Friday 3 May 2013

Facebook Rolls Out “Promoted Page Likes” Globally

promote-page
Facebook has released “Promoted Page Likes”, a feature which has been available to U.S. page owners in beta since December. Promoted Page Likes are like Promoted Posts, allowing page owners to buy adverts based on a predetermined budget. However, unlike Promoted Posts, Promoted Page Likes bypass the complicated ad dashboard.

Promoted Page Likes, which are accessible to any page owner whose page has a profile picture and a listed location, ask administrators to decide on a daily advertising budget based on their advert’s reach. Administrators are also asked whether they want to target users by city, state/area or country.

Buying Promoted Page Likes creates three distinct advert types: sidebar ads, Page Like ads, which appear in the news feeds of both mobile and desktop devices, and Sponsored Stories, which again appear in news feeds across all devices.

Whereas Promoted Posts notify existing page fans of new content and updates posted to a page, Promoted Page Likes simply feature a page’s name, photo, description and a like button to tempt new fans to the page.

Unlike other ad features on Facebook, Promoted Page Likes need to be stopped by an administrator, otherwise they will run indefinitely.

How successful do you think Promoted Page Likes will be?

Wednesday 1 May 2013

Retwact May Solve Twitter's Misinformation Problem


Misundertood-cher-tweet

Some journalists have called for Twitter to build a corrections function involving the same code it uses for retweets and favorites. So far, Twitter has given no indication that it plans to do so, which has led one independent developer to build his own solution. And until something more polished comes along, it's not a bad option.

The tool is called Retweet Retract — or Retwact, for short. Built as a side project by Stonly Baptiste, a software developer at the Pennsylvania-based company independenceIT, Retwact tries to contain the damage (and shame) that comes along with spreading information that later turns out to be untrue.
Here's how it works. Once you've given it permission to look at your account, the app culls your five most recent tweets that have garnered retweets.


Click on one of them, and a little green radio button fills in. Down below, you can tap out a hand-written apology or send the correction as-is. When you publish the notice, it goes from your account to all your followers. Meanwhile, Retwact's own Twitter account (@Retwact) reaches out with an @-mention to the first 100 people who retweeted your (incorrect) tweet.


The link above takes you to a side-by-side comparison showing both the older, incorrect tweet as well as the newer, corrected one.

Baptiste told me he hacked the tool together in a "sleepless" 48-hour session, using resources he'd never worked with before such as OAuth and the Twitter API. That was after he'd posted the idea to the social news aggregator Hacker News, where it got promoted to the front page within an hour and received upwards of 1,500 requests for Retwact to be built. (Twitter, are you listening?)

Retwact isn't perfect. If you tweet often, you can only use the service to correct something you tweeted minutes rather than hours ago. And Retwact can't detect manual retweets of misinformation — just the ones produced when you click Twitter's own retweet button.

Baptiste said he plans to keep working. He's considering adding a feature that will delete the original, misinformed tweet altogether while still preserving the text on the correction page. That means there'll still be a record of the mistake, but other users will no longer be able to spread it around.

Baptiste promises to improve the app until "A) People stop using it, or B) Twitter (or someone else) offers me a lot of money for it."

Mashable composite, images courtesy of Flickr, NASA and Twitter

Monday 29 April 2013

Vine App Coming to Android 'Soon'


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The popular iOS video-sharing app Vine will be coming to Android in the near future, according to its founders.

The Verge is reporting the app — which Twitter launched in January — will bring the ability to create and share six-second GIF-like looping videos to Android "soon."


Vine has also submitted at app update to the Apple App Store for a feature that lets you tag friends in videos, the report said.

The news comes just a few weeks after the company introduced the ability to embed Vine videos (at full 600 x 600 resolution) on any website.

The platform has gained popularity over recent months. It's been used by musicians and brands to promote products, news stations to get out news, job applicants and even by the White House. Of course, Vines are also acceptable for sharing with friends how you make dinner and what you're doing in your free time.

What other features do you hope to see from Vine? Let us know in the comments below.

Image by Mashable, Nina Frazier