Kiran Upadhyay

Almost a decade ago, Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox (pictured above) started playing weddings with a reggae band out of East Palo Alto. At the time, the company had barely launched beyond college campuses and Cox had just finished Stanford. East Palo Alto, in contrast, is this community that sits right across the Highway 101 from Palo Alto, the originally home city of Silicon Valley which gave rise to iconic companies like Hewlett-Packard, VMWare, Tesla and Facebook itself. Unlike its neighbor to the west, East Palo Alto has double the unemployment rate and one-third of its residents lack more than a high school diploma. As I wrote about last month in a very long and through history, a lot of this has to do with unjust land-use and local government policies from the past 70 years. Today, Facebook’s headquarters sits right on the Menlo Park and East Palo Alto border, and the city has shifted toward a Latino majority from its historically black roots. It is one of the

Do you run a Facebook Page? Heads up: your page’s “Like” count is probably going to drop a bit soon, and it’s totally not your fault. The short version: Facebook is changing the way it’s counting likes, subtracting any accounts that have been either manually deactivated or “memorialized” after its owner passed. It’s something that probably should have been done since the beginning — but since it wasn’t, it’d be easy to think your Likes had dropped because of something you’d done. One thing that’s important to note: it seems that this only accounts for profiles that have been manually deactivated. Likes from profiles that could be considered “inactive” because the user just hasn’t logged in for a while will continue to count. The shift won’t happen immediately; Facebook says it’ll roll out in “the coming weeks.” So how many Likes might you lose? It’s tough to say. While Facebook says to expect a “slight dip,” it’s all relative to how many Likes you have to begin with. If your

elebrities aren’t like you and me. They’re better. Or at least Facebook thinks they’re worth more money. Convince experts and influencers to like something, and everyone will follow their lead. The question is how to identify who these special people are, and Facebook’s just patented one of the trickiest ways yet. The idea is that Facebook could watch the rate at which a piece of content like a link is shared, then figure out whose posting led to a sudden increase in share rate in their network. Those people are the influencers, and the people that they discovered the content from are the experts. Facebook could then target those people with ads and presumably charge businesses a boatload to reach them. It makes perfect sense. Why would it cost the same amount to reach someone famous, powerful, or widely cited as someone whose endorsement won’t sway people? Spotted by PatentYogi and Mikhail Avady, the “Identify experts and influencers in a social network” patent was first

Facebook’s Internet.org project to provide basic mobile Internet services for free just took its biggest step to date after it launched in India. The service, which is run by Internet.org with input from a number of telecom industry partners, has thus far been available in a handful of African countries and Colombia, but now it is making its way to India’s billion-plus population. The app isn’t available to the full Indian population yet, since Facebook partnered with operator Reliance to offer free access to Internet.org sites in an initial six states: Tamil Nadu, Mahararashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala, and Telangana. That’s the first step on a path to “provide Internet access to more than a billion people in India who aren’t yet connected,” Facebook said in a statement. “Most” of the services on Internet.org are available in English and six local languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati and Marathi — and they can be accessed via the dedicated Android app

Facebook on Tuesday announced the addition of a new feature for Facebook Groups designed to make it easier for members of a “For Sale” group to list their items. The new “Sell” feature, which is now starting to roll out globally to more groups, will allow members to create a post where you can add a description of the item for sale, set a price and set a pick-up or delivery location. The social network today already hosts tens of millions of groups based around a variety of interests, and “For Sale” groups are one of the most popular categories. In these groups, members use Facebook as an alternative to something like Craigslist for local selling, or as an alternative to eBay for selling collectibles or other items of broad interest, like books or electronics. Currently, members in these “For Sale” groups generally post photos and text descriptions of their items, but the addition of the “Sell” feature will make filling out the necessary information a bit more structured than be

“I declare all my Facebook photos are copyrighted” “Free Southwest Flights”, “Bigfoot spotted”. This is the kind of crap gullible people share on Facebook, until enough friends point out these are fake they delete them. Now the company’s getting proactive by reducing the News Feed visibility of hoaxes. Satirical content like The Onion will still fly, and Facebook won’t delete people’s foolishness, but it will show that content to fewer people and display a warning that it might be a sham. Every few months it seems a new diatribe goes viral, where people accuse Facebook of appropriating ownership for their content. They copy and paste a status update claiming this legally reserves their ownership. This is stupid, not only because Facebook doesn’t claim ownership of your content in that way, but because even if it did, a social media update is obviously not legal protection. Facebook actually published research on how memes like these spread through the feed. Now, it will use its

Facebook has a acquired QuickFire Networks, a TC Disrupt 2014 Battlefield contestant that built a custom hardware and software platform for reducing video file sizes and upload times. The Wall Street Journal got the news earlier today, with confirmation later arriving on QuickFire’s site. QuickFire’s tech speeds up encoding videos with different profiles for frame rate, resolution, color and audio settings for different platforms. QuickFire’s solution relied on custom motherboards built to accommodate 11 high-end Intel Core i7 processors. Custom software let these processors work in unison, and a layer on top of that let the startup massively scale up by distributing work among multiple motherboards. For users, the end result of Facebook integrating QuickFire’s tech would be reduced buffering of videos without degradation in quality. According to a letter announcing the acquisition on QuickFire’s site from CEO Craig Lee, the company will wind down its prior business operations

In Mark Zuckerberg’s second public Q&A currently being livestreamed, Zuckerberg discussed how Facebook won’t add a dislike button but wants to give more nuance to how people share emotions and reactions other than approval, and explained how he doesn’t think connecting with friends is a waste of time. The 30-year old CEO, clad in his gray t-shirt uniform, said Facebook changes its privacy policy as infrequently as possible while keeping up with its new technologies. The company is working on oversight of experimentation and user testing around emotion and sensitive communities. And while Facebook gets flack for making us less connected in real-life, Zuckerberg said the product’s goal it to let us blow past Dunbar’s Number and maintain relationships with more people. Zuck’s first public Q&A last month saw him tackle some of Facebook’s toughest questions and criticisms head on. The CEO explained that Facebook split off Messenger from its main app and forced people to downl

 Yet the news cruised by with analysis focused simply on what Facebook’s new keyword post search does today. Yes, any post by you or any of your friends can now be dug up with a quick search from mobile. But I don’t think people realize how big a deal it is for tomorrow. Facebook just went from data rich to Scrooge-McDuck-swimming-in-a-tower-full-of data rich. The ramifications for advertising, developers, and Facebook itself are tough to fathom. Our most vivid doppelgänger, our digital echoes can now be tracked. They don’t just say who we were, but where we’re headed, and what we’ll want next. First, the trillion post index gives us group memory.Each person can only search stories from their friends and surrounding network, but Mark Zuckerberg recently said those all add up to over 1 trillion posts. If your friends put their lives on Facebook, you can now remember them too. You could say these are just faded snapshots, nowhere near the real thing, but how much of our own lives

Twitter’s not the only one Facebook is battling for control of news and content distribution. With Pages getting quieted down in the feed, Facebook wants to make its home for businesses less like a newspaper that come to you and more like TV channels you turn on. That’s why it’s YouTube that’s getting flattered by the social network with a new design for the Video section of Facebook Pages. All businesses will soon be able to choose a featured video to be displayed extra-large with a live comment feed atop their Page, and cobble together playlists of more of their videos. This makes the Videos tabs of Pages look and feel a lot like YouTube Channels. TechCrunch spotted the new design and features on ABC News’ Page, and the company confirms it testing the format with a handful of Pages, and plans to roll it out to them all in the coming weeks. Facebook’s video product changes come alongside pushes on the monetization front. It just struck a deal with the NFL to show football game

Milliseconds make a difference when it comes to chat. The less lag, the more it feels like being in the same room. But with texting, we lost the cues like nods and “mmhmm”s that tell you someone heard what you said. Today Facebook Messenger takes a leap forward on both fronts with a big speed improvement across all its versions, and a new animation that shows you whether your message is sending, sent, delivered, or read. And rather than some tiny gray text, Messenger uses your photos of your friends’ faces to show exactly who in the convo has seen what, the company tells me. Facebook originally came up with the FacePile design about five years ago for a plugin that showed which of your friends Liked a website. Now it’s found to repurpose the design to let you know at a glance who has seen your messages. The new Messenger design is now rolling out on iOS and Android in Europe and the US, and will go worldwide soon. You can see how the read receipts work in this quick demo video:

It seems that Facebook quietly removed Bing as its primary search provider over the weekend, announcing plans to debut its own search tool on Monday, according to Reuters. The report says that Facebook’s new search tool will give users the ability to filter through old comments and other information from friends. Facebook has been building out its search products for a long time, using Bing as an extra layer to provide results beyond the Interest Graph in an effort to avoid letting rival Google into the system. A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters: “We’re not currently showing web search results in Facebook Search because we’re focused on helping people find what’s been shared with them on Facebook. We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft of lots of different areas.” Microsoft said almost the same thing to VentureBeat: “Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that’s been shared with them on Facebook versus

We’re not ace photographers, but we all take photos. Most could use a little help with light and shadow. So rather than making you manually filter them, Facebook tells me it will now auto-enhance newly uploaded photos starting today on iOS and soon on Android. You’ll be able to adjust a slider to control just how enhanced you want the light, shadow, and clarity, or revert back to your original shot. The tool could make it much quicker to post well-lit photos so you can share on the go and get back to what you were doing. Facebook and the other social apps are locked in a battle for photo sharing. To the winner goes tons of engagement. That’s why Twitter just revamped its filtering interface, Snapchat started letting you dual-filter with color filters and its geo-filter titles, and Instagram today added five new filters. Google+ added a similar auto-enhance feature a year ago. Previously when you uploaded a photo to Facebook from mobile, you were shown your unedited image, and c

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile has come under attack from a large number of online trolls who are taking advantage of the opportunity to leave comments, including stickers, photos and other “meme” images, on the Facebook CEO’s public posts. The attackers are largely based in Brazil, and their barrage of comments and jokes have continued for several days now, nonstop. We’ve heard some reports, via tipsters, that the attack started as some kind of protest against the low reach of Facebook Pages, but that remains unclear. The messages and comments currently visible don’t speak to any specific agenda or complaint against Facebook or its founder, but rather seem to be random, and sometimes bizarre, posts typical to spam attacks instigated by trolls. The trolling is taking place on older posts which are further back on Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline. It appears the attacks began in the comments section of a post in May 2012 where Zuckerberg added a “life event” announcing his marriage

Facebook today announced that it is open sourcing Proxygen, the C++ HTTP libraries — including an HTTP server — that it uses internally. The company has open-sourced quite a bit of its code in recent months, much of it focused on mobile developers. In many ways, today’s launch is more interesting, though, as it’s likely to reach a far wider number of developers. From the get-go, Facebook notes that it isn’t trying to replace popular HTTP and proxy servers like Apache or nginx with Proxygen. “Those projects focus on building extremely flexible HTTP servers written in C that offer good performance but almost overwhelming amounts of configurability,” Facebook engineers Daniel Sommermann and Alan Frindell write in today’s announcement. “Instead, we focused on building a high performance C++ HTTP framework with sensible defaults that includes both server and client code and that’s easy to integrate into existing applications.” Still, the framework allows you to quickly set up an event

Clearly, Facebook wants more users building and sharing videos on its service. Today, the company announced “Say Thanks,” a new tool that lets you quickly put together personalized video cards using a combination of pre-built themes and your own posts and photos. The end result is an easily shareable — if a bit cheesy — customized video you can post on yours and your friend’s Timelines. To create the video, users visit facebook.com/thanks (note: the service is rolling out throughout the day, so check back if the URL is broken for you). They then select a friend, choose a theme, and pick out posts and photos that “represent your friendship,” explains Facebook in a blog post announcing the new tool. The experience is somewhat reminiscent of using something like Flipagram, a mobile application that lets users put together short videos from their own photos and then share those creations to social networks. In fact, Flipagram hit the top of the Apple App Store over the 2013 holiday s

This afternoon an industry source confirmed for me that Facebook is indeed piloting ‘Facebook at Work’ a product aimed at enterprise collaboration and the source told me such a product will be rolled out in a few months. Back in June, TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden reported that Facebook was working on a business collaboration product called ‘Facebook at  Work‘, and The Financial Times reported on a website with the same name this morning (registration required) and speculation began in earnest. Here’s what we know that’s new: While Facebook refused to comment officially, the source says the idea of a Facebook enterprise collaboration tool has been tested inside of Facebook for the last six months and is now being piloted by a small group of companies. They would not name the companies nor could they comment on what the final product will look like in terms of mobile or web-based tool, but there is no doubt Facebook is working to release such a tool in the near term. The source sa

Facebook today announced that its newest data center in Altoona, Iowa, is now open for business. The new facility complements the company’s other centers in Prineville, Ore; Forest City, N.C. and Luleå, Sweden (the company also operates out of a number of smaller shared locations). This is the first of two data centers the company is building at this site in Altoona. What’s actually more interesting than the fact that the new location is now online is that it’s also the first data center to use Facebook’s new high-performance networking architecture. Traditional data centers are, for the most part, built around clusters of machines. That’s because you need really high networking performance between all of the machines within a cluster. Networking resources between clusters, however, are typically more limited. That’s fine, as long as your applications mostly run within a single cluster, but as Facebook grew, its applications also expanded beyond these single clusters. So the bala

700 million people use Facebook Groups every month, but it’s a second-class experience on mobile, slow and buried in the social network’s main app. So today Facebook is releasing a standalone Groups app with powerful notification controls and a Groups discovery section. You won’t be forced to use it as the Groups feature will remain in the Facebook app, and you won’t be fast-switched to it either. The Groups app for iOS and Android could be a massive help to admins trying to keep their communities from devolving into chaos, and speed up the consumption experience for everyone from families and friend cliques to study groups and support networks. It’s bright, quick, and could unlock more private sharing outside of the News Feed. “No one is really doing this out there. We think what we offer is unique”, says the Groups app’s project manager Shirley Sun. Despite Yahoo and Google fiercely competing to dominate group email lists, there’s a surprising lack of people and rich content

Face it. You’ve accepted friend requests from some weirdos and over-sharers. Luckily, today Facebook’s launched a News Feed Settings tool that shows the friends and Pages taking up the most space in your Feed, and lets you quickly unfollow them without unfriending. There’s also a new flow for hiding specific posts from your Feed that lets you tell Facebook whether it’s the author, or a person, Page, or app mentioned that you want to see less of, and then unfollow them if necessary. Both Facebook and Twitter have spent years trying to grow our social graphs with suggestions of who to follow, even if it dilutes our feeds. Yet feeds full of boring or annoying posts are amongst the top complaints about social networks. Finally, Facebook is combatting this irrelevant information overload, even if that means helping you silence brands that paid for your Likes. Once upon a time, about 5 years ago, Facebook had a set of powerful sliders you could use to tune the presence of different