Facebook thinks twice about splitting news feed
Facebook has done an aboutface.
Recently, the social media site announced it would split its news feed in two. There would be the traditional one aimed more at communicating with friends and family. The second feed, the Explore feed, would handle news, product posts, organization news and other posts.
After testing the new setup in six countries, Facebook determined that customers did not cotton to it.
“People don’t want two separate feeds,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, wrote in a blog post. “In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them connect more with friends and family.”
Publishers complained about being relegated to a secondary position and said the change promoted fake news by preventing journalists from posting to debunk stories, The New York Times reported. The U.S. was not among the test countries, and Facebook did not say when or if the feed split would end here. When TechMan checked last, he still had the Explore feed.
Fuhgettaboutit. Google says it has received 655,429 requests to remove 2.4 million URLs from its search results, of which it granted the removal of almost half. A European court ordered establishing the “right to be forgotten,” the right of people to ask search engines to remove results with their
name in it for good cause. No such provision exists in the U.S.
Search results seen outside of Europe are not affected. Google says it uses “geolocation signals to restrict access to the URL from the country of the requester,” including all of its European Union country search engines.
According to a new study, your nose looks 30 percent bigger if you take selfies with the phone close to your face. The closeness of the camera distorts the size of your nose. In 2017, 55 percent of facial plastic surgeons reported seeing patients who want to look better in selfies, according to the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. That marked an increase of 13 percent from the prior year.
What a schnoz. Print the truth.
TechMan has been at war recently with a printer that won’t print. He has run diagnostics and print-head cleaning, installed and uninstalled, and the machine would still print only color. Yet the printer software said there was plenty of black ink. Printers have two purposes. One is to print and the other is to get you to buy really expensive ink. Usually a printer tells you it’s low on ink well before it is necessary to replace the cartridge. Could this printer be lying in reverse? I finally switched out the black cartridge. Voila, printing. Never trust a printer.
Repairing their image.
I wrote recently about states considering Right to Repair bills that would force manufacturers to make available parts, manuals and diagnostic equipment to allow users to repair their own products. The industry association representing farm equipment manufacturers has put out a statement saying it will make these things available through purchase or lease from dealers for equipment put into the field after 2021.
An attempt to cut off legislation? Maybe, but a step in the right direction.