Facebook will now help you nearby public WiFi networks!

According to a report by VentureBeat, Facebook is rolling out a new Public WiFi finder feature in their app. This feature will allow users to find nearby open WiFi to help conserve their precious mobile data in times of great need.

This news comes amidst the recent drive of Facebook in live videos feature, which consumes a great amount of data. It seems that this feature is intended to help users access features like those while making sure they do not burn through their monthly data plan. While talking to VentureBeat on this new feature, an unnamed Facebook spokesperson said:

“To help people stay connected to the friends and experiences they care about, we are rolling out a new feature that surfaces open Wi-Fi networks associated with nearby places.”

This feature was first spotted in wild by Next Web’s social media director, Matt Navarra, which suggests it is available for some users right now through the iOS app. To see access this feature, scroll through your menu options to find “Enable Find WiFi.” If it’s there, toggle the setting so it’s turned on, and the app will detect places nearby with an access point. It will not only show you the business offering free WiFi, but also how long it’ll take to get there and the network you can connect to. To make sure that you connect with the right network, Facebook will show you the exact name of the network.

Availability

There is no official word available for its global availability. However, considering the apparent maturity of the feature, it won’t be far-fetched to expect it to roll out to all users in coming weeks. We will let you know when it is pushed to users in Pakistan.

Skype for Android – Share Photos with Offline Contacts Now!

Many of you already use Skype for Android to share photos on the go – be it a beauty, a world wonder, or selfies. With yesterday release of Skype 5.2 for Android, we just updated photo sharing to make it an even simpler and more integrated experience.

Send photos to your contacts – online or offline

Gone are the days when you and your contacts need to be online at the same time for you to share photos using Skype. With this update, you can now send photos to your Skype contacts at a time that’s convenient for you, regardless of your contacts’ online status. When they are back on Skype, photos you shared show up beautifully inline in the chat history, whether or not you’re online – allowing you to easily carry on the conversation.

In addition to a better photo sharing experience, we’ve also made several other improvements recently, including:

• Picture in picture view is now supported on phones, too – letting you keep a video call going even when you navigate away to other applications
• Chats load faster, especially when opened from a notification
• Call quality improvements, especially in low bandwidth scenarios

You can download the update starting today in the Play Store.

Reference : Skype Official Blog

Facebook Graph Search Comes To Your Smartphone!

Facebook’s search technology is coming to mobile devices this week. (Facebook)

Facebook’s search is going mobile.

The social network said Monday it’s going to make its “Graph Search” technology available over the next week for the Facebook iPhone app, nearly two years after it debuted for desktop computers.

Users will be able to search inside posts of their friends, allowing them to easily find items like photos from a wedding or a special trip.

“You’ve told us the most important thing is being able to find posts you’ve seen before, and now you can,” Tom Stocky, vice president of search at Facebook, wrote in a blog post.

Search has become one of the most crucial technologies in Silicon Valley. Not only is it central to Google’s business, for example, but it’s also become a key technology in many services such as Apple’s Siri digital assistant, LinkedIn’s professional network, and Twitter’s messaging service. For Facebook, the inclusion of Graph Search gives users a way to interact with its service even more while on their mobile devices.

Facebook announced Graph Search in January 2013, calling it a key technology for the future and a potential new business over time. The technology allowed users to tap into the vast stores of information in Facebook’s databases with queries such as “College classmates who like Coldplay and X-Men movies and live in San Francisco.”

But the promise was grander than the delivery. In practice, Graph Search was complex. The way it worked didn’t always make sense, and it turns out that pulling together all the information about a user from Facebook’s many databases proved difficult, the company said a year after the launch in an interview with BloombergBusinessweek.

That hasn’t deterred the company from moving forward, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he believes search, as well as the company’s Instagram photo messaging service and WhatsApp messaging program, will reach 1 billion people within the next five years. “Once we get to that scale, then we think that they will start to become meaningful businesses in their own right,” he said in an October conference call.