Most of Facebook’s interactions are local interactions, either between members of a community or people we already know in real life. The connections which span continents are estimated to be around 12% and 16% of the total. Ethan Zuckerman thinks that Facebook is being led astray by its grand vision of connecting the world together, […]

The Next Web: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. GOOG-FB-AMZN traffic would be the most common, due to their popularity among internet users. Because of this market demand, ISPs will likely provide cheap plans with access to GOOG-FB-AMZN, while offering more expensive […]

Brad Frost: But lately I’ve noticed the platform feeling increasingly grabby, to the point where they’ve broken the fourth wall with me and now the whole experience is no longer enjoyable. They’ve gotten so brazen in their tactics to keep users engaged (ENGAGED!) I think it’s no longer possible to be a casual Facebook user. […]

Ben Thompson: This, ultimately, is why yesterday’s keynote was so disappointing. Last year, before Facebook realized it could just leverage its network to squash Snap, Mark Zuckerberg spent most of his presentation laying out a long-term vision for all the areas in which Facebook wanted to innovate. This year couldn’t have been more different: there […]

New York Times: In Mr. Zuckerberg’s telling, there are few boundaries for how this technology would evolve. He said he envisioned a world in which people can eventually point smartphone cameras at a bowl of cereal and have an app create tiny sharks swimming in the bowl of milk. Fra visioni di delfini che nuotano nel […]

Un’estensione di Chrome che vi osserva mentre state su Facebook — per poi rivelarvi i dati che a sua volta Facebook colleziona su di voi, e come (in base a questi) vi classifica.

Da Hacker News: In addition to the original password, we also accept the password if a user inadvertently has caps lock enabled, if their mobile device automatically capitalises the first character of the password, or if an extra character is added to the end of the password.

Provate a ispezionare una delle immagini del vostro news feed del Facebook: molto probabilmente avrà un tag alt, automaticamente popolato con attributi che la descrivono – sole, montagna, natura, etc. a seconda di quale che sia il soggetto. Questi attributi non sono inseriti dagli utenti, ma automaticamente da Facebook, che analizza ciascuna immagine caricata e prova a comprenderne il contenuto. Un’estensione per Chrome vi dà […]

Il profilo del New York Times su Snopes – uno di quei siti di fact-checking che Facebook usa per verificare l’autenticità di quelle storie sospette di essere false: Their first group of posts, back in 1995, tackled questions about Disneyland, such as whether there really was a secret restaurant at the park. (There was.) It was a […]

Si discute molto in questi giorni della sezione trending topics di Facebook, che a differenza del news feed — nel quale la priorità di una notizia rispetto a un’altra viene determinata da un algoritmo — ha delle persone dietro che scelgono a quali notizie dare rilevanza. Pare, stando alle dichiarazioni di uno dei giornalisti che lavora a Facebook, […]

Om Malik: In other words, “the term ‘photographer’ is changing,” he [Peter Neubauer, the co-founder of the Swedish database company Neo Technology] said. As a result, photos are less markers of memories than they are Web-browser bookmarks for our lives. And, just as with bookmarks, after a few months it becomes hard to find photos […]

Quartz: While WeChat is accessible to users all over the world, it runs on a different app inside and outside China. People or organizations anywhere can register for Chinese official accounts (roughly analogous to public Facebook pages), where they’re screened for sensitive content and visible to anyone. Separate official accounts exist for people located outside […]

Interessante articolo di Slate sulle nuove reactions di Facebook (le aggiunte recenti al bottone like): The new reactions aren’t designed to help users express how they really feel. They function more like patches for all those times when a like seems insufficient or inappropriate. […] Facebook’s limited set of responses feels strangely more constricting than the solitary […]

Leigh Alexander su quella funzionalità di Facebook che una volta al giorno ti ricorda cosa ti è successo uno, due, tre o più anni fa nella stessa giornata: Part of the palpable dissonance comes from the fact that many of our posts were never intended to become “memories” in the first place. An important question gets […]

Zuckerberg non si capacita che l’India possa pensare di bloccare Free Basics, al punto che in “The Times of India” scrive: We have collections of free basic books. They’re called libraries. They don’t contain every book, but they still provide a world of good. We have free basic healthcare. Public hospitals don’t offer every treatment, but […]

Slate: Facebook’s data scientists were aware that a small proportion of users—5 percent—were doing 85 percent of the hiding. When Facebook dug deeper, it found that a small subset of those 5 percent were hiding almost every story they saw—even ones they had liked and commented on. For these “superhiders,” it turned out, hiding a […]

Mantellini: Il problema fondamentale con le reti “stupide” come Internet è da sempre quello che simili reti, per funzionare ed avere successo, devono restare stupide. Devono essere trasparenti ai contenuti ed ai soggetti che li veicolano, devono, semplicemente, non poter far differenza fra grandi e piccoli, fra ricchi e poveri e perfino – e questo […]

Facebook M, l’assistente virtuale di Facebook, è un AI oppure ha dietro delle persone che compongono manualmente le risposte? Se lo è chiesto Arik Sosman, dato che le richieste che M è in grado di soddisfare sono di gran lunga più complesse di quelle a cui Siri, Google Now, Cortana o qualsiasi altro degli assistenti virtuali […]