459,000 years. That’s how long Twitch users spent watching other people play video games last year, and Facebook wants a piece of the pie. It might sound weird, but e-sports are wildly popular, and Facebook is getting serious about owning those video views. A source tipped us off that Facebook has hired e-sports super-connector and former professional gamer Stephen… Read MoreHeads up Twitch, Facebook just hired gamer Snoopeh for its e-sports division
459,000 years. That’s how long Twitch users spent watching other people play video games last year, and Facebook wants a piece of the pie. It might sound weird, but e-sports are wildly popular, and Facebook is getting serious about owning those video views. A source tipped us off that Facebook has hired e-sports super-connector and former professional gamer Stephen… Read More
We haven’t heard much from Fleksy — one of a number of custom keyboards for Android and iOS — lately, and it seems we may have an answer why: It’s been acquired by Pinterest. But it isn’t a total product acquisition. While the app will continue running (with minimal updates) for the forseeable future, half of the team will be integrated into Pinterest’s… 
Remember that basketball mini game easter egg that got tucked into Facebook Messenger back in March? There’s a new one hidden in there now. This time around, it’s soccer. It’s basically a digital version of Keepie Uppie, otherwise known as “trying to keep a soccer ball up in the air until you get tired or roll your ankle or it’s time for orange slices.”… 
The Pew Research Center’s latest annual State of the News Media report underlines how successful technology giants continue to be at creaming off digital ad profits, even as traditional news media faces ever intensifying pressure to find a way to sustainably fund journalism. 
Reminder: Facebook is continuing to promote video content on its primary platform at the expense of the written word. 
Facebook has updated its suicide prevention tools and is now making them available worldwide. 
Starting today, advertisers will be able to advertise against Pinterest users that have visited their sites — giving retailers a powerful new tool that is available in other advertising suites that will help them follow users as they browse the internet (including on Pinterest). 
Surround and conquer is Facebook’s new strategy for getting people to switch from SMS to Messenger. You can now read and send old-school text messages from inside Facebook Messenger for Android. With this near-global rollout of the SMS feature, Facebook is touting ease, as you won’t have to jump back and forth between chat interfaces if your friends are split between them. 
Facebook has found the holy grail of advertising in a set of new partnerships with point-of-sale systems like Square and Marketo that will prove who bought what after seeing Facebook’s ads. Even if you don’t buy something, Facebook will also now know you visited a store based on a new feature that matches GPS, beacons, WiFi, radio signals, and cell towers with brick-and-mortar…