Facebook Acquires Wit.ai To Help Its Developers With Speech Recognition And Voice Interfaces

Facebook’s latest known acquisition involves a startup specializing in voice recognition technology.

The firm, Wit.ai, began life just 18 months ago, and exists as “an open, distributed, community-based platform that makes it easy for developers to build apps that users can talk

Your hidden Facebook photos were never really hidden. This app finds them

Hiding photos on Facebook may not actually work as well as you think it does.

Picturebook, a browser extension now available in the Chrome web store, claims to allow you to "view hidden photos of anyone on Facebook"— even if you aren't friends with them.

Sounds like a Facebook

The Enormous Implications Of Facebook Indexing 1 Trillion Of Our Posts

A whole wing of the Internet just got added to our collective conscience, like websites by Google or knowledge by Wikipedia before it.

Yet the news cruised by with analysis focused simply on what Facebook’s new keyword post search does today. Yes, any post by you or any of your friends can now be dug up with

Words Are Dead: Facebook Sticker Search Is Here

Facebook wants you to find the perfect sticker to convey your emotions in the post-text world.

Baked into Facebook’s website and the standalone Messenger app, which recently grew to more than 500 million users, are cute and colorful “stickers” that can be pasted into a message in lieu of actual words.

Facebook Starts Auto-Enhancing Photos Because Algorithms Are Better At Filters Than You

We’re not ace photographers, but we all take photos. Most could use a little help with light and shadow. So rather than making you manually filter them, Facebook tells me it will now auto-enhance newly uploaded photos starting today on iOS and soon on Android. You’ll be able to adjust a slider to control just how enhanced you want the light, shadow, and

SwiftGift Lets You Send Presents Via Facebook

Tis the season for gift-giving, which is presumably why stealthy U.K. startup SwiftGift — founded back in 2013 — is unwrapping its gifting-made-easy service to launch in beta today, ahead of the holidays.

The startup says it has raised more than £400,000 in angel funding from undisclosed investors to-date. And is apparently in the process of closing an extension to that

Facebook Launches Standalone Groups App To Stoke Micro-Sharing

700 million people use Facebook Groups every month, but it’s a second-class experience on mobile, slow and buried in the social network’s main app. So today Facebook is releasing a standalone Groups app with powerful notification controls and a Groups discovery section. You won’t be forced to use it as the Groups feature will remain in the Facebook app, and you won’t be fast-switched to it either.

Facebook Launches “Say Thanks,” A Personalized Video Creation Tool For Thanking Your Friends

Clearly, Facebook wants more users building and sharing videos on its service. Today, the company announced “Say Thanks,” a new tool that lets you quickly put together personalized video cards using a combination of pre-built themes and your own posts and photos. The end result is an easily shareable — if a bit cheesy — customized video you

Zuckerberg Answers Big Questions About Facebook, Forced Downloads Of Messenger, And Page Reach

Today at his first public Q&A, Mark Zuckerberg boldly responded to some of the top gripes and questions about his company. Here’s a look at the top questions and a summary of the Facebook CEO’s answers.

Why were people forced to download the separate

Spying And Police Requests For Facebook Data Up 24% Since 2013

Facebook continues to fight dragnets for private data by governments, but the combined number of requests from local law enforcement and federal spy agencies like the NSA went up 24 percent from the last half of 2013 to the first half of 2014, according to Facebook’s new government requests report. In

Facebook 'Safety Check' Tells Friends You're OK in a Natural Disaster

When a major disaster strikes, whether natural or man-made, many folk with loved ones in the affected area more often than not turn to social media to check that they’re OK.

With that in mind, Facebook on Wednesday rolled out Safety Check, a new tool that lets users

Facebook Stickers Are Now Available In Comments On Timelines, Groups And Events

Facebook Stickers – the cute, cartoonish images Facebook Messenger users take advantage of to spice up their conversations – are now rolling out to a wider audience. Facebook announced today that stickers will be available on comments found on people’s Timeline posts, Group posts and Event posts.

To access the stickers, users tap the smiley face icon in the bottom-right of any comment field on Facebook in order to

Facebook Readying App for Anonymous Sharing

Facebook might soon offer the option for users to share with one another completely anonymously.

The social network is preparing to launch a standalone app that will allow users to anonymously interact with each other,

Facebook Opens Up Mobile Ad Network to All Advertisers

Facebook's mobile ad business is about to get another boost.

The social network announced Tuesday that its mobile ad platform, called Audience Network, is now open to all marketers and mobile developers.

Facebook Messenger Hack Reveals Mobile Payments Service

Not content to manage the news updates and friend connections of its over one billion users, the long arm of Facebook is now reportedly preparing to enter the world of mobile payments.

According to a report from Techcrunch, Andrew Aude, a student developer at Stanford, discovered

Facebook May Be the Next Tech Company Collecting Your Health Data

Facebook may be the latest tech company eyeing your health information.

The social network is reportedly looking into creating a healthcare-related app and "support communities" on the site where people suffering from certain ailments would be able to connect,

Facebook to start testing Wi-Fi drones next year

Both Facebook and Google are battling it out to become the first high-profile company to bring Internet connectivity to remote locations around the world, with the social networking giant this week revealing further details of its drone-based initiative that it hopes will enable it to achieve its goal.

The bold project, which could see

Facebook reportedly close to launching new ad platform in bid to take on Google

It looks as if Facebook is about to reveal exactly what it’s made of the Atlas Advertising Suite, which it bought from Microsoft last year.

The ad manager and measuring tool will launch imminently as an advertising platform for the social networking giant as part of its strategy to boost revenue and take on Google in the online ad space, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

New Facebook Tools Let Developers See What Users Are Doing In Their Apps

Facebook has a new plan for helping application developers monitor the success—or failure—of their applications. And that's true whether they're developing apps specifically to work with Facebook or not.

On Tuesday, the company introduced two new functions in App Insights, a tool that lets developers monitor 

Facebook Working on Private Sharing App, Report Says

Facebook is reportedly working on a new app designed to encourage private content sharing — by making the process even more personal.

Citing multiple sources, a report on Techcrunch claims that the current code name for the app is "Moments" and will give users a grid-style interface from which to share