Facebook cutting fluff out of news feeds
Facebook cutting fluff out of news feeds
2:47

Facebook cutting fluff out of news feeds

Culture
Facebook wants you to care more about the news and there's new tech for tracking Santa. I am Bridget Carey and this is your CNET Update. Facebook is hoping to raise the quality of post on your news feed by showing you more links to news articles and fewer mean images and click bait junk articles. Facebook wants you to engage more with post from high quality websites, so it may suggest more news stories to read on a similar subject. And if you feel like you keep seeing the same stuff over and over again, that's because Facebook is resurfacing stories that keep getting new comments. If smart glasses are on your holiday wish list but you can't get Google Glass, the company Vizix is selling its version of a computerized headset for $1,000. It's the M100 Smart Glasses and they're available for pre-order with a ship date of two to four weeks. It has a small screen that sits near your eye and it also has a 5- megapixel camera. It's powered by Android and features WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a speaker for your ear and a microphone. It can link to a phone with pre-installed apps. If it sounds a little too geeky for you, well, the company says it's targeting this to the professional market like say, people who need to do inventory quickly in a stockroom and they could just take photos and scan barcodes with the headpiece camera. Apple just paid $200 million to buy a company called Topsy, which sorts through data on Twitter. TapSee is the go-to company for tracking Twitter conversation trends during big events, like for example the Super Bowl. So, what can Apple do with the power of Topsy? Perhaps it can help Apple sell more songs in iTunes when it detects an artist that's trending on Twitter, or maybe Apple just wants to use the engineering team to quickly detect trends in its app store. Tracking Santa this year just got a little more touchscreen friendly. Thanks to Microsoft for the second year in a row, the Santa Tracking Team at NORAD partnered with Microsoft and the company gave the website noradsanta.org a redesign, so it works best on Internet Explorer 11 and it lets you spin a 3D globe with your finger if you're using a Windows 8 touchscreen tablet or laptop. The website has plenty of games and activities to keep you busy up until Christmas. Bing Maps will track Santa's journey and this year, you can contact the NORAD Santa Tracking Command Center with Skype, but you could still dial the number from a telephone if you want. And there's a Santa Tracking app for Windows that has a life tile to see Santa's progress on Christmas eve from your start screen. That's your tech news update but you could find more details at CNET.com/update. From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.

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