News

 The WaterIsLife charity discovered a Venmo loophole, enabling it to blast its message to a thousand unsuspecting people earlier this week. By sending $0.01 to folks who were appearing in the Venmo feed, it was able to advertise the charity to hundreds of people. Their shitty marketing stunt kicks open the floodgate for yet another channel of spam coming at you from all sides. Yay. Read More

 What’s a poor beleaguered brand like Yahoo to do? Use its smart engineers to jump on the hottest trend, of course. Today the company is launching a bot that simulates a pet monkey for Facebook Messenger. Oh, and a few slightly more useful bots, too, like ones that will tell you about the weather, latest news and how your stock portfolio is performing. Read More

 I hate networking. Or at least the type of networking that consists of awkward happy hours where no one knows each other and you’re approached every five seconds by some over-eager “networker” who seemingly has an endless pocket full of business cards.
But, here’s the thing, that’s only one small type of networking. In its broader and much less aggressive form… Read More

 Comment reels can become cesspools, especially on celebrity social media posts that get replies by the thousands. But now Instagram is letting its new business pages take out the trash with a new Comment Moderation option. It “Blocks comments with words or phrases often reported as offensive from appearing on your posts.” Instagram confirms to me that the feature rolled out… Read More

 The developing world can’t join the age of social video since streaming sucks up too much costly data and is sluggish on slow connections. But Facebook wants to change that with a new video download option it will start testing on July 11th with a small percentage of users in India. While on WiFi, people can sync videos to their device for offline viewing within Facebook’s… Read More

 Facebook is clearly very serious about its mission to connect the world and in the process, it has launched solar-powered drones that use lasers to connect to each other and the ground, and more prosaic efforts like new antennas for covering both urban and rural areas. Today, Facebook is expanding this work with the launch of OpenCellular, a new open source hardware and software project that… Read More

 Memories fundamentally shifts Snapchat to encompass the past rather than only being about the present. Yet by allowing you to modify previously shot content and add it to your story with a white border that signifies it’s a memory, Snapchat lets you share later and stay in the now Capture now, live, then share later. Snapchat tells me it set out to create the most human camera, and… Read More

 Twitter announced today that Bret Taylor is joining its board of directors. Taylor is best-known as one of the founders of social networking startup FriendFeed — and then as the chief technology officer of Facebook, which acquired FriendFeed in 2009. After departing Facebook three years later, he became co-founder and CEO at mobile word processing company Quip. News!: @btaylor is… Read More