Facebook has recently announced a number of updates to Trending, a feature that shows topics currently popular on the platform. Users in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and India have been able to see Facebook trends since 2014. On the Web, they appear in the top right corner, and on mobile, the trending topics…

Paul Jun destroyed a wedding. He brought together a gang of friends, waited for the right moment then charged into the ceremony and began smashing things up… and killing the guests. The wedding took place on World of Warcraft between two players who had met and matched up in real life, and Paul was engaging…

Look around your neighborhood. You’ll probably find people a lot like yourself: similar income, similar education levels, similar outlook, similar views.  It’s what journalist Bill Bishop called The Big Sort, the tendency to choose to live among people similar to ourselves. It’s one of the factors that has led to America’s polarization. When we meet…

Imagine that you’re on your way out of your therapist’s office. The elevator opens and the person waiting by the door gives you a double-look. You’ve never seen them before. You don’t know them. But they know your name, who you work for, what school you went to, the details of your recent break-up, your…

It’s hard to believe now, but back in the early days of the Web, when Amazon was still a bookshop and Mark Zuckerberg just another geeky Harvard student, websites didn’t have comments sections.

Remember MySpace? It used to be the king of social media, the platform that other social media platforms wanted to be.

Chances to beat Zuckerberg at his own game don’t come around too often but owners of private social networks have a glorious opportunity right now.

There’s a wide variety of reasons why people might want to start their own social network; privacy is a dominant one. Whatever you’re interested in keeping safe, from your children to data about how you use the internet, smaller social networks can be a very appealing option. Here’s three popular private social networks, to show…

Google’s autocomplete tool is a great way to find out what people want to know about certain topics. It completes your words and sentences, based on what it thinks you’re going to type – and it makes these assumptions based on what other people around the world are searching on Google, and how frequently they’re…