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How to block someone on LinkedIn
Our step-by-step LinkedIn guide shows you how to quickly block someone who's annoying and abusive to get relief
If someone is relentlessly annoying you on LinkedIn, you can block them, as you would on other social media platforms. However, you might want to use more caution when doing so. LinkedIn differs from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other top social media networks. LinkedIn focuses on business networking rather than personal connections. You might be able to block a friend or family member and apologize if you later realize that was a mistake, but the same action could end a business relationship.
Facebook rebrands as Meta, hopes you'll forget how terrible it is
The company, not the social network
Facebook held its Connect 2021 keynote today, a company-wide conference originally dedicated to its Oculus-branded VR branch. In addition to announcing a whole slew of VR-focused products, Mark Zuckerberg finally revealed a previously-rumored rebrand to his business, changing its name to "Meta."
Facebook is testing one, Twitter has one, Telegram (kinda) has one, and even LinkedIn is working on one — every social media network that takes itself seriously has a Clubhouse clone these days. The hot audio-only discussion/conferencing platform has inspired many competitors to come up with their own alternatives, and now the latest to join the party is Reddit.
Pinterest may not be the hottest app in our tech bubble, but it looks like there's quite a big audience regularly returning to the network — about 442 million people every month, to be exact. These users will soon discover a familiar interface tweak that's currently popping up in apps left and right: A stories carousel on the home page. Pinterest calls its take on the original Snapchat feature Story Pins, and it's supposed to help Pinterest creators interact with their audience.
Google+ is dead, long live Currents (for G Suite users)
A fresh coat of paint for the demised social network + some new features
Last year, Google announced the beta release of Currents. You'd be forgiven for not having a clue what that is, as the company hasn't exactly advertised it since, but it's the enterprise replacement/successor for Google+, so us regular folks don't get to use it anyway. Still, Google has been working on the new business social network for a year now and deems it stable enough to migrate G Suite Google+ users over starting July 6, 2020, as the company announced in an email to administrators.
Social networks have proven to be breeding grounds for the spread of misinformation campaigns, especially in the months and weeks leading up to major elections. Over the last few years, in particular, the issues have been getting worse. With the 2020 US elections inching closer, Twitter has decided to introduce a new policy to combat these problems by labeling and removing deceptive and manipulated media on its platform starting March 5.
Vine was the internet phenomenon that proved that short, easily digestible video clips could be tremendously popular and spark creativity. However, the rigid six-second format had soon been adopted and loosened up by Instagram and later TikTok, and after Twitter purchased Vine, it vanished into obscurity. An unceremonious death followed in 2016. But Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann still believes in the format and has been working on a successor for a long time. After an extensive beta phase, this new product, Byte, is now official and stable on the Play Store.
All major social networks are financed by advertising and thus free to users who trade access to their data for cat videos and sometimes questionable news content. Wikipedia co-founder and internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales wants to change that. He is currently rolling out his donation-based "news focused social network" WT.Social to people interested in high-quality journalism and productive discussions.
Six years is a long time, especially in the technology world. When Google+ was launched on this day in 2011, the Nexus S was still pretty new, Google Reader was still around (RIP), and we were mourning the loss of Google Buzz. Here we are, six years later, and the site is still kicking - though perhaps to a lesser extent than Google initially hoped for.
Duolingo is one of the most popular apps on the Play Store, but oddly, its social features have been a bit on the light side up to now. The latest update to the language learning service aims to alleviate that with Duolingo Clubs. The feature is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: users (or "players" as Duolingo likes to call them) can congregate into social clubs to keep track of each other's use of the app and progress though the guided, game-style courses.
The CyanogenMod project is easily the biggest and most-used custom Android ROM out there. But a series of poor decisions has basically sunk the corporate spin-off Cyanogen Inc., and that failure is also sinking the tools that the original open-source project has built up. Some of the original CyanogenMod team announced earlier today that they'll continue their work for community-created Android device ROMs under a new banner, Lineage OS.
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Many happy returns, Google+, you are five today. Google's home-built social network was launched on June 28th, 2011, competing with the likes of Facebook and Twitter with a unique "circle" approach to contact management and deep integration with Google services. Many predicted it wouldn't last this long (rest in peace, Google Wave), but Google+ has proven surprisingly resilient.
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Nintendo is taking its sweet time in making its Miitomo app available to us US Americans. But the waiting, in so much as there has been waiting for a glorified Nintendo-only social network, is almost over. After a bit of exclusivity in Japan, the app is set to go live in the United States and "several other countries" on Thursday, March 31st. Want to know which other countries? So do we. Update: the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Canada.
You might think that the field is too crowded for people to make more social networks, and you would be wrong. Peach debuted at this year's CES as an iOS-only messaging app that sought to differentiate itself from the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world. Instead, it's more of an instant messenger. And now it's available for Android.
Google+ is going through changes. A drastic redesign hit the browser version of the social network a while back, and the developers continue to push out tweaks.
The rise of social networks has generally been a boon to people everywhere... and I'm going to keep believing that no matter how many times I have to point my relatives to a Snopes article. But there's no denying that it's also become more complicated. Facebook is trying out some new tools specifically aimed at making using the service easier, or at least more comfortable, following the end of a romantic relationship.
The time has come. Dear people who use Twitter as their instant messenger of choice, your direct messages are no longer limited to 140 characters. Twitter announced today that it has removed the restriction and will begin rolling out the change to both Android and iOS.
It's easy to hate on Instagram. It's not just that most of the photos have user-applied filters. The photo-centric social network has capped images at 640 by 640. Even if your phone can take a decent shot, it only gets scaled down when you share it with the world.
Love it or loathe it - and plenty of people seem to do both - it doesn't look like Google's most recent attempt at a social network is going anywhere soon. Today marks four years since Google+ was first introduced as an invite-only beta, after which it rapidly expanded with an Android app and hooks into nearly every Google web and mobile service. Google continues to update and refine Google+ on a regular basis.
When was the last time that you used the Circle sharing feature on Google+? Statistically, it's probably been a while... and you certainly haven't used it in the last few days. According to enthusiast site Google Plus Daily, the ability to share Circles of followed people and pages was quietly removed from Google's social network earlier this week. If you've never used Shared Circles, they were similar to public follow lists on Twitter.