Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook has added stickers support to its web chat, carrying the jumbo emoticons over from the mobile apps to the desktop interface. The popular images – which some IM users love, while others find them infuriating – have been featured in Facebook’s mobile chat service for some time, but have quietly been added to conversations in the desktop browser.

The oversized images – which range from larger versions of traditional emoticons, through to huge cartoon characters – are found in the existing emoticons pane in the IM interface. However, they’re not yet available to all users, it seems; the company is apparently rolling support out progressively.

Eventually, though, there’ll be support for downloading extra “packs” of stickers. A basket icon will take users to the stickers “store” of sorts, while the different tabs in the interface will allow them to switch between the various packs they have.

For the moment, the stickers are all free of charge. However, there’s precedence for charging for the emoticons, and it’s a path Facebook might opt to follow.

Wildly popular IM service LINE offers its own paid stickers store, for instance, and it’s been a considerable source of income for the company. The most recent numbers LINE released, roughly a year ago, suggested users were spending $3.75m per month on stickers.

Given Facebook’s attempts to monetize its users, mobile particularly, that seems like a potential source of income that the social site couldn’t afford to ignore.

Facebook stickers hit web chat is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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While Windows Phone 8 has had an iteration or two of Facebook now for some time, this week the first Facebook-made Facebook app is available for the masses. Having been plagued, more or less, by oddities and off-brand Facebook portals since birth, Windows Phone 8 here finally has an app that’s up to snuff. The

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It may be hard to believe, but Google+ turned two years old today. Just two short years ago, we were treated with Google’s second attempt at a social network, one that we thought would bite the dust yet again, but here we are today, still basking in the existence of Google+, which now has even

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When you said someone was “social” fifty years ago, they were probably friendly, outgoing people who would talk up a storm and go out of their way to get to know everyone in the room. When you describe someone as being “social” nowadays, you probably mean they have accounts on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare.

This is one change brought about by technology that isn’t all good. Sure, it’s great that you can talk to people and connect with them through the Internet, but people often take it a bit too far, choosing to go on their online networks when they’re out and about, ignoring the people they’re actually with instead.

Brazil’s Salve Jorge Bar, for instance, wasn’t too pleased with this anti-social social phenomenon, so they had design firm Fischer & Friends create the “Offline Glass”, which was meant to “rescue people from the online world” and bring them “back to the bar tables.”

At first glance, the Offline Glass looks just like any other glass, except for the smartphone-shaped notch at the bottom. Turns out this little notch makes all the difference, because the glass is highly unstable because of it. The only way to make the glass stand up straight is if the patron inserts his or her smartphone into the notch, stabilizing the glass and forcing people to keep their hands off their phone sat the same time.

So the glass design is more of a novelty, because I doubt people would regularly put their phones at risk of spillage or breakage on a regular basis.

The Offline Glass kind of makes you think about how “social” we’ve all become, which was the main purpose of creating the glass in the first place.

[The Telegraph via TAXI via Food Beast]

If you’re one of the still-massive amount of users working with Foursquare for all of your daily check-in needs, you’ll certainly have some sort of an opinion on the addition of an “I’m with” option for the app for iOS and Android. This option allows a much-requested (so says Foursquare) feature to the app ecosystem

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