Two weeks after Facebook launched Instant Articles in India, the social juggernaut announced on Thursday that it is launching the media format to many more countries in Asia. After the launch, Facebook’s service is live in the following Asian nations: China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam. Some of the content partners include CCTVNEWS, SBS News, and Next Magazine Taiwan. The company said some partners including China Press, United Daily News Group will start publishing their articles soon. The company now has more than 50 media partners in Asia. As of Q3 2015, Facebook has…
Author: Richard
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The European Union on Thursday launched a forum bringing together Internet firms like Google, Facebook and Twitter as well as law enforcement agencies to combat online extremism. The move comes amid growing alarm in Europe over the use of social media as a powerful recruiting tool, especially by the Islamic State group. “Terrorists are abusing the Internet to spread their poisonous propaganda: that needs to stop,” EU Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said in a statement. “The voluntary partnership we launch today with the Internet industry comes at the right time to address this problem. We want swift results,” he…
Twitter has applied for trademark for the word “subtweet”, which refers to a tweet directed at another person without mentioning their Twitter name, Digital Trends reported. If Twitter succeeds in its bid, the word “subtweet” would belong to the company to use in a commercial context. The trademark filing took place on October 30, just weeks after Jack Dorsey was named permanent CEO of the company. “When you need to protect your namespace from people who would misuse it. #keepingit,” a Twitterspokesperson was quoted as saying about the decision. Words like “tweet”, “subtweet”, and “tweetstorm” all refer to Twitter activity…
As the year draws to a close, Twitter India has released its list of the most retweeted tweets, the most popular trends, and most followed personalities on its platform. Shah Rukh Khan’s selfie with Zayn Malik at the Asian Awards in London was declared the Golden Tweet for India in 2015, with over 141,000 retweets and nearly 18.3 million views globally. PM Narendra Modi’s followers on Twitter has increased by four times to reach 16.4 million since taking office last year. Popular Twitter hashtag trends in India saw a mix of sports, entertainment, political, and social activism movements. Led by…
American teens think Facebook has definitely lost its cool factor, but use it as much as ever. A survey released Monday by Forrester Research found 78 percent of US teenagers use Facebook, a figure unchanged from last year. That’s more than any other “social” site except the video-sharing service YouTube, used by 80 percent of teens. The cool factor isn’t there for the leading social network, Forrester found: 65 percent of online users ages 12 to 17 say Facebook is cool, far less than services such as YouTube (80 percent), Snapchat (79 percent) and Facebook-owned Instagram (78 percent). “Sure, young…
Instagram on Wednesday said its user base in India has doubled over the last year. The social network that lets users post photos and videos, has 400 million monthly active users globally but it didn’t reveal how many of them are from India. What Instagram did share is that people from the 18-24 age group are the most active on the platform. “Instagram has gained immense popularity and people are using it to express themselves. Our monthly actives in India have more than doubled over the past year (as of September 2015) and the momentum continues to build,” Facebook India…
In a victory for Facebook,a US court has ruled that it can block content without any explanation after a Sikh group filed a lawsuit challenging the blocking of its social media page. The ruling by the US Court in San Francisco came in response to the lawsuit filed against the Silicon Valley-headquartered company by Sikhs for Justice, which alleged thatits Facebook page, which advocated Sikh separatism, was blocked by the social media giant. US District Judge Lucy Koh in her November 13 ruling stated that the Sikh group’s claims of religious discrimination are precluded under the Communications Decency Act, which…
Astronomers have taken the first images of a planet still in formation, a discovery expected to shed light on how giant planets manage to beef up early in their lives, research published on Wednesday showed. Astronomers used a telescope in Arizona to peer at a young star located about 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. The star, known as LkCa 15, is similar to the sun, but only 2 million years old. Unlike the 4.6 billion-year-old sun, LkCa 15 is still surrounded by a disk of gas and dust, the raw materials for planet building. Within the disk is…
Twitter appears to be down in some regions, with multiple users reporting the issue on other social networks such as Facebook. While Twitter’s own Status page does not show any disruption to services, crowdsourced downtime reporting services like Down Detector and Down Right Now both indicate the disruption began around 3pm IST (9:30am GMT). For us here in India, Twitter does not seem to be having any problems, though the official clientTweetDeck does intermittently fail to load images. Down Detector’s Twitter Outage Map (seen above) shows most user reports about the outage are coming from Western Europe, and appear to…
Earlier this week, Google announced that it is revamping Google+ social network with a focus on Collections and Communities. It now comes with a new, intuitive, and responsive interface that is also more consistent across devices and platforms. The company said that the redesigned interface will gradually roll out to all users, however, Web users had an option to manually flip the switch to see the new interface from Settings. The Android client of the social network was expected to get it in coming days, but it turns out there is already a way you can get the new designed…