Hasta La Gadget!

Comments on the internet: often a haven for trolls and axe-grinders, but comment threads also give rise to some insightful and entertaining commentary. In an effort to encourage the latter and to provide users with an improved experience, YouTube’s rolling out a new commenting system that integrates deeply with Google+. What does that mean, exactly? Much like that other social network’s News Feed, comments in YouTube will be based on relevance, not how recently they were posted. So, comments from people you know, celebrities and video creators, plus positively rated comments will percolate to the top of comment threads according to Big G’s ranking algorithms. Additionally, replies will be nested beneath original comments to better enable conversations. Like Facebook, should you find the idea of automated comment curation unsettling, you can always switch back to the old way of having the most recent comments show up first.

The integration with Google+ also broadens your commenting boundaries; post a comment on YouTube, then share that video on on G+ and comments and replies made on either site will show up in both places. You can also control who gets to read comments you make by choosing which circles will see them, so you can even have private conversations. As for content owners, the system borrows features from many other commenting platforms. To deal with comments at scale, channel admins can build user whitelists and blacklisted words and phrases to make moderation easy. YouTube Product Manager Nundu Janakiram tells us that the comments system has been in the works for over a year, and that these features are only the beginning. His team plans to provide even better tools for users and content creators to let them filter out the noise and increase the quality of comments. Initially, folks will be able to test out the new comments in the discussion tab on any YouTube channel’s home page, after which it’ll roll out to individual videos in the coming months — and we’d be shocked if these G+ enabled comments don’t make their way into many other Google properties eventually, too.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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It hasn’t been outrightly confirmed by the government of Iran, but at least some within the nation’s borders are now able to access both Twitter and Facebook. For those keeping score, public access to the networks has been banned since 2009, shortly after the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, seems fairly convinced that Iran itself should not be restricting its citizens to information available via social channels, and a number of trusted accounts — including Rouhani himself along with The New York Times‘ Thomas Erdbrink — have tweeted in recent hours without the use of a proxy. It’s unclear whether the lift is intentional, or if it’s scheduled to remain permanently, but we’re obviously hoping it’s a sign of meaningful change.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: Quartz

Source: Hassan Rouhani (Twitter), Thomas Erdbrink (Twitter)

The usefulness of Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm may not be universally agreed upon, but the social network’s dedication to improving it is unquestionable. Today, FB has updated that ranking system with a newly developed algorithm meant to better surface “high quality content” from pages users are connected to at the top of News Feed. To do so, the algorithm makes determinations about what content is timely, relevant, from trusted sources and is likely to be shared — and also identifying content that users complain about seeing or attempts to “game News Feed” distribution with solicited likes. These signals were informed by the results from surveying a few thousand users, and after implementation in a small scale test, Facebook found folks sharing, liking and commenting on more stories, and hiding fewer of them. As such, we can all expect to see the update in the next few weeks, so brace for a Facebook flood of insightful stories, funny cat videos, or whatever else it is you’re into.

Filed under: Internet, Facebook

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Source: Facebook for Business

LinkedIn has already branched out a bit with its own blogging and following features for select groups, and now the popular social networking site has introduced a tool geared towards students. Aptly dubbed University Pages, LinkedIn describes the new service as one that’s part of its strategy to help college-bound pupils “at every critical milestone from campus to fulfilling successful careers.”

Beginning September 12th, LinkedIn’s set to welcome high school students on its network and provide access to the new University Pages, allowing them to explore and rub elbows with about 200 participating universities, both in the US and abroad. Users will then be able to do things such as receive regular updates about campus news / activities and view notable members of each college’s alumni. If one of your favorite schools isn’t there just yet, fret not — LinkedIn says “thousands more” will be given access over the next few weeks.

Filed under: Networking, Internet

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Source: LinkedIn

Have a love/hate relationship with your Facebook news feed? Sure, that feed serves up plenty of photos and posts from friends and family that you want to see, but there are also plenty of posts you could do with out, or posts you wish had been assigned greater importance. Facebook knows this, and is constantly tinkering and iterating its news feed post ranking processes to provide the most relevant stories possible to each individual user. To that end, Facebook’s rolling out a new feature, called story bumping, to better percolate the stuff you care about to the top of your feed. Story bumping has already been launched on the web, and will be rolling out to mobile in the coming weeks.

Previously, Facebook evaluated the most recent posts on the social network by assigning each post a score based upon a series of factors including: number of likes and comments, the relationship between you and the poster, the type of content, etc. Using those signals, Facebook runs them through a proprietary algorithm to determine a post’s score. News feed then displays the posts with the highest score at the top of the feed. However, this method often resulted in relevant posts being relegated below the fold, and those posts would forever be lost in the never-ending social story avalanche. Story bumping provides a way for such posts to be seen by tweaking the recency logic previously used. Instead of picking from the most recent posts, the system now looks for the most recent posts that have not been viewed by the user, so that those older, yet relevant posts get a second crack at showing up in the top of your feed.

Filed under: Internet, Facebook

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Source: Facebook for Business