Today’s topics include Facebook’s defense of its trending algorithm, Microsoft’s improvement of Edge browser plug-ins for Windows 10, SAP’s new Internet of things functionality and Apple’s investment in China’s latest ride-sharing company.
Facebook, in response to a report that editors manipulated its “trending” news sections by keeping out politically right-wing stories and inserting stories that weren’t actually trending, has released a 28-page document—its guidelines for the section.
The Trending Review Guidelines were released in a May 12 blog post by Justin Osofsky, Facebook vice president of global operations. Osofsky said, “Our goal has always been to deliver a valuable experience for the people who use our service.
“The guidelines demonstrate that we have a series of checks and balances in place to help surface the most important popular stories, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum. Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to discriminate against sources of any political origin, period.”
On May 9, Gizmodo reported that Facebook workers said they “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers” and that trends were determined by the editor on duty.
Members of Microsoft’s Windows Insider early access program can now test the new Windows Store-powered Edge extension model and expanded Bash functionality ahead of this summer’s highly anticipated Windows 10 Anniversary Update.
A new preview build includes a new method for installing Edge browser extensions. When Edge, Internet Explorer’s successor, shipped alongside Windows 10 last summer, add-on support was conspicuously lacking.
In March, Microsoft announced the first batch of Edge browser extensions, including Microsoft Translator, Mouse Gestures and Reddit Enhancement Suite.
At the time, the company said that future extensions would be made available in the Windows Store app marketplace, a move that the company claims will simplify the extension discovery and installation process as well as improve security.
SAP earlier this month launched its laboriously named HANA Cloud Platform for the Internet of Things. Now the company has revealed new capabilities and partnerships for its home-built platform where all roads lead to its in-memory HANA database.
SAP’s IoT data management product is a set of capabilities that extends what the HANA solid-state database can do in concert with its Vora software in order to specifically address the requirements of diverse IoT applications. SAP said it is partnering with Dell, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Siemens and Hitachi to bring more functionality to the table.
Apple unveiled a $1 billion investment in China’s DiDi Chuxing ride-sharing service, a competitor to Uber, just before Apple CEO Tim Cook heads to China for talks with leaders there.
The Apple investment is the largest received so far by DiDi as the company continues to create a data-driven ride-sharing platform in China, DiDi said in a May 12 announcement. Other investors include Tencent, China’s largest Internet portal, and Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.
DiDi is building a data-driven ride-sharing platform that it hopes will be used by hundreds of millions of Chinese drivers and passengers.