Category: social network

Exclusive: Snapchat Hackers Friend 4 Million Users [And show their work to the CEO of Snapchat]

Young hackers Ash Bhat and Ankit Ranjan just hacked into Snapchat, and friended 4 million users. After getting their project up and running, they showed it to Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat. We talked to Ranjan, who gave us the whole story. According to Ranjan, Bhat came into the HackTech hackathon at Caltech thinking “I want to piss off a company”, and because of the...

air over time graph google trends

Facebook Engineer Mocks Princeton Study

Recently, Princeton published a controversial study claiming the imminent demise of Facebook. In response, Mike Devlin, a Princeton data scientist, wrote a scathing and sarcastic criticism of Princeton’s research methods. Rather than address the Princeton study directly, Devlin applied the Princeton logic to Princeton’s own Google trends data (the data they used to predict facebook engagement), and predicted mockingly “Princeton will have only half...

Exclusive: Mark Cuban Talks Snapchat Acquisition Offer

For reasons I’ll explain later, I found Snapchat’s actions this week unfathomable, so I went seeking advice from the most expert man out there on the subject of acquisitions: Mr. Mark Cuban (Shark Tank, Broadcast.com). I’m on a role with exclusives this week, although this one’s pretty succinct. As many of you may know, Mark Cuban’s fortune comes from a site called Broadcast.com (an...

This is What 1 Billion Friends Looks Like On a Map [Photo]

Have you ever wondered what billions of connections, mapped out looks like. Mark Zuckerberg today released a map of the world, represented in friend connections on Facebook. The more friends you have in your area, the darker it is. The map also links each friend, creating an almost-magical view of the world. A few Things To Notice First of all, this map makes clear...

quicki game interface

How Well Do You Really Know Your Facebook Friends? This App Calls Your Bluff

The definition of ‘friends’ has morphed in the online era; some say it’s gone from ‘individuals with mutual affection’, to “people I think I saw or met once, somewhere”. Teen developer Ash Bhat’s new game, Quicki, tests your friendship and your memory, by seeing if you can connect names with the faces of your facebook friends. Gameplay: Basically, after connecting your facebook account to...