Hasta La Gadget!

Hot on the heels of a big performance update for the Facebook Android app yesterday, the social network has also released an update of their iPhone app today. The update brings a rebuilt timeline and a faster-loading news feed. The app is technically only an incremental update, but the speed improvement makes it feel like a brand-new app.

While iOS received a native version of Facebook on iOS a few months ago that increased the overall speed of the app, the news feed was one item that still felt a little sluggish. Now, the news feed definitely zips along and can keep up with my scrolling without any problems, and while I don’t visit Timelines too often on my iPhone, it’s nice to know that the speed is there when I need it.

The new update for iPhone also lets you designate which album photos are uploaded to, an add-on to the recently-launched Photo Sync feature, which allows users to have any photos taken with their phone uploaded to Facebook automatically, similar to Dropbox’s and even Google+’s automatic upload offerings.

With the Android update releasing yesterday, Facebook now has both of their popular apps running native versions, and both are as speedy, snappy, and responsive as it gets. Yesterday’s Android update saw an increase in performance that nearly doubled the speed of the old version, thanks to the ditching of HTML5 and using all native code.

Facebook updates iPhone app with rebuilt Timeline, promises faster speeds is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

For some folks out there who cannot live without Facebook, you would have noticed that you were unable to gain access to Facebook earlier this morning. How many of you were affected? Well, it seems that the cause of the downtime or outage of Facebook earlier this morning was due to a change made to the DNS infrastructure. This change brought about the unwanted effect of some folks being affected, and hence, were unable to gain access to Facebook. Facebook mentioned that they “detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

It is rather weird that something like a social network, being down for less than an hour or so, has led folks to be rather upset, as though there was a death in the family or something. This just goes to show how certain parts of our society has grown to be so dependent on Facebook and other kinds of Internet addiction, that even a simple downtime or technical glitch could cause us to rear our ugly sides.

In retrospect, this is one of the first major outages of Facebook since October 11th, when the world’s most popular social network actually went belly up in several countries around the world.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Discounting Chromebooks For Schools To $99 Until 12/21, Intel Readies 13W CPUs, Dives Deeper in Low-Power Territory,

We haven’t heard from Microsoft officially on how many Windows Phone 8 devices the company has sold so far, but thanks to some external data and a little bit of math, it’s been estimated that approximately 4.2 million Windows Phone 8 devices have been sold since October, possibly more according to other estimates.

According to The Next Web, there’s a ratio that exists between the number of monthly active users of the Windows Phone Facebook app and the total number of Windows Phone handsets sold. Thanks to the ratio, the monthly active users figure can be used to figure out the number of handsets that were sold recently, since older phones wouldn’t appear in the figures.

First off, monthly active users for this year is booming compared to last year, according to WMPoweruser. Around 627,000 monthly active users of the built-in Facebook app have been added since October 1, 2012 (the start of Q4). Over the same period last year, less than 150,000 monthly active users were added by December 15. That’s four times as many users, which goes right along with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s statement that the company is selling four times as many Windows Phone handsets than last year.

The aforementioned ratio is 6.756 handsets sold for every active user of the Windows Phone Facebook app, based on last year’s sales numbers. This results in 4,236,012 Windows Phone 8 devices sold since the start of the fourth quarter. Obviously, the ratio may not hold as much weight as it did last year, but it’s certainly a good starting point to the guessing game.

However, WMPoweruser suggests that Microsoft has sold more than 4.2 million WP8 devices. Research firm Gartner estimated that Microsoft sold about 2.75 million Windows Phone devices in Q4 2011. Using those same estimation techniques as last year, the data suggest that 7 million Windows Phone handsets were sold already this quarter, with a possibility of over 10 million being sold by the end of the quarter. Obviously, you should take these figures with a slight grain of salt, but it seems these guys are confident in their estimates so far.

[via The Next Web]

Microsoft has sold 4.2 million Windows Phone 8 handsets, according to Facebook data is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Patent litigation is all over the place these days, and regardless of who’s in the right or wrong in any specific case, it’s eating up a whole bunch of resources. That’s why Facebook, Google, and a number of other companies have rallied together with an amicus brief kindly asking the U.S. State Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to quit honoring crazy-vague patents. More »

The Pakistani Taliban is now using Facebook to hire people. According to AFP, the Islamic and militant group has set up a new Facebook page bearing the name Umar Media TTP. The account appears to have been created in September this year, and it currently has over 274 likes with around 28 people talking about the page as of this writing. Umar Media TTP has a handful of posts written in English.

The first post reads, “Umar Media is proud to announce online jobs oppertunities. Job discription is video editing, translations, sharing, uploading, downloading and collection of required data.” Another post, dated November 23rd, reads, “Dear brothers and sisters. ‘Pen is mightier than the sword.’ Now you have a chance to use this mighty weapon. ‘AHYAH-E-KHILAFAT’ is an official quarterly magazine of ‘TEHREEEK-E-TALIBAN PAKISTAN.’ Would you like to be a writer for ‘AHYAH-E-KHILAFAT?’ You can write to us on topic of your choice, or on jihadi, current affairs, history, islamic movements, plight of ummah, and etc.”

We’re not sure if the Facebook page is genuine, but AFP says that a Taliban spokesperson has confirmed via telephone that the page is being used by the group to “to fulfill its requirements” prior to launching a website of its own. The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Intelligence Group also confirms that the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) indeed uses Facebook as a “a recruitment center.”

Image Credits: The Express Tribune

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: MarkerBot announces new dashboard and follow feature on Thingiverse, Yandex discreetly launches new maps service in the U.S. and Europe,