Facebook turning into a mall with stores inside pages
Tech Industry
Facebook is turning into a mobile mall.
I'm Bridget Carey and this is your CNet update.
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In Facebook's never-ending Never-ending quest to swallow up the Internet, it now wants to become a main shopping page for retail stores.
You've heard of Facebook testing a buy button on advertises, but this latest test is taking things to a whole new level.
Turning a store's Facebook page into a full online shop.
First reported by Buzzfeed, this mockup photo shows what this page could look like.
But these Facebook storefronts are in a limited test right now, so you may not see it.
But Facebook isn't the first here, it's following a trend of other social media sites like Pinterest.
Instagram and Twitter that are also building virtual retail shops inside of their networks.
In other news, the sometimes controversial anonymous network Yik Yak isn't following the shopping trend.
Rather, it's adding photos.
But everything on On Yik Yak is anonymous.
So to keep it that way people will not be able to post photos of their faces.
Photos have to go through a moderator approval before their published.
Which also prevents people from posting anything nasty or illegal.
If you've never heard of Yik Yak, it's a location based message board app where you can see message from everyone within a mile of your location.
But you don't see any names.
And it's that system that has made it popular with college campuses, where people can post about their interests, invite people to events or even alert people of something urgent going on nearby All without identification.
But the anonymous nature means that you'll find lots of adult language, so consider yourself warned.
Moving on to gadget news.
Misfit Activity Trackers have all dropped in price, and there's a new, cheap $20 tracker added to the family.
With Misfit, you really have too many models.
There's the Shine, which is a more upscale design of brushed metal.
That's now $70.
And there's the Flash.
It does the same things, but it's a plastic design.
Now sold for $30.
If you don't care about the wristband, and you wanna just use it as a clip-on.
There is now the Flash Link.
For 20 dollars, also plastic.
An what's cool about both plastic flash models is that they do more then just track activity, they are clicker buttons that can be programmed as a remote for different things.
Click to take a photo with your smart phone camera for a cool selfie, or Use it as a clicker in a media presentation to move to the next slide or click to change songs as a music remote.
And looking ahead, Motorola is teasing it'll have some new phones to show in an event later this month.
In the invitation it plays off the XOXO hugs and kisses but It looks like it's XGX possibly hinting at new versions of the Moto X and Moto G smartphones.
That's it for this tech news update, there's always more at cnet.com.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
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