Twitter, Google, Apple, Facebook, iPhone, Android — what’s new — dominated my writing during 2012. But there were others such as Famo.us, Kickstarter and France’s Free. Here are some of my stories from this year that I believe will have an impact technology ecosystem in 2013. Read more »
The sister of Facebook’s CEO got caught in a privacy snafu on Christmas Day after a private photo of her family was shared publicly. But this is about more than Facebook and its notoriously complicated settings — figuring out the boundaries of online privacy is not easy. Read more »
A law firm is trying to capitalize on recent outrage over Instagram’s changes to its terms of services. Despite media hype, the lawsuit has been described as “frivolous” and “flimsy” by social media law experts. Read more »
Facebook announced a new set of privacy tools and features last week, and those updates will begin rolling out to users in the U.S. starting Thursday night. One of the most significant coming changes is users not being able to hide their profiles from search results. Read more »
Facebook announced some tweaks to the Facebook messages inbox and filtering on Thursday, allowing a small percentage of users to test out a feature that would allow them to pay to have a message delivered to another user’s primary inbox rather than the secondary one. Read more »
Facebook’s hackathons have generated some cool ideas. Facebook shared the top hacks from 2012 that range from silly (3-D printed globes showing where and how people use Facebook) to serious (calendar views for you upcoming events on the site). Read more »
Path is adding its own version of search to your Path moments and check-ins on Thursday, implementing a search bar that lets you look through your posts for memories with a particular friend or restaurants that are popular nearby. Read more »
Many of the biggest stories in the connected consumer space occurred mostly offstage in 2012, from Apple’s new media services to policymakers in Washington. Overall, the past 12 months have laid important groundwork for significant advances in the connected consumer space. The year 2013 should be eventful. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook’s new Nearby local search feature could become a Foursquare killer one day. So far, however, it’s not as comprehensive, deep or personal for users. But if Facebook can get its 600 million mobile users to think of it as a local search utility, look out. Read more »
With investment souring on consumer-focused companies, 2013 will be more about the social enterprise, with a different set of companies driving innovation and perhaps a little disruption. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Instagram released new terms of service on Monday that enraged users who worried that their content would be used for advertising without their permission. Instagram clarified on Tuesday, but it’s unclear if the damage is already done among its customers. Read more »
Instagram responded to user complaints over the update to its privacy policy on Monday. It explained that it does not intend to sell user photos, and that users can still set their photos to private to maintain privacy controls. Read more »
Facebook is leaping into the local discovery and search market with an upgrade to its mobile Nearby feature, which will allow users to find relevant places based on social signals and other data. Nearby will pit Facebook against Yelp, Foursquare and Google. Read more »
Canadian entrepreneur Louis Michaud, who has spent years trying to commercialize his “out there” technology to harness tornadoes for power, has received a small grant from PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s early stage lab Breakout Labs. Read more »
Gmail went down for 18 minutes during prime email checking hours on the West Coast thanks to a routine software update conducted Monday morning. But in an era of continuous code deployment Google’s mid morning update isn’t unusual — it’s the future. Read more »
Berlin’s highly successful games studio is moving into Android, starting off with a new version of the hit Diamond Dash. It seemed like a good time to get a snapshot developer perspective on coding for the big two mobile platforms. Read more »
As our compute infrastructure becomes more distributed it’s much harder to keep everything synced. But with users demanding immediate access to their files, photos and whatnot all around the world, solutions like Google’s Spanner DB and Twitters photo blobstore are a solution. Read more »
Facebook is announcing updates to its privacy settings Wednesday, changing both how easy it is for users to make updates to those settings, and making a few changes in how information is presented, and also how user timelines appear in the search function. Read more »
What are Twitter’s core design, product and engineering capabilities — stuff they are really good at. What is Twitter’s core competency? Those are tough questions for the company to ask itself and answer — for it would help define and set expectations and strategy that is lasting. Read more »
Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky was onstage at today’s launch of Intel’s first low-power system on a chip for the data center, but it turns out that the social networking doesn’t plan on using the chips. Instead Frankovsky’s role could be seen as validating the microserver market. Read more »
Intel has released its first Atom system on a chip aimed at the data center. The new SoC consumes 6 watts and has many enterprise-class features. But with ARM taking aim at the same market Intel has a totally different type of competition to worry about. Read more »
Facebook’s Gifts platform will become available to all users in the United States beginning Tuesday, and in addition to content from iTunes, Starbucks, and a variety of retailers, a variety of wines will be available for purchase on the site as well. Read more »
When we think about data privacy, we normally think about a company giving or selling our info to a third party. But a single company can also circulate around our information among its various units in ways that raise similar privacy concerns Read more »
As voters increasingly spend their leisure time with things other than newspapers and television, political campaigns need new methods of making sure their messages reach those people. Obama for America’s Rayid Ghani took to Facebook to find not just possible voters, but possible campaign workers. Read more »
The SEC says Netflix is in trouble for sharing news on Facebook rather than through a more traditional method like a press release. The incident shows how regulators can fail to recognize transformations in our communications infrastructure. Read more »
The mobile-messaging value chain is changing as OTT players upend mobile operators’ SMS business. There will be 27.7 trillion messages by 2016, and most of the growth in traffic will come from IP-based services. Successful carriers will use this new technology to extend reliability and scalability. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Instagram says it is removing the ability for Twitter to embed photos because it wants users to go to its own website instead of Twitter’s to see that content. Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter. Read more »
Plexxi has made a new networking box that it calls a switch, but is radically different from the switches on the market today. The switch contains software plus an optical transceiver that link to other Plexxi boxes to form a fast connection between thousands of servers. Read more »
Facebook will soon allow anyone to sign up for its Facebook Messenger App with just a name and a phone number instead of requiring users to have a Facebook account. The roll out begins on Android in select countries before going international and iOS soon. Read more »
Are you cheating on your quantified self? Even if our quantified selves are a little better, fitter and more hardworking than our actual selves, they’re still part of a new kind of virtual, fluid and filtered identity that’s becoming more common place on the internet. Read more »
The photo and video app market is a sizable one undergoing rapid changes right now. With low barriers to entry, this is a market that also consists of a large number of developers and is certainly not limited to a handful of well-financed startups. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Who has the right to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter? On Thursday, a federal judge emphatically sided with Facebook against an adware company that wanted to use the site for its own ends. Read more »
After critics accused its new Jerusalem bureau chief of making inappropriate comments about the Middle East on Twitter and Facebook, the New York Times has appointed a senior editor review her posts — but this robs social media of the power it has when used for journalism. Read more »
A study of Black Friday cyber-shopping said that social media advertising was a big bust with few people buying things in response to an ad from Facebook. The story is very different if you use other metrics to define “responded.” Read more »
Thanksgiving, shopping, social — boy aren’t we overwhelmed by all the clamor. It is time to make sense of it all. Why Verizon doesn’t get social. 10 Gbps broadband. Where is MOG founder going? And GE CEO Jeff Immelt is all crazy about the Industrial Internet. Read more »
Archify isn’t the first service to promise a personal search engine but, with smart touches such as Gmail integration and the recording of social streams, it has a decent chance of being the one that succeeds. Read more »
Looking to give your friend the perfect birthday gift, or want an easy way to give your kids a gift card for the holidays? Facebook announces Monday that it will be integrating iTunes gift cards and content into its digital gifts platform. Read more »
An old hoax has resurfaced that suggests Facebook users can tell the company what to do by posting a legal notice on their profile. Alas, it’s not true — your interactions with the company are governed by law and licenses, not your wishes. Read more »
Apple’s Passbook joins the mobile payments gold rush. But Jeff Fagel, of edo Interactive, has doubts about its viability and says until we see a system that’s easier for everyone, plastic will remain king. Read more »
Included in the changes that Facebook recently announced to its privacy and governance policies was an admission that it aggregates and shares data on user activity with advertisers — and Facebook says it plans do so not just inside the network but on external websites as well. Read more »
