Microsoft is working hard to make sure its new Edge browser isn’t dogged by the living-in-the-past reputation its older Internet Explorer suffers. The new Edge, which begins shipping Tuesday as part of Microsoft’s Windows 10 Creators Update, adds some new features that are easier to spot, like the ability to stash away a bunch of …
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Facebook Messenger hits 1.2B users, that’s a lot of people
Facebook Messenger appears to have made it to the big time. The social media company said Wednesday its messaging app now has 1.2 billion people actively using the service every month — that’s a big chunk of the world’s 7.5 billion population. “I keep on hearing powerful stories about how our product is becoming a more important part of your …
Read More »Facebook hosting Communities Summit this summer in Chicago
Looks like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to make good on his word to help users of the social network have more face-to-face interaction. Facebook will hold its first “Communities Summit” in Chicago on June 22-23, the company said Tuesday. The goal is to have a few hundred Facebook Groups administrators — the people who run community pages on …
Read More »Twitter’s livestreaming effort takes a body blow from Amazon
Twitter got sacked big time when it lost out to Amazon in a livestreaming deal with the National Football League this season. We learned Tuesday the social network had been outmaneuvered, after the league chose e-commerce goliath Amazon to stream 10 “Thursday Night Football” games this year. The deal was reportedly valued at $50 million — five times more than …
Read More »Facebook Instant Articles will soon show pleas from publishers
Facebook is giving its Instant Articles publishing partners new tools to keep you in their clutches. Instant Articles is the feature that lets publishers load content quickly and within the Facebook ecosystem, making surfing for news on your phone a lot faster. Now, thanks to new “call-to-action” units, the flow of the story you’re trying to read will soon be …
Read More »Google fights fake news in search with ‘fact check’ tags
Google is bringing tools to fight fake news to its most important and iconic product: search. The tech giant said Friday that it’s adding “fact check” labels to some of the results in its search engine. If you search for something and a story from a credible fact-checking source like PolitiFact or Snopes comes up, it will get that label. …
Read More »Facebook Messenger’s M assistant gets new AI powers
The good people at Facebook must be working overtime. After implementing the Snapchat-esque Stories feature and trialing a second News Feed, the company is adding some AI components to its Messenger’s M assistant. Launching in the US on Thursday, Facebook said in a blog that M will offer helpful suggestions during conversations with friends. M knows if you’re talking about …
Read More »Twitter Lite launches to attract people in emerging markets
Twitter on Thursday introduced a speedier, more data-friendly version of its social media website to attract more people in developing markets. Twitter Lite uses less data, loads faster on slower wireless connections and takes up less than a megabyte of memory on a device. The mobile web app loads up to 30 percent faster on a 3G device than the …
Read More »Facebook makes it easier to find groups that brands care about
If you go to a few brand pages on Facebook, like HBO’s, you might notice a new tab along the left edge of the page: groups. It’s an easy-to-miss addition, but it actually represents a big push for CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his social network: building out Facebook’s platforms for large online communities, instead of just connecting people with friends …
Read More »Facebook Live is a fifth of the social network’s video sharing
Facebook Live is living well. One out of every five videos shared on the social network is Live, Fidji Simo, the company’s head of video, wrote on her Facebook page on Thursday. The amount of time people spend watching those videos has grown more than four times over the last year, she added. “A year ago today, we made it …
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