Internet & Websites News - Page 32

You've probably already seen the upgraded like button array already, likely due to being on Facebook at this very moment. But if you haven't had a chance, it seems that Facebook is adding a bit more to their Like button, letting users pick from five other emotes to express how they feel about a particular post, and they're calling them "Reactions".

Liking a post has been a way to acknowledge a post, interacting with it in a one-dimensional way that sometimes can be misinterpreted to mean something it doesn't. Do I "Like" the death of a friends grandmother? Well, now you can choose an emote to indicate how that post makes you feel. So it just got a bit less awkward.

The search for a better way to communicate actually was a long road by the team behind the new Reactions. The team, led by Sammi Krug, did a lot of research into how people tend to communicate, with stickers and with words, to determine the best mix of reactions to add. "People come to Facebook and share all kinds of things," Krug said. "And we kept hearing feedback from people that there wasn't an easy way to express empathy for these different kinds of posts."

Google is shutting down another service that you've probably never heard of but sounds great: Google Compare (also known as Google Advisor). The website allows you to obtain quotes from a variety of companies on car insurance, travel insurance, credit cards, and mortgages.

"Despite people turning to Google for financial services information, the Google Compare service itself hasn't driven the success we hoped for," Google wrote in an e-mail sent to partners yesterday. "After a lot of careful consideration, we've decided that focusing more intently on AdWords and future innovations will enable us to provide fresh, comprehensive answers to Google users, and to provide our financial services partners with the best return on investment."

Google explained it had difficulty attracting advertisers to the service, in part due to limited availability of products in the US and UK.

ZDNet has noticed something that many of us may never think about - Google has changed its side-displayed advertisements on searches. Previous 'versions' of this search program would display direct link advertisements for product sales, with companies vying for your dollar and continued service through this marketing option.

This changes a few things for certain companies, now unable to directly market to consumers looking to buy something on a whim or look for reliable resellers of wanted products. While a good opportunity for Google to ensure its pages load faster and look more streamlined, many are upset at this move - taking out a popular advertising avenue used by many.

Small business' may be the ones suffering majorly due to this change, meaning that companies are now going to have to pay top dollar to this tech giant in order to increase their search ranking. With less advertising space comes a higher asking price for what's left - I hope your budget is big!

Super Bowl 50 didn't just set records on the field, but data-wise as well: a historic 10.15 terabytes of data were transferred over the Levi's Stadium Wi-Fi network on game day, according to provider Extreme Networks. The figure represents a 63% jump over last year's 6.23 TB, and sets the record for most data transferred at a sporting event.

To put things in perspective, 10.15 TB of data is equivalent to more than 6,000 hours of HD video or about 1.2 million 2MB photos.

Levi's features over 12,000 network ports, over 1,200 Wi-Fi access points, about 1,200 Bluetooth beacons, and 40Gbps of bandwidth.

While Kanye West has been on a rampant Twitter tirade surrounding his 'Life of Pablo' album release, even social media accounts from The Land Down Under have gotten in on the action.

Virgin Australia's official Twitter account told Kanye West to "EAD" recently, further labelling him as a "douche" and embodying the common insult of many Aussie Generation X or Y youths.

While this tweet did come from the official and verified Virgin Australia account, it was soon after deleted with the company releasing a statement that "A recent tweet on our account was not published by a Virgin Australia employee and we are investigating the matter."

Thanks to a recent nation-wide outage, Telstra offered its mobile customers a free data Sunday promotion, seeing those from The Land Down Under take full advantage of this offering.

In total, it is explained that Australians downloaded a massive 1841 terabytes, something that News.com.au explained as 5.1 million Game of Thrones episodes.

With the majority of this data being downloaded over 4G connections, Telstra group managing director of networks, Mike Wright, explained that "Over the course of the day we had twice as much traffic as we would normally see on a Sunday (or any day)," further stating that "We hope it helps make up for some of the inconvenience we caused."

CBS was in some heated negotiations with Apple to bring forth their lofty network services through the network, and potentially allowing you to stream that content to Apple devices. But that's no longer, or so says the CEO of CBS.

According to the CEO, Les Moonves, they really haven't heard from Apple regarding that aforementioned TV streaming service. The initial meetings occurred, and they appeared to be positive from what we can gather. It's just that Apple never called them back afterwards.

"We had conversations awhile back, and we haven't had recent conversations with them," Moonves told CNNMoney in an interview. Internet streaming services have accounted for nearly 40% of their revenue this past year, meaning that they understand the importance of digital media. They've made a number of partnerships with outside companies for streaming content, so a partnership with Apple isn't out of the question. Apple just needs to answer the phone.

The right to be forgotten, or the set of regulations that were passed in the EU that allow people the right, and ability, to ask that search results pertaining to them be hidden or outright deleted, is being extended thoroughly.

It used to be that only the particular countries Google domain would remove those search results, but now all domains within Google will subsequently erase that information. That means that someone in Belgium requesting info be forgotten won't have those same search results available on Google.de either. It seems that this is a result of a Canadian court case forcing Google to apply the rules worldwide combined with France's threat of a fine if such widespread forgetfulness wasn't implemented.

The original idea was quaint because it didn't quite cover the entire worldwide web as it should have from the very beginning. You could just as easily find the same info by doing searches from other country domains, so it really amounted to doing next to nothing.

Google and Bing are already quite good at predicting what you're thinking and giving you relevant suggestions. But it's slow and the predictive algorithms just aren't quite good for actual real-time suggestions. So a graduate student from Cornell wants to speed things up considerably, making things potentially awesome, yet incredibly creepy.

We all like our personalized suggestions when shopping or even when searching for things. It legitimately helps us, despite the privacy concerns related to it. But those results don't show up instantaneously. There's a significant amount of background work going on that links your actions to those personalized results. Wenlei Xie has come up with an algorithm that could potentially speed things up to near real-time.

Search engines and their underlying suggestions generally use a weighted node graph which is examined analyzed to see just how appropriate the suggestion is based on years of collecting and correlating information. The problem that Xie has found is that there's just so much information to walk through, that it's incredibly slow. So to make it faster and more relevant even sooner, he's proposed simplifying those graphs. In essence they're assembling only the most pertinent information, and discarding a lot of the fluff, to make it quicker.

In a new blog post, Twitter has revealed that it has shut down over 125,000 user accounts since mid-2015 for promoting terrorism, particularly terrorism related to ISIS. The company reminds that while it values free speech, terrorist threats and any violent threats for that matter are forbidden on its service.

"Like most people around the world, we are horrified by the atrocities perpetrated by extremist groups," it writes. "We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism and the Twitter Rules make it clear that this type of behavior, or any violent threat, is not permitted on our service."

"As an open platform for expression, we have always sought to strike a balance between the enforcement of our own Twitter Rules covering prohibited behaviors. The legitimate needs of law enforcement, and the ability of users to share their views freely - including views that some people may disagree with or find offensive."