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WhatsApp Trends: Here's How Fake News, Videos go Viral

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If you are baffled at the speed at which jokes, videos and GIFs reach your WhatsApp account from groups or friends almost at the same time, remember that such posts are being planned and executed by teams sitting in some corner of the country to bombard the maximum number accounts at one go. 
 
With 160 million users in India, the Facebook-owned mobile messaging app has become a top choice among marketers, social influencers and certain groups to reach them via jokes, videos and GIFs whenever there is a breaking news, a major announcement, a tongue-in-cheek celebrity statement or even a festival, say experts. 
 
"WhatsApp is emerging as a highly susceptible channel for propaganda, misinformation, fake news as well as highly influenceable from the targeted marketing message or advertisement perspective, i.e., digital word-of-mouth," Neil Shah, Research Director (Devices & Ecosystems) at the market research firm Counterpoint Research, told IANS. 
In India, WhatsApp has the highest penetration among any "social-centric" web/app platform available on the nearly 260 million active smartphone users. 
 
"Several marketers are leveraging an infantry of smart or influential folks to develop and spread targeted and viral-natured content. I believe the viral messages developed and spread are not by a single source but many individuals and firms working on this behind the scenes," Shah added. 
 
There are ways to populate the sharing of such viral content but it can be defined in two parts -- content and objective. 
"While objectives and the purposes could be anything, one can easily relate these with driving mass awareness, creating social buzz, dragging public attention on political or public issues or making fun among friends or sharing memes or news," Anoop Mishra, one of the nation's leading social media experts, told IANS. 
 
Social media or digital marketing agencies work behind the content marketing strategies to make stories viral and shareable on WhatsApp. 
 
"Several FMCG companies, major political parties and politicians have their in-house sponsored team of social media warriors to generate and share such content or hashtags on various social media platforms," Mishra noted. 
According to Shah, among several social media platforms, WhatsApp has a clear edge because of its user-friendly approach which has put the platform in a strong (as well as vulnerable position) for flow of both good and bad news or information or any content across the platform. 
 
"Since the degree of separation among different WhatsApp users is theoretically lower, there is a high chance for any information to go viral faster than any other social media platform or even word-of-mouth," said Shah. 
 
With some 150 million active users in India, Facebook is the second-most used social media platform and can also act as a catalyst for proliferation of viral content due to a broader sharing and a greater engagement with the content. 
 
"However, Facebook is quite curated and controlled via an algorithm according to a person's social graph and Facebook's advertising engine and, hence, potentially less viral than Whatsapp," Shah pointed out. 
 
Facebook's third property, Instagram, is also quickly rising to become a popular platform from the perspective of social media influencers to drive rich content for marketers and mainly target millennials. 
 
Is there a revenue model in there for those making posts viral? "Absolutely, wherever there is a greater reach and high engagement for any platform, a potential revenue model certainly exists," Shah stated. 
 
Owing to its "no ads" DNA, WhatsApp has so far been resistant to a direct engagement-driven revenue model. However, with Facebook connecting WhatsApp to its social graph, it unlocks potential for Facebook to work with marketers who, in turn, work with influencers to build a robust value chain. 
 
"Right now with WhatsApp its much more unorganised and influencers are earning directly from the marketers without any Facebook or Whatsapp intervention, unlike the Facebook or Instagram platforms," Shah told IANS. 
 
According to Mishra, the content is being prepared by digital marketing agencies with some earning prospects. 
"But the reality is that more than 80 per cent of the images or videos shared among the WhatsApp groups are downloaded from websites without any personal revenue benefits excepts some blogging sites which are paying their members for posts, comments, likes or to share contentson linked social profiles," Mishra told IANS. 
 
On August 25, WhatsApp made extensive changes to its privacy policy, announcing it would and could share users' personal information, including their phone numbers, with its parent company Facebook -- a move that drew sharp criticism from privacy activists and the Delhi High Court in India. 
 
The move was touted as the first step towards monetising WhatsApp since Facebook acquired it for $19 billion in 2014. 
"Right now, WhatsApp is quite fragmented and unorganised compared to Facebook. We believe this will change fast as Facebook tries to indirectly monetise the power of WhatsApp as a 'content sharing and targeting' platform," Shah added.</div>

WhatsApp Trends: Here's How Fake News, Videos go Viral

If you are baffled at the speed at which jokes, videos and GIFs reach your WhatsApp account from groups or friends almost at the same t...

Is Facebook quietly adding computer art to make your photos incredible?

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Social networking giant Facebook and its photo and video-sharing app Instagram are reportedly set to quietly make your photos incredible by adding computer art to them. 
 
According to The Verge, it has been discovered that for every photo you upload to Facebook or Instagram, the company quietly makes an html page that replicates that photo using ASCII or text characters that lets you blow up your images to massive scale. 
 
Mathias Bynens, a web standards enthusiast from Belgium, noticed it and tweeted about it on Friday. "Take any Facebook/Instagram photo URL… Append '.txt' ? ASCII art … append '.html' ? colored ASCII art," he wrote in his tweet. 
 
If you add ".html" to the end of that URL of the photo, you will get the coloured ASCII version. Similarly, If you add ".txt" to the end of that URL, you will get a black-and-white version. 
 
"We have reached out to the company for the reasoning behind this hidden-but-cool 'feature' - there is probably some boring backend explanation," the report noted.</div>

Is Facebook quietly adding computer art to make your photos incredible?

Social networking giant Facebook and its photo and video-sharing app Instagram are reportedly set to quietly make your photos incredibl...

Facebook closes gap with Google, the Internet's most powerful company

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Facebook is growing at an exceptional pace as it enters adolescence, propelling it into a better position to challenge Google as the Internet's most powerful company. 
 
Facebook's fourth-quarter report Wednesday provided the latest gauge of the company's impressive strides. 
 
It marked the first time that Facebook's quarterly revenue has surpassed $5 billion — more than fading Internet star Yahoo now generates in an entire year. Facebook's earnings also more than doubled to $1.56 billion, even as the Menlo Park, California, company invests heavily in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, Internet access in remote parts of the world and a mobile ad network for services other than its own. 
 
The performance lifted Facebook's stock by $11.37, or 12 per cent, to $105.82 in extended trading after the report came out. 
 
Although Google remains three times larger by revenue, Facebook has been closing the gap as it sells more mobile advertising on its addictive social-networking app. And it's just beginning to mine revenue from its trendy Instagram service and a rapidly expanding video library. 
 
This spring's debut of the Oculus Rift headset, part of the virtual-reality technology that Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014, could open another lucrative market. Google is now hiring more virtual-reality specialists, a sign that is trying to catch up with Facebook in a still-nascent field that could transform computing. 
 
Social networking remains Facebook's foundation. The service picked up another 46 million users during the final three months of last year to expand its worldwide audience to 1.59 billion users. 
 
"I'm excited about our progress and the chance to build something great for the future," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts in a Wednesday conference call. 
 
Google, now a part of the recently created Alphabet Inc., is thriving too, with more than 1 billion users on its search engine as well as its YouTube video site and its Android software for mobile devices. That makes it unlikely that Facebook will topple Google anytime soon. 
 
Powered by the world's dominant Internet search engine, Google still sells the most digital advertising by a wide margin. Just how much more will be disclosed Monday, when Alphabet is scheduled to announced its fourth-quarter earnings. Alphabet is expected to report fourth-quarter revenue of nearly $17 billion, after subtracting ad commissions, nearly triple what Facebook generated during the same three-month period. 
 
But consider this: Facebook will be turning 12 years old next week and it just posted revenue of $5.8 billion in its latest quarter. At the same stage of its existence in September 2010, Google's net revenue stood at $5.5 billion. 
 
What's more, Facebook's revenue is climbing at a more rapid clip than Google's was at a comparable stage. Facebook's revenue in the past quarter represented a 52 per cent increase from the same time a year ago. When it turned 12 years old, Google's quarterly net revenue rose 25 per cent from the previous year. 
 
In another sign of Facebook's progress, its share of the digital advertising market rose from 8 per cent in 2014 to 10 per cent worldwide last year, according to the research firm eMarketer Inc. Google's share shrank from 32 per cent in 2014 to 30 per cent last year. 
 
That's still a lot of ground for Facebook to make up, but it's not impossible, given the digital dossiers that it has compiled about its users' passions, friendships and other services that they visit while signed into the social-networking service. 
 
All that data could help Facebook deliver ads tailored for each individual's interests even better than Google has done by analyzing search requests, emails and people's locations, eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said. 
 
"I wouldn't underestimate Facebook," Williamson said. "They have shaken up multiple types of businesses and completely changed the way that people communicate." 
 
Google knows better than to dismiss the threat posed by Facebook. After all, when it went public in 2004, Google was still smaller than Yahoo. It didn't take long for Google to trounce Yahoo, partly because its rival focused on being on an all-purpose destination while overlooking the lucrative business of search advertising. By contrast, Google has been vigilant about protecting its search business while developing YouTube, Android and other popular products such as Gmail and the Chrome browser. 
 
Investors are betting on both companies. Facebook's stock climbed 34 per cent last year, while Alphabet's stock (formerly Google's) surged 47 per cent. Meanwhile, the Standard & Poor's index dipped 1 percent. 
 
"Some people have been wondering if Facebook wins, does that mean Google loses?" said Rosenblatt Securities analyst Martin Pyykkonen. "For now, I think both of these stories can win. They are the two big gorillas in digital advertising."</div>

Facebook closes gap with Google, the Internet's most powerful company

Facebook is growing at an exceptional pace as it enters adolescence, propelling it into a better position to challenge Google as the Int...

Facebook adds 'Photo Magic' facial-recognition feature to Messenger

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Facebook is offering a feature called Photo Magic that will automatically address a message so it can be sent quickly to Facebook friends identified in a picture. The option relies on the same image-recognition technology that attaches people's names to Facebook posts. 
 
With this twist, Facebook is deploying the technology in its Messenger application to make it more convenient to distribute pictures to a few friends and family members. 
 
Facebook will highlight Photo Magic in a Messenger update that will start rolling out Thursday to users of Apple's iPhones and smartphones running on Google's Android software. It will still be up to each individual to decide whether they want to activate Photo Magic. After the feature is turned on, it can still be switched off at any time. 
 
The update is being distributed to a broad audience after a month of testing among smartphone users in Australia. Facebook is planning to make Photo Magic available to Messenger users everywhere in the world except in Canada and the European Union. 
 
Messenger currently has more than 700 million users, about half the size of the audience on Facebook's social network. 
 
Facebook is counting on Photo Magic to foster more allegiance to its Messenger app as it competes against other competing services such as Snapchat that have become particularly popular among teenagers and young adults. 
 
If Photo Magic is turned on, it is supposed to promptly figure out if any of the people in a picture belong to the smartphone owner's circle of Facebook friends. If some are found, Photo Magic creates a messaging thread that allows a user to send the picture to all the identified parties with two clicks. 
 
About 9.5 billion pictures are already sent through Messenger each month, according to Facebook. The Menlo Park, California, company believes the volume will be even higher if Photo Magic's automation is successful in making it less of a hassle to pick out the images and figure out which people might be interested in seeing them. 
 
As part of the Messenger upgrade, Facebook is also including an option that will allow users to change the colors of their exchanges with different friends, and switch the formal name of a recipient to a nickname, such as "mom" or "dad." Until now, Messenger's address book mirrored the names listed on people's Facebook profiles.</div>

Facebook adds 'Photo Magic' facial-recognition feature to Messenger

Facebook is offering a feature called Photo Magic that will automatically address a message so it can be sent quickly to Facebook friend...

Facebook’s ‘Your Year in Review’ can now be edited to show off your best memories

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After rolling out Facebook’s ‘Year in Review’ which focused on both, the good and the bad events around the world from the past twelve months, we now have an new ‘Your Year in Review’ that is appearing on the New Feed. While many may have dreaded such a feature in the past, the new ‘Your Year in Review’ can actually be edited and then shared with your Facebook friends.</div>
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What this also means is that you can now edit out all the bad stuff that happened over the past twelve months like break ups, friends who aren’t your friends anymore and technically fix ‘Your Year in Review’ timeline.</div>
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“We heard feedback last year that we need to do more to select the photos that are most enjoyable to people and make it easier for them to edit the photos they see and share in their Year in Review. So we’ve applied a unique set of filters to Your Year in Review to reduce the chance we’ll show you a photo you don’t want to see.” said a Facebook spokesperson. “Any photo that we suggest that you’d rather not include can be easily removed or replaced, and you can choose whether you want to enjoy this experience yourself or share it with friends.”</div>
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The ‘Your Year in Review’ basically comprises of ten photos selected by Facebook that it thinks are the most interesting (liked or commented) ones. A user can edit his post by clicking on the ‘edit’ button to change and adjust what they would like their friends or family to see. The feature has begun rolling out from December 16 and users should begin to see their ‘Your Year in Review’ promotions in their News Feed.</div>
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Facebook’s ‘Your Year in Review’ can now be edited to show off your best memories

After rolling out Facebook’s ‘Year in Review’ which focused on both, the good and the bad events around the world from the past tw...

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WhatsApp Trends: Here's How Fake News, Videos go Viral

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Is Facebook quietly adding computer art to make your photos incredible?

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Facebook closes gap with Google, the Internet's most powerful company

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Facebook adds 'Photo Magic' facial-recognition feature to Messenger

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Facebook’s ‘Your Year in Review’ can now be edited to show off your best memories

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