Facebook

Last week, Google CEO Larry Page met with WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum in a last-ditch effort to prevent the rapidly growing messaging app from selling itself to Facebook, according to three people involved in the deal. The Google chief had learned that a few days before, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had made a pitch to Continue Reading →

Facebook will no longer limit who can view the accounts of its deceased members. Until now, Facebook would change the privacy settings on a deceased person’s account — known as a “memorial account” — so that only their friends could view the page. But going forward, Facebook will leave privacy settings as the account’s owner Continue Reading →

Two recently-published academic papers foretell the imminent implosion of Facebook. One review from Princeton employed disease modeling to suggest that Facebook could lose up to 80 percent of users in the next three years. The other was from University College London (UCL), a leading UK university. In UCL’s instance, Professor Daniel Miller wrote a blog Continue Reading →

Facebook’s surprise $16 billion acquisition of WhatsApp on Wednesday might not have been part of the only offer the messaging company received. Fortune reports that Google offered to buy WhatsApp for $10 billion. In a brief report on the rumored offer, Fortune notes that two separate sources have confirmed Google offered to purchase WhatsApp, but Continue Reading →

Facebook announced on Wednesday afternoon that it had reached an agreement to buy popular mobile messaging startup WhatsApp for an upfront total of $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and about $12 billion in Facebook shares. Co-founder and CEO Jan Koum will join Facebook’s Board of Directors, but WhatsApp will continue to operate independently Continue Reading →

Google Plus, the company’s social network, is like a ghost town. Want to see your old roommate’s baby or post your vacation status? Chances are, you’ll use Facebook instead. But Google isn’t worried. Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future Continue Reading →

Facebook on Thursday announced it has added the ability to select a custom gender on your profile, a change it has made after working closely with LGBT activist groups. The feature will only be available to people in the US for now, but Facebook plans to expand availability “in the future.”  A custom gender on Continue Reading →

If you’re (a) on Facebook and (b) have an iDevice, you need to be using Facebook’s newest app, Paper. There’s no two ways about it. Paper (or, more formally, Paper – stories from Facebook) is a complete re-invention of the way you interact with Facebook. Gone is the clunky Facebook app we’ve come to know Continue Reading →

A Facebook study has revealed that Twitter might have a battle on its hands as the social network of choice for real-time engagement while people are watching films or TV. The research is the result of a partnership between Facebook and UK analytics firm SecondSync, and looked at social TV data from the US, Australia Continue Reading →

Facebook’s new standalone app Paper is now available for download on iOS to everyone in the US, and it’s more than just a content reader. Paper has messages, notifications, search, and a completely redesigned profile. When I asked the team leaders behind Paper if they still used the old one, product manager Michael Reckhow diplomatically Continue Reading →