A few days ago, Facebook announced their new mobile app called Paper. Paper combines your regular Facebook feed along with news from different sources in a radical new design that is a complete departure from anything Facebook has ever made. The app is now available for download for free on the iPhone in the US.

Paper is that new Facebook app that you always wanted but it does more than just give you a new design. The developers have found a way to also incorporate news from different sources, similar to the Flipboard app. You can add categories you want to get posts from and you’ll get a curated list of content that fits the bill. Click on a post you want to read and it flips open like a newspaper. If you just want to go through your Facebook feed, you can do that as well. Read more »

Twitter has completely revamped its web interface to bring it closer to the look and feel of its iOS and Android applications. The new design comes with a cool new white navigation bar at the top, replacing the dark hue.

Twitter has retained all its navigational elements such as home, connect, discover and user profile in its new tweak, but the overall design of the micro-blogging site is a lot lighter now. Read more »

CEO of Branch, Josh Miller, has announced that the service has been bought out by Facebook. As part of the deal, Facebook will also acquire Potluck, a similar service. If you’re not familiar with Branch or Potluck, they’re link-sharing services that allow friends to share news stories and internet articles, and have conversations about said stories. This news-centric app’s intention was to move discussions away from Facebook and email and allow users an easier, more “feed-like” way to talk about the links they’re sharing.

The news doesn’t really come as much of a surprise, considering that Facebook has been moving more towards putting real news stories in your feeds along with photo albums of your best friend’s weird night in Bangkok photo album. Facebook is bringing on CEO Josh Miller to do just this, so he’ll be working for Zuckerberg in addition to being bought out. Read more »

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook is said to be selling some of his Facebook shares to raise about $2.31 billion. The founder of the popular social network will sell about 41.4 million ‘Class A’ shares and utilize the money to fund a tax bill.

Mark is allegedly buying 60 million ‘Class B’ shares of his company and that is when the tax bill is expected to arise. The sale of shares would mean that Zukerberg’s stake in Facebook will drop to 56.1% from 58.8%. Read more »

Facebook has introduced a new set of stickers for the Facebook Messenger service. These are all variations of the famous Facebook Like icon showing a thumbs up gesture, with the hand showing other gestures, including a much requested thumbs down or Dislike gesture that Facebook would probably never implement on their site. So you can’t yet Dislike a post but now you can at least send them a sticker on Messenger.

For those not aware of Facebook stickers (or are possibly embarrassed to admit), these are small static or animated images that you can insert in your chat. Read more »

Twitter has rolled out version 6.0 update for its iOS and Android mobile applications, which bring with it some big new changes. The most obvious one is the redesign on both versions, unique to their platform. The iPhone version gets a new white themed bar at the bottom unlike the black on the previous version. The ‘Connect’ tab has been replaced with ‘Notifications’ (essentially the same thing) and ‘Discover’ tab has been replaced by ‘Messages’.

Twitter is pushing their Activity and Discover section in a big way with the latest updates, that show you activity of the people you follow and other people on Twitter respectively. On the iPhone, you now swipe on your timeline to go to the new sections, indicated by the three dots at the top. Read more »

Google has released an update for the Google+ app on iOS that brings a useful new feature for those who take a lot of photos and also happen to use Google+. The latest update now allows you to upload full resolution images and videos to your account without any compression or resizing. This feature is only available to those running on iOS 7.

You can now also share your location with your friends. People can now see others sharing their location on a map and you can choose who is displayed on the map. This is similar to the Find My Friends app on iOS, but instead uses the vastly superior Google Maps. Read more »

Facebook has released an update to the Facebook Messenger app for iOS and Android that brings with it a complete overhaul of the UI. The design clearly looks like it was made for the new iOS 7 but carries over to the Android version as well.

At launch you’ll notice that the older dull gray and Facebook blue colors have been replaced by bright white and a brilliant blue combination. There are no more gradients and drop shadows anymore and the UI has a clean, flat UI that is consistent with the rest of iOS 7. Read more »

Facebook’s latest third quarter earnings report shows things are looking up for the social media giant after a rough entrance into public trading following its IPO last year.

The company’s heavy investment into mobile is beginning to pay off as mobile ad revenue has jumped to $656 million – a 76% increase over last quarter. Read more »

At yesterday’s Google event, the company announced a slew of new features for their Google+ social networking service, along with the Hangouts messaging service.

Google+ already had a pretty impressive photo sharing experience that is way ahead of what other services such as Facebook offer but now Google has made it even better. In the new update, the service automatically scans your photos and sorts them by categories such as sunsets, snow, etc. by identifying over a thousand objects within the images to make searching for your photos easier. Read more »

Something is rotten in the state of Facebook – posting a new status, writing on someone’s wall or using Facebook’s payment system have been out of order since earlier today. And what are people to do about it other than complain on Twitter?

Facebook’s developers page confirms that the payment system is down, has been since 4:50AM PDT. And it’s not the first time this month either, the same thing happened on October 5 and again on October 12. Read more »

Although Windows 8 has always had Facebook integrated in the OS Facebook has now released a proper app for those who are into that sort of thing. The app is being released on the same day as Windows 8.1 and is only compatible with the new version of Microsoft’s desktop operating system.

As you can see from the screenshot, the app looks similar to the web version of Facebook, but has a flat look to blend with the general UI design of Windows 8.1. It also supports Snap View so you can run it alongside other apps and with Windows 8.1 now improving the Snap View functionality by letting you adjust the size the apps take and having up to four apps on the screen simultaneously, this is going to come in handy. Read more »

The Instagram service has been free of cost to users ever since it launched three years ago on the iPhone. After it became immensely popular, the service was acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars last year, which signalled that there might be a change in the way the company made money. In this case, by starting to make money.

So Instagram has now announced how they will be making money. In the next couple of months, Instagram users in the US will start seeing promoted photos and videos from top brands on their timeline. These photos will appear on your timeline as if you were following that account. If you don’t like a particular photo or video, you can choose to hide it and report it. Read more »

Facebook’s personalized Graph Search has been updated to include statuses and posts by people sharing with you.

Once the feature rolls out to you, you’d be able to search for posts, status updates, photo captions, comments, check-ins, etc. which have been shared with you by friends or publicly shared by people you follow. Read more »

Instagram has released a new update for the iPhone version of their app, which has been redesigned to go with the new iOS 7 update that started rolling out last week.

The first thing you’ll notice in this update is that the design is now flatter with the gradients being replaced by solid uniform colors. Oddly, though, the camera interface still is the same, with the curved glossy shutter button, not to mention the icon, which is also the same and inconsistent with other iOS 7 icons. Read more »