News

 Tumblr announced on Thursday it intends to roll out affiliate codes across its site – meaning all users’ blogs – as a means of generating additional revenue. The Yahoo-owned blogging platform teamed up with VigLink to make this transition, which will affect all users who have not specifically opted out of affiliate links via a new option in Tumblr’s Settings.… Read More

 Buying cool is the best way for big companies to stay cool. Snapchat rightly believes in itself, and now it’s getting bankers to bet on that vision without selling its precious equity. Snapchat has secured a line of credit led by Morgan Stanley, potentially with other banks participating, according to Recode. Snapchat can borrow against that credit line and pay it back later if it… Read More

 Twitter rolled out an update to its service this morning that aims to make the social app more competitive with mobile messaging clients, including the recently upgraded iMessage arriving in iOS 10. The company says it’s introducing a number of new features for Direct Messages – its private messaging feature – including things like Read Receipts, typing indicators, and web… Read More

 Need to post content to multiple social networks at the same time? A new chatbot called Yala wants to help. The bot, live now on Slack with Facebook Messenger support coming soon, not only does the work of posting for you, it’s also intelligent enough to know when to post. That is, Yala uses algorithms and machine learning to determine the best time to post in order to increase… Read More

 it’s the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, counting from the airing of the first episode of the original 1966 Star Trek series starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Facebook is marking the occasion, in a few different ways. First, there’s a personalized greeting appearing atop News Feeds of users who’ve liked or otherwise interacted with Star Trek or sci-fi content on FB,… Read More

 As if Twitter’s deal to stream NFL Thursday Night Football didn’t convince you that the social network was going all-in on the NFL, maybe this will.
Twitter announced today (a day before tomorrow’s NFL season opener) that they made a custom hashtag emoji for every NFL team. There is also a #TNF hashtag for Thursday Night Football that shows the NFL logo on a helmet. Like… Read More

 The iPhone 7’s powerful new camera features will be getting the spotlight in an upcoming version of Instagram. Ian Spalter, Instagram’s head of design, appeared on-stage at the iPhone 7 launch event to demo the iPhone-inspired upgrades coming to his app.
The iPhone 7 Plus telephoto zoom lens will be usable by dragging a single finger up and down in Instagram — an interface… Read More

 Snapchat has given observers another reason to suspect it might be working on hardware – the social network company joined the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) according to the Financial Times. The SIG industry association maintains the Bluetooth wireless standard, and membership is a necessary prerequisite for companies that want to employ Bluetooth in any hardware devices.… Read More

 It’s possibly one of the few remaining near-universal experiences for mobile users: the frustration of trying to zoom in on an Instragram image and remembering that you can’t. That’s now changing, since Instagram is rolling out pinch-to-zoom support in its iOS app starting today. The new feature will let users zoom in on both photos and videos in the main feed, on profile… Read More

 Facebook’s goal of tracking ads all the way through to a customer’s purchase at point-of-sale is getting a big boost today with a makeover of the Facebook Offers program. Now designed to be more mobile-friendly, Facebook is allowing businesses to create two kinds of offers – those customers can redeem online and those they redeem in-store – while also making it… Read More