Zuckerberg Listens to America (But Isn’t Running for Office)
Before he was elected president, Donald Trump was just a businessman (by many accounts, a corrupt and failed businessman) and celebrity with no real experience in the political realm. According to his supporters, what qualified him for office were his willingness to play outside Washington’s established rules and his prodigious deal-making skills — after all, […]
Leak Reveals Facebook’s Content Moderation Policies
Tasked with monitoring content generated from 2 billion users from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, Facebook’s moderators have a tough, maybe even impossible, job. These reviewers often have less than 10 seconds to decide whether or not content is appropriate, leaving them no time for nuance. The Guardian recently obtained more than 100 internal […]
Facebook’s New Drones Will Bring WiFi When Disaster Strikes
Mother Nature has a cruel tendency to knock out cell towers and other infrastructure after major natural disasters, when they are needed most. When communications are down, it’s extremely difficult for disaster relief efforts to coordinate and for panicked families to reach out to endangered loved ones in the impacted area. Fortunately, Facebook and Everfly, […]
Facebook Unveils Augmented Reality Platform at F8 Conference
Ten years after Facebook launched its game-changing Platform, the company is looking ahead to its next big conquest: augmented reality. “If you take one thing away from today, this is it,” said Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday in his keynote address at the annual F8 conference. “We’re making the camera the first augmented reality platform.” The […]
It’s Twitter vs the Government in a Battle Over Free Speech
As if President Trump’s relationship to tech wasn’t already fraught enough, Twitter announced yesterday that it is filing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for attempting to unmask the anonymous user (or users) behind the @ALT_USCIS account. One of the several rogue government agency accounts that have popped up since the election to […]
Facebook Looks for New Approaches to the Fake News Problem
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2016 was “surreal.” The Oxford English Dictionary went with “post-truth.” The Australian Macquarie Dictionary settled on “fake news.” No matter what term social media app developers prefer to use to define it, 2016 was the year that the conspiracies, propaganda, and outright hooey that used to be the purview […]
Apple’s New Clips App Creates Another Way to Tell Stories
It seems as if everybody wants to play the Snapchat game these days, which is understandable given the ephemeral image messaging app’s popularity with young people (and investors, of course). Instagram and Facebook have already looted the Stories feature, and now it appears as if Apple is doing a little borrowing of its own with […]
EU Cracks Down on Consumer Rights Violations on Social Media
In this era of “fake news,” hateful trolling, and increasing privacy concerns, the negative aspects of social networking have never been more clear. While social media app developers scramble to address these issues, governments around the world are becoming more involved with proposed laws and regulations designed to turn up the heat on the major […]
Why Aren’t Developers Chasing the iMessage App Boom?
Messaging apps — which is to say, apps that existing within messaging platforms like iMessage, Line, Messenger, and etc. — have been a huge growth area in the mobile tech industry. Sticker sets alone drove over $250 million in revenue for Line, and Western chat apps have seen similar success stories adding-on services to their […]
Dogtown Media & Craftsman Oyster Shuck a Huge Success
SXSW has rounded out to be a wild experience this year, and our Oyster Shuck event with Craftsman and Mongers Market was no exception. Thanks to everybody who came out to enjoy good food and great drink specials in the Texas sun! We got into app development to make great products, but it can be […]