Leeky
Posts: 3,357 +116
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Facebook has been a hive of activity this week. The social network’s Messages app has been updated and now looks more like an email inbox, iOS users have been treated to a completely re-written Facebook app, and the FTC has green-lighted the pre-IPO acquisition of popular photo app Instagram.</p>
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The FTC cleared the <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/9494813/Facebooks-Instagram-deal-approved.html">$1 billion purchase</a> saying that the popular photo upload service has no revenues and as such, the merger would not create a monopoly. “We are pleased that the Federal Trade Commission has cleared the transaction after its careful and thorough review,” Facebook said.</p>
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<img alt="fri facebook " src="https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2012/2012-08-24-image-1.png" width="600" height="389" srcset="https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2012/2012-08-24-image-1-p_500.webp 500w, https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2012/2012-08-24-image-1-p.webp 600w" sizes="(min-width: 901px) 600px, (min-width: 651px) 78vw, 100vw"></p>
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Meanwhile, the changes made to Messages are in line with the company’s plans to make it a fully-fledged email client, and brought a host of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-improving-messages/10151032941658920">under the hood improvements</a>. The refreshed interface uses a new two-pane layout with all messages on the left, and the content of each one on the right pane.</p>
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Facebook also released a <a href="https://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2012/aug/24/facebook-iphone-app?newsfeed=true">completely re-written app</a> for iPhone and iPad users yesterday, moving away from HTML5 and returning to Objective-C, which should respond to commands twice as fast. “The three things we really focused on were opening the application, scrolling through the news feed and tapping into and viewing a photo. So we made all those things twice as fast,” Mick Johnson, a product manager at Facebook said.</p>
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If all that wasn’t enough, Peter Thiel of PayPal fame and one of Facebook’s earliest backers with a 10% stake in the company, dumped 80% of his shares once the lock-up ended. The move raised $395.8 million but led many to question why he sold his shares so quickly, adding to the already precarious stock price since its IPO.</p>
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Nevertheless, shares in Facebook rose slightly by 1.5% to $19.44 during trading on the Nasdaq stock market yesterday, down 49% from $38 apiece when the company first traded on May 17.</p><p><a rel='canonical' href='https://www.techspot.com/news/49903-facebook-re-writes-ios-app-revises-messages-cleared-for-instagram-deal.html' target='_blank'>Permalink to story.</a></p><p class='permalink'><a rel='canonical' href='https://www.techspot.com/news/49903-facebook-re-writes-ios-app-revises-messages-cleared-for-instagram-deal.html'>https://www.techspot.com/news/49903-facebook-re-writes-ios-app-revises-messages-cleared-for-instagram-deal.html</a></p>
