The HTC First is Official

HTC has officially unveiled the HTC First at today’s Facebook Home announcement. The company says this is the best social experience you’ll find, with Facebook’s new Home experience pre-loaded and optimized onto the phone right out of the box. It’s clearly aimed at the younger crowd, but more clearly the Facebook fanatic.

Just as we saw leaked earlier this week, the device will come in multiple colors, including red, light blue, white and black, covering a nice little spectrum for users who want more choices. HTC First will be available on April 12 for $99. Right now, neither HTC or Facebook has talked up specs, so we’ll look out for those to hit soon.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Facebook Introduces Facebook Home for Android

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage in San Francisco today and said Facebook is going to focus on Android moving forward.

“The great thing about Android is its so open,” Zuckerberg said. “You can have apps that can be your keyboard, can be your home screen of your phone, you don’t need to fork Android to do this, you don’t even need to modify the operating system. The home screen is the soul of your phone.” Home will takeover your lock screen and your home screen and will provide all sorts of status updates that would otherwise populate inside a dedicated Facebook app.

Zuckerberg guaranteed that it’s still easy to access applications, however. You can tap a photo of your face at the bottom of the screen and swipe up to see all of your applications.

We expect Facebook will also introduce a smartphone, but we know that at least part of the experience is designed for multiple Android devices.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Who Really Wants a Facebook Phone?

On April 4, Facebook will unveil its “New Home on Android.” The software is designed to put Facebook front and center on people’s Android phones, and it seems HTC will be among the first to partner with the company on this.

I haven’t said much about the prospect of a Facebook phone because… well, I can’t seem to get my brain around it. There’s an internal dialogue going on — a debate, if you will — that leaves me struggling to make sense of it all.

Let’s start with HTC. Now this is a company that needs to strengthen its position in mobile. While it got off to a great start with the HTC One, it still can’t compete with the likes of Apple or Samsung. And so it needs to get creative about its approach.

And it sees partnering with Facebook as one of the ways forward? Didn’t its previous forays with Facebooking smartphones crash and burn?

[Source: TechnoBuffalo - Click here to read the full story]

Facebook Appears Set to Debut iPhone Competitor Built on Android on April 4

Facebook today invited members of the press to an Android-related event on April 4, and TechCrunch reports that the event will likely see the debut of the long-rumored Facebook phone. According to reports, the device would be an HTC handset running a Facebook-modified version of Android. 

If true, the move would turn Facebook into an Amazon-style competitor in the smartphone market for Apple, as Amazon has heavily modified Android for its own Kindle Fire tablet devices. 

There have been persistent rumors of Facebook working on a smartphone, withBloomberg reporting in 2010 that the phone would be based on a "stripped-down" version of Android. Last year, the New York Times reported that Facebook was hiring former Apple iPhone and iPad engineers to work on a "Facebook phone." 

TechCrunch highlights one of the key reasons why Facebook would want to create a smartphone device of its own:

With deeper control of a modified operating system would come huge opportunities to collect data on its users. Facebook knows that who you SMS and call are important indicators of who your closest friends are. Its own version of Android could give it that info, which could be used to refine everything from what content you’re shown in the news feed to which friends faces are used in ads you see.

Facebook currently has two of the more popular free apps in the App Store with Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Recently, the company has updated its main Facebook app to add free VoIP calling in a number of countries.

[Source: MacRumors]

Facebook gets green light to build its second campus at California headquarters

Seems as if building new, fancy properties is quickly becoming the norm within the tech sector. Following in both Apple and Google's spacious footsteps, Facebook too will be looking to amplify its California-based headquarters -- and now it's received the OK from Menlo Park authorities to commence turning Frank Gehry's design vision into a reality. The second campus itself is set to boast nearly 434,000 square feet in total and be built across 22 acres, which will be plenty of space to house anything from a rooftop park to an underground tunnel which leads to Facebook's existent abode. As for city council members, they seem to be rather pleased by Zuck's proposed construction, with one Kirsten Keith expressing how she "feels very lucky that we'll have a Frank Gehry building here." Well then, cheers all around.

[Source: Engadget]

Facebook Messenger Updated with Voice Calls in UK

Facebook recently released a new version of its Messenger application in the United Kingdom. The update offers voice calls and voice messages, two features that have been available to U.S. users since the middle of January. The application is available for several platforms, including Android and iOS, although the iOS version is reportedly the only one with the added voice call support right now.

Facebook appears to be chasing Skype with the new VoIP services, although we’ll need to see the feature rolled out across the globe before it even starts to look like a real competitor in the space. The application is free and is available from the iTunes App Store now.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Netflix Gets Social With Facebook Integration

Netflix has announced integration with Facebook that will now make it possible to get social recommendations of what you should watch next.

At long last you can see what your Facebook friends are watching on Netflix, and, in turn, you can share with them what you have enjoyed from the streaming service. Once you’ve connected the accounts the information from your friends will be shown in social rows of recommendations and is restricted only to the items that they have rated four or five stars.

Netflix has done some very smart things with this integration to make sure you have as much control as possible. For instance, the information will only appear in Netflix and not on Facebook unless you specifically tell it to do so. Additionally this isn’t an all-or-nothing scenario as you can choose to hide your guilty pleasure programming from the process, and even go back and make sure to do the same with items you have watched and rated before this was integrated. Feel free to keep watching the complete run of Basketball Wives while only sharing your love of Fellini films.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Facebook buys Storylane blog, to go with new News Feed

Facebook has snapped up Storylane, a blogging site with a community feel that lets people share stories. The social networking behemoth has acquired the team behind the site, rather than the site itself, so if you've posted anything, rest assured, Zuckerberg won't get his mitts on it.

Jonathan Gheller, founder of Storylane, posted the news on the site, reassuring users that anything they'd shared wouldn't fall into Facebook's hands.

"The beautiful stories you have decided to share with us are yours to keep and share in however way you want," Gheller wrote. "We are building tools that will help you migrate the content to other services if you so desire. I will be in touch with you about those specific tools later, but I can confirm that Facebook is not acquiring any of your data; and we're working to make sure you can migrate your content in a manageable way."

Facebook just unveiled its new News Feed, which Mark Zuckerberg said should be like a "personalised newspaper" for each person. Obviously it's a bit late to integrate some of Storylane's features into it, but we could well see some built in at some point in the future. The new News Feed has bigger images -- a staple of Storylane -- and lets you customise it as you see fit. It's also designed to be more consistent across mobile devices and desktop browsers.

It's more of a mix too, with news articles, images, maps, photos, and the rest, much like Storylane, or a Pinterest board.

Storylane only launched last October. Yahoo was also reported to be interested in snapping it up. That seems the way to get rick quick, come up with a killer idea and sell it to Facebook or Apple.

[Source: CNET]

Facebook Announces Newly Designed News Feeds

Facebook announced new design elements to engage users more effectively on Facebook on Thursday.  The new design rolls out today, facebook.com/newsfeed, for some users, but the roll-out will be gradual. The most notable changes include: larger images, videos, more prominent check-ins, more detailed information from publications (like TechnoBuffalo), a greater display of possible friends without having to click on the profile. You could even view highly trending content.

Facebook claims, this allows for “a richer, simpler, more beautiful feel” as well as more choices on what shows up on the news feed. You can determine what feed you want to view from choices such as photos, news content/likes, music and games.

Facebook’s new navigation menu is very mobile-inspired and allows a continuous look and feel across devices (desktop, tablet, phones).  The company claims you get the most out of “smaller screens” to gain a greater experience.  New notifications, that Facebook calls “new stories bubble,” show updates across your feeds, that float on the top of your screen.

While Facebook is excited about this new format, they are planning on rolling it out on a gradual basis to certain users and spreading the new format to a wider audience.  So far we’re excited to see what we can do with the new format of Facebook, from a visual design, it looks cleaner and thus far seems easier to navigate. Take a look for yourself at the video demo below.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Facebook Will Show Off a Redesigned News Feed on March 7

Facebook’s constantly evolving face will get yet another overhaul at an event scheduled for March 7. One of the biggest complaints users have with Facebook is the cluttered and painful to look at News Feed—it’s an absolute mess, and has been that way for awhile now. Zuck and friends obviously feel the same way.

First Timeline, then Graph Search, now this. What kind of redesign are we expecting? We’ll find out next week.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Microsoft was hacked in the same wave as Apple and Facebook

Microsoft has been hacked, in the same wave of attacks targeting Facebook and Apple. The company made the announcement in a blog post on its website.

You can sleep safe if you use Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 though, as Microsoft says there's no evidence of any customer data being compromised. Funnily enough, the company says some of its computers in its Mac business unit were among those hacked.

Microsoft says it didn't make a statement immediately, as first it wanted to find out what exactly happened. Only a "small number" of computers were infected by malicious software "using techniques similar to those documented by other organisations."

Last week, Apple announced it had been hit by malware that attacked Java, and a few days earlier, Facebook said it too had been targeted. Just don't tell Jeff Jarvis. Twitter was also hacked last month, with 250,000 accounts affected.

Newspapers including The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have all accused China of cyber attacks, though the origins of the hack targeting Microsoft haven't been revealed. Google's Eric Schmidt has penned a book on the subject, calling China "the world's most active and enthusiastic filterer of information", as well as the "most sophisticated and prolific hacker of foreign companies."

Microsoft acknowledged these kind of attacks are par for the course in the modern tech landscape. It said in its blog post: "This type of cyber attack is no surprise to Microsoft and other companies that must grapple with determined and persistent adversaries… We continually re-evaluate our security posture and deploy additional people, processes, and technologies as necessary to help prevent future unauthorised access to our networks."

[Source: CNET]

Facebook Adds Buy Tickets Button in Event Pages

Facebook is making our itchy trigger fingers more susceptible to impulse clicks, with a new “Buy Tickets” button emblazoned in event pages.

The social conglomerate confirmed that instead of having a bit.ly link to a third-party ticket seller, that area will now entice users with a button. It doesn’t sound like an enormous change, but that small switch will no doubt affect a psychology in click happy Facebook users. Or at least that’s the hope. Everything seems to be live in the Netherlands and Israel, so the new switch is confined to only a specific audience. It’ll make going to shows with your friends that much easier.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]