Social & Web
Facebook has spent most of this week fighting off the storm of controversy from a psychology study by the company that showed it manipulated the News Feeds of thousands of users to draw an emotional response without their consent. On Wednesday, speaking to NDTV in India, COO Sheryl Sandberg admitted, “We communicated very badly.” However, Sandberg downplayed the impact of the study and said that the company was neither breaching privacy nor being manipulative: “Facebook cannot control emotions of users. Facebook will not control emotions of users.” It’s another semi-apology from Facebook: Sandberg apologized for the way the study was handled, but not for the study itself.
Vine has become a popular medium for users to share six-second videos, but until now there hasn’t been a way to know how popular individual Vines are. On Tuesday, the company introduced “loop counts,” which are available now in the Vine update for iOS and Android. Loop counts are exactly that — a number in the corner of a Vine that shows how many times a video has been “looped” — or played end-to-end and restarted — since April 3. The update, which includes a redesign, also offers richer analytics for Vines, including milestones like reaching 100 “likes.”
David Hahn, the former VP of product for LinkedIn, will join Greylock Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence, the VC firm announced Monday. At LinkedIn, Hahn oversaw the company’s monetization products, including Sponsored Updates. According to LinkedIn co-founder and current Greylock partner Reid Hoffman, Hahn’s product portfolio generated $1.5 billion for the company. As an entrepreneur-in-residence, Hahn will advise the leadership teams of the firm’s portfolio companies, which include both social and enterprise startups, on monetization and product.
Google’s earliest social network, the decade-old Orkut, will shut its virtual doors at the end of September, the company said on Monday. This mainly affects Brazilians, as the service has been more or less specific to that country for the last six years (it was also successful in India for a while). Seriously, Orkut was huge in Brazil — Facebook only overtook it there two and a half years ago — but now it has well under 1 percent of the market. In a blog post on Monday, Google said new Orkut registrations were now closed and people could export their photos and other data using Google Takeout.