Heena Sharma Blog

  Twitter has announced that users can use their security keys as only form of two-factor authentication (2FA) on both mobile and web, which is the most effective way to keep the Twitter account secure. In March, Twitter had said it would soon let people use a security key as their only two-factor authentication method. Security keys are small devices that act like keys to your house. Just as you need a physical key to unlock the door to your home, you need a security key to unlock access to your account. "Security keys offer the strongest protection for your Twitter account because they have built-in protections to ensure that even if a key is used on a phishing site, the information shared can't be used to access your account," Twitter said in a statement on Wednesday. Security keys can differentiate legitimate sites from malicious ones and block phishing attempts that SMS or verification codes would not. Read More

  Popular social media platform Snapchat has reached over 500 million monthly active users, with roughly 40 per cent of its community located outside of North America and Europe. In India, Snapchat has seen over 100 per cent (year-over-year) growth in daily active users (DAUs) in each of the last five quarters, the company announced during its third Snap Partner Summit virtually late on Thursday. Snap also announced new features, latest updates and Augmented Reality (AR) experiences, like new AR tools and camera experiences, the next generation of Spectacles and launched 'Story Studio' -- a new standalone app offering powerful editing tools to creators on mobile. "Built with Creators in mind, Story Studio will offer insights into trends happening on Snapchat. It is launching later this year on iOS and will be available for free," the company said in a statement. Read More

  After the seven-day limit, WhatsApp is now testing and developing a Disappearing Message feature with the 24-hour option for personal and group chats. According to WABetaInfo, a website that tracks WhatsApp in Beta, revealed that the disappearing message feature will be available in a future update. "WhatsApp won't replace the 7 days’ option, but 24 hours will be an addition," the report said on Sunday. WhatsApp will soon include the 24-hour option in the section where people are used to enable/disable disappearing messages for personal and group chats. When the user chooses "24 hours", all messages sent/received after this change expire after 24 hours, so they will disappear from the chat. "The feature is under development and it will be available in a future update for iOS, Android and Web/Desktop," the report mentioned. Read More

  Audio-chat app Clubhouse said on Monday it will launch a monetization feature for its creators on the platform and that it will not receive any payment from it. Starting Monday, all users will be able to send payments through the platform, Clubhouse said. The feature to receive payments will initially be available only to a small test group, and later rolled out to other customers. Users can send payment to Clubhouse creators who have the feature enabled, by tapping a 'Send Money' option. The audio-based social network company said a small card processing fee will be charged by its payment processing partner, Stripe. The San Francisco-based company, whose app lets people gather in audio chatrooms to discuss different topics, requires newcomers to be invited by existing users before they can join. The app saw its global user numbers soar after Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and Robin hood CEO Vlad Tenev held a surprise discussion on the platform. Read More

  Known to clone or lift ideas from its competitors to stay ahead in the game, Facebook is now reportedly working on to build its own social audio app like Clubhouse. According to a report in The New York Times, the social network has asked employees to create a similar product like Clubhouse. The product is "in its earliest stages of development" and the "project's code name could change". "We've been connecting people through audio and video technologies for many years and are always exploring new ways to improve that experience for people," A Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying in the report on Wednesday. The news comes after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined Clubhouse last week and participated in chat about the future of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Read More

  Facebook-owned Instagram is now working on new vertical feed for Stories, the way TikTok first used and Reels on Instagram has already cloned the feature. According to a TechCrunch report, navigating with vertical swipes up and down would make Stories experience more like Reels, recently launched by Facebook to compete with the Chinese short-video making app. Vertical swiping feels more natural than taps and horizontal flicks, the way we do on smartphones and other apps. The "Vertical Stories" feature on Instagram was spotted by Alessandro Paluzzi who shared the discovery on his Twitter account. "Now you can swipe up and down to browse stories". The feature is not live yet. Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday that the feature is being developed but is not available for the public at the moment. Read More

  China's ByteDance has decided to reduce the size of its India team and is unsure when the company will make a comeback in India, it said in an internal memo to employees on Wednesday. India has decided to retain its ban on video app TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps after reviewing responses from the companies on issues such as compliance and privacy, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.   The apps were banned amid rising tensions between India and China following a border clash between the two nations last year. "We initially hoped that this situation would be short-lived ... we find that has not been the case," ByteDance wrote in an internal memo to staff, seen by Reuters. Read More

  Chinese short-video making app TikTok has expanded a privacy feature where parents will have more options over what their children can see and restrict comments on their content. Parents will now be able to restrict who can comment on their kids' videos, who can view their account and who can see what videos they've liked. Parents will also be able to stop their kids from searching for videos, users, hashtags or sounds. TikTok already offers the ability for parents to turn off or limit direct messages, reports The Verge. The new options are all part of TikTok's Family Pairing feature. The update is a big step from TikTok. In February 2019, the company paid $5.7 million to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over alleged violations of a children's privacy law. Read More  

  Instagram users in select countries will now be able to search the platform using keywords and no hashtags are required. The Facebook-owned company said the keyword search feature will initially be available in English in six countries, including the UK, the US, Ireland and Canada. "The search is limited to general interest topics and keywords that are within Instagram's community guidelines," the company was quoted as saying in media reports on Tuesday. Instagram also announced to expand Guides to everyone -- to make it easier to find, curate and share the products, places and posts people love from their favourite accounts. The users can find Guides on Profile, and share them across Stories and in direct messages (DMs). Read More  

  WhatsApp is reportedly working on a new 'Expiring Media' feature that will let users send self-destructing media on the popular messaging app. The upcoming ' Expiring Media ' feature is an extension to another under-development feature called 'Expiring Messages'. WABetainfo, a website that tracks WhatsApp in Beta, has spotted Expiring Media as part of WhatsApp for Android's new beta version 2.20.201.1. This upcoming WhatsApp feature is similar to that found in Snapchat, which was later copied by Instagram. When this feature will be enabled, users will have an option to set expiration when they share media files, the report said. Those who will receive any "Expiring Media" can only view them for a single time and once they exit the chat, they will disappear without any trace unlike "This message was deleted" message when the sender deletes messages. Read More

Facebook-owned Instagram said on Wednesday it would begin testing in India its Reels feature as it seeks to replace TikTok, the wildly popular short video service the government banned more than a week ago along with 58 other Chinese apps. Reels, which comes to India after being tested in Brazil, Germany and France, offers a new way to create and share short videos on Instagram. Users can record and edit 15-second multi-clip videos with audio, effects and new creative tools on Reels. They can share the videos with their followers on their Instagram Feed and if they have a public account, make their 'reels' available to the wider Instagram community through the platform's Explore feature. Reels will start rolling out to users in India from 7:30 pm on Wednesday and will have content from a diverse set of public figures and creators, such as Ammy Virk, Gippy Grewal, Komal Pandey, Arjun Kanungo, Jahnavi Dasetty aka Mahathalli, Indrani Biswas aka Wondermunna, Kusha Kapil...

Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram has rolled out the pinned comment feature to help users maximise engagement. The new feature will help users to pin on the top important or favourite comments on their posts, said the company. "We're rolling out pinned comments everywhere. That means you can a pin a few comments to the top of your feed post and better manage the conversation," the company said in a tweet on Tuesday. Instagram started testing pinned comments in May alongside its comment filtering tools. One can pin up to three comments to the top of the post at a time, all of which will appear right underneath your photo with a "Pinned" label underneath it. Read More

Social app Chingari , a desi alternative to Chinese TikTok, on Friday said it has crossed 10 million downloads on Google Play Store and content creators are making a beeline to join the app. It is now among the top two free apps on Play Store for more than a week now. "Our retention numbers and the app's daily engagement time are also witnessing a solid increase. Our team is working round the clock to provide all our customers with a seamless experience," said Biswatma Nayak, Co-founder. Earlier, the app reached three million downloads in just 10 days and garnered about 500,000 downloads in just about 72 hours. Read More

Short-video sharing platform TikTok , owned by Chinese firm ByteDance , is facing a huge backlash in India after an internet war broke out between its influencers and YouTube content creators. The app's rating on Google Play Store reduced to 1.3 stars on May 20 from more than 4.5 stars only a few days earlier. Moreover, there has been a growing demand for a ban on the platform in India owing to alleged distribution of insensitive and hateful content on TikTok . Recently, the National Commission for Women (NCW) wrote to the video-sharing social networking service TikTok over a video in which one of its users allegedly glorified acid attack and crime against women. The video has been taken down since, and the user's account has been suspended. Read More

While the number of apps installed by smartphone users in India range from five to 207, the average number of installed apps on a phone is 51, said a new report on Wednesday. However, people do not use all the apps they install. Most of the people in India use just about 24 apps on their smartphones, according to the research from technology research consulting firm techARC. The findings of the " techARC DIGIT " report indicate that there are some users who go on installing apps without much of a thinking and understanding. Such extremely high installation of apps can not only drain the smartphones in several ways and also impact its performance, but can also expose such users to various vulnerabilities that could be acquired by the device through some apps. By category, the social media apps lead the usage with 76 per cent of the users using them on a daily basis. Read More Business Standard