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Facebook kills some redundant ad units

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Facebook wants to make it less confusing for marketers to advertise on the social network, so it's killing some ad units and consolidating others, the company announced Thursday.

"What we want to do is take the guesswork out of the process," Fidji Simo, a product manager for ads, said during a press event at Facebook's headquarters. The company is rolling out several changes in the next couple of months to its 27 types of advertising, including the elimination of Facebook questions, online local offers, and the individual page posts ads.

The simplified … Read more

Facebook Home gets new dock for your favorite apps

Facebook hopes to quell some of the concerns around its Home software suite for Android with its first new feature, a dock designed to make it easier for users to access their favorite non-Facebook applications.

The social network released an update Thursday to Facebook for Android that simultaneously adds an application dock to Home. Now, Home users can customize the app launcher by dragging the apps they use the most to a favorites tray.

The tweak is an expected addition that is meant to fix one of the most obvious flaws of Facebook Home: the software package makes it too … Read more

Senator's wife on Facebook: Keep away from my man, strippers

It can't be easy being a handsome state senator's wife.

You've seen what happens to those who reach even higher office and you count the number of wives some of them have had.

The mathematical odds don't look so good.

So please offer an ululation of support for Heather McGill, wife of Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill, who has decided to get her retaliation in first.

Tired of predatory women's carnal desires directed at her husband, she has taken to Facebook to tell them that she's ready to shame them into oblivion.

As if … Read more

Israeli military to restrict soldiers' Facebook accounts

Fearing that enemy forces are gathering information on Israeli soldiers from social media, the Israel Defense Forces has decided to ban social network from some high-ranking soldiers and severely limit it for others.

The IDF is in the middle of drafting a "social networking code of ethics" that will ban the use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media for all highly classified units, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Other sensitive units, like pilots and intelligence officers, will be allowed to have social media accounts but won't be able to say they're soldiers or upload … Read more

How to get social with Pandora

Maybe I'm a creature of habit, but in spite of all the great new streaming-music services out there, I still find myself settling back into my love of Pandora. It's just a solid service that demands none of my attention and best of all, none of my money.

And while Pandora may be an old dog compared with the whelps of Spotify, Rdio, and Twitter Music, it actually has includes a number of ways to share your favorite music on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

To see how it's done, watch the video tutorial above. … Read more

Turkey tracks down Twitter provokers

Turkish authorities have detained 25 people accused of using social media to spread false information and provoke antigovernment riots, according to several reports.

Last week, protests erupted in Izmir, the third most populous city in Turkey, over the government's decision to replace Gezi Park, one of a few remaining green spaces in central Istanbul, in Taksim Square with a shopping mall. Demonstrations devolved into a broader critique of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's authoritarian regime and turned violent when police used tear gas and other tactics to break up protests.

Tuesday night, police brought in several people suspected … Read more

Facebook to retire Credits on September 12

Facebook said Wednesday that it will no longer support Facebook Credits, a virtual currency specific to the social network, as of September 12, 2013. Developers, instead, will need to migrate their applications to local currency payments using the company's just-released API.

The complete payments switch, a year in the making, is meant to help developers better price their virtual goods for international markets, as well as simplify the purchase process for buyers.

"Local currency payments give developers much more control over their pricing and payments," software engineer Yongyan Liú wrote in a blog post. With the … Read more

Facebook post about hungry child gets school bus driver fired

Let's role play.

You're a school bus driver at Haralson County Middle School in Georgia. A 6th-grader gets on your bus and complains he's hungry.

You ask him why he's hungry. The kid says he was 40 cents short on his lunch card, so he was denied food.

When this scenario played out for bus driver Johnny Cook, he took to his Facebook page to express his shock and offer to help any child who is short of lunch money.

However, as CBS Atlanta reports, the school wasn't too pleased with this expression of concern. … Read more

RNC picks Facebook engineer for first CTO

The Republican National Committee has hired Facebook engineering manager Andrew Barkett to serve as its first-ever chief technology officer.

The newly created role is meant to provide the party with much-needed expertise in the digital realm and help it develop relationships in the tech sector.

"I am confident that with Andy's experience and our continued efforts to build meaningful relationships with experts in Silicon Valley, we'll see the changes to this part of our operation that we all agree are both important and necessary to winning elections in the future," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in … Read more

Parents lack bandwidth to monitor kids' online activity, says study

When the world's most famous companies are run by boys who seem to have only slight familiarity with shaving, it's easy for grown-ups to give up.

Somehow, this newfangled digital world has created an entirely new species of human -- one that ultimately wants to eradicate all species that are currently thought of as human.

Who can even lift an eyebrow, therefore, at new research that suggests parents are largely clueless about their kids' activities on laptops, phones, Facebook, and all the other places to which kids choose to disappear?

A new study from McAfee, touchingly called Digital Deceptions, … Read more