Hasta La Gadget!

It’s time to get real with Vine, Twitter’s newest and perhaps most bold introduction of a service since their inception as a mobile-friendly service. Here with Vine you’re invited to create 6-second videos that you construct instantly of one single shot or a series of shots by pressing the center of your smart device’s display. The results are posted to Twitter (and Facebook, if you like) as well as on Vine’s own server, these videos then able to be viewed near-instantly by your connected associates.

This app and the videos it makes are really, really simple. The service appears here at first to be working really swiftly right out of the box and has clearly been tested to work at Twitter-speed. That means right here and now that you’re not going to have to wait around to see the videos as they’re just 6 seconds long – ain’t nobody got time for anything longer than that, shall we say.

Click the image above to visit the Twitter post where the Vine video can be seen – be sure to take the audio off mute, too.

You can connect to your friends on Facebook as well as your friends on Twitter to create your own Vine feed when you open the app up, otherwise you’ll be seeing a feed consisting of videos from the most popular sources in the Vine library. This service is both a standalone environment and a connected environment with Twitter and Facebook – you can use it on its own, you can connect with Twitter and Vine, you can connect with Facebook and Vine, or almost any combination therein.

The only thing you cannot do is send your videos to Twitter or Facebook without them being posted to Vine. To keep everything running as swiftly as possible, Vine is taking the hosting duties from top to bottom. We’ll be discussing the privacy issues and worries that will inevitably come up with regards to this sooner than later, I’m sure – for now though, feel free to enjoy the quickness with which you’re able to work with this app.

Hot Tip: to find this app on the App Store, you’ll need to search for “Vine make a scene”, otherwise it’ll be buried under loads of other apps with the name “vine” in them that came before this beast.

Vine is at the time of this posts’s publishing an iOS-only app. It’s also restricted (sort of) to the iPhone and the iPod touch. You can open it up on your iPad if you wish, but it’s optimized for the smaller displays without a doubt. If you do end up downloading this app, be sure you’re connected with @t_chrisburns on Twitter as well as @SlashGear on twitter (more on the way) so you can keep up to date with us as we head to some of the biggest tech events through the immediate future.

We’ll be bringing Vine with us to Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona in just a few weeks – stick with us all the way!

Vine app Review: video Tweets unleashed! is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Twitter has been criticized in the past for not being as vigilant as other social networks as far as removing offensive content, and it looks like a French court is taking matters into their own hands by ordering Twitter to hand over the usernames and information of users who post racist and offensive tweets.

The French court ruling follows a legal complaint from back in October by the Union of Jewish Students in France (UEJF), where they argued that a number of tweets were being ignored by authorities that had broken French law prohibiting racial hatred. The group has criticized Twitter in the past, and the social network eventually removed some of the tweets, but the UEJF is still taking legal action against Twitter.

The French court today said that Twitter must hand over the usernames of the offending tweeters “within the framework of its French site,” so the ruling doesn’t affect other countries. Twitter says that they do not monitor content, but they review reports that are sent in consisting of content that may be illegal or against its policies.

The court also ordered Twitter to set up an “easily accessible and visible” system that would allow users to alert the site of illegal content specifically for “crimes against humanity and incitement to racial hatred.” Back in October, Twitter removed a neo-Nazi group that would post racist tweets on the site, but only after German police stepped in.

French court orders Twitter to identify racist users is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that an Indiana law, which bans sex offenders from using social networking sites just because children are on them, is unconstitutional. More »

This week we’re hearing a lot of talk about how the upcoming Graph Search inside Facebook will be un-privatizing us once again – let’s talk about why that’s not true. In a report in Ars Technica they note how once Graph Search is turned on for the masses, information you’d previously had hidden from search results will become public. There’s also a post on Quartz citing a segment in the Facebook Privacy Policy which interprets a “hiding from timeline” note as Facebook admitting it wont hide anything no matter how hard you try – that’s simply not true.

The note that this talk all comes from is in an update to the Facebook Privacy Policy made public on December 11h, 2012. This update notes some specifications and clarifications on how the Facebook Timeline works since basically everyone in the Facebook universe is now up and running with that interface. Have a peek and see what you make of it:

“When you hide things on your timeline, like posts or connections, it means those things will not appear on your timeline. But, remember, anyone in the audience of those posts or who can see a connection may still see it elsewhere, like on someone else’s timeline or in search results. You can also delete or change the audience of content you post.” – Facebook Privacy Policy as sited by Quartz

Both Ars and Quartz refer back to a phone interview done between Nick Bilton and Facebook’s Sam Lessin in which Lessin said that “one-single digit percentage of users” had worked with Facebook’s original ability to “hide themselves on Facebook’s search.” Because 1% of Facebook’s users is somewhere in the tens of millions of people, the one single fantasy “hide me” button’s disappearance became the main subject.

In fact, you are still able to hide yourself from Facebook search, and not just by deleting your account entirely (which is always an option, of course). What you’re able to do right this minute – aside from the collection of Privacy assurances and how-to demos given by Facebook earlier this week – is to go to your Privacy Settings and Tools tab and check it out: “Who can see my stuff?” and “Who can look me up?” the both of them.

You can change “Who can see your future posts” to “Only Me”, go to your Activity Log and cut out everyone on everything you’ve ever done, and “Limit The Audience for Old Posts on Your Timeline” with a single button – that’s limited to your Friends, mind you. You can update “Who can look be up” from “Everyone” to Friends only, and you can un-check “Let other search engines link to your timeline.” If you do all of these things (however inconvenient it is to do several tasks here instead of just one), your visibility will indeed be limited to those you’ve connected to as Friends on Facebook. Make it work!

Lack of Facebook “hide from search results” no reason to panic is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook may refuse to deliver what the rumor-mill wants – an own-brand smartphone to take on the iPhone – but that’s not to say it isn’t following a cuckoo-style mobile strategy, progressively infesting handsets from other vendors. The company’s new free voice calling service, quietly revealed in the aftermath of the Facebook Graph Search announcement, is the latest in a growing suite of mobile products that, while lacking the eye-catching appeal of a glossy slab of hardware, nonetheless shows that the social network finally has a mobile strategy.

Before the free voice calls, there was voice messaging in the Facebook mobile app, and before that Poke, which sends time-limited text, photo, and video messages that auto-destruct and warn users if the recipient attempts to save them. Dubbed Facebook’s “sexting app” it had an early stumble after being found to secretly cache concent, though the social site did quickly move to patch the bug.

Then there was Nearby, a Foursquare-style location service, and just ahead of that Photo Sync, to make it even easier to suck photos from your phone to your Facebook gallery. That’s not to mention Facebook’s $1bn grab of Instagram, despite the fact that it had just pushed out its own Camera app which replicated most of the features of its expensive acquisition.

Facebook is seldom first to offer each mobile feature. Poke was the most obviously “inspired” product, closely following in the footsteps of earlier app Snapchat, but Google has been offering free voice calls in the US for some years now, through its Gmail voice system. (That Google deal has again been extended, now covering 2013.) Facebook Camera’s similarity to Instagram and Facebook Messenger’s overlap with the huge number of IM apps – whether iMessage, GChat, WhatsApp, or even good old fashioned SMS – hardly portray the social site as the most innovative of companies.

“Facebook isn’t some naive, cash-strapped startup”

Then again, arguably it doesn’t need to be. Facebook isn’t some naive, cash-strapped startup desperate for attention and users; it’s a multi-billion dollar business with a vast user-base much of which, despite periodic outcry and calls for mass defection, shows high degrees of addiction.

Where its been struggling is in making the most of its mobile users. That’s not the same as acquiring mobile users – in fact, Facebook has plenty already, it just hasn’t been too hot at extracting some sort of financial return from them. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fingered commerce as one potential option, but right now everything about Facebook’s mobile suite reeks of lock-in – making users keep using Facebook, and for an increasing proportion of their everyday mobile activities – rather than revolution.

Viewed in those terms, spreading itself across the common applications regularly demanded of a smartphone (calls, messaging, photo and video sharing) makes perfect sense for Facebook. A mobile commerce push would fit in with that nicely, though we can maybe excuse Facebook for not being there yet: few manufacturers, vendors, or carriers have got commerce quite right yet.

What Graph Search might do for Facebook’s mobile strategy, however, is give it an all-important injection of context. Your friends and family are arguably the best recommendation engine you know, and if they don’t know the answers themselves, they may very well have “Liked” the sites, reviews, and other sources that do. Context is another area no company has nailed so far, though Google Now is perhaps one of the better approaches we’ve seen.

There’s plenty that’s been said about the importance of controlling the hardware and the software you offer, if you want to succeed in today’s mobile market. That, we’re told, is what gives Samsung sleepless nights over Android, gives Apple its edge with the tight integration of iOS and iPhone, and what Nokia has sacrificed in throwing in with Microsoft and Windows Phone. Is it not more important, though, to own the users themselves? To have a platform considered so essential, so integral to their everyday lives, that users shape their device and service shopping lists on the basis of who supports it?

Facebook could still screw up: the mobile industry moves fast, and while that makes for interesting times both as a consumer and a company, there’s little space for second-chances if you get it wrong. For all spreading itself across dozens of apps, numerous services, and a handful of platforms might not satisfy in the gut like a Facebook phone might, though, like the cuckoo chick stealing warmth, food, and ultimately attention in a foreign nest, a strategy based on mobile inclusion is just what Facebook needs.

Is every phone the Facebook phone? is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.