This is your chance to ask Mark Zuckerberg anything

Mark Zuckerberg is prepared to take your questions

The massively wealthy, Mandarin-speaking Facebook founder will be hosting the social network's first public Q&A next Thursday on Nov. 6 at 2 p.m. PT (5 p.m. ET)

See also: 8 Brutally Honest Facebook Notifications That Need to Exist Now

You can already submit questions to Zuck by commenting on his announcement post. If you're too shy to ask something yourself, there's the option to "vote" for what questions get answered by liking comments.

The Q&A will last an hour, but considering there are already almost 5,000 comments on the post, there's no way he'll get to them all. Read more...

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5 top social media campaigns of 2014

When was the last time a social media campaign made you really feel something, whether it was happiness, hope or fear?

Below are five of the most successful social media campaigns of 2014, each of which was able to tap into genuine emotion to make a lasting impact on consumers.

Each of the below will be featured at this year’s Mashies Award Ceremony, where we’ll be revealing the year’s most outstanding examples of digital media from categories including Best Real-Time Marketing, Best Branded App and many more.

The Mashies will be held at Gotham Hall in New York City on Nov. 4, so make sure to get your tickets before they sell out. Read more...

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Chelsea Handler calls Instagram sexist for taking down her topless photo

Facebook is now available through Tor for ramped-up privacy

The "deep web" is not only home to shady online drug bazaars where you can exchange bitcoins for drugs, but also portals where whistleblowers can safely pass sensitive documents to journalists.

Now, it's also also home to Facebook.

See also: How to See When Someone Unfriends You on Facebook

The social network announced on Friday that it is now hosted directly on the Tor network to allow for an even more secure and private way to connect to Facebook.

People using Tor, software that allows for safe and anonymous web browsing, can now connect directly to Facebook using its new onion address (http://bitly.com/107ZWT5), also known as a hidden service. Read more...

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If you haven't noticed, Facebook's News Feed is 50% faster on iOS

You might have noticed that your Facebook News Feed is faster than it used to be on your iPhone or iPad. You're not crazy.

Facebook has made the News Feed operate 50% faster than the previous version in the iOS app, according to the company.

See also: 8 Brutally Honest Facebook Notifications That Need to Exist Now

About two years ago, Facebook switched from HTML5 to native iOS code to make the app perform as smoothly as possible. But the developers noticed something strange: Each time the app updated, it would take longer for the News Feed to load. And gradually, users started noticing, too.

"As we added more and more features to the app, every part of the app got slower," Adam Ernst, a software engineer at Facebook's New York office, told Mashable. Read more...

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Photo challenge: Bring out your dark side

For this week's Mashable Photo Challenge, bring out your dark side. Explore the outdoors after sunset, look for shadows on dark pavement and entertain your superstitions

See also: These Vintage Halloween Costumes Will Scare the Sheet Out of You

Your submissions can be Halloween-related — orange and black, spirits and haunted things — but they certainly don't have to be. You're free to experiment with shadows, still life, and low light settings in basements and warehouses. Take advantage of late dusk and early dawn. We want to see a variety of raw images, heavily edited shots and even film photographs with vintage effects. Read more...

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Facebook loses $24,420 a minute during outages

At 6:52 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 28, Facebook went down. (It began working again at 7:27 p.m.) This is the third such outage in the last several months, and it happens to coincide with the company's announcement of impressive summer earnings.

The close proximity of outage and earnings makes some uncomfortable math possible.

SEE ALSO: Facebook and Google own the future of advertising — in two charts

In the third quarter, Facebook posted revenue of $3.2 billion. The third quarter lasts 91 days, from July 1 to Sept. 30. This amounts to:

• 
  

  $35,164,835 per day

  
  


• 
  

  $1,465,201 per hour

  
  


• 
  

  $24,420 per minute

  
  

If we consider "revenue per minute" as a benchmark for potential losses, Facebook took a bit of a hit this evening. Their last outage, back in August, lasted for 19 minutes and lost them $426,607 (based on second-quarter revenue.) Using the same hypothetical math, this outage cost them a bit more — their third quarter was much more profitable, after all. Though it was down for just 35 minutes, Facebook lost $732,600 in revenue. Read more...

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College students trust Snapchat despite hack, study says

Snapchat may have security vulnerabilities but that's not deterring one of the app's biggest demographics: college students.

A new study found that most students still trust the service and haven't changed their use of the app since the hack, that resulted in nearly 100,000 private user photos and videos being published online.

See also: Ghost in the Shell: The Snapchat Privacy Illusion

The study was conducted by Sumpto, a marketing firm that helps connect brands with college students. The company polled more than 1,800 undergraduate students from around the country about their use of Snapchat following the hack of a third-party Snapchat apps that resulted in the thousands of leaked photos. Read more...

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Channel your inner spook for our Halloween Vine challenge

In the eerie spirit of Halloween, we brought on a true mastermind of spooky art, Jennifer Messmore, to guest-host our Vine challenge.

We want to see moving candles, spine-chilling spirits, terrifying tales and other unsettling scenarios in your videos. Act out classic horror films or animate something like the Ghoulies in stop-motion. Shoot in darkness and show us flashes of red and orange. The scarier, the better.

Messmore, a Las Vegas native, is an artist of all trades. In her spare time she paints, draws, makes jewelry, refurbishes dolls and, of course, creates Vines.

She owes her "Vine addiction" to her sister (Big Red on Vine), who has been active on the platform since its early days. "What interested me most about Vine initially was the six-second loop," Messmore said. "Eventually I fell in love with the community. I’m overwhelmed by the incredibly talented, creative, and amazingly kind people I’ve met there." Read more...

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Twitter's executive shakeup continues with 2 more resignations

In yet another high level shakeup at Twitter, two more executives are reportedly leaving the company.

Jeremy Gordon, Twitter's VP of engineering and Adam Kinney, who heads up analytics, are stepping down from Twitter's engineering team, the two announced Wednesday.

See also: It's More Than Just Ali Rowghani: A Look at Who's Left Twitter

Gordon, who came to Twitter in 2012 after the company acquired his startup, was promoted to VP of engineering earlier this year. He announced his resignation on Twitter, thanking CEO Dick Costolo, but did not provide a reason for his departure.

It's been an amazing two years @twitter. Thank you so much to @dickc and @aroetter for believing in me but it's time for the next adventure!

— Jeremy Gordon (@JeremySF) October 29, 2014 Read more...

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15 Vines that show an unexpected turn of events

Many award-winning films lend their greatness to twist endings. Stories that are too predictable are often less interesting, so a good surprise really does the trick

Mashable, in collaboration with Unpopular Now, hosted a Vine challenge themed around unexpected endings. We asked you to wow us with a creative twist in your video.

See also: 12 Vines That Show the Artistic Value of a Glitch

"Trying to establish a scenario that has a surprise ending in six seconds is not easy," Unpopular Now CEO and Creative Director Peter Heacock said. "However, those that were up for the challenge made some great work." Read more...

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Facebook Makes It Easier to Share Photos 'In the Moment'

Facebook rolled out an update to its app on Monday that adds a new way to quickly organize and post small batches of photos from your smartphone.

Now, when users upload multiple photos from its iPhone or Android app, the app generates a quick preview of how the photos will be displayed. Users can then rearrange the order in which the images appear by holding down on a photo and dragging it to a new position.

See also: 11 Times Everyone on Facebook Changed Their Profile Pictures

You can select up to 30 photos at once; tags, locations, captions and descriptions can also be added to individual images within this view. Once uploaded, the photos appear in the app's new collage layout that emphasizes the order of the photos. Read more...

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Photographer Documents the Death of Real-Life Conversation

As our smartphones make it easier to connect with people across the globe, they often can make it harder to connect face-to-face.

London-based photographer Babycakes Romero doesn't own a smartphone. Instead, he treks along in his beloved city, camera in hand, capturing whatever catches his eye. "As a person dedicated to observation, I just feel I would be missing too much of the world around me if I was staring into the palm of my hand the whole time," he says.

See also: The Hard Truth About Your Online Life

In his photo series, Death of a Conversation, Romero captures people connection with their digital devices rather than with each other — a phenomenon he believes is only creating more pain and social awkwardness to the world. "I saw that smartphones were becoming a barrier to communication in person. I saw how people used it as a social prop, to hide their awkwardness, to fill the silence ... they basically allow people to withdraw rather than engage." Read more...

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7 Vine Tips and Tricks You May Not Know About

Taylor Swift's '1989' Came Out 47 Minutes Early: Best Fan Reactions

The wait is over

Taylor Swift's 1989 dropped 47 minutes early Sunday ahead of its scheduled midnight release, sending fans on Twitter into digital hyperventilation a.k.a. frenetic all-caps mode

See also: Kelly Clarkson Turns Taylor Swift's 'Shake It Off' Into Soulful Church Song

The album marks the 24-year-old's risky jump from being a country-pop artist to trying to take over the charts as a pure, no-country-strings-attached pop star.

IT'S OUT IT'S OUT IT'S OUT

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

GO GO GO

#TS1989

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 27, 2014

My last tweet tonight.

It's here.

#TS1989

@iTunesMusic

http://bitly.com/1rIP9pA

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 27, 2014 Read more...

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38 Blood-Curdling Zombie Walk Photos on Instagram

The undead were out in full force this weekend — but don't worry, you're perfectly safe

Brains, lesions, and guts graced the faces of zombie enthusiasts out for one of the many zombie walks in cities worldwide, including Toronto, San Francisco, Montreal and more. This gory tradition calls for an all-or-nothing dedication to making the most skin-crawling costumes imaginable.

See also: A DIY Survival Guide for the Zombie Apocalypse

Check out some of the weekend's most gruesome looks through the Kelvin-filtered lens of Instagram, below. And for those wondering how to get in on the gore before the Halloween season ends, you can find a comprehensive list of upcoming zombie walks, here. Read more...

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Twitter Acquires Twitpic's Archive, Saga Finally Ends

Twitter has acquired Twitpic's website and photo archive.

"I'm happy to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to give them the Twitpic domain and photo archive, thus keeping the photos and links alive for the time being," Twitpic creator Noah Everett announced Saturday in a blog post. "Twitter shares our goal of protecting our users and this data."

This resolution, which is more than a little ironic, ends one of the most melodramatic startup closures in recent memory.

See also: Twitter Isn't Essential and Probably Never Will Be

Twitpic, a service that allowed users to attach photos to their tweets, said in September that it would be shutting down. The reason, according to Everett, was that Twitter — a public company — opposed Twitpic receiving a trademark for its name. If Twitpic didn't withdraw its trademark application, Twitter said it would revoke Twitpic's API key, making the service useless. Read more...

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24 Hours Later, Users Find Hacks for Facebook's Rooms

Facebook introduced its anonymous community app Rooms on Thursday. Now, just 24 hours later, the lead product manager on Rooms discovered that users have hacked it

He's delighted. Josh Miller, the Facebook product manager, wrote Friday in a Medium blog post that Facebook left out the ability to discover new Rooms

"Though counterintuitive, our logic was that retro web browsers didn’t offer 'discovery' for early Internet communities — you had to tell Netscape exactly where you wanted to go –- so why should we?" he said. "Our hypothesis was that places on the web being hard to find was a feature, not a bug." Read more...

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Facebook Launches Anonymous Community App Called Rooms

What Twitter Fabric Means for Developers

Twitter has had a complicated relationship with developers.

In its earlier days, the social network encouraged third-party developers to build their own apps and services on top of the platform. But the company later began to roll out its own competing features (the most notable example of this is when Twitter created its own image sharing service, frustrating companies like Twitpic and Yfrog).

But Twitter made its biggest appeal yet to developers on Wednesday at Flight, the company's first mobile developer conference. There CEO Dick Costolo unveiled Fabric, the company's ambitious plan to win back developers. Read more...

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