The photo collage editor Layout by Instagram is now available for Android devices. The application was a available only for iOS since its launch in late March.

Layout for Android has the same design as its iOS counterpart and lets you combine multiple photos into a single image. Read more »

A few weeks after it was revealed that Facebook’s Internet.org has benefited over 800 million people in nine countries, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the service, which was recently launched in the African country of Malawi, is now available to over 1 billion people around the world.

“Giving people free access is the right thing to do,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “We will keep connecting more people and more countries, and we won’t stop until every person in the world can connect to the internet.” Read more »

From weird images to latest breaking news, reddit front page has quickly turned into a window to a large number of user-shared content. Unlike many other community-drived websites, reddit accommodates a myriad variety of popular to niche communities and labelled them as subreddits.

Alex Ohanian, co-founder of reddit, has now announced the new reddit Original Video site to drive its original content plan at the on-going TechCrunch Disrupt conference. With Original Video, reddit plans to transform its Ask Me Anything subreddit to video style and give more control over it. Read more »

You might start seeing content from major publishers directly in your Facebook feed as soon as this month. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the company is currently in talks with publishers, including BuzzFeed, the New York Times, and National Geographic, on Instant Articles – a feature that will bring full news stories and videos straight to a user’s News Feed.

As per the report, the world’s largest social network is wooing publishers with a revenue model that will allow them to keep all of the revenue from ads they themselves sell, and a 70% cut from ads Facebook sells for them. Read more »

Secret, the anonymous social network, that exploded into popularity shortly after it launched, is shutting down after a 16 months of existence. While the news has been rumored for a while now, the company CEO David Byttow confirmed it yesterday on his blog.

In case you haven’t heard of Secret, it was a social networking service that allowed users to post completely anonymously. You could only see posts from your friends and maybe their friends but you would never know for sure who was it was behind the posts. Read more »

Twitter has introduced a new feature which the company claims allows you to catch up with the stuff that is most relevant to you. Dubbed Highlights, the feature offers a twice-daily digest of the best Tweets, which are delivered to you via push notification.

“While your home timeline is a great place to browse through and engage with Tweets, we know it can be challenging to find the time to get through everything,” the microblogging company said in a blog post. Read more »

Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, which aims to bring affordable Internet to the 5 billion people in the world who otherwise can’t access it, has already benefited 800 million people in nine countries, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“We’ve now made free basic Internet services available to more than 800 million people in nine countries, including just in this quarter, launching in India, Colombia, Ghana, Guatemala, and the Philippines,” Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s Q1 earnings call, adding that over 7 million people, who weren’t connected to the Internet before, now get online using Internet.org. “And this year, we expect to connect even more people,” he said. Read more »

Twitter has made changes to its direct message (DM) feature, allowing you to receive private messages from other users, even if you don’t follow them. The feature is available in the form of a new setting, which is turned off by default.

“Previously, if you wanted to send a Direct Message to the ice cream shop down the street about how much you love their salted caramel flavor, you’d have to ask them to follow you first,” the microblogging company said in a blog post. “With today’s changes, the ice cream shop can opt to receive Direct Messages from anyone; so you can privately send your appreciation for the salted caramel without any barriers.” Read more »

Facebook has announced that it will be retiring its Like Box plugin in June this year. “With the release of Graph API v2.3, the Like Box plugin is deprecated and will stop working on June 23rd 2015,” the company said in a post on its page for developers

The world’s largest social network is recommending you to use the new Page Plugin instead, which according to the company enables users to embed a simple feed of content from a Page into their websites (see image above). Read more »

Looks like Facebook is staring at fresh trouble in Europe, as data protection authorities there have launched a joint probe into the way the company handles privacy.

“There is concerted collective action between five European authorities, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain,” said head of France’s CNIL privacy watchdog Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, adding that the project is being coordinated by the Netherlands. She revealed that watchdogs are also likely to look into the sharing of data between different apps such as Instagram or Whatsapp, both of which are owned by Facebook. Read more »

Facebook has launched a standalone website for its Messenger service. This is already accessible at Messenger.com, where you can go and use only that functionality from Facebook’s main site. The company is adamant that this doesn’t mean Messenger will ever go away from Facebook.com.

However, Messenger was once part of the Facebook apps for mobile – but then it got pulled out, thus forcing people to install the standalone Messenger app alongside the main one. So, in the future, there’s still a slim chance we’ll see something like that happen on the Web too. Read more »

If you use Twitter, you’d have noticed that the ‘quote’ tweet button is entirely useless. It adds the entire tweet of the person in your tweet with their handle and quotation marks, which often leaves no space to add your own comment to it, in which case you’d rather just use the retweet button.

A better way to quote someone then was to add a link to their tweet with your comment, which is precisely how the new quote button works now. It lets you type your comment with the URL of the quoted tweet automatically added to the tweet. The URL cuts into some of the 140 characters but it’s not as bad as having the entire contents of the tweet using up the space. Read more »

Facebook’s Creative Labs department has come up with a new app for iOS and Android, called Riff. Riff lets you create videos that your friends can add to and contribute to videos created by your friends.

With Riff, you can make short videos that you can share with your friends. By default the videos are only visible within the app but you can also choose to post it on Facebook so it appears on your timeline. If someone wants to add to your video, they have to hit the + button on your video within the app, and their clip then gets added after yours. You can do the same to your friends’ videos. Read more »

New parents love checking the comments and number of Likes on the photos of their infants on Facebook. However, it is not easy to visit those comments when those photos are spread over different albums and at a different time frame.

That’s why Facebook is rolling out new Scrapbook feature for the parents to organize all the baby photos in one place. The Scrapbook can be a private album or available to friends. Read more »

Facebook tracks the Web movements of all its European visitors, including people who are logged out, have opted out of the tracking option, as well as even those without an account, according to a report compiled by the Belgian Privacy Commission.

“When a logged-in Facebook user visits a site with Facebook social plug-ins, Facebook receives the Facebook ID and browser ID, along with the URL of the page being visited,” the report says. “[And] when a Facebook user explicitly logs out, Facebook keeps uniquely identifying … cookies in the browser, which are then used to track logged-out users across the web.” Read more »