Hasta La Gadget!

It seems that Facebook is on its way out from the Teen community. Many teens are moving more towards social media platforms like Instagram (conveniently owned by Facebook) and SnapChat. It’s most likely because of Instagram/SnapChat’s appealing user-friendly mobile apps (Facebook for Android still needs work), and because of teenagers’ obsession with sharing photos. Some teenagers only use Facebook as a last resort when they get bored of their other social media apps.

Adam Ludwin, developer of a social photo album app entitled Albumatic, interviewed a group of people under the age of 25 about his app, and a majority of the people he asked stated that they disliked the apps reliance on Facebook. Ludwin stated, “They gave me the typical teenage response. We’re bored with Facebook.”

It also seems that Facebook is very aware of this problem. In Facebook’s annual 10-K report, it stated, “We believe that some of our users, particular our younger users, are aware of and are actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook.” The statement continues on by saying that its business could be harmed due to its users lack of interest in its service.

It’s normal for teens to quickly move onto the next “it” thing. It’s very impressive that Facebook became so popular with teens for as long as it did. Perhaps Facebook will find a new way to bring back teens to its service. Otherwise, it’ll join the masses of other left-behind services, like AOL Instant Messenger, Xanga, and MySpace. While those services are still alive and still have a user-base, they just aren’t the way they used to be “back in the day”.

[via Business Insider]

Facebook no longer appealing to teens is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Founded in 2002, Friendster was a pioneer among social networks, beating MySpace and Facebook to the scene and, at its peak, boasting over 100 million users. In 2009, though, it swiftly descended into irrelevance and obscurity—and computer scientists have been scraping though its remains to work out exactly what went wrong. More »

Falcon Pro, arguably one of the best Twitter clients available for the Android operating system, has just reached its 100,000 token limit set by Twitter. The limit was set by Twitter back in August of last year, and it limits 3rd party apps, who utilize Twitter’s main features, to only 100,000 users. Falcon Pro has hit this limit only 3 months after it launched its app, catching them by surprise.

As of right now, Falcon Pro has created a petition. The creators hope that the petition will get enough signatures to convince Twitter to extend Falcon Pro’s amount of tokens. As of 8 hours ago, the petition has accumulated over 600+ signatures. Whether this helps or not is completely up to Twitter. Falcon Pro is also working on the issue of pirates. According to its stats, only 40,000 people have actually purchased its app, meaning there are 60,000 who either aren’t using the client anymore, or have pirated the app.

Guys, bad new, the Token limit has been reached sooner than expected. Getting reports that new users can’t login… Thanks @twitter.

— Falcon for Android (@falcon_android) February 23, 2013

Falcon Pro is also asking users who don’t use its client anymore to revoke access to the app via their Twitter settings. This way there can be additional tokens freed up for other users. Falcon Pro has included a disclaimer in its app description warning users of the 100k limit. Hopefully it will stop users from giving the app a 1-star rating. However, it still has to deal with the refunds for people who bought the app, but can’t access it.

Falcon Pro is currently finding other ways to get an extension on its tokens, and it’s trying to avoid any methods that may breach Twitter’s terms of service. While it’s important to get more users access to its app, Falcon Pro doesn’t want to jeopardize anything for its current users. So as of right now, all its users can do is sign its petition and hope that Twitter’s lenient.

[via Falcon Pro]

Falcon Pro reaches Twitter’s 100k token limit is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google+ is apparently experiencing an outage. If a social network falls on the internet and nobody’s on it, has it actually fallen at all? More »

Twitter’s new Vine social video service, a “video Instagram” of sorts for sharing six second blasts of video content, has fallen afoul of Facebook, with users blocked from raiding their Facebook friends for new contacts. Vine, which launched as a free iOS app yesterday, attempts to kickstart the sharing process by pulling in other users from Twitter and Facebook accounts; however, shortly after the app went live, those trying to import contacts from Facebook were faced with a message that the functionality had been disabled.

According to the original pop-up, Twitter’s new app “is not authorized” to grab Facebook’s data, leaving users facing manual adding of their friends on the site. That warning has since been changed to a more generic “An error occurred” dialog; there are also reports that Vine users have been unable to share their videos to their Facebook timeline.

A Facebook spokesperson told Mashable that the social network had no comment beyond the vague text of the error message. However, it’s not the first time the company has yanked down the shutters to prevent rival social services from getting their teeth into Facebook data.

Back in August, microblogging platform Tumblr discovered its friend-finder functionality had been blocked by Facebook, for instance, while Android dropped native Facebook contacts sync in early 2011, after the social site refused to allow exports for backup purposes. Facebook isn’t the only company to wage war with data access, mind; only a month before the Tumblr block, Twitter had thrown up a similar block to Facebook-acquired Instagram.

What remains to be seen is whether Facebook has a Vine-style short video sharing feature of its own in the pipeline; the company has proved adept at mimicking rival apps with its own, home-grown versions, such as happened with Snapchat-esque Poke last month. Expanding Facebook Camera or Instagram with brief video support would hardly be difficult.

Facebook’s Vine Whine is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.