Facebook Developing 'Talk,' a Messaging Service For Teens

Social media powerhouse reportedly seeks to extend its reach to a younger demographic
Facebook is making moves to maintain its place as a relevant social media platform at a time of intense competition with newer distractions, including fidget spinners and an endless string of Snapchat filters. And part of that is creating new ways to communicate through its apps, designed specifically for teens.

Social media giant came under fire for not curbing spread of misinformation in lead-up to election

"Code inside the main Facebook app points to an unreleased messaging app aimed at young teens called 'Talk,' which hasn’t been previously reported," The Information reports. "The code reveals signs of new parental controls that would set the app apart from Facebook’s existing Messenger app. For example, a reference to unreleased features, written in plain-English text in the code, says, 'Talk is a messaging app where you fully control the contacts.' Another command states, 'Your child uses the Talk app to chat with you in Messenger.'"
According to the site, the app will be restricted to users 13 years or older, and teens wouldn't need their own Facebook profile to access the app. Perhaps just as importantly, teens who use Talk won't be publicly searchable, a safety precaution that could help eliminate the danger of teens being approached online by strangers.
The app has not yet been announced, though it does seem to align with Facebook’s recent push to better understand their younger users. Last month, Facebook showed advertisers how it can monitor posts and photos obtained in real time to determine whether certain users are feeling "stressed," "defeated," "overwhelmed," "anxious," "nervous," "stupid," "silly," "useless," and a "failure."
In the 23-page document leak (first reported by The Australian), Facebook claimed that it could help advertisers pinpoint "moments when young people need a confidence boost." Other parts of the document focused on body image and weight loss, dissecting the ways in which image-recognition tools are used on Instagram and Facebook. The report, co-authored by Facebook employees Andy Sinn and David Fernandez, garnered criticism, and in response, Facebook released a statement.
"On May 1, 2017, The Australian posted a story regarding research done by Facebook and subsequently shared with an advertiser," the statement reads. "The premise of the article is misleading. Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated."

Instagram the New LinkedIn for Young Workers?

Young job seekers prefer researching company culture and workplace life on Instagram

 

The job search has gone almost completely digital and increasingly social. In fact, a good portion of job seekers use Facebook and Twitter to research companies, while recruiters use LinkedIn to vet potential candidates. However, for younger job seekers, Instagram is becoming an important place for learning about the culture of potential workplaces.
Jobvite surveyed more than 2,000 American workers with the goal of demystifying the supposed rift among American job seekers. What it discovered was that the idea of the “divided America” was a myth, and job seekers are as diverse as the nation in which they live. There are, however, some distinct perspectives depending on race, gender and generation.

For instance, older workers are more optimistic about the job market than younger workers, and men are more comfortable negotiating their pay than women. Racial disparities persist, according to the survey: Non-whites are usually paid less and care more about workplace diversity. Rural workers tend to earn less than those in urban areas, but they are less concerned about their jobs being automated.
Job boards are falling out of favor. In fact, 60 percent of those surveyed said they had referred someone to work at their company. Recruiters are on board with this trend and, in the Jobvite Recruiter Nation survey, 34 percent said that referrals are the best source for high-quality candidates.

There remains, however, a big difference between where recruiters go to check out potential candidates and where job seekers go to find out more about companies. Recruiters still depend on LinkedIn for their candidate research, while more job seekers prefer researching companies on Facebook. 28 percent of workers aged 18 through 29 preferred using Instagram as a window into company culture and workplace life.
Check out the full report for more demographic differences and perspectives among job seekers and how the American workplace is evolving.

Taboola intros Facebook-style ‘news feed’ to target mobile

Taboola, the startup that works with hundreds of publishers to provide a set of links at the bottom of pages directing readers to more content on the site and elsewhere, has long positioned Facebook as the big competitor.

Consumers scanning articles on Facebook, especially on mobile, are less likely to ever visit a publisher’s own site, even more so now with the introduction of Instant Articles that keep readers essentially inside the Facebook experience: hence the push to create more links at the bottoms of stories to try to keep readers engaged and in your own network sphere.
Now, in an ironic twist, Taboola is launching a new format that could be summed up as “if you can’t beat them, join them”. As an alternative to its existing grid of links, Taboola wants now to feature content recommendations in the form of a continuously scrolling list, its own take on, yes, Facebook’s news feed.
The new format is launching first with the New York Daily News before getting rolled out to other publications.

The new Taboola news feed essentially consolidates a number of widgets and links you already have on websites, specifically publishers’ websites, into a larger feed experience: alongside the links to other articles on your own site, and those of other publications in the Taboola network, you will see cards for other services like the weather, videos, and marketing cards for in-app purchases, sponsored content and more — additions that have in part been made possible by some of Taboola’s recent acquisitions like ConvertMedia and Commerce Sciences. 

The germination for adding in a news feed comes from the fact that Taboola doesn’t feel like its set of links are a solution, as much as they are part of an ongoing problem.

“Today, when you look at publishers’ sites, it’s a shitshow,” Adam Singolda, Taboola’s founder and CEO, said in an interview. “You have the right rail, at the bottom you have Taboola, you have newsletter widgets, and commenting and navigation bars. And in mobile it’s even worse.” He said that Taboola’s tests have found that the average user reads one article and then just goes back to Facebook. “Engagement becomes horrible because the experience is really bad.” 
In trying to figure out how to solve that problem, Taboola — which is based in New York but was founded in and still operates in Israel — has taken a page from the new guard of cybersecurity companies: the best way to combat a threat today is to put yourself (or your security system) in the mindset of that threat.

“Even though I have a lot of issues with Facebook they are doing something well, the news feed,” he said. “Scrolling down you are presented with different cards — images or posts or links or videos or ads — but it’s a consistent, ongoing experience. Users don’t have to get to know Facebook all over again each time something new is introduced, and so they keep scrolling, for an hour or more a day.”

The ideal, he said, is to get the 1 billion or so people that see and (potentially) click on Taboola links to spend more than 3 seconds on a page: to move them to three minutes, and perhaps one day to three hours. This is especially relevant in markets where mobile is the primary platform for media consumption and browsing. Singolda said that today in the U.S. and Western Europe, about half of the readers across its network are on mobile. In parts of Asia, that proportion is 90 percent.

Taboola’s news feed is not completely replacing the Taboola grid at this point, but this is Singolda’s long-term intention. It’s one more way to bring in more engagement, but it is also another way for Taboola to differentiate from its lookalike competitors. These include the likes of Outbrain, which has long been the subject of speculation that it will merge with Taboola. Nothing to report on that front yet, Singolda said.

Readers using the new feed will, for now, click out of a publisher’s page to go to a new page in the browser to read stories, with a small option to click back to the originating page. Singolda told me that the idea will be to introduce AMP pages into the mix over time to speed up the jumps, as Taboola is already an AMP partner.

I’ll be looking to see how that plays out, since AMP links currently mean no traffic for the originating or endpoint publications, with Google hosting the speed-up pages on its own URLs. Same, too, goes for the idea of bringing in infinite scrolls, which seem to pose their own kinds of unique challenges for publishers that want to keep readers engaged on their own properties, not floating away on an endless river provided by someone else.

Taboola has raised over $160 million, and Singolda said that it’s profitable and has $100 million of that funding still in the bank.

Facebook is promising to use its greatest asset to help media companies make more money

Facebook says it want to help media companies make more money from digital ads. And now, the social networking giant is even offering to let publishers sell ads using Facebook’s data.
The question is, will media companies, leery of Facebook’s formidable and ever-growing clout in the ad business, welcome the help?
The new product in this case is Audience Direct, which is designed to help web publishers sell targeted video ads using Facebook’s demographic and location data. For example, a publisher could use Audience Direct to make sure that an advertiser running a campaign aimed at women between the ages of 18 and 34 gets what they paid for.
That’s not easy for many publishers, according to Brian Boland, Facebook’s vice president of publisher solutions, since they don’t always have very robust data on their own audiences. Publishers can work with third parties to measure the average composition of their audiences. But delivering ads only to the consumers an advertiser is interested in paying to reach can often result in guesswork and waste, said Boland.
“This is a problem that we’ve heard about from large video publishers,” said Boland. A publisher might have to deliver 2 million ad impressions just to make sure that an advertiser gets the 1 million targeted ads it commissioned, he explained. "They end up throwing thousands of dollars out the window,” he said. “This helps them solve that problem.”
Facebook says in an a recent test, it was able to help a publisher deliver the right ads to 90% of a given target compared to an industry average of 59%.
Facebook has signed on ESPN,Hearst, A+E Networks and Scripps Networks as early test partners for Audience Direct.
Right now, no money is changing hands during this beta test, but the plan is to eventually figure out a business model where publishers make more money and Facebook collects some sort of fee, said Boland.
In addition, the more publishers that use Audience Direct, the more that will likely employ other Facebook ad products, or so the thinking goes. Facebook already sells ads that run on a large number of websites as part of its Facebook Audience Network.
Indeed, the potential for Audience Direct would seem to be huge. After all, Facebook has data on nearly 2 billion users, including their real names, locations and interests, so its data and technology should be able to help the average web publisher improve ad targeting precision. Media partners won’t be able to pull any individual Facebook user data and won’t be able to reuse this data for other ad campaigns.
Not every publisher is going to be so willing to hand over more of their advertising infrastructure to Facebook. They are seeing Facebook swallow a huge percentage of marketing budgets while leaving many a publisher fighting for scraps even as many web publishers rely on Facebook to get their content in front their audiences.
 
Many accuse Facebook of operating a "walled garden"Elena Elisseeva/Shutterstock.com
“We’ve heard that criticism,” said Boland. “We firmly believe that the publisher partners we are working with, as people see how we treat them, the ways people feel about us will evolve. Hopefully our actions speak loudly. We think we are building out a compelling suite of tools for publishers.”
Interesting, the move puts Facebook squarely against Amazon, which late last year rolled out a set of products aimed at helping publishers learn more about their audiences and make more money. Amazon also boasts of a unique and potent data set.
Besides challenging another tech giant, Facebook’s plan to helping publishers is intriguing, given that Facebook had seemingly retreated from ad tech to a degree. The company acquired the web video ad platform Liverail a few years ago, only to shut much of its down.

France Social Media

France has the fourth largest number of internet users of any country in Europe (52.2 million), and ranks tenth for the number of internet users globally. Internet penetration was 79.6% in June 2012, whereas Germany had 83%, and Iceland had 97% penetration. According to Intel, 39% of French adults are more comfortable sharing online than in person.
According to comScore, French Internet users spent an average of 27.7 hours online during the month of June 2012 (way behind the UK at 37.3 hours, but ahead of the European average at 25.9). comScore’s analysis also revealed that France had the third highest number of unique visitors during that month (43,214,000), just behind Russia and Germany.

Social Networks

• The average time spent per French visitor on social networks is 247.4 minutes a month
• Facebook is the most popular social network in France
• France has the third highest number of Facebook users in Europe
• France generally has low levels of involvement with social media
• Skyrock is the second most popular social network site in the country
• 95% of French companies don’t use social networks

Top 10 social network sites among internet users in France, ranked by unique visitors, December 2012:
1. Facebook: 34.3 million
2. Skyrock: 8.6 million
3. Twitter: 5.6 million
4. LinkedIn: 4.4 million
5. Viadeo: 3.7 million
6. Trombi: 3.6 million
7. Tumblr: 2.6 million
8. Copains d’Avant: 2/6 million
9. Badoo: 2.5 million
10. Nomao: 2.0 million

Fujifilm's new camera brings Instagram

Fujifilm's new camera is here -- and it's equal parts digital and instant film.

 

The Instax Square SQ10 is what you'd get if you crossed Instagram's filters with nostalgic instant photos -- the tools to edit digitally combined, with the immediate gratification of instant printing.

Take a photo and you'll be able to edit the image right on the camera's LCD screen. The SQ10 offers 10 different filters, along with brightness adjustment and vignette control (which darkens the edges of a photo). You can also crop, rotate, and zoom in on the image before printing it directly from the camera. 

The Japanese company officially launched the camera at an event in New York on Wednesday night. The SQ10, which was first announced in April, is the latest in Fujifilm's Instax line -- and it's the first to combine instant prints with digital (previous models printed photos.

Teacher who had sex with three students and used Snapchat to share intimate photos is jailed.

 

 Jaclyn McLaren was warned by bosses to stop social media contact with students

A teacher who exchanged intimate photos and had sex with her students has been jailed for two years.

Jaclyn McLaren, 36, pleaded guilty to charges of child exploitation, possession of child pornography, and luring.

A court heard how McLaren used social media app Snapchat to send nude pictures of herself to students as young as 13.