Facebook Developing Camera App Similar to Snapchat

Facebook to come up with Stand-Alone Camera App

According to online source report, quoting people familiar with the matter, Facebook is coming up with a stand-alone camera app which will be like the disappearing photo app Snapchat, to upsurge user engagement and will encourage its 1.6 billion users to create and share photos and videos.The app which is being developed by the friend-sharing team of Facebook in London is said to be in its initial stage and may not come to completion, as per the report.

 Moreover, the newspaper has reported that the company is also said to be scheduling a feature which would enable user to record video through the app to start live streaming. The same had caused apprehension within Facebook, over increasingly passive behaviour on the social network of the user. Several of the users tend to check Facebook often or multiple times a day though few tend to share photos, video and update of status regarding their own lives.

Withdrawing the trend seems to be a growing priority within the company. Facebook spokeswoman had refrained from commenting on the product plans. She had mentioned that the overall level of sharing on Facebook had been strong and alike to levels in prior years. People familiar with the matter had stated that the camera-first format is focused in motivating users to create photos and videos.

Open to Personalized Feed/Articles

The flagship mobile app, in comparison, tends to open to a personalized feed or articles, status, updates and ads, which encourages users to use content, though not necessarily create it. The approach also tends to differ from Instagram image-sharing network of Facebook that had gained reputation as a place to post the best, most well-photographed pictures.

 Instagram tends to compel users to go through numerous steps before posting an image, inclusive of filters and it is not the first time that Facebook has built an app encouraging sharing. It had launched Slingshot, in June 2014, a Snapchat like app which enabled users to trade photos and videos, which disappeared after 24 hours.

It had earlier launched a photo-editing as well as sharing app known as Camera and none gained much traction among users which was later on dropped. The latest app would have a bit different features like the live-streaming mode. In the past year, the decline in sharing on Facebook has developed as a problem.

New Feature - `On This Day’

Technology news website – The Information had reported earlier this month that the original broadcast sharing on Facebook had dropped by 21% as of mid-2015 when compared with the earlier year.During the first quarter of 2016, 33% of Facebook users surveyed by market researcher GlobalWebIndex had informed that they had updated their profile status in the past month and 37% stated that they had uploaded or shared their own photos.

A year back, 44% had informed that they had updated their profile status in the past month and 46% stated that they had uploaded or shared their photos. The camera app just seems to be one way that Facebook intends tackling the issue.

 Facebook has also tried to re-engage users with a new feature known as `On This Day’ that permits users relive and share past posts. According to GlobalWebIndes, this together with similar features could have prompted more users to `like’ Facebook post. It also said that that in the first quarter of 2016, 82% of Facebook users had clicked `like’ at least once in the previous month up from 73% at the same period, a year earlier.

Facebook Launches Notify News App

Notify – Released By Facebook – News/Entertainment Stories

An app for iPhone usersknown as Notify has been released by Facebook that tends to collect news and entertainment stories in one regularly updated feed. Among the 70 organisation that would be providing stories to the app are CNN, Fox News and the Washington Post.

Those who intend to install the app can choose their own mix of sources which will post notification their feed. This competes openly with Twitter’s Moments and Apple’s News services that produce feeds of breaking stories. Facebook has mentioned in a blogpost that the feed of stories can be adapted on choosing from the various categories which comprise of movies, sport, music, news and celebrities.

Besides these, there are also categories for daily meditation exercises together with Getty picture library portraying iconic images from the same day in history. Presently the Notify service is only made available to iPhone users with Facebook account in the United States.

 It has not been mentioned by Facebook as to when or if the service is likely to be extended to the other areas of the world or other operating systems. Notification with regards to new articles had been seen on the lock screen of an iPhone and can be shard from that display.

Facebook – Jumping Off Point in the Digital Lives

Managing director of Analyst Company, Midia Research, Mark Mulligan, stated that the move made sense since Facebook had become the `jumping off point in the digital lives and the better a job it could do of this, the better it locks users in’.

He adds that it has seen standout success with spinning out Messenger and recognises that more touch points could develop with its users; the more it could create greater loyalty. Notify comes soon after Facebook had unveiled its Instant Articles service in May. This ought to hasten up delivery of off-site content by hosting it in its individual data centres.

Articles which have been featured on the service are from BuzzFeed, National Geographicand the New York Times besides six other media organisations. Initially, Instant Articles is available only on iPhones but a test of Android version has already started.

A rival company which is identical known as the Accelerated Mobile Pages – AMP initiative had been launched by Google and several other web firms in October. The AMP tends to store slimmed down copies of stories from dozens of news organisation to permit them to load quickly on portable devices.

Useful to Publishers/Readers

Facebook, in its official blog post had described its stations of notifications for 11 paragraphs prior to mentioning that `if you want to see more’ than the sentence or two on your lock screen, you could tap the notification to load it (around eight seconds) inside an in-app browser or one could just sit back and rely on this evolving medium to get updates.

It is likely that Notify seems like an experiment and Facebook would be utilising what it learns to inform the way it tends to build notifications in the Flagship Facebook app. Moreover, it would also be more useful to publishers and readers to enable users to subscribe to push notification from brands within Facebook of different levels of granularity.

This would help to separate those who desire to see everything from a publisher and from those who only prefer top stories and breaking news. Notify would perhaps help Facebook there. Meanwhile, should the user be in need of more push notifications on the phone, there are several publishers who would be ready to oblige.

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“FacePile Read Receipts”- The Latest Feature in Facebook Messenger

When it comes to chatting, every millisecond counts. The lesser time is takes for the interaction, the more lively you feel in the chat room. However, when it comes to texting, concepts like hmmm, or nods have completely lost, there is no indication whatsoever to tell that the other person is listening to you.

Facebook’s Latest steps: 

Now Facebook messenger has taken a giant foot forward in terms of improvement in speed in their entire version apart from adding the new animation, which indicates the sender if their message is sending, sent, delivered, as well as read. According to the company, they have not followed the currently used concept of grey text indicating the information but the new animation will use the photo of your friend and indicate who is actually in conversation with you.

The company came up with the concept of Facepile design nearly 5 years ago and it was initially meant for a plug-in to show if your friend liked any website. It has now be modified for broader usage and to indicate as to which friend has seen and read your text messages. At present, the new messenger design will be rolled out in Europe and United States of America on Android and iOS platform. The company is planning for a worldwide release later on.

According to Lexy Fraklin, Product manager, they wanted a messenger, which will let the user feel Facebook messenger as the fastest and the most reliable mobile messaging product. In order to improve the efficiency of the application on all types of devices, the company has made lot of modification and put in lot of efforts towards minimizing the latency. As per Facebook’s new head of Messenger and former PayPal president, MarcusDavid, whether anyone agrees or not, speed is very important and everybody wants to feel the speed.

The FB is expecting to gain a competitive advantage with this new chat feature. When it comes to the slickest and the fastest chat application, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Kik and many among other are all racing together. Apart from messaging, Facebook have other global competitors in the form of Line’s stickers, Snapchat’s visual messaging, Twitter’s worldwide town square, and Google’s video chat. At present the company’s strategy is to focus on utility, which will drive lock-in to their completely social platform, while there competitors are still trying to pull out money from the direct messaging. The company has already been making lot of money from the number of ads that are being posted in the newsfeed.

What is more? 

The company has also launched “Stickered For Messenger”, which is an app for pasting stickers on top of photos before being sent. According to Franklin, the company has many things in their mind and working on more to make the user’s experience very cool. The first thing they have achieved is the fastest and clearest chat platform. Now the company is looking towards the newsfeed. The main aim of the FacePile was to ensure that you can check the message read as soon as possible and get on with work, rather then waiting for response.

Now Get The Latest Tech News Through Your Facebook Application

FB Techwire, is the latest page launched by the company completely dedicated for highlighting all the tech news and that too in your timeline. The latest page is an expansion of the FB Newswire. This page will certainly be an advantage for the reporters and journalists who are looking forwards to exposing the biggest tech news possible from around the world.

What is Techwire all about? 

According to the company, just like Newswire, even Techwire, will be carrying out verification and aggregation of the best of the contents available around the world in a manner, which will allow the common people to understand the concept and conversation pertaining to the news.

In this way, we can clearly see that it is very much similar to the other page, but the difference comes in terms of the focus area. Earlier this year, Facebook's director of news and global media partnerships, Andy Mitchell, stated that they are thinking about an official website (Facebook) as a main source of news and associated contents. The content has been made journalist friendly, which will enable them to scan and extract the relevant data they are looking for. They are hoping that their new page Techwire will also be accepted in the same manner ad given the same importance.

What is the challenge? 

The main challenge that will be faced by the company will be to persuade the tech journalists to use their page for posting the latest news instead of using Twitter as the main platform. Facebook is known to be the largest drivers of the traffic among all the social media platforms. They know that technology draws a lot of the audience and Facebook is looking forwards to using this opportunity.

The Company’s aim is to offer more than just posting your pictures and sharing your friend’s status. The Techwire page is dedicated towards highlighting all the incidents in the technology sector. The page is powered by Storyful which is known for checking the accuracy and authenticity of the posts. Facebook has been working on grabbing every opportunity possible, starting with the introduction of Hashtags as well as trending topics. Facebook has more users than Twitter, so the company does have the capability to disseminate more news than Twitter.

With the launch of Techwire, the company can extend their media coverage as well. Newswire has already reached the peak and already been picked up by The New York times, BBC, The Washington and other publications. Facebook has opened up a new tool for the benefit of the journalist, who can do their job on a much bigger platform.

They want to beat every other site and become the most go to site for the latest tech news. The company is always towards starting their own authentic content and started a tech-news feed. Facebook has become one of the most important platforms for journalists and publishers. The Facebook user’s will have to subscribe to this page to get alerts of the latest tech news.

Facebook Launches New Groups App For iOS And Android

Facebook is one app, which can be found on every Smartphone. On 18 November, Facebook announced the launch of groups for iOS and Android. This group with have functionality very similar to that of the app due to all being connected to the same social media platform. Users will be able to download Android app directly from Google play store, whereas iPhone users get this app from the Apple’s App Store.

What is the group all about? 

Compared to the regular Facebook website accessible on the PC and on the Facebook mobile app, the group app will have lot in stored for the users, which extends more than basic functions like chatting, discussion, collaboration, and planning. Groups for iOS and Android the users to choose between different groups, they will be able to join new groups, manage their notifications, and learn about additional features and contents.

According to Facebook, the main idea for building this new app came from the people who are interact more in their groups. The whole objective is to give people an app, which will provide them an easier and faster mean of interacting in their chosen groups. However, people need to remember that, Facebook is in no mood to remove the group feature out of their main app as they did with the messenger application.

The advantage of this app is that, if you already have Facebook main app and messenger app on your phone, then when you trying to login to Group app, you will get a notification asking if you would like to login as the same person. The account holder of the Facebook will not have to login separately in all these apps of Facebook. In the Facebook group app, the users will get their groups aligned according to their preference and usage. This will allow them to move easily between each of these groups. Since all these apps use the same icon (Facebook), notification are received in the same form. However, the user’s can change this in their settings option.

According to the recent performance report, the company claimed that as of Q3, 2014, they noticed 700 million people using the groups every month. The Company is not considering this app has any experimental launch but considering it part of their main operation on the line of messenger app.

However, as this app has been developed by the same company, which produced many experimental apps, suggesting that Facebook is still not very confident about this new app. The company is releasing the app on iOS and Android platform all around the world, but they do not intend to get windows anytime soon. Although the company has not made any upgrades in the Group feature but it is still a very popular feature of the main app. For a long time people expected upgrades to come out and the rumor mills indicated the time for September.

For PC users, they should soon be expecting notification about groups that you can join.

Add Text and Doodles to Photos through Facebook Messenger

With the increasing number of people either getting fed up or starting to get annoyed with Facebook Messenger and this also being a separate app apart from the main Facebook app, the media giant is still focusing on adding features to this to recapture the hearts of their users. The latest update to the app which has now reached a 500 million mark will allow the users to have more fun with photos that they will be sharing with their friends.

Now it’s the time for the people to cheer up as their long wait of adding comments to the shared photos has become a reality in the messenger app. One should be able to add comments or even scribble on the photos before sharing it with your loved ones or even sent as a group message. So now no more depending on photo editor apps, you will be able to point to any details on a photo or even add caption and doodle to a particular picture, all this through your Facebook messenger.

How it works? 

So when you are in your app, you just need to tap on the photo tab and select the picture you want. After that before sending the picture, you should be able to click on the pencil icon to add text in the picture. The developers have given option of pen as well as “Aa” format for text. User will be able to select from a whole range of color and will be able to write with finger or stylus. On the negative side, this can be only done on the photos which have been saved on the phone and not on the “selfie cam”. This is one feature which is being considered impractical and lame as well.

If you are unable to see this feature on your app, one can get this through manual download. Facebook has stopped messaging from their main app and migrating the same as a different app; you will not be able to view and access this feature on your regular app.

Whether people consider this update practical or not, it is certainly a welcoming update for better expressing oneself through the android app. At the end the usage of this new feature completely depends on the user as well as whether they actually use Facebook Messenger to start with.

So this new feature can be considered as an incentive for getting people to download the messenger app and those who enjoy doodle. But is it a wise move as it has not been received with open arms by the app users. Even though the feature is currently available on the android app, the users of the app on the iOS sure will not have to wait for long time.

At the same time the social media giant is working on introducing counter video play which will help the users to find the videos they want to see. Through this the company will also be able to monitor how the videos are performing.

The Facebook app on Android is intrusive!

The publisher of Norton anti-virus reported about the Facebook application on Android. The up-to-date Norton Mobile Security comes with bad news for Facebook. Last Thursday the Norton raised this issue in one of a blog. The new technology offered by Facebook namely Mobile Suite which gives mobile insight is the root cause for this issue. This application makes the social network to index the mobile number you are using. The more interesting work of Mobile Insight is the automatic collection and analyst information about applications installed on the device. Technology Norton actually a summary combining data of the Android by applications such as phone number, email, contacts etc. It must simply answer the question "What does your camera with you?" Particularly it is more sensitive on Smartphones. Note in passing that Facebook is regularly pointed to her bulimia of personal data, in the heart of its business model. Late last week, we learned for example that the UFC-Queue Chooser has launched a legal battle against the social network and other giants in connection with the lack of respect for the privacy of users. Analysis by Norton Mobile Security could give grist to critics of Facebook. The application of social network on Android has been marked with a flag automatically. Reason: it will automatically send the phone number of the user to the Facebook servers.

 It does not look like much, and may even seem normal. Except, says Norton, that sending the telephone number is the first launch of the application, "even before you hook up" to your Facebook account. "You do not need to provide your number to identify you, or even have a Facebook account for this to happen." This therefore provides a good number of users, since the Facebook application has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. In fact, most of these users have installed anyway to use Facebook, and had to provide a phone number to the social network, even without it. But is it to Facebook to allow the recovery of data, without the advice of the user? At each judge, but here Norton adopts a restrictive policy, which can be seen well from users a little heated by Facebook, competitors, and practices. Moreover, Facebook said that they did not use the numbers, and have removed from its servers.

If evidence was that the social network walking on eggshells on these issues, and is clearly not comfortable with the analysis of Norton Mobile Security. The new line of Facebook seems to be confirmed: it will be fixed in the next release - a way of saying that this is a bug? However, Norton concludes, "the Facebook application is not only to steel private data, or even worse." Mobile Insight has already analyzed over 4 million Android applications, and added "tens of thousands" per day. Norton Mobile Security and packed with information on the intrusive applications, says the editor, who warns. "You might be surprised by what your applications reveal about you"

Facebook is soon with private chat rooms!

Facebook is testing private chat rooms. According to information from TechCrunch, the new function is currently in the testing phase, which will decide whether they will be introduced for all users of the social network or not. According to the information, you could start out from the status line chat rooms in the future. The new chat feature is called "host chat". It is about personal chat areas, as TechCrunch reports: A user launches an open chat, which his friends can join if they want. They learn about their timeline of the open chat room. The initiator may exclude friends he does not want to invite into his chat room. According to TechCrunch host chats started from the field for Facebook status updates out. The options "Status" and "Photos / Videos" then came as the opportunity for "Start chat" list. The user can enter the chat topic or a name and make privacy settings. Then, a reference to the open chat room in the timeline of his friends to join him by clicking appears. The conversation then takes place in a normal chat window. Currently testing is going on for Facebook chat rooms in a small circle. It is not yet decided whether the function is available for all visitors in the future or not. The advantage of chat rooms for Facebook would be that users would spend on the website so even more time.

Facebook Pipe to send large files easily!

Facebook fans! Now you can not only exchange messages and status messages with friends, but also can send files of any type. The Facebook app Pipe makes it possible. Usually you could communicate with your friends through chat messages, status messages, photos and even talk with your friends with the help of Facebook. Now you can send and receive all types of files of any size with the help of Facebook Pipe which an apps. Network users previously had to turn to other services such as Dropbox or the good old email. The new Facebook app Pipe wants to change that - and now allows the easy file sharing among Facebook friends. Now Facebook user can Piped to share large files with their friends up to one gigabyte each per user. This saves having to use cloud storage like Dropbox and high-resolution photos, videos or large PDFs future land quickly at the receiver end. Even if the pipeline app is not running, you can send up to 100 megabytes of large files even after all. The recipient then gets in his personal locker provided. To set up the file sharing, open the Pipe page on Facebook and sign up with your Facebook login data. According to application and clicks on OK the pipe window opens in the browser. In the future you will find pipe left in the app list or via Facebook search. If both exchange partners online, the transmission is encrypted using a direct and real-time connection between sender and receiver PC. Even if the Facebook friend is not listening and is just a cache in the box, the files will only run on the server, according to its own pipe. This means that Facebook has no access to the file. The app is added to your own Facebook account and quickly presented with a simple interface. Which of your Facebook friends are currently online, you can see at a glance. The file you want to send, you simply drag and drop transport in the green tube. Folders cannot be shared by Pipe: If you want to send multiple files in one go, they must first tackle as a ZIP archive. This is done by using a free program like Zip pack. So far Facebook pipe apps can be used via your desktop browser and the mobile version for Smartphones and tablets follows soon.

Facebook allows users to Test their Beta Version

Facebook just announced that it was setting up a test program for its Android application. Thus, those who wish to test it may register and use a special version which will be updated more often, with features being finalized. While Android is gaining more and more popularity, the diversity of Smartphones, not to mention the fragmentation in the OS versions, raises concern. Developers should indeed take into account a multitude of cases, while the iOS side, only a few models of the iPhone, iPad and iPod exist. Recognizing this problem, the Facebook team has decided to launch a new program. This will enable it to offer a beta version to all users who have decided to use. It will allow developers to identify potential problems in terms of both ergonomics and operation, before starting production on the stable version of the application. This is good initiatives that is rather significant, and allow "early adopters" to find their happiness. Currently, the cycle of updating Facebook is four weeks. This is a practice which came into force last year. During this period, it is the employees who are testers, and can give their opinion about the features under development. But for the reasons mentioned above, a larger panel was necessary. Thus, at the beginning of this year, manufacturers such as Facebook Qualcomm, HTC, Ericsson, Sony, Huawei and MediaTek are partners and have had the opportunity to have early access to certain features (including the disastrous Facebook Home?). The goal here was to allow optimization namely the material for items such as graphics rendering, network management, etc. This is the very first opening for Android users to set up via functionality integrated update to the Facebook app.