Facebook News Feed Change

Another News Feed Change from Facebook. Here is the story.

In January, we introduced Trending to help highlight the global conversations that happen on Facebook. Today, we’re adding a new way for people to discover conversations around topics they’ve expressed interest in.

Now, when a Page tags another Page, we may show the post to some of the people who like or follow the tagged Page. For example, this post by the Bleacher Report might be shown in News Feed to people who follow or like Dwight Howard, in addition to people who follow or like the Bleacher Report.




This already happens with updates from friends -- if a friend tags me in a photo, my friends may see this photo in their News Feed even if they're not friends with the person who tagged me. When we tested adding this feature for Pages we found that people liked seeing this type of content in their News Feeds and gave these stories high scores in surveys.

We look at many factors to make sure the most relevant stories appear in News Feed, including which posts are getting the most engagement (such as likes, comments, shares and clicks) across all of Facebook. We also consider which posts are getting the most engagement from people who like both the Page that posted and the Page that was tagged.

For example, if many people who like Dwight Howard also like the Bleacher Report, it suggests that these two Pages are connected. If we see that people who like both the Bleacher Report and Dwight Howard are liking the post above, that's an indication that it may be relevant for people who only like Dwight Howard.

This means some Page posts that tag other Pages may be seen by new people.

Facebook Doing Away With Facebook.com Email

Facebook is retiring its email service and has begun notifying users that all email sent to their @facebook.com address will soon be forwarded to their primary email address on file. 

Facebook users can turn off the forwarding feature, which is on by default. Users without a primary email address on Facebook won't receive forwarded messages, but it's pretty unlikely that they're missing anything. 

"Most people have not been using their @facebook.com email address," said a Facebook spokesperson, who confirmed that the update effectively retires the social network's email service.

Facebook Adding Phone To WhatsApp

WhatsApp, the globally popular texting app that Facebook just acquired for a whopping $19 billion, is adding phone calls to its list of services says CNN.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said the voice service will be free and begin rolling out to users within the next few months.

Currently, WhatsApp offers unlimited text and voice-mail messages between users. Its service is free for the first year, then costs 99 cents annually.

"We want to make sure people always have the ability to stay in touch with their friends and loved ones really affordable," Koum said in a speech at Mobile World Congress.

As reported by multiple news outlets, Koum also announced that WhatsApp now has 465 million monthly users and 330 million daily users. The latter is 15 million more than what was made public last week when Facebook announced the purchase.

Voice service will come first to Apple devices and Google's Android operating system, with Windows phones and Blackberry to follow.

The move puts WhatsApp in competition not only with other messaging apps that offer voice but chat tools such as Skype and even mobile carriers. WhatsApp's unlimited texting has already helped establish it in places where smartphones and fancy data plans are less common.

It has 40 million users in India and another 38 million in Brazil, two countries highly coveted by tech companies such as Facebook for their large populations and emerging mobile customer base. WhatsApp hasn't released figures for the United States, where it is less popular.

Last week, Facebook shocked the business world when it announced it was buying WhatsApp for up to $19 billion in cash and stock -- by far the social network's largest acquisition to date.

LinkedIn Adds Blocking Feature

As the features keep rolling out for LinkedIn here is the latest one that should have been added years ago. The ability to block. Here is how you block someone.

To block a member from viewing your profile:

Go to the profile of the person you'd like to block.

Note: After you finish blocking someone, you will disappear from the Who's Viewed Your Profile section of the person you blocked.

Move your cursor over the down arrow next to the button in the top section of the member's profile. Button name may vary.

Select Block or Report next to the member's name.
Click Continue.

On the next screen, click Agree to confirm your action.

Once you've blocked a member, they'll appear on your blocked list. The blocked member won't receive any notification of this action. You may block up to 50 members on LinkedIn. Learn more about what blocking does and doesn't do.

Facebook To Give 10 Year Anniversary Movie To Memorialized Accounts

Facebook is doing a great thing by giving those family members a chance to see the 10 year movie of a lost loved one.

Here is the story:

As members of Facebook’s Community Operations team, we talk to people who use Facebook every day and we're committed to making their experience better. Some of the people who reach out to us are grieving the death of a friend or family member, and they usually ask for their loved one's timeline to be memorialized.

Over the past several months, we've been thinking about and working on better ways for people to remember loved ones. As we continue to think through each aspect of memorialization, we ask ourselves questions that have no easy answers: How might people feel? Are we honoring the wishes and legacy of the person who passed away? Are we serving people who are grieving the loss of a loved one as best we can?

Based on conversations inspired by these questions, we've decided to make an important change to how we preserve legacies on Facebook. Up to now, when a person's account was memorialized, we restricted its visibility to friends-only. This meant that people could no longer see the account or any of its content unless they were Facebook friends with the person who passed away. Starting today, we will maintain the visibility of a person's content as-is. This will allow people to see memorialized profiles in a manner consistent with the deceased person's expectations of privacy. We are respecting the choices a person made in life while giving their extended community of family and friends ongoing visibility to the same content they could always see.

Today, we're also glad to begin offering a way for anyone who has suffered the loss of a loved one to see that person's “Look Back” video. In recognition of our ten-year anniversary, a group of our engineers created personal movies for people using some of the posts and photos they had shared over the years. For one man in Missouri, the Look Back video he was most desperate to watch was one that had not yet been made. John Berlin reached out to ask if it was possible for Facebook to create a video for his son, Jesse, who passed away in 2012. We had not initially made the videos for memorialized accounts, but John's request touched the hearts of everyone who heard it, including ours.

Since then, many others have asked us to share the Look Back videos of their loved ones, too, and we're now glad to be able to fulfill those requests (video requests can be made here).

Changes like this are part of a larger, ongoing effort to help people when they face difficult challenges like bereavement on Facebook. We will have more to share in the coming months as we continue to think through how best to help people decide how they want to be remembered and what they want to leave behind for loved ones.

More Changes From LinkedIn

As I stated in another blog, LinkedIn is continuing to turn out new features to their platform amiss the on going drop in their stock. The newest feature is "Who viewed your Profile?"

Here is what LinkedIn had to say about this newest feature.

Wouldn't it be great if someone could tell you that just by adding a photo to your profile or sharing a specific article with your LinkedIn network, your LinkedIn Profile would be 11x more likely to be viewed and potentially attract more professional opportunities your way? Well, I’m happy to say that starting today, it will be available to you – on LinkedIn.

We’re pleased to introduce the new Who’s Viewed Your Profile – packed with new visual analytics and actionable insights designed to give you more ways to manage your professional identity and increase your visibility across LinkedIn.



As one of the most popular destinations on LinkedIn, Who’s Viewed Your Profile has always given members a way to discover new opportunities and be discovered by others – but we knew the full potential hadn't been unlocked. Today we’re giving you the key with access to more data driven insights such as the industry your viewers work in, the keyword searches that led to your profile, how they found you and new insights including what regions they live in, what profession they are in and what company they work for. This will help you quickly identify trends and enable you to align your professional brand with your professional goals.

Google Acquires Spider.io

Google has acquired Spider.io, a British web security firm that makes its living fighting ad fraud, the company announced today.

The acquisition brings one of the world's most respected anti-malware teams in-house at Google. Over the past few years, Spider has unearthed a number of giant botnets and digital fraud operations, including one that implanted malicious ads on Google-owned YouTube across a reported 3.5 million desktops.

"It's an industry-wide problem and it's something that if we don't address as an industry, it's going to impact all of us," said Google VP display advertising Neal Mohan in an interview with Ad Age.