Facebook’s Gold Standard
Facebook is now putting restrictions on the ads that are being displayed on their site after companies like Marks and Spencer and BSkyB had complaints filed against them for placing ads on pages with offensive material.
“We recognize we need to fo more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action,” Facebook said in a blogpost on Friday.This blogpost follows a Sky ad that was placed on a page called “Cute and Gay Boys”. The pages featured many inappropriate pictures of teenage boys- all of whom were underage.
The company said on Monday it will implement a new “Gold Standard” of around 10,000 pages that are deemed suitable for advertisements. It will then inspect other pages to see if it can be added onto the list and remove ads from pages that haven’t been approved.
The two companies that have been complained about have said that they will use Facebook again, as long as their advertisements won’t be posted on pages that will have any offensive content or pages that reflect negatively on their brands.
This is the second time in under a month that Facebook has been under fire. Earlier this month, women’s groups were protesting due to misogynist content on the site, causing many advertisers to suspend their campaigns.
R.I.P. Google Reader
In March, Google announced that it would shut down due to decline in use. Whilst the company admitted it did have a “loyal following”, Google’s chief executive Larry Page said that he wanted the company to focus on fewer projects.
Since the announcement, other web companies have been trying to get a hold of the “orphans” when the popular service closes its doors on Monday.
Using RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, its users can see the updates from their favourite sites faster without having to visit each site. Similar to an inbox, RSS readers show how many unread updates a user has.
The decision to stop this particular RSS reader has angered users, many of whom claim that any other service wouldn’t offer the same level of functionality.
PC magazine published that what Google is doing is “a grave mistake”. A magazine from the United States, Slate, posted a “virtual graveyard” listing all of Google’s retired services. It even went as far as inviting its users to come and offer their condolences to Google’s fallen products.
For some, however, this provides Google’s competitors to scoop up new users in a very short amount of time. In a recent post, the social recommendation site, Digg, revealed it had been planning to make its own reader for quite some time now. Thanks to Google’s reader closing, it has ramped up the efforts.
“As daily (hourly) users of Google Reader, we’re convinced this is a product worth saving,” wrote Digg’s Andrew McLaughlin.
Another service that is expected to gain a following is Feedly, which states that it has gained almost three million new users since Google’s Reader announcement.Facebook is rumoured to be launching its own reader, but it isn’t being named as the Google replacement.
BlackBerry Shares Take a Plunge
Shares in the Smartphone company BlackBerry have divided since its $84 million loss for the first three months from June 1. Even though this is a large number that has Blackberry disappointed, it’s better than the $518 million loss from this time last year.
The company said it would post the loss for the next quarter that runs to September.Blackberry shipments have increased, but Blackberry didn’t release how many handsets running the Blackberry 10 have been sold this quarter; however the company chief executive promised that the new BB10 would be a hit with the customers.
BlackBerry is increasing investments to support new product rollouts and services for the next three quarters.
Blackberry launched two new Smartphones this year, the new touchscreen “Z10” and the “Q10” with a mini keyboard that many BlackBerry users prefer.Overall, BlackBerry says that they have shipped 6.8 million phones this quarter, a much smaller number than the 7.8 million is shipped out last year.
“It doesn’t bode well for the initial BlackBerry 10 launch, particularly the Z10. But even the outlook for a second quarter loss doesn’t bode well for the Q10 either,” said Morningstar analyst Brian Colello.
Blackberry has had some serious competition with other smartphone producers such as Apple and Samsung. Some even say that the phone company has fallen between two categories.
“They’re not the high-end provider anymore, they’re not Apple. They’re not the low-end provider, they’re not Nokia. So they are in the middle and they do relatively low volumes,” Daniel Ernst from Hudson Square Research.
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