Articles about Social Media

Popular business-oriented social network LinkedIn has unveiled new mobile apps for Android and iOS, touting a "brand new mobile phone experience, completely revamped with the general professional and everyday use case in mind". This comes a day after LinkedIn updated its Windows Phone 8 app, with major new features.

However, unlike the Windows Phone 8 app which offers a similar user experience as before, LinkedIn for Android and iOS sports an overhauled UI (User Interface) that is both more modern as well as better looking. Gone are the darker colors of before as lighter ones take their place instead.

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The Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission is investigating allegations that Samsung representatives posted fake reviews of rival HTC’s products online. Allegations of dirty dealing come from whistle-blowing site taiwansamsungleaks.org, which posted documents it claims are from a third-party marketing agency employed by Samsung.

The documents reveal a raft of allegedly fake posts on popular Taiwanese gadget websites, prompting the leaks site to describe Samsung’s tactics as "evil". The company is accused of hiring students to post negative comments about HTC smartphones.

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Perhaps Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are geeks of similar kind. Gates, along with buddy (and chief executive) Steve Ballmer, is known by us old-timers for a series of self-effacing videos spanning more than a decade -- many distributed internally or shown publicly at tech trade shows. Zuck is ignored -- gasp, is there a metaphor here -- in the first commercial for Facebook Home. The app is now available on Google Play.

While Zuckerberg introduces Home to Facebook employees, he is ignored by one using the Android skin. The video, which is posted to YouTube, had about 7,000 views when I peaked yesterday; the number is nearly a quarter-million today. The commercial spot is fun, festive and does what many of us wish we could do in a room: Ignore Zuck. Something so self-effacing makes him more human, too, less the geek or the privacy-invader critics call him. Put the CEO in more videos, I say.

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Facebook Home, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on April 4, and leaked as three APK files shortly after, today officially hit the Google Play store and the HTC First, announced at the same event, can officially be ordered through AT&T. The social network today pushes out a new launch page designed to make a splash with its live background of endless video.

The Google Play app describes itself as "the mobile experience that puts your friends at the heart of your phone". It essentially functions in the same way as any other launcher app for Android, bringing Facebook front and center on your homepage. From the moment you unlock your device you will be bombarded with a steady stream of photos, posts from friends and notifications of all sorts -- it's like a full-screen Windows 8 Live Tile totally dedicated to Facebook.

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If something really matters on Twitter then it's on Trends. The little card displayed to the left of the tweets feed in the browser (or inside a tab in the mobile app) shows ten topics that have managed to come out on top as most relevant to worldwide users.

In order to get even more spooky, Twitter even offers something called "tailored Trends" which delivers a more personal list "based on who you follow and your location". But if you don't want to use the feature, you can get trends only for a specific location, an option which Twitter has expanded to include 160 more places worldwide.

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Checking Facebook on the move is a great way to keep in touch with friends and keep up to date with what is going on. But when you are moving about you will invariably hit an area where there is poor signal, and you find that the official Facebook app can be a little on the slow side even at the best of times. oStream offers a possible solution by synchronizing your contents so it is available for offline reading.

Even for those who will own up to being addicted to Facebook, the official Facebook app is far from being without problems. It can be slow and cumbersome to use, awkward to navigate -- generally a bit of a pain. In addition to making your newsfeed available offline, oStream also has the added benefit of running much more quickly that the Facebook app -- or many popular alternatives for that matter.

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How important is Facebook really? The answer may come soon after April 12, when the social network releases Home to Google Play. The Android add-on usurps the homescreen, putting interactions/people first and pushes apps to the background. This, ah, Home invasion means potential trouble for Apple and Google, but in vastly different ways. Apps anchor both their platforms, curated content and the digital lifestyles users adopt. Facebook bets that between the choice of both ways, human relationships matter more.

For either the fruit-logo company or search and information giant, another question is perhaps more significant: Is Facebook's mobile experience already good enough? Related: Do most users want to be enmeshed in a constant stream of social updates and interactions most of the time? Affirmative answer to either, or both, spells trouble for the platform developers but most worrisome for Apple, for which Facebook Home affronts and condemns the entire business model.

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Well, the rumors were false. Facebook didn't release a phone today, not that I'm surprised. There are reasons why we write so few rumor stories here at BetaNews -- they often are false. "We're not building a phone. We're not building an operating system", CEO Mark Zuckerberg said early this afternoon. But the social network has launched an OEM program for the new Facebook Home, which displaces the default Android start screen. HTC is first partner. Aptly named then, the smartphone is called HTC First.

Preorders start today, and the device will be available exclusively from AT&T, in four colors (black, pale blue, red and white), on April 12. Facebook Home, which also will be downloadable same day for HTC One X and One X+ and Samsung Galaxy S III and Note II, is First's default experience. Essentially, the social network becomes primary user interface on top of Android.

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It's the question many people have asked since the social network announced its April 4 event one week ago. This live blog answers the question.

Today's "new Home on Android" follows by nearly a month, a massive user interface redesign, as Facebook unifies the look and feel across devices and puts more emphasis on mobile. Obviously Android is part of that. Paragraphs are reverse order, with newest up top. All times EDT.

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Kids. They grow up so fast. It seems like just yesterday that my Android phone finally became a member of the Instagram generation, only just "slightly" behind all of those iPhones out there. Now the social photo sharing service is celebrating its one year anniversary on the Google-based mobile operating system.

Philip McAllister, of the Instagram Android team, announces that "One year ago today we launched Instagram for Android. In less than a day, over a million people downloaded the app, and now nearly half of all Instagrammers use the Android app to share photos with friends, family and the world".

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The notion of a Facebook phone has certainly lingered for a few years now -- the concept reached a point of half-hearted fruition in the HTC ChaCha and Salsa in 2011, but neither really embodied the true potential of a Facebook phone. They were much more of "throw and see what sticks" devices -- with the only tangible evidence of deeper Facebook integration being the Facebook button on the devices’ fronts.

Much has changed in nearly two years: Facebook’s Open Graph, the acquisition of Instagram and the introduction of Facebook Camera and Messenger applications, among others. Perhaps the most strident progression Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has made in the past two years is reaching 1 billion active users. And counting. That’s approximately one in seven people in the world, and an even larger proportion if accounting for the developed world alone.

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Complexity creep is ruining Google's social network, much like Facebook before the recent, and quite exciting, redesign. I use G+ mainly on mobile devices, and that experience is in the outhouse -- and, whew, does it stink -- following this week's app update. Just four days ago. It seems like four years. My use of the service has collapsed. There is too much clutter, too much distraction. The user experience on Nexus 10 is analogous to going from a vast, wide-open forest to thicket and bramble.

But the larger problem is change, change, change. Google constantly modifies the Plus user interface -- experiments really -- and users are lab rats.

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BlackBerry Z10 social butterflies rejoice! Updated Facebook and Twitter apps are now available for BB10 sporting new features and enhancements over previous iterations. Users should find it easier to "stay connected and do more with social media", according to the Canadian smartphone maker which detailed the changes.

Twitter was previously updated three weeks ago alongside LinkedIn, and the latest iteration only contains more modest improvements by comparison. Twitter 10.0.2 features a Connect tab where users can view all interactions, similar to the Android, iOS or Windows Phone counterparts, a counter which displays the number of favorites for a tweet and the ability to display photos, summaries and other items straight within tweets.

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Google updates just keep on coming. Earlier today new versions of Google+ for Android and iOS pushed out, and I've been too busy to handle the goods (Later! Promise!). Two key areas of focus: Sharing and sharing -- as in primping photos and being better part of Communities. The updates are somewhat different for both platforms.

In an unsurprising move, the iOS app picks up some features from Snapseed, which Google acquired last autumn. So now, when you’re sharing a photo, you can: "Do basic edits like rotate and crop, as well as select filters like Drama and Retrolux; adjust saturation, contrast, brightness and lots more by sliding your fingers up-and-down, then left-and-right; single tap at any time to compare your creation with the original", Amar Gandhi, Google+ director of product management, says.

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Last week, Digg revealed plans to build a replacement app for Google's soon-to-be-defunct Reader and compete with other services that have suddenly become popular, like Feedly and The Old Reader. While I wait to someday have my OPML file uploaded to The Old Reader (currently number 3,590 in the queue), I am trying out some other alternatives -- I really liked Feedspot, but updating seems spotty.

In a blog post, Digg says "Google did a lot of things right with its Reader, but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement. We want to build a product that’s clean and flexible, that bends easily and intuitively to the needs of different users. We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News. We likely won’t get everything we want into v1, but we believe it’s worth exploring".

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