reach via the social network. Now, in light of a ProPublica investigation and pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus, Facebook says it’s committed to taking a closer look at its advertising policies. Read More
Farmers Business Network has raised $110 million in new venture funding to support a business that may sound boring to some Silicon Valley technologists but which appears to have addressed a very real need: it’s a social network for farmers that invites them to share their data, pool their know-how, and bargain more effectively for better pricing from third parties. It’s a real… Read More
Instagram announced this morning that it now has 25 million active business profiles, up from 15 million in July. The company throws out a lot of different statistics (back in September it said it had 800 million monthly active users, 500 million daily active users and 2 million advertisers), but this one’s significant as a measure of how many businesses see Instagram as an important way… Read More
s Twitter tries to figure out how to lock down the parts of its platform that enable harassment, as well as the spread of misleading information and illicit content, there have been a number of moments that highlight how the service, and its levers of control, are far from perfect. One such moment took place earlier this month, when the very active, very watched Twitter account of President… Read More
Even YouTube is adding Stories. The popular format introduced by Snapchat, then adopted by Instagram, Skype, Facebook, Messenger and even some dating apps, is now making its way to YouTube as a new feature the company is calling “Reels.” To be clear, Reels is YouTube’s spin on Stories, not an exact copy. And Reels won’t live at the top of the app, as Stories do on… Read More
Facebook has always been about friends, but now it’s seeking a broader purpose. So today, Facebook is lending a hand with what it does best: social connections, APIs, and money. At its first Facebook Social Good Forum conference in New York City, the social network just unveiled a slew of new philanthropy-minded features and initiatives. Mark Zuckerberg started the event with a… Read More
Streaming services like Spotify have turned playlists into one of the main ways to discover new music, but I’d argue that they’re missing some of the personality of traditional radio — the kind of radio where I knew not just the names of my favorite DJs, but also what kind of music they liked and random details about their life. That’s the experience that Stationhead,… Read More
By putting best friends first and dividing them from professional publishers, Snapchat hopes to conquer Instagram and revive its own growth with a big redesign that begins rolling out Friday. And it looks great. Snapchat is finally personalizing, highlighting the most relevant content so it’s easier to consume. “We are separating the social from the media, and taking an important… Read More
Instagram has tweaked a couple of its direct messaging features to make them a bit more flexible and interactive. You can now automatically capture and remix photos sent to you in replies back to friends, and allow photo and video replays to be replayed more than once. The remix feature lets you capture the original photo message and incorporate it into your reply, complete with the option… Read More
A UK parliamentary committee that’s investing fake news has been told by Facebook and Twitter they will provide information relating to Russian interference during the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum vote in the coming weeks. Read More
Facebook may soon be ready to squeeze more money out of its 1.3 billion user chat app. The company has internally developed “Messenger Broadcast”, a self-serve mass-messaging interface that lets businesses send marketing messages to users. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature internally, but hadn’t trialed it to the public or with businesses as… Read More
Over the holiday weekend, The New York Times found that one of its Twitter accounts had been locked. @nytimesworld was frozen for a full 24 hours over a innocuous tweet about a story in which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for the country’s treatment of indigenous school children. Twitter restored the account Sunday afternoon, apologizing to The Times “for… Read More
This is software to save lives. Facebook’s new “proactive detection” artificial intelligence technology will scan all posts for patterns of suicidal thoughts, and when necessary send mental health resources to the user at risk or their friends, or contact local first-responders. By using AI to flag worrisome posts to human moderators instead of waiting for user reports,… Read More
YouTube is firefighting another child safety content moderation scandal which has led several major brands to suspend advertising on its platform. Read More
Image-hosting site turned meme social network, Imgur, is the latest tech service to ‘fess up to a security breach. In a blog post Friday it revealed that hackers had compromised its systems in 2014, with ~1.7M emails and passwords affected. Read More
The weight of problems being demonstrably attached to heavily used tech services has acquired such a gravitational and political pull that it’s becoming harder and harder for these businesses to sidestep wider societal responsibilities. Read More
Snap Inc’s stock tanked after missing revenue expectations by $30 million last quarter, so Snapchat is looking to win over businesses with immersive new ads formats. This week it introduced two new forms of ads: Promoted Stories which string together multiple Snaps into a longer-form slideshows openable from a tile on the Stories page that’s shown to everyone in a given country,… Read More
Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that will show how many people are “talking about” individual, popular tweets. The metric shows up under some embedded tweets when they appear elsewhere on the web, and seems to replace both the retweet and replies totals with one, cumulative total. The new look for embeds as seen above is just a small experiment according to Dan Jackson,… Read More
Last month, Twitter started work on a new “save for later” feature for Tweets in your timeline that you wanted to flag to refer back to in the future. Now it’s given the feature a name — it will be called Bookmarks — and is running tests with it. The news was made public last night in a series of Tweets from Tina Koyama, a staff product designer at the company,… Read More
Facebook is building out a tool to show which Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts associated with Russian Internet Research Agency election troll farm you Liked or followed. Launching by the end of the year as part of the Facebook Help Center, the tool will show a list of all the IRA accounts you followed. The IRA is a group based in St. Petersburg, Russia with ties to Kremlin. It’s… Read More
Results from a new ProPublica investigation suggest the tech giant is failing at even simple self-policing. Read More
Instagram just rolled out a neat feature for its live product. Users can now request to join a live stream that they’re watching and if accepted, can start broadcasting live as the host’s guest. To request to join a live video a viewer can tap a request button in the comments section. Hosts see the request pop up in real time and can accept or deny, and also have access to a list… Read More
PayPal and Facebook are expanding their integrations today with the launch of an extension for Messenger that allows PayPal sellers to invoice buyers directly through private messaging. The feature is ideal for use with Facebook’s numerous Buy and Sell groups as well as Facebook Marketplace, in addition to being an easy way to send PayPal invoices in general. The launch comes on the heels… Read More
