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New Media News Every Morning

Facebook Testing Facebook Highlight in NZ, Other Markets

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Social network giant Facebook is currently testing a new scheme that where you pay to have your status update promoted. With the new system you pay Facebook a small fee to have a status update you’ve chosen appear on Facebook more prominently.

The pay to promote system is already being tested in New Zealand although some people have claimed that it is also running concurrently in a few other countries. At this point, Facebook has not released any statements on whether it plans to expand it to its other markets or even to continue with this new payment system. [Read more…]

Facebook Updates Messenger App with New Notification Feature

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Facebook has recently released a series of updates to its standalone Facebook Messenger application for both the iOS and Android operating systems. One of the most notable new feature in the updates is a notification that informs a user if a friend has viewed a message the user sent and at what time it was viewed. The same feature will also appear in the group chat function. This is particularly helpful in this application since friends usually set up meetings and get togethers while chatting on Facebook. This way, everyone will know a message was read by all of the friends in the chat.   [Read more…]

Google Gets Popularity Crown, Beating Apple, Facebook and Twitter

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There are times when you take survey results with a grain of salt – and for some, this new survey may be one instance you need to do it.

According to a survey conducted by ABC/Washington Post, Google is the most popular company compared to such heavyweights like Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. To make it more eyebrow raising, the poll was conducted during the period when people expressed outrage over Google’s new unified privacy policy (from Mar 28 to April 1). [Read more…]

Google, Facebook Crying Foul Over California Bill?

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Despite being bitter enemies, it looks like the search engine giant and the social networking king may have to form a temporary alliance in order to squash a California bill that can hinder both their businesses.

Web giants Facebook, Google, Twitter and Skype have banded together to oppose an online social networking privacy bill in California that would require users’ permission to display personal information such as home addresses and phone numbers. […]

The bill would also allow parents to request any personal identifying information about their children under the age of 18 be removed within 48 hours of asking. Violations of the bill would result in fines of up to $10,000 for each violation. (Washington Post)

While the bill seems like a great idea in theory, it would probably not help parents govern the digital lives of their kids (who would respond by simply lying about their age in order to avoid having their posts removed).

Even though I can not speak from personal experience, many of my friends who are parents with kids on Facebook, Google, etc. already have the ability to remove their children’s content due to the fact that they know their kids password (which they use as a prerequisite in order to use the internet).

Although the California government has good intentions, they should let the parents be parents in the lives of their kids, instead of trying to force companies to bend over backwards when simpler solutions are available.

Image via Sluggin.com

Facebook, Bing! Making Social Search A Reality?

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Instead of mimicking Google’s insta-search (which would probably be a huge engineering challenge in of itself), Microsoft has decided to “out Google” Google by leverage the one asset the search giant has been unable to obtain.

A few months ago, we announced an exciting partnership with Facebook to make search more social. As part of that work, we introduced Liked Results, which promotes links your friends have publicly liked or shared via Facebook. Today we are extending Liked Results to annotate any of the URLs returned by our algorithmic search results to all users in the US.

If your friends have publicly liked or shared any of the algorithmic search results shown on Bing, we will now surface them right below the result. (Bing! Community Blog)

Combined with the partnership with Twitter, Bing! is as close to a social search engine as we will probably see in the next few years (provided Facebook doesn’t launch their own competing engine).

Unfortunately once again this is only available for American users, although hopefully the company will consider expanding this feature to the rest of the planet as Facebook’s user base extends beyond the shores of the US.

While their rival Google can rely upon its superior resources (not to mention tapping into Twitter as well), the search giant’s lack of a decent social graph could prove to be a major hurdle down the road as users rely more upon social friends than sophisticated machines to filter their search queries.

(hat tip: Mashable)