Hasta La Gadget!

As it stands, you can do a lot with Facebook. You can stalk your ex-lovers, you can show the world pictures of what you’ll be eating for dinner, and you can annoy almost every single one of your Facebook friends at the same time by constantly posting statuses of a political nature. Soon, you’ll be able to buy your friends real world gifts though Facebook with a new service called – you guessed it – Facebook Gifts.

Announced today, Facebook Gifts allows you to purchase a gift for any of your Facebook friends and have it delivered to their door. Did your friend just have a baby? Buy them a teddy bear. Did your friend just get dumped? Buy them a batch of cupcakes. Perhaps you have a friend who can’t function without caffeine? Good news for them, because it appears that Starbucks gift cards are available through this service as well.

Once Facebook Gifts has been fully implemented, you can buy a gift for your friends through birthday or engagement notifications or directly through their timeline. You don’t need to know their address as they’ll be the one who enters it in, and bad gift givers have no reason to fear – recipients will be able to choose the size, color, and flavor of their gift, and if they really don’t like it, they can exchange it out for something of equal value.

Facebook says that this new gifts service will roll out gradually, but those in the US will be getting it first. There isn’t a time frame for the full roll out of Facebook Gifts, likely owing to the social network‘s nearly 1 billion users around the world. Facebook promises more information on Gifts soon, so we’ll update you once new details are made public!

[via Facebook Newsroom]

Facebook launches new Gifts service is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Earlier this year, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, a body whose decisions impact Facebook’s policies in Europe at large, made several recommendations to bring the website in line with regional privacy laws, calling for greater transparency on how users’ data is handled and more user control over settings, among other things. The DPC just officially announced that Zuckerberg et al. have for the most part adjusted its policies accordingly. The biggest change involves the facial recognition feature, which attempts to identify Facebook friends in photos and suggest their names for tagging. The social network turned off this functionality for new users in the EU — and it will be shutting it down entirely by October 15th. It’s not like Ireland, home to Facebook’s European HQ, is the first to give the site flack about such features: Germany was having none of it when the site introduced facial recognition last summer.

Continue reading Facebook shutting down facial recognition in the EU, gets stamp of approval from Ireland DPC

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Facebook shutting down facial recognition in the EU, gets stamp of approval from Ireland DPC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Emergency services are embracing technology as new ways to investigate, send alerts and receive reports of crises. And now, the Japanese are looking at social networks to support communication in disaster scenarios, especially when traditional services fail. The local Fire and Disaster Management Agency put together a panel discussion on just that topic, with representatives attending from the likes of Twitter, Yahoo, Mixi and NHN Japan, as well as various government and emergency bodies. The talk was motivated, in part, by the March tsunami, when the internet was the sole means of information for some, and with initiatives like Google’s Person Finder playing a role in the aftermath. Any formal implementation of the ideas discussed is probably a long way off, and this is the first of three planned meets to hash it out. In the meantime, however, Twitter’s Japanese blog posted some suggestions on how their network could be used in emergencies — we just hope they won’t be needed anytime soon.

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Japan considers using social networks in disaster situations originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Aug 2012 01:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has just announced that the Bing website is now integrating Quora in the social side bar. The idea -says Bing- is that the Microsoft search engine not only want to show pertinent search results, but also who provides relevant answers. Although there are relevant answers elsewhere (forums, Q&A sites…), this is a potentially huge win for Quora, where most users log-in via Facebook with their real identity. U.S based users should start seeing Quora contributors in the sidebar, today. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Bing New Architecture: Introducing Snapshot and Social Sidebar, Yahoo benefits from Google losses in July US search market share,

For those who haven’t kept track, Facebook has had a years-long history of only maybe-sort-of-more-or-less purging our photos: they could be removed from a profile, but they would sometimes float around the site’s content delivery networks for months or years, just waiting for a prospective employer to spot those embarrassing frosh week snapshots by accident. As Ars Technica discovered through experiments and official remarks, that problem should now be solved. In the wake of a months-long photo storage system migration and an updated deletion policy, Facebook now won’t let removed photos sit for more than 30 days in the content network stream before they’re scrubbed once and for all. The improved reaction time isn’t as rapid as for a service like Instagram, where photos vanish almost immediately, but it might be a lifesaver for privacy advocates — or just anyone who’s ever worn a lampshade on their head in a moment of insobriety.

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Facebook starts really, truly deleting removed photos originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Aug 2012 19:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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