The Facebook Phone Is Reportedly Dead
Five weeks after Facebook debuted the HTC First — and four days after AT&T priced the device at less than a dollar — the joint venture appears to be unraveling.
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If you have suicidal Facebook tendencies — as in, you want off the social network but just can't bare to part with your photos, wall posts, and all those precious, precious likes — then you should probably try playing the new game Social Roulette. If you feel lucky.
Five weeks after Facebook debuted the HTC First — and four days after AT&T priced the device at less than a dollar — the joint venture appears to be unraveling.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk decided to leave Mark Zuckerberg's immigration reform pushing political action committee FWD.us Friday evening because he doesn't agree with the group's habit of supporting politicians on both sides of the aisle, just so long as they support immigration.
Facebook's in "advanced talks" to buy Waze, an Israeli mapping start-up, for somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion, according to multiple sources at Calcalist and TechCrunch, making it the social media company's biggest acquisition to date.
It's never a good sign when a cellphone company lowers the price of a cellphone so soon after its release, which makes the new, very low $0.99 price of HTC's so-called Facebook phone so very foreboding.
In this definitive telling of the history of Instagram we get CEO Kevin Systrom's reasoning for ultimately choosing Facebook's $1 billion offer over Twitter's $520 million—and it has less to do with money than you might think.
Now that Instagram has introduced a "Photos of You" section for tagged snapshots just like its parent company Facebook, you can forget the beautiful images of pro photographers and amateurs turned pro — your square cellphone art is about to degrade into filtered party pics.
We have some good news for irritated Facebook phone users. In the coming weeks Facebook plans to add controls to let users hide all those pesky mobile ads if they so desire, a Facebook spokesperson told The Atlantic Wire this afternoon.
Voters in South Carolina may see a new spot from "Americans for a Conservative Direction," promoting Senator Lindsey Graham as an anti-Obamacare, anti-spending Republican. They probably won't realize the real force behind the spot: Mark Zuckerberg.
The typical gadget review these days can run thousands of words and cover hundreds of features before telling you what you really want to know: is this thing any good? The Atlantic Wire will cut to the chase after spending a week with a device and give you just the bottom line.
Tech companies are always battling each other for the title of the greenest organization out there and these so-called green roofs are the latest turf for these environmentalist wars.
Google's latest quarterly earnings report arrived on Thursday evening, and it reveals as much about broader shifts in the tech sector as it does about Google's relative success. And that success is relative.
There is at least some relative calm amidst the panic that is the "ongoing event" in Boston right now: Cellphone service is overwhelmed in the area, but there remain important ways for people to reach loved ones online.
After years of long hours and low-ish pay, many of President Obama's old aides are cashing in on their political connections. But as The New Republic's Noam Scheiber explains, there's some squabbling among the Obama alumni network over who looks like a crass sellout and who's a classy sellout.
Facebook's biggest foray into cellphone software, Home, is now officially available to the cellphone masses, and there sure are a lot of ways to download it. For those having trouble deciding whether to take the plunge, we put together this little personality guide for the dawn of the "Facebook phone" era.
With Twitter's new music service reportedly coming out sometime this weekend, it's time to consider if we really want to go to our Twitter friends to find new tunes.
Google's new "digital afterlife" feature feels creepy and morbid, but it's the kind of responsible data control we should embrace for the rest of our Internet selves.
Despite all the negativity around the Facebook phone, the early reviewers can all agree on one thing: The Facebook phone got them using Facebook — a lot. Maybe even too much.
For those looking to get an early version of Facebook Home it's not worth downloading this leak that came out this morning, since its "rather buggy and incomplete," according to Paul O'Brien who discovered the early release over at MoDaCo.
The conventional wisdom among Silicon Valley's functional equivalent of Morning Joe is that the plebeians will want what Facebook has to offer. But just who are these "millions" of realpeople who should run out and buy the HTC First loaded with Facebook's new Home software?
There is more than a silver lining to Mark Zuckerberg's most blatant jump into your mobile life: Facebook Home actually offers some key user interface experiences that are way better than their counterparts on other Android phones — and even the iPhone.
Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that Facebook is neither building a phone nor an app — because those aren't good enough. Here's your first look at Home, a full screen's worth of Facebook greeting you as soon as your turn on your device. And then there are "chat heads" and "cover feeds" and more. Oh, and it's for more than just one phone.
Hacker News today surfaced this Angel Fire page that looks like it was created by a 15-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, which we hope is the case because it would be a wonderful little look into a hacker's humble beginnings.
The tech gadget crowd, generally pretty good at reporting rumors as rumors, is taking the leaks related to the Facebook phone as the real deal.
Forget making the world more open and connected. Facebook has a more pressing, arguably more difficult task ahead: creating advertisements that its billion users both "like" and actually like. And Mark Zuckerberg is finally speaking out about it.
The tech blogger masses are treating the leak to the Android Police as the real deal version of Facebook's forthcoming phone, and since the social network hasn't been particularly secretive about the launch, it's safe to say this is probably a legitimate look at the gadget in some stage or another.
The Human Rights Campaign's social media blitz was so effective that Facebook engineers decided to map the portions of the United States, county by county, where users were most likely to change their avatar.
If Facebook leaks everything about their big phone event a week before their big phone event, does Facebook's big phone event need to exist?
Cross your fingers, cross your legs. Cross your arms and bow your head. The seemingly never-ending rumor mill spinning around the idea of a Facebook phone may finally come to a stop at a just-announced event next week.
It took Facebook about six months to start using all that offline shopping data for more than just "research" and start putting all our rewards cards info to good, lucrative advertising use.
YouTube made a big announcement on Wednesday night — ten digits big to be exact. The video-sharing startup that spent its early days operating out of an apartment above a pizzeria now boasts one billion users.
Five years after Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone filed the application, the government granted issued a shiny new patent to the two cyber-inventors on Tuesday. Their invention? Twitter, of course.
While you're filling out your expertly analyzed bracket, you might want to take a look at how March Madness fandom is spread across the country with this map from Facebook.
In an attempt to continue its quest to become everyone's hyper-organized "personal newspaper," Facebook is planning to adopt a modern organizing tool that's as easy for its native Twitter users to make fun of as it may prove useful to the often cluttered No. 1 social network.
To go with its brand-new News Feed, Facebook has now updated individual profiles pages, using a similar picture-focused look for a few of your favorite things.
After getting rid of some legal barriers, Netflix and Facebook have now cemented a friendship promised to us back in the fall of 2011, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Open Graph would give us all sorts of Facebook integrated actions.
With Sheryl Sandberg's already much talked about "feminist manifesto" Lean In out today, the conversation about the topic has reached new lows, with a lot of women (and men) reverting to pre-Betty Friedan era form.
He didn't say the word "advertiser" once on Thursday, but Mark Zuckerberg may have made an historic step with Facebook's redesigned News Feed: The homepage for which he once apologized has transformed into a big, engaging platform that marketers already say they love.
Facebook has unveiled what it calls a "mobile first" new homepage look and — as expected — it takes up more space, meaning bigger ads. There's also a multi-faceted feed, seeking to transform the social network into "the most personalized newspaper in the world." Here's your first look, and how to sign up.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
Word has leaked that Mark Zuckerberg will unveil separate feeds for different types of content at an event tomorrow, transforming the News Feed of 2013 into Facebook's September issue, only with five subdivided sections of the second most popular website in the world.
Facebook is holding a mysterious event next week to introduce "a new look" for its tired News Feed, and, yes, the speculation has begun. Here's what a revamp might look like.
With Marissa Mayer's new decree on telecommuting and Sheryl Sandberg's "feminist manifesto," everyone has an opinion about the feminine boss, but on what they're actually doing. Here's how we talk about women in power now.
When three Connecticut lawmakers asked Mark Zuckerberg in a letter on Monday to do something about the flood of fake Sandy Hook memorial pages, he got back to them quickly.
If you live in one of the lucky 14 countries selected for a new test, it's now cheaper to use the social network's Messenger app to make a phone call — and it might be spreading.
In which we finally answer — or try to answer — the key question haunting our modern, hyper-connected condition: how many of your friends don't use Facebook?
From The New York Times and the Defense Department to Facebook and now even Apple, there's one increasingly sophisticated type of spam to watch out for — and here are some tips, just in case the Chinese hacker war hits your inbox next.
If it weren't for the strictness of the Chinese government's Internet firewall, security firm Mandiant may never have discovered the identities of the Chinese army's instantly notorious "Comment Crew."
February really is the cruelest month because, on top of all this snow, one is forced to start contemplating death, or at least filling out one's taxes. You might be left scratching your head, and wishing you had a better accountant, when you hear how Facebook is getting hundreds of millions in a tax refund this year.
Facebook announced in a blog post on Friday afternoon that its "systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack" and that "Facebook was not alone," which immediately raised the cyber-espionage question of the moment: Was China behind this one, too?
In the latest rather obvious attempt to monetize every inch of its network, Facebook is now trying to charge you to promote not just your own content — they think you'll pay for your friends' wall posts, too.
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