Articles about Facebook

According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were the most generous US philanthropists last year. In 2013, the couple donated 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, amounting to some $992.2 million. The Chronicle of Philanthropy put together a list of the top fifty most generous donors in 2012, ranked according to the size of individual donations.

The list is concerned only with gifts and pledges of cash and stock to non-profit organizations and it might be surprising to find that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is not at the top spot -- in fact, it does not appear in the list at all. This is explained by the publication:

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The biggest news of the week has to be the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO at Microsoft, which brought to an end weeks of speculation and rumor. Bill Gates also stepped down as chairman. A leaked version of Windows 8.1 Update 1 appeared online giving us all a sneak peek of what we can expect to see in the upcoming release -- including context menus on the Start screen, a new enterprise mode in Internet Explorer, and different ways of working with modern apps. Ahead of this big release, it was Windows XP that was showing growth rather than Microsoft's latest operating system.

In other Microsoft news, Xbox One's first big update was revealed to be coming up on 11 February. Sony announced that it was selling its VAIO business to enable it to focus its attention on mobile devices. Business and individuals who rely on 37signals' products found that the company was not only changing its name, but also dropping all of its services apart from Basecamp. There was another blow for Bitcoin as the online currency was effectively banned in Russia.

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Facebook is celebrating its 10th birthday and will no doubt be looking back in glee at its meteoric rise and bountiful first decade. But it’s not all been clear sailing for the social network giant.

In the 10 years that Facebook has grown from a project in a student room at Harvard University to a multi-million-pound business with 1.23 billion monthly users, it has sparked controversy and mixed opinions.

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Two weeks ago my colleague Mihaita Bamburic wrote a piece on how a Facebook news reader app could give users the best tailored content. Today, Facebook announces Paper, a "new app that helps you explore and share stories from friends and the world around you". It's not quite the app Mihaita was hoping for -- not yet, at least -- but it does sound promising.

Paper is essentially a Flipboard alternative for iPhone (and Android eventually, presumably) that displays content from your Facebook friends, well-known publications, and "emerging voices" in a fullscreen, distraction-free layout.

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Regardless of whether you feel Facebook exhibits disease-like characteristics or not, one thing is for sure -- it can certainly turn into a time-sucker. There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg's social network is blocked in many workplaces you know! Just like many people "underestimate" how much alcohol they drink, particularly when speaking to a doctor ("Oh, not much... just a beer twice a year, doc!") many Facebook users are likely to be surprised -- or perhaps scared -- by just how much time they spend using the site.

If you've ever been curious, but haven’t bothered to sit with a stopwatch every time you log on, a new tool from TIME magazine could be what you've been looking for. The how-much-bloody-time-have-I-really-wasted-reading-other-people's-pointless-crap calculator has been created ahead of Facebook's tenth anniversary. It's on 4 February if you were thinking about getting a card and present, by the way.

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Facebook has been in the news over the past few days after a report suggested that the social network is spreading in a similar way to a virus. Like all epidemics, the report suggests, the rate of infection will ultimately drop off, leading to the suggestion that by 2017 the social network will have shed 80 percent of its users. To which I -- and many others of reasonably sound mind -- cry "nonsense!" The catchily titled "Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics" paper published by, of all places, Princeton University puts forward the idea that Facebook users are set to abandon the social network in droves in the coming years.

Things don’t get off to a good start. In explaining the methodology, authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler say they will use "epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs [online social networks], where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery". The abstract gets off on the wrong foot by suggesting that Facebook "is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase" -- a wonderfully vapid term with no grounding in, well, anything really. It's easy to pick holes in papers that have slight flaws, but right from the start it is almost too easy here.

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Now that CES 2014 is completely out of the way (although there was still time for me to pick my favorite tech from the show), it's back to business as usual. For many a company, business as usual means security issues, and Microsoft suffered at the hands of The Syrian Electronic Army. Again. The earlier security issues at Target were found to be far worse than first thought, affecting an estimated 100 million customers, and a potential security flaw was identified in Starbucks' mobile apps. For the antivirus side of protection, Kaspersky's Internet Security was named product of the year by AV-Comparatives.

Hoping against hope that new tech isn’t embraced for the sake of embracing new tech, I pondered the need for curved screens. In the mobile world, KitKat started to roll out to the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and also announced the company somewhat deceptively named Galaxy Tab3 Lite, which is in fact no lighter than the non Lite version, other than in terms of hardware specs.

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It's starting to feel as though the myriad of social networks that exist are homogenizing. As one site introduces a feature, it is not long before the rest follow suit. Now it is Facebook's turn. Occasional leader, but often a follower, Facebook now boasts a trending topics feature. Simply known as Trending, the new feature borrows the idea used by Twitter and countless news websites to provide a constantly updating list of topics that people around the world are talking about.

In fact, Trending acts as a sort of blend between Twitter's Trends feature coupled with content suggestions. This is not a straight list of the subjects that are proving most popular around the world, but, theoretically, the list should be personalized with content that you have an interest in. That’s the theory at least.

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Of all the services I use, Facebook knows me best. It knows where I live, who my "friends" are, what movies I like, what my favorite bands are, where I like to go out for a drink, what sort of content I want to see when I scroll through my feed and which sources I like for news stories.

Facebook also knows that when it comes to reading news on my tablet I prefer Flipboard. Why? Well, the apps are nicely designed, pleasant to use and, because of the newspaper-like layout, provide a certain sense of occasion. The content that I get, after having carefully selected the sources and added my social network accounts, mostly suits my preferences. There is still stuff that I have to filter out but, generally speaking, Flipboard does a good job at tailoring the news content to my liking. Facebook, though, could do an even better job, if it decided to offer a rival service.

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I'm not big on making year-ahead predictions -- common as the stories are at the turn of the year. But it's a slow news week, with the holiday and Consumer Electronics Show still ahead, so I thought: "Why not look into the crystal ball?"

If any of these come to be, something is seriously wrong with the space-time continuum.

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The Syrian Electronic Army is no stranger to the headlines, and the group's latest exploits have gained it further attention. This time the target is Microsoft, specifically Skype. The SEA target the Skype Twitter stream, as well as Facebook page and blog in what may be the first high-profile hack attack of the New Year.

The group defaced the blog with a message to Microsoft that read "Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying!". A message posted on the Skype Facebook page read "Don't use Microsoft emails (hotmail,outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments."

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Once the darling of the social networking world, it looks as though Facebook is falling out of favor. At least that seems to be the case with teenagers. An extensive and ongoing study into social media finds that huge swathes of 16 to 18 year-olds are abandoning Facebook and jumping ship to the likes of Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. In total, nine different regions are being studied over a course of 15 months.

As Professor of Material Culture at University College London, Daniel Miller says, Facebook is now uncool. Mum and Dad are now not only using the social network (which is an immediate nail in the coffin), but actively encouraging their kids to share details about what they're doing: "Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected".

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I'll be brief, because I'm seven days now with the flu and don't feel much like writing. But today's "open letter" for global government surveillance reform demands rebuke.

I'm all for curbing government snooping, but what about corporations collecting information? Tech Giant's -- AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo -- reform rally is disingenuous and self-serving. These same companies collect mountains of personal information for profit. So, what? It's okay for them to snoop, but not governments?

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Headlines about government surveillance of web usage all over the world have been difficult to avoid this past year. Since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on activities by the NSA, both companies and web users have been asking for greater transparency in data collection and there have been endless calls for dragnet data collection to be stopped completely. It is often the case that when confronted with a common enemy, some unlikely alliances are forged. This is certainly true with the NSA, and now Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter and AOL are all coming together to present a united front and push for legal reform.

The collective has written an open letter to President Obama and congress, warning that "the balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual". There has been quite a backlash against the number of requests for data that the US government has made of companies, and the letter makes it clear that the eight companies that have joined forces are not happy:

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The tech world seems to be slowling down slightly in the run up to Christmas, but there have still been a lot of stories over the past seven days. There are sure to be a whole new raft of sales to look forward to both before and after Christmas, but if the Thanksgiving sales are anything to go by they may not offer as good a deal as first appearances would have you believe. Whether you bag a bargain or not, it looks as though tech presents are going to be as popular as ever this year -- and if you buy a Windows device, you'll get a free gift card.

After Microsoft tried comparing the Surface to the iPad Air, Amazon decided to follow suit  -- guess which was more popular! Microsoft kept its fire trained on Google, taking a swipe at the Chromebook. Tablet makers may be pushing their product in the run up to Christmas, but PC shipments have suffered the largest decline ever. New computers will have an updated USB connection in the near future. USB type C brings to an end a problem that has plagued anyone who has ever plugged in a USB cable -- this generation can be plugged in either way up!

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