Hasta La Gadget!

Pinterest, the online board where users can pin images for other users to see and share, has finally added private boards. Secret Boards, as the new feature is called, allows users to set up private, user-restricted boards where images can rest safely knowing they’re not open to public scrutiny. The feature is being “gradually rolled out.”

A Secret Board can be a private board that no one else has access to, allowing you to gather together images for your own use that no one else can see. Alternatively, the feature can also be set up so that certain users are authorized to view and interact with it. According to the announcement, the feature was launched today and is gradually be rolled out, with no details on what exactly that means.

Pinterest’s software engineer Evrhet Milam stated this in the announcement. “We hope that secret boards will make Pinterest even more useful. You can use secret boards to keep track of holiday gifts, plan a special event, or work on a project you aren’t yet ready to share with the rest of the world. You can keep your secret boards to yourself or invite family and friends to pin with you.”

Creating a private board seems pretty straight forward. Log into your Pinterest account, then click on your profile and scroll to the bottom of the page. Select “Create a Secret Board,” then click “Add+.” In the board creation screen, click “Create Board,” then be sure to switch the Secret button to the “On” position.

[via Pinterest]

Pinterest launches Secret Boards for private pinning is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

All throughout last week, we saw images of the devastation from Hurricane Sandy all over social networking sites. Social networks helped people stay in touch and gave those outside of the storm’s path a way to see what kind of havoc Sandy was wreaking. Instragram was one of these sites people on the East Coast used to show the impact of Sandy, and it turns out that the Hurricane ended up being a pretty big event for the photo sharing network.

Speaking at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said that users uploaded almost 1 million photos accompanied by the hashtag “#Sandy.” The 800,000 photos that were uploaded were enough to make Sandy “probably the biggest event to be captured on Instagram,” Systrom said. Naturally, the media’s coverage of Sandy helped propel it to center stage on a lot of different social networks, but as far as Instagram is concerned, Systrom said that the service’s new geotagging feature helped users follow the storm in real time.

The fact that users flocked to Instagram to share images of the storm is probably pretty encouraging for the network, as it means that users don’t just view Instagram as a way of sharing photos, but also sharing news and getting vital information to others quickly. This also proves that social networks – which some consider a waste of time – have some really useful applications. If nothing else, social networks like Instagram and Facebook are additional ways to get much-needed information to those affected by natural disasters quickly, and that is only a good thing.

The debate over the value of these social networks aside, it sure is interesting to hear that Hurricane Sandy proved to be Instagram’s biggest event ever. It just goes to show that out of all of the social networks we have these days, Instagram is probably going to be one of the networks that hangs around for years to come. Check out our story timeline below for more on Instagram.

Hurricane Sandy was Instagram’s “biggest event” ever is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Twitter has prompted user confusion by implementing a new copyright policy that censors contentious tweets rather than deleting them altogether, a shift that the microblogging service argues is more transparent. According to Twitter’s legal policy chief, Jeremy Kessel, the change offers “more transparency by processing copyright reports by withholding Tweets, not removing,” though some users have still criticized the approach for  potentially censoring first and investigating second.

According to Twitter’s official DMCA policy, the company reserves the right to restrict access to a contentious tweet before a final decision on whether copyright infringement has actually taken place:

“Twitter’s response to notices of alleged copyright infringement may include the removal or restriction of access to allegedly infringing material. If we remove or restrict access to user content in response to a notice of alleged infringement, Twitter will make a good faith effort to contact the affected account holder with information concerning the removal or restriction of access, including a copy of the takedown notice, along with instructions for filing a counter-notification” Twitter

While in the past, however, such tweets were deleted, they now read “This Twitter from @Username has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder,” together with a link to the appropriate policy. A similar message can be shown for media subject to a copyright take-down report.

A Twitter spokesperson claims that the blocking system is preferable to the old approach, which saw the company manually recreating tweets that had been deleted but then deemed not to infringe:

“[W]hen we get a valid DMCA request, we withhold the tweet until such time as we get (if we ever do) a valid counter-response from the user. In this case, if someone with the permalink tries to navigate to the tweet, they’ll see that it is being withheld for copyright reasons. We also send the requests to Chilling Effects for publication. Our prior policy was to delete the Tweet without any language explaining the takedown, then manually repost the Tweet if/when we got a valid counter response” Twitter spokesperson

The increased transparency of the process is being welcomed by many, but the extra visibility of how Twitter reacts to copyright claims is also prompting some confusion from users.

[via GigaOm]

Twitter copyright policy change promises “transparency” through censorship is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook is a crowded place any more, with statuses from what is often hundreds of friends and pages vying for the limited space within your daily news feed. Because there is more info than can be reasonably displayed, users often miss out on certain statuses and updates. To help de-clutter things a bit, Facebook is testing out a new Pages Feed, which is a news stream of status updates from pages you’ve liked.

Reportedly, some Facebook users are seeing a Page Feed, which aggregates posts from pages they have liked in a single place. If you have this feature on your Facebook, it’ll be located in the left-side menu in the “Pages” category. This seems to be a move on Facebook’s part to appease growing complaints from both page owners and users over the posts that never make it into the standard news feed.

Facebook has already enabled a feature that allows users to select specific friends whose status updates they want to see. When one of those friends make a post, a notification will be given, helping users to keep track of things and ensure they see what they’re most interested in. Soon, this same feature will be available for pages, providing users with notifications whenever a starred page posts an update.

Don’t see the link in your side menu? You can view posts from pages directly in the meantime here. According to Facebook Insider, those with the feature in their Facebook sidebar still see page statuses in their main news feed. This means that while you’ll still see a smattering of select statuses from various pages when browsing Facebook, you have the added ability to open a separate stream and see all the posts you’ll otherwise miss.

[via Inside Facebook]

Facebook testing Pages Feed that aggregates page statuses is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The perennial Facebook phone rumor has resurfaced, with chatter that the HTC Opera UL will be the social site’s first “official” smartphone as it attempts to tighten its slack in mobile. The Opera UL, as HTC has internally called it, is an OEM device “made for Facebook” a source tells Pocket-lint, while leaked benchmarks suggest it will have a 1.4GHz processor and run Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean.

The exact identity of that processor is unclear, though since it’s paired with a Qualcomm Adreno 305 that does narrow the field somewhat. So far, we’ve seen that GPU used with various iterations of the Snapdragon S4 Plus (though not the S4 Pro, as in the LG Nexus 4), each with a dualcore CPU.

Other tidbits from the NenaMark2 benchmark leak include a 1280 x 720 display, which is in keeping with other recent high-end devices from HTC. Although HTC has flirted with both full-touch and QWERTY form-factors in its own-brand Facebook handsets before – the Salsa and the ChaCha – with a resolution like that, unless it’s a slider, then our guess would be touchscreen-only.

According to the insider, we shouldn’t necessarily expect to see the Facebook phone any time soon. “Apparently it’s been delayed” the source said; with no public release timescale, mind, the exact impact of that “delay” can’t really be judged.

Although Facebook has long denied that it intends to release an own-brand device, rumors of the work-in-progress have circulated nonetheless. Whispers from inside the company indicate Facebook has been reworking Android for its own web-centric purposes, much as Amazon refettled Google’s OS for the Kindle Fire.

Facebook’s software and hardware efforts at its modified Android approach have been accelerating in recent months, according to other sources, with ex-Apple engineers supposedly poached to work on the project. More than six ex-iPhone engineers and an ex-iPad engineer, with a mixture of hardware and software skills, were tipped to have quietly joined the company midway through this year.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg again dismissed chatter of a dedicated device back in September, but did emphasize that Facebook is focusing on mobile users moving forward, as they increasingly comprise its most active userbase. Back in pre-IPO days, Facebook filings to the SEC publicly voiced the company’s fears that it might see revenues fall should users begin to favor the mobile interface, which has been less monetized than the desktop view.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook Phone is the HTC Opera UL claims insider is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.