text messaging

WhatsApp Messenger dominated both major app stores in the number of downloads in April, according to data from Distimo.

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OMG! The expression OMG as an abbreviation for “Oh my God” first occurred in 1917 letter Lord Fisher, the admiral of the British navy, wrote to Winston Churchill, then a member of parliament, during World War I, the Anorak has uncovered.

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Facebook Test Makes Comments on Page Posts More Like Web Plug-in (Inside Facebook)
Facebook has given us an update on its latest test for page post comments: in addition to a new option to reply to specific comments, the entire thread will be sorted by an algorithm to put the most engaging comments higher. Page administrators are also able to reply directly to comments via a “reply” option.

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A survey backed by the Pew Internet and American Life project found that social networking takes second place only to face-to-face conversations as a way to communicate about the election.

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YouTube Chief Mulls Paid Subscriptions (Reuters)
YouTube is exploring selling subscriptions to provide access to some of its video offerings, potentially providing a way for certain cable channels to be available outside the traditional “bundles” offered by cable network providers, said YouTube boss Salar Kamangar. Cable channels with smaller audiences will in the future migrate to the Web and become available on an “a la carte” basis, Kamangar said at the Reuters Media and Technology Summit on Thursday. Engadget It appears YouTube is testing a new homepage styled more like the look that recently rolled out on Google+. The current default look rolled out last winter with more focus on channels and social integration, while this new facade features more white space and list of channels and friends to the side. Los Angeles Times YouTube and Google+ are starting to look a lot more alike, and now, they will play together more too. The team behind YouTube announced Thursday that the service’s Google+ app has received an update increasing the amount of things that users can do with YouTube videos inside Google+ hangouts. The Next Web This is the perfect example of an integration that makes Google look like more of a social powerhouse with each release. This new app is available worldwide in 60-plus languages and takes all of the hard work that the YouTube team has put into playlists inside of Google+ Hangouts. WebProNews As ubiquitous as YouTube now seems, it’s easy to forget that the company is less than a decade old. In just over seven years, the video sharing website has spread all over the globe and continues to quickly expand into new markets. Despite this, YouTube only operates 46 individual country YouTube sites. This week, Indonesia became that 46th country. Read more

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Facebook IPO Week: The Basics (PC Magazine)
Big news for Facebook this week — and no, not just because the company is testing new ways for its users to annoy each other in the form of paid-for “highlighted” posts. Actually, it’s Facebook IPO week! The significance of this fact carries a ton of importance if you’re an institutional investor, a small amount of importance if you’re a neophyte investor, and absolutely no meaning whatsoever if you think the stock market is little more than organized gambling. ZDNET Going public brings with it all new pressures. For venture-backed companies such as Facebook, it means a difficult transition from the multi-year expectation on delivering returns to the quarterly results horizon. Even in the extremely fast-moving world of Internet companies, this can come as a shock to the system. AP He famously wears a hoodie, jeans and sneakers, and he was born the year Apple introduced the Macintosh. Today is his 28th birthday. With eight years on the job, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has logged more time as leader than the average CEO, whose tenure is a little more than seven years, according to executive search firm Spencer Stuart. Bloomberg News Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said he will buy shares in Facebook when the social networking company sells stock to the public. Wozniak, who built the first Apple computer with Steve Jobs and co-founded the company with him in 1976, said he would buy Facebook’s stock regardless of its valuation. Mashable Facebook, infamous for its changing policies and confusion among users about what they’re getting themselves into when they use the world’s largest social network, has finally aggregated all its terms and policies under the same roof. That roof — Facebook.com/policies — contains, in the words of Facebook, “Everything you need to know, all in one place.” Read more

Text messages has, as many millions of frequent user know, earned is place as a high value tool despite its relatively low-tech nature in a world increasingly filled with smartphones and tablets. It works on nearly every phone regardless of how smart, or not, it is. It is so ubiquitess and useful that one company launched a service that speifically targets a perceived need in the K-12 school space.
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Pew Internet surveyed 2,277 adults in the U.S. to learn about their text message and voice call behavior. The results are probably not surprising to those who have been following mobile communications trends. But, the findings are still enlightening.
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One of the biggest irratants in life to me (what a friend of mine would term a “first-world problem”: Things that bother you assuming the basics in life are already met) is text message spam (SMS spam). Tatango’s SMS Marketing Blog has a fascinating infographic summarizing the demographics of the problem.
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If you receive text messages while sitting in front of a personal computer, you might find it more convenient to reply to those messages using your PC rather than typing a reply on your phone. DeskSMS is an Android app currently in beta that redirects text messages sent to your phone, to your Gmail or Gtalk accounts, where you can then type a reply on your PC.
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