AT LAST.
The pinch-to-zoom feature works with photos and videos in your profile, feed, and Explore.
It is currently available only on iOS, and will be available on Android "in the coming weeks," according to Instagram.
AinaAns / Via Twitter: @AinaAns
@ddeluciaa / Via Twitter: @ddeluciaa
Carrington Coleman Law Firm/Monica Latin
Robert and Michelle Duchouquette from Plano, Texas were sued by Prestigious Pets in Dallas after they wrote the one-star review. The company said the review violated a clause in its contracts which prohibits customers from publicly criticizing the business.
The Yelp review complained of poor communication from the company and a lack of clarity about prices — along with lackluster maintenance of the couple's fish bowl. “The one star is for potentially harming my fish,” Michelle Duchouquette wrote in its conclusion. “Otherwise it would be have been two stars.”
Prestigious Pets sought $200,000 to $1 million in damages in the suit, claiming the couple defamed it and violated a non-disparagement clause in its contract with them.
In response to the judge's dismissal of the case, a Prestigious Pets spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the company is considering appealing the ruling, and is "confident that Texas law supports enforcing their contract, including the non-disparagement clause."
The company said its claim is particularly strong "given the proof presented that Prestigious Pets never agreed to care for the fish, was not paid or hired to care for the fish, and the fish was never harmed."
The business has said in court documents that the Duchouquettes' "media campaign" around the lawsuit led to a "dramatic decrease in new business and the loss of current clients that has left Prestigious Pets a shell of its former success."
Yelp / Via yelp.com
"The burden is on the plaintiffs to establish, by clear and specific evidence, each essential element of each of their claims," the couple said in a court document. "They cannot do so."
The judge apparently agreed. District Court Judge Jim Jordan dismissed the allegations against the Duchouquettes and ordered Prestigious Pets to cover their attorneys’ fees.
The judge also said the couple was entitled to "recover sanctions against the plaintiffs sufficient to deter them from bringing similar actions" under the state's free speech codes.
In May, Yelp placed an alert on its page for Prestigious Pets, warning users the company may be issuing "questionable legal threats" against reviews. The consumer alert was the first of its kind issued by Yelp.
Paul Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen, who represented the Duchouquettes, told BuzzFeed News that the order is a useful step in efforts to protect consumers from being slapped with similar so-called gag clauses.
"The very fact that a non-disparagement clause was held unenforceable shows other consumers that they can stand for their rights," he said. "What consumer wants to hire a company that sues its customers and has a non-disparagement clause in its contract?"
"We are so grateful for the attorneys who have supported us through the case," she said. "It took lots of hours and many smart minds spending too much time talking about Gordy the betta fish. Thank goodness they did not lose sight of the real issue: the threats posed by non-disparagement clauses to our right to free speech.”
LINK: A Pet Sitting Business Sued These Customers For Posting A Negative Yelp Review
LINK: Yelp’s Warning: This Dentist Might Sue You For Posting A Negative Review
The Tile Slim is an ultra-thin tracker that can fit anywhere a credit card can.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Which jacket was I wearing yesterday? Are they in that one purse? How about the backpack? Did I leave them in my pants that are now IN THE DRYER? Noooo.
– Me, every morning.
There are a lot of useless gadgets on the market – Dash buttons for binders, $700 juicers, internet-connected laser pointers for cats, and the like – but Tile isn't one of them. It can find your stuff when memory fails you.
Bluetooth trackers, like Tile, are a pretty elegant tech solution for an everyday problem. They're small, typically no larger than a tin of lip balm. Almost every tracker has the same features (including Trackr, Chipolo, and, of course, Tile): the ability to ring the item from your phone, display the item's last known or current location on an app, reverse find a phone by pressing on the tracker itself, and tap into a network of the device's users to crowdsource your search when the tracker goes out of Bluetooth range.
I bought my Tile more than a year ago. Of the three trackers I considered, Tile had the most Facebook likes and therefore, perhaps, the most users ("millions," according to the company)?? Yeah. Idk. Those users, I figured, could come in handy when I lose them for good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But even on my own, Tile has come in handy more times than I'd prefer to admit. My boyfriend has been driven INSANE by the 90-decibel Tile chirp I activate every morning to find my door key.
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed
The company sent a review unit over, on loan, and I've been playing with it, and trying to lose my stuff ever since.
It's fundamentally the same product as the original Tile, but much slimmer and minus a key ring. There's an integrated button you can double tap to locate your phone, and it will also appear in the app with a map of its current or last known location. It has the same IP5 splash-proof rating and 100-foot Bluetooth LE range.
Tile
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed
Kelly Ellis is an software engineer at Medium. She's verified on Twitter and has roughly 11,000 followers. And for the past week or so, Ellis has been the subject of relentless targeted abusive tweets from @fredcarson915. Among the barrage of 70 tweets (all of which were posted to Medium by Ellis), @fredcarson9151 tells Ellis he wishes she would be raped and calls her a "psychotic man hating 'feminist'."
When Ellis reported the abuse, Twitter replied that its investigation found the alleged violent and abusive tweets did not violate Twitter's rules, which prohibit tweets involving violent threats, harassment, and hateful conduct. Twitter's rules explicitly state that one may not "threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease."
Anyhow, here are some tweets that Twitter does not believe rise to the level of violent, abusive, or hateful:
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Get your life under control.
Zoe Burnett / BuzzFeed
:cryingforever:
The app is being killed as a part of an acqui-hire by Microsoft, and folded into Outlook for mobile, which sounds like a deathbed but is actually my favorite email client for iOS. Here are some alternatives that aren't as good, but will be just fine until the next Sunrise comes along.
CBS / Via cbs.com
The Good 🔥 – Outlook is an email, calendar, and cloud storage app in one. You can easily manage multiple accounts, which makes it great for merging your personal and work lives.
Best of all, Outlook’s calendar already incorporates a lot of Sunrise features. The daily agenda and 3-day view look nearly identical. Email in the app is surprisingly good, too. Outlook sorts messages into two inboxes: Focused (for important stuff) and Other (for everything else).
The Bad 👎 – Because Outlook’s email and calendar views are side-by-side, you might get caught in an email vortex when all you want to do is look up where you’re supposed to be right now.
Also, activities on Outlook for mobile can’t be synced with the Outlook web app, so you’re shackled to your phone. Currently, there are no plans to revamp the web app or integrate the Sunrise experience. However, you *can* open the Outlook app and go to Settings > Help & Feedback > Suggest A Feature to give the team a lil’ nudge in the right direction.
Outlook
Over 60 million account details were stolen in 2012, and the list has been leaked.
Hackers obtained around 68 million email accounts at that time – and it was recently revealed that passwords were also at risk. The database was sent to Motherboard by the breach notification service Leakbase.
In a blog post, Dropbox wrote, "If you signed up for Dropbox prior to mid-2012 and haven’t changed your password since, you’ll be prompted to update it the next time you sign in."
The forced reset is a "purely preventative measure," according to the company.
Dropbox
A month after Instagram released its clone of Snapchat Stories, Snapchat's user numbers are holding steady, according to four third-party data providers.
The data providers — App Annie, Apptopia, Sensor Tower, and SurveyMonkey — did not find any meaningful decline in Snapchat's numbers in the weeks after the introduction of Instagram Stories. So for those who were quick to deem Instagram Stories a Snapchat killer, the early results suggest it may be wise to reconsider that label. It doesn't look like Instagram's number of users changed after it released Stories, either.
"About a month into the launch of Instagram's Stories feature, we are still not seeing a significant increase of time spent in the app versus Snapchat," Danielle Levitas, SVP of research at App Annie, told BuzzFeed News. "While there are several factors that may be contributing to this, the early stage of adoption by its user base is still ongoing."
Wes McCabe, at Sensor Tower, said the trend lines remain the same as before Instagram's introduction of Stories. Data from Apptopia showed no ill effects on Snapchat at all. And Snapchat usage among SurveyMonkey's panel of over 1 million US iOS and Android users also didn't flinch.
“Our data shows that Instagram Stories hasn't made any discernible impact on Snapchat. The core usage metrics haven’t budged for either app throughout August,” a SurveyMonkey spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
It's still early in the battle between the two prominent social apps, but the data reveals that Instagram won't be able to swiftly poach Snapchat's users by simply adding the same features. It's now clear that Snapchat's users are loyal. And if Instagram wants to convince its rival's 150 million daily users to port their activity over, it will need to be patient.
Snapchat declined to comment. An Instagram spokesman indicated Facebook will soon introduce even more features to the app: "We're thrilled to see how quickly Instagram Stories has caught on with the community," he said. "We’re working on some exciting new features for the coming weeks."
