The News Feed is one of the most important parts of Facebook, so this is pretty big news. The social network has announced that it’s giving its users more ways to tweak what shows up in the News Feed.

This comes by way of a revamped News Feed Preferences menu, which launches on iOS today and will become available for Android and the Web “over the coming weeks”. Read more »

Your beloved Instagram photos are about to get a whole lot prettier! The social network quietly increased the size of its images to 1080 x 1080 pixels – up from the rather ancient 640 x 640 pixels.

Without telling anyone, Instagram started gradually rolling out the new resolution to iOS and Android last week. Read more »

reddit is in a state of turmoil after firing of one of the employees for unknown reasons. The employee, Victoria Taylor (u/chooter), was coordinator of AMA and sort of the company PR for engaging with celebrities for their AMA. This has caused several of the subreddits to go private as a protest.

After her sudden firing yesterday, several of the subreddits who were about to organize AMAs came under distress as Taylor was their only point of contacts with the people doing the AMAs and without her they couldn’t proceed. Other than disrupting activities, Taylor was also well-loved in the community and pretty much the reason why any of the AMAs took place and were a success. Read more »

Just less than a month after Facebook announced Lite, a lightweight Android app aimed at emerging markets, the company officially launched it in India and Philippines.

The app uses less data and hence works well even when your bandwidth is at a minimum, the social networking company claims. It is less than 1MB in size (430 KB to be precise), which makes it quick to download and load. Read more »

Facebook has released its latest employee diversity report, revealing that there has been little progress in the area since it reported the numbers last time.

As per the report, 91% of the company’s employees are white or Asian. These include 94% of the tech employees, 86% of the non-tech employees, and 94% of the senior leadership. Read more »

Following the lead of Facebook, its perpetual competitor in the social network space, Twitter has today announced it’s enabling autoplay for videos. This goes live today on iOS and the web, and it will come to Android soon through an update for Twitter’s app for Google’s platform.

This means exactly what you think it means. From now on, while scrolling through your timeline, videos will automatically start playing. This works with native videos, Vines, and animated GIFs. Read more »

Facebook has announced an update to the News Feed ranking algorithm that the company says will allow it to take into account the amount of time a user spends viewing a story.

“Just because someone didn’t like, comment or share a story in their News Feed doesn’t mean it wasn’t meaningful to them,” the company said. “There are times when, for example, people want to see information about a serious current event, but don’t necessarily want to like or comment on it.” Read more »

Hot on the heels of its Android app grabbing more than 1 billion downloads, Facebook Messenger has now passed 700 million monthly active users. The previous such milestone was reached in March, when Messenger had 600 million monthly active users. And before that, in November of last year, the app boasted 500 million monthly active users.

The information comes straight from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, who revealed the new figure at an investor meeting. The discrepancy in the numbers (compared to the 1 billion installs on Android alone) obviously comes from the fact that not all the people who installed Facebook Messenger are using it on a monthly basis. Read more »

Twitter, as we all know, places a 140-character limit on all tweets. The same limit also applies to Direct Messages (DMs). However, that was until now, as the company has announced that it’s removing the 140-character limit in DMs starting next month.

The limit will be raised to a whopping 10,000 characters, which is effectively unlimited given that it’s very rare for someone to send such a long DM. Read more »

Amid mounting concerns over slow user growth, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has decided to step down from his position effective July 1. He, however, will remain on the company’s Board of Directors.

Co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey will assume the role of interim CEO till Twitter finds a permanent replacement – the company has formed a search committee, and said it would consider both internal and external candidates. For those who aren’t aware, Dorsey also co-founded payments start-up Square. Read more »

Since the first time the website was introduced several years ago, Instagram has updated the design. The new design is extremely minimal, with a lot of white space and large, full-size images.

The new design gets rid of the grey textured background and the blue top bar, replacing it with a clean white everywhere. The top bar just has the Instagram logo, your account name and a logout button. Read more »

Twitter is rolling out a new feature that aims to make it easier to follow conversations that are displayed on the tweet page. The company says that the new feature will group conversations together and highlight some of the most interesting exchanges surrounding a given tweet right below it.

To decide which tweets need to be highlighted, several factors will be taken into account, like whether or not the original account has replied. Read more »

Facebook has started rolling out a new feature that allows you to send locations as messages using the company’s Messenger app. “Now you can choose to explicitly send a map of your location or another particular place as a separate message,” the company said.

To use the feature, just tap the More icon or the location pin present the bottom of the app’s window, and you can share your (or any) location with the one you’re chatting with. Read more »

According to a report in Re/code, Twitter is interested in acquiring Flipboard. The social network has reportedly been holding talks with Fipboard since the beginning of this year.

An all-stock deal is said to be valuing Flipboard in excess of $1 billion. Read more »

Instagram began sending out “Highlights” emails to its subscribers. The move is a bid by the now mature social network to keep its300 million users more involved.

The messages contain popular posts from the accounts one follows. Read more »