Facebook Home arrived in the Google Play store as planned. What wasn’t planned however, was the surprisingly good experience and well designed software. Here’s my first look and impressions. Read more »
Good news for those that want a better Facebook experience on their Android, but don’t want to give Facebook full control of their home screen. Chat Heads is available in Messenger for devices Android 2.2 and up. Read more »
Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Is Facebook serious with its new partner categories advertising program? Somehow, using offline data to target ads seems like a stretch for a company already facing a privacy backlash and that has such rich data to mine from inside its own platform. Read more »
People wondered why Google sold Frommer’s Travel barely nine months after acquiring it in the first place. The answer is that it’s keeping a huge number social media followers from sites like Facebook. Read more at paidContent »
Launchers are nothing new to Android, having been around for a few years now. That’s why I’m not surprised a Facebook Home style launcher is already available in the Google Play store. Read more »
Ron Johnson, former retail chief of Apple was hired by JC Penney as a man with the silver bullet. Both didn’t realize: winning comes from team (and timing). Read more »
For a deeper dive into the topics and technologies covered on GigaOM, check out the latest in-depth analyses on GigaOM Pro, our subscription-based research service. This week: the future of the smart watch, investing in smart grid technology, and more. Read more »
This week Facebook became the next tech giant to build upon Google Android. That raises quite a few questions — and some potential answers — about privacy, control over Android and who might use Facebook Home as their full-time Android launcher. Read more »
How exactly will Facebook be using your data if you download the new Home launcher on Android or buy the HTC First phone? Facebook says it won’t be collecting your data any differently than it does with the traditional app. Read more »
Its a unicorn. No it’s a phone. Actually it is Facebook Home, for now; Apple’s China Syndrome is making it think different; The Bit coin boom (& bust); Chrome & WebKit go to war and did Vdio really kill the Rdio star? Read more »
Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about Apple, the iPhone and Facebook in two different one-on-one interviews that hit Thursday. Read more »
Samsung may have a lead in the worldwide smartphone market, but Apple’s dominance is growing in the U.S. Read more »
Starting April 12, you can get the HTC First from AT&T: An LTE, Android 4.1 phone with Facebook Home as your launcher. AT&T hasn’t provided many specs, but some nosing around on the HTC site yielded quite a few. Read more »
Facebook didn’t quite unveil its own phone, but you can make your Android phone a Facebook phone with a custom launcher. The question now is: will you? Read more »
The financial company Bloomberg says it will add Twitter to its platforms now that the SEC has given a green light to companies to use social media to announce market moving news. Read more at paidContent »
We’ll have live coverage of Facebook’s Android event here, with a new Facebook-centered experience expected running on an HTC smartphone. Read more »
We’re covering Facebook’s Android event live here, with a new Facebook-centered experience expected running on an HTC smartphone. Read more »
A year ago, it seemed mobile was going to be Facebook’s achilles heel. Things seem to have turned around, though I am not entirely convinced that it means big dollars for the company. Read more »
Applied Micro, a chip company with a market cap of $500 million, is set to take on Intel and AMD with the first 64-bit, ARM-based server part that mimics an entire rack on a chip. Read more »
Got 20 minutes to spare on your commute or at work? Why not tune in to this week’s call in podcast where we answer your tech questions. Plenty of Chromebook tips on this week’s show as well as thoughts on the Facebook phone. Read more »
There’s little doubt that Facebook will unveil a new phone on Thursday, but the star of the show will be software, not hardware, in this battle between Facebook and Google for user engagement. Read more »
Facebook has built a new open source tool for benchmarking graph databases, called LinkBench. And although the chances are your infrastructure and workloads look nothing like Facebook’s, the good news is LinkBench was built with configurability in mind. Read more »
A reported leak of the software that will power Facebook’s upcoming phone shows specs of the handset as well as capabilities of what appears to be a dedicated Facebook home screen for Android devices. Read more »
A “Facebook phone” is one of the longest-running rumors in the technology world, but a number of observers think such a beast is actually going to make an appearance next week. But do users actually want one? Read more »
The era of constrained resources is just beginning, so right now access to resources acts as sort of dark matter, quietly putting pressure in complex ways on how the virtual world operates. Read more »
Twitter may be run by a private corporation, but it has quickly become one of the strongest tools we have for free speech, which is why it’s so important that the company resist efforts to curb that speech. Read more »
Instagram might be changing the economics of the paparazzi business, but the photo-sharing service and its social media peers can also make celebrities — willing or not — out of ordinary people. Who should pay when digital activity has real-world consequences? Read more »
A recent study found strong correlations between people’s Facebook likes and a number of personal characteristics such as sexual orientation and intelligence. But relying on correlations as proof of anything is a questionable practice. Read more »
Google+ announced Monday that it’s incorporating some photo editing and filtering features into its iOS app from the team at Snapseed, which Google acquired back in September 2012. At this point the “photo wars” seem to have died down slightly, but Google+ gets into the mix. Read more »
For better or worse, we all live in glass houses. Yet social media has made it easier and faster than ever before to throw stones, and that’s not always a good thing. Read more »
Storytelling website Storybird has added a poetry web app designed to let users quickly create illustrated digital poems. Read more at paidContent »
Massachusetts education staffers are watching Twitter for signs of cheating on the statewide MCAS exams. Read more »
Publishers’ lack of strategic focus on licensing and syndication today is matched by nearly equal indifference from software developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. To change this, they must structure their repositories of content so it can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Want to see big data in action? When it comes to planning out data center capacity, data can influence everything from the power usage to planning for disasters. Read more »
Netbreeze promises to bring multi-lingual access and analysis to Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube streams via Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Read more »
Mega data centers’ innovations in serviceability, automatically detecting and recovering from failures, procurement practices, and so forth will become standard practice in all modern data centers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With Facebook’s appointment of Mike Schroepfer as its new chief technology officer, the company is putting in place a person who has overseen an infrastructure strategy that has made an industry take notice. Read more »
Internet giants, investors and web and mobile startups are placing even more emphasis on design and user experience in 2013. Read more »
Ready for some #social #disruption? Reports from the Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD indicate that Facebook is considering adopting the hashtag on its platform, which would help users organize content around particular topics and give advertisers more opportunities. Read more »
