Facebook’s gamble of forcing users to download Messenger has paid off. Despite the backlash, Messenger has doubled its user count in 20 months to reach the one billion user mark five years after its debut. Messenger joins Facebook, its acquisition WhatsApp and Google’s YouTube in the billion user mobile user club. The app has racked up some other impressive stats. Each month,… Read MoreHow Facebook Messenger clawed its way to 1 billion users
Facebook’s gamble of forcing users to download Messenger has paid off. Despite the backlash, Messenger has doubled its user count in 20 months to reach the one billion user mark five years after its debut. Messenger joins Facebook, its acquisition WhatsApp and Google’s YouTube in the billion user mobile user club. The app has racked up some other impressive stats. Each month,… Read More
Virtual reality as it exists is generally an isolating experience. Plenty of VR worlds are sparsely populated, inhabited by robots, or empty. There are social platforms for VR already, but MetaWorld, an upcoming collaboration between UK-based Improbable and Berkeley-based HelloVR, will expand the horizons of social VR – expand them nearly 10,000 square miles, to be exact.
“They’re going to hit some challenges and marketers are gonna start to ask questions when they get out of the experimental budget phase,” Facebook’s head of adtech said about Snapchat today. While Facebook tries to collect as much data about users as possible to prove its ads work, Snapchat has tried to avoid being creepy, despite that hindering its potential… 
Prisma morphs your photos into fine art like Picasso or Mondrian, and it’s blowing up the iOS app charts. Today it came out in unofficial APK beta on Android. But what will be the fate of this red-hot social product? We’ve heard Prisma is in talks with investors about raising funding, but it might make more sense as an acquisition for Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat. When… 
Snapchat bought Bitstrips, the startup behind Bitmoji, back in March. The acquisition was worth a reported $100 million, but at the time, how the product would be integrated wasn’t clear. Today, Snapchat finally acknowledged the acquisition and revealed how it would integrate Bitstrips’ product: Users can now send their Bitmoji to each other either in chat or in snaps. We saw… 
Who would you trust more with your kids: a person sent by a babysitting agency or the sitter who watched your friends’ kids last weekend? 
Not-so-breaking news from the world of celebrity gossip: Kimye and T-Swift are at it again! And with this particular stage of the celebrity feud, we are given an amazing opportunity to look at how social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat can be used as weapons. As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Kim whipped out the big guns this weekend, posting a Snapchat Story of… 
Finally there’s a better way to gain followers on Snapchat. The app refuses to tell you who to watch. There are no suggested user lists, no leaderboards, no little buttons everywhere begging you to add someone new. You’ve had to go out and find your own people to follow. Until now. Alongside the recent launch of Memories, Snapchat quietly added a new feature it didn’t… 
Getting people to download apps on their phone is hard enough. Getting to use them and return is even harder. And getting valuable users who spend money in the app or take other actions that the developer wants to encourage, is the most difficult task of all. Today, Facebook announced plans to attack that latter problem with the debut of more advanced ad targeting options for mobile app…