Facebook shuts down Creative Labs, apps

The initiative behind some of the company's most experimental apps has gone away, along with the apps it produced over the past year. Facebook says it will still encourage experimentation.

Facebook's Slingshot app missed its mark. So did Riff and Rooms.

The social-networking giant has quietly curtailed its Creative Labs, the startup-like initiative that encouraged its employees to design innovative and unusual mobile software. Among the first casualties: Slingshot, an ephemeral messaging service that competed with Snapchat, and Rooms, a group messaging service.

As of Monday, Slingshot, Rooms and Riff, an app that allowed users to create and share short videos based on a theme, have been pulled from app stores. The Menlo Park, California-based company has also removed the Web page for Creative Labs.

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the apps had been removed, noting they hadn't been updated in some time.

"Since their launches, we've incorporated elements of Slingshot, Riff and Rooms into the Facebook for iOS and Android apps," she added.

Facebook is famous for its mantra "Move fast and break things." The company decided some of these initiatives had, in fact, failed to gain traction and is shutting them down.

The move marks a turning point for Facebook's app ambitions as it focuses on other areas of innovation. It's still building artificial-intelligence technology, drones to beam Internet signals to far-flung parts of the world and virtual-reality goggles. The company has also been steadily adding features to its primary social-networking service, such as live streaming and 360-degree videos.

Creative Labs was a two-year experiment that often drew inspiration from Facebook's famous "hackathons," binge-coding sessions where developers work together over a day or so to create a prototype app or service.

One such app was Slingshot, which was conceived of two years ago by Joey Flynn and Rocky Smith, a designer and engineer respectively. Slingshot's team eventually grew to about 10 people.

Slingshot allowed users to take a photo or video and then send it to friends. Those people then responded with their own photos or videos.

Facebook signaled modest hopes for the Creative Labs apps from the start. The company told reporters it didn't expect its community of more than a billion people to sign up immediately, and Facebook didn't heavily promote them either.

"We're not going to fly a flag about it," Flynn said at the time about Slingshot's launch. "We want it to start with a small group." Today, Slingshot isn't available on Apple's App Store or the Google Play store, though Facebook said the service still works for people who already have the app.

Rooms had been overseen by Josh Miller, the former head of the social network Branch, which Facebook bought last year. Miller joined the White House as director of product in September.Rooms, which is being shut down on December 23, is a group-messaging service that brought a modern spin to the chat rooms that were popular in the early days of the Internet. Users could log in anonymously -- no Facebook account required -- and post videos, photos or text. People joined chat rooms through an invitation that contained a QR code, similar to the way people can follow one another on Snapchat's messaging service.

Facebook said it will still experiment with new apps, and support initiatives like its Paper newsfeed-reading app in addition to others like Instagram's Hyperlapse video and Layouts photo editor.

Twitter Adds Support for New Emojis, Including Racially Diverse Icons

Apple was the first to add over 150 new emoji characters with full support for Unicode 7.0 and 8.0emojis with its iOS 9.1 update. This was soon followed by Google which recently started rolling out Android 6.0.1 update for its devices adding new emoji characters.

Now, Twitter has quietly added the new emojis with full support for Unicode 7.0 and 8.0. First reportedby Emojipedia, Twitter will now show new emoji characters including the ones with skin tones.

Emojipedia also notes that Twitter, unlike other services, supported limited emoji characters on its desktop site as well as TweetDeck, the Twitter client app. The addition of new emoji characters will enable users to use various emojis. Apart from emojis, Twitter enables Hashflags only for some events and promotions.

To recall, the Unicode Version 8.0 specifications include new emoji characters including several faces, food, animals, middle-finger, unicorn, and vehicles as well. The Unicode 8.0 also added skin tones to emojis.

The company on Tuesday confirmed that it is currently testing a timeline format for its tweets. The new format will sort the tweets by relevance instead of in reverse chronological order.

Twitter's spokeswoman Liina Potter said in an emailed statement to Reuters said, "Yes, this is an experiment. We're continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter."

The micro-blogging website recently announced a couple of changes to its Web interface that claimed to deliver a "richer photo experience" to users. The micro-blogging website will now show uncropped images in single-photo and multi-photo tweets.

The Easy Ways to Download Facebook Videos on Android

If you have an Android phone and an active user of Facebook, you must have wondered about the ways to download Facebook videos that appears on your timeline so that you can watch it over and over again without needing an internet connection.

Although, Facebook does not offer a direct link for you to download a video, but you can download the Facebook videos on your Android phone using a third-party app calledMyVideoDownloader, which is available for free on Google play store.

MyVideoDownloader for Facebook is the leading app to download videos from your Facebook to your Android device. It is very easy to use. With MyVideoDownloader, you can download any kind of videos from Facebook. Videos like tagged, shared and uploaded by you or your friends can be downloaded using this app. It is also allows you to download videos from the pages and groups you liked.

How to Use MyVideoDownloader for Facebook

• Once installed, launch the app and log in to your Facebook account.
• Swipe in to the right to access the menu. In the menu, select ‘News Feed’ to search for the video you want to download.

• Once you have found a video you like, tap on the little tick icon beside the video you would like to download, and hit the download icon located on the top-right corner of the screen.

• Your downloaded video will be saved to you phone’s SD card by default, but you can choose to save videos to your phone SD card from the Setting’s menu.