LinkedIn Refresh Creates New Professional Communities for Business

A month after announcing the redesign of its Groups platform, LinkedIn unveiled Groups Experiences to build a shared space for professional communities.

LinkedIn Groups Relaunch

On its blog, LinkedIn said the new platform was built from the ground up after hearing how important Groups was for its users. The improvements will bring connectivity, communications, and collaboration tools the company has been developing front and center in the website and app.

The integration of these tools will give the 562 plus million users on LinkedIn more ways to find the resources they need and be part of groups they are interested in.

For small business owners, Groups offers a private space where likeminded individuals with similar industry affiliations can share experiences, new skill sets, developments and more. It is also a valuable resource for finding good candidates for businesses looking to make their next hire.

The New Group Experiences

One of the most requested feedbacks was to have more ways to carry out engaging conversations. Group administrators wanted better ways for their members to communicate and participate with each other.

Group members can now post different types of media such as videos and images to enrich their conversations. And when someone comments on your post, you will be notified so you can respond as soon as possible. The notification also applies anytime users request to join your group.

All of these features can be accessed on the LinkedIn Android and iOS app so you can respond no matter where you are. Group admins can message members, accept a request for joining, or delete posts which are not following group rules from their mobile device.

In addition to these features, LinkedIn said coming soon you will be able to navigate to your groups with less effort, keep the conversation going from your LinkedIn Feed, and discover new groups that match your interests easily.

According to the blog, there will be more features in the coming months including new moderation tools for admins.

The new LinkedIn Groups experience is being rolled out now. Groups will be migrated automatically to the new platform on desktop and mobile.

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50 Million Facebook Accounts Compromised, Is Your Business Page Safe?

The security breach which was discovered by Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) engineers on September 25 allowed the attackers to take direct control over user accounts; around 50 million of them to be exact.

The Latest Facebook Security Breach

In addition to the 50 million, Facebook also said there were another 40 million accounts which were potentially vulnerable. All said, the company logged out 90 million accounts to prevent further damage.

In a security update, Facebook admitted the attack was able to exploit the complex interaction of multiple issues in its code. This came about from a change the company made to its video uploading feature in July of 2017 affecting the “View As” feature.

Facebook said, “The attackers not only needed to find this vulnerability and use it to get an access token, they then had to pivot from that account to others to steal more tokens.”

This attack couldn’t have come at a worse time for Facebook. The company is trying to ratchet up its security before the upcoming mid-term elections while at the same time trying to recover from the Cambridge Analytica fiasco in which data from about 87 million users was shared with a political consulting agency.

The View As Feature

The View As feature allows users to see how a profile looks to other people.

The attackers were able to exploit three flaws or bugs in the “View As” feature. In the same security update, Pedro Canahuati, Vice President of Engineering, Security and Privacy, listed those flaws as follows:

1. View As incorrectly provided the opportunity to post a video.
2. A new version of the video uploader (the interface that would be presented as a result of the first bug), introduced in July 2017, incorrectly generated an access token that had the permissions of the Facebook mobile app.
3. When the video uploader appeared as part of View As, it generated the access token NOT for the viewer, but for the user the viewer was looking up.
4. Facebook said it has turned off the View As feature temporarily while it conducts a security review.

Tricking Facebook to Issue Access Tokens

With this vulnerability, the attackers were able to trick Facebook into issuing them access tokens. This gave them access to user accounts as if they were the user.

They also had access to services the user might’ve registered for using Facebook such as Airbnb, Spotify, Tinder or other apps and games.

Facebook has reset the access tokens of the 50 million accounts that were affected as well as the additional 40 million accounts that might’ve been vulnerable.

If your account was one of the 90 million affected by this incident, you will be prompted to re-login on Facebook and any linked accounts.

Who is Responsible?

In a conference call (PDF) Guy Rosen, Vice President of Product Management for Facebook said the company has notified law enforcement and is working with the FBI.

As to who is responsible, Rosen goes on to say it is hard to discover who was behind the attack, adding “We may never know.”

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Google Launches a Dedicated Street View App

Street View is the latest Google service to get the dedicated app treatment, launching today on both iOS and Google Play. With Google’s new app you can view 360-degree panoramas, which allow you to get a better look at an outdoor space, or tour the interior of a hotel or restaurant. If you find a location that doesn’t yet have its own panorama view, you can upload your own photos or panoramas right to Google Maps from the Street View app.

An Explore tab allows you to browse galleries of Street View collections and content contributed by others. You can search for and explore any location of your choice and see it from just about every point of view imaginable. If you happen to own a spherical camera, the new Street View app is compatible with models like the Ricoh Theta S and NCTech iris360.

You can use either of these cameras to shoot and upload your own panoramas to the app. Of course, you can also use the camera on your phone if you prefer, which is likely how the majority will end up uploading photos The Street View app is now available to download on both iPhone and Android devices. Editorial Credit: Shutterstock

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YouTube Launches YouTube Newswire, A Feed Dedicated to Eyewitness Video

As more people turn to eyewitness video to keep up with breaking news events as they happen, YouTube has launched a site to help people follow this kind of content more closely. In partnership with social news agency Storyful, YouTube has launched YouTube Newswire — a curated feed of newsworthy eyewitness videos of the day, vetted by Storyful’s editorial team and embeddable from the original sources.

YouTube Newswire will contain global and regional feeds containing the most relevant videos in different parts of the world. In addition, YouTube has introduced two new resources specifically for journalists: The First Draft Coalition and The WITNESS Media Lab. The First Draft Coalition is a new site with educational resources for verification and ethics training, tools, research, and case studies around the biggest news stories of the moment.

The First Draft Coalition is said to launch this fall. The WITNESS Media Lab is a new site focused on tackling pressing human rights issues by analyzing eyewitness video. This site will contain a series of in-depth projects focusing on human rights struggles from the eyewitness perspective of real people who live, witness, and experience them.

YouTube Newswire and the WITNESS Media Lab are live as of today, with the First Draft Coalition to follow in the coming months.

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Google Launches Google News Lab, A New Home on the Web for Reporters

Google announced the launch of a new site called Google News Lab, which is designed to be a home on the web for reporter resources.

With this initiative, Google explains that by working directly with journalists it hope to have a lasting effect on future media:

“That’s why we’ve created the News Lab, a new effort at Google to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media. Our mission is to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to help build the future of media.”

Google hopes to accomplish this lofty goal in three distinct ways:

Easy access to the tools journalists need

Providing Google data to journalists everywhere, and

Launching programs to take advantage of the opportunities that exist in today’s media industry

The tools which Google is referencing were actually rolled out in a series of announcements last week. They include YouTube Newswire, which also includes WITNESS Media Lab and The First Draft Collection, and the update to Google Trends.

All of the above mentioned tools will be linked to from the News Lab, which can be found at http://newslab.withgoogle.com.

Google has also forged new partnerships focused on re-imagining the future of news and information while empowering new voices in media. Currently, this includes partnerships with Matter, a media accelerator in San Francisco, and Hacks/Hackers, a global community group for developers and journalists.

The News Lab is not just US-based, it also includes teams in the UK, France, and Germany to start with. The overarching goal of this initiative is to keep the world more informed by having technologists and journalists work together.

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Facebook’s News Reader App, Paper, Launches Today on iOS in the US

Facebook Creative Labs have launched their first ever product, a curated visual news reader app called Paper. If you live in the US and own an iPhone, you can download it now from the App Store. Paper is already being lauded by the tech and mobile app community, receiving rave reviews and high praise for its design and user experience.

Most are saying its unlike anything Facebook has done before. What sets Paper apart from other news reader apps out there is its distraction-free, full screen design that completely immerses its users. Paper is made up of sections that you can customize yourself, pulling in stories from your News Feed and external sources including authoritative publications across the web. Each section in Paper uses a combination of human and machine curation.

The Paper algorithm curates stories, pictures and videos that have been posted publicly to Facebook, while human editors will throw in interesting content from lesser known sources. With Paper, Facebook wants to surprise and delight its users by showing them content they may have missed, or content from sources and authors they never would have sought out on their own. Another great feature of Paper is that it doesn’t completely separate you from the Facebook experience, it adds to it.

You can share content, or compose your own content to be shared on Facebook right from within Paper. You will also be able to access Facebook notifications and messages without having to leave the app. If you have had a chance to download and use Paper, what do you think of it so far? I really want to know because I’m an Android user living in Canada, so it might be a while before I get to use it myself. Let me know what I’m missing out on!

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