Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch.
Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology.
Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master’s degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interaction. He researched the impact of privacy controls on the socialization of children, meme popularity cycles, and what influences the click through rate of links posted to Twitter.
Constine also received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Stanford University in 2007, with a concentration in Social Psychology & Interpersonal Processes. He became fascinated with social networking theory after joining Facebook as a freshman a month after the service first launched.
Josh Constine has spoken at the South By Southwest Interactive and Music conferences, and has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Atlantic, BBC World Magazine, Slate, and more.
“Where did my Android go?” is the common theme of Facebook Home reviews in Google Play. People want the widgets and old homescreen they meticulously curated. Facebook needs to preserve and offer quick access to the phone we’re used to if it’s going to make Home a hit. Facebook’s reading the reviews too, so bet on the early Home updates to make it more of a bonus than a trade-off. → Read More
Sick of high-paid tech employees driving up rent prices, protestors in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood held a “Anti-Gentrification Block Party” and beat on a Google bus pinata before cops broke up the crowd. The area has long been home to artists and Mexican-American families. But they’re being forced out as techies move in, their employers set up shuttle stops, and housing prices skyrocket. → Read More
Dropbox doesn’t want to be a storage service. It wants to be the data layer uniting your information on all apps. To get more apps and enterprises integrated with its platform, today it announced DBX, the six year-old startup’s first developer conference. To be held July 9th at San Francisco, you can request an invite for a $350 ticket to, DBX which could help Dropbox drive enterprise sales. → Read More
When you’re spreading like wildfire, why douse the flames to make a few bucks? Facebook’s willingness to wait on advertising helped its site and mobile apps grow massive, and now it’s applying the same strategy to Instagram. Wall Street is clamoring for Facebook to earn back the $700+ million it spent buying the photo app, but Mark Zuckerberg refuses to trade tomorrow’s dollars for today’s dimes. → Read More
Facebook’s social graph went missing from yesterday’s update to Path’s smartphone app, and Facebook now confirms it has restricted Path’s API access. Path can no longer look up your Facebook friends, which prevents it from sending them invitations or suggesting you follow them. The damaging blow to Path’s growth may be in response to Path spamming user’s contacts with invites last week. → Read More
Buy it in a store, laser scan it at home, upload it to the web, print it anywhere. 3D printing is poised for the mainstream, but what happens when one person’s finely hand-crafted designs can be pirated and reproduced by anyone? Will 3D printing piracy social networks arise? And how will manufacturers lobby to stop them? → Read More
BeTheDancer is Alex Greenburg’s name and handle on Instagram. He’s a good friend and a brilliant photographer, but because Instagram doesn’t require real names, I had a lot trouble using the app’s new tagging feature to point him out in my photos. Right now, Instagram’s 100 million users are discovering that while pseudoanonymity can be fun, it’s not very functional. → Read More
Today Instagram launches photo tagging, the feature that fueled Facebook’s early growth. New Instagram iOS and Android updates rolling out now let you tag any person or brand in your own photos, which then automatically show up in the “Photos Of Me” section of their profile. You get notified when you when you’re tagged, can require approvals before photos hit your profile, or detag yourself. → Read More
“Happier, healthier, more productive.” That was the goal of mobile app Astrid, and now Yahoo is taking up the mission as it’s just acquired the social productivity platform. Co-founded by a former Palantir engineer, Tim Su, AngelPad-backed Astrid says that it has four million users, who as of September 2012 logged 30 million plans on the platform. → Read More
Facebook app install ads were the star of Facebook’s earnings call today. Sheryl Sandberg said 3800 developers, including 40% of the top 100 iOS app developers, used the ads to drive over 25 million installs. Mark Zuckerberg meanwhile said, “We’re starting to see real revenue from selling mobile app installs.” → Read More
It appears that as people switch from the desktop where Facebook shows multiple ads per page to mobile, Facebook is earning less ad revenue per user in its most important markets. While user growth helped total revenue increase, in the US and Canada Facebook earned $2.85 on ads per user (ads ARPU) in Q1, down from $3.30 in the holiday Q4 2012, but also down from $2.87 in Q3. Another important stat… → Read More
Facebook has just posted its earnings for the quarter that ended March 31, 2013. Facebook hit $1.46 billion in revenue up 38% from Q1 2012, beating Wall Street estimates of sales of $1.44 billion. Facebook reported earnings of $1.06 billion for the same quarter a year ago. Earnings per shared missed estimates, staying flat at $0.12 (analysts had expected earnings per share of $0.13. Net income… → Read More
How could a site for explaining rap lyrics make good on its $15 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz? Because it’s also a collaborative text-annotation platform that enterprises are asking for. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the Rap Genius founders told me they plan to monetize by building private installations of their service for big companies and government agencies. Biz Genius is coming. → Read More
How do you get hundreds of millions of people to consider downloading your app? One of the only answers is Facebook’s app install ads. With the app stores overrun and every company going mobile, app install ads are Facebook’s big chance to monetize mobile. Companies like 1-800-Flowers and Poshmark say the ads are already a hit, and I think they could be the star of Facebook’s earnings tomorrow. → Read More
After three years of slow roll outs and testing with specific partners, Twitter’s Senior Director of Product for Revenue Kevin Weil just announced the general availability of its advertising options for all US business. Businesses don’t need an invite any more. Weil revealed the move on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, which could ramp up revenues and prep Twitter for a widely anticipated IPO. → Read More
“I wish I could have gone to that concert” is a common refrain amongst music fans. Spacebar can’t teleport you to the venue, but it can stream the audio to your mobile device so you can listen along for a dollar or two. Launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY with 15 local clubs and hundreds of musicians on board, Spacebar’s app could give bands a new revenue stream they desperately need. → Read More
Twitter is great if you’re famous. But Jawbone’s founding CEO Alexander Asseily thinks everyone deserves a powerful voice online, so today he’s launching State, a structured opinion-sharing network where people don’t need to follow you see your posts. You can get an early State invite now and start contributing to an opinion graph where what matters is what you believe, not who follows you. → Read More
Despite developers grumbling that they would ditch Parse’s mobile app backend service now that it’s been bought by Facebook, Parse CEO Ilya Suhkar tells me signups spiked 9.4x and fewer clients are leaving than before. Meanwhile, to calm fears about Facebook spying on Parse app data, the company issued the statement “We currently have no plans to make any changes to how Parse app data is used.” → Read More
Some developers got very angry and threatened to leave mobile app backend platform Parse when it was bought by Facebook yesterday. Hoping to capitalize, competitor StackMob has since released a Parse migration tool that makes it easy for devs to import their Parse apps. It’s a cutthroat game, this game of tech. When the Parse acquisition was announced, disgruntled developers flocked to… → Read More
Venture capitalist Jim Breyer is giving up his seat on Facebook’s board in June, which he’s held since April 2005. The split is amicable, and stems from his desire to concentrate on his new board seat with the Harvard University Corporation Board. Breyer joined the Facebook board after his venture firm Accel became one of Facebook’s earliest investors, leading its $12.7 million Series A. → Read More
While there’s still few details and no official announcement, AOL is shutting down its AOL Music news properties and is firing their employees, according to tweets from the official AOL Music site Spinner’s account and some staff. Poor performance due to competition from independent bloggers may be to blame. However, reports indicate Winamp, Shoutcast, and flagship music blog Spinner may survive. → Read More
Charles Darwin’s Galapagos Finches and his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” are the inspirations for Facebook’s first animated sticker pack, which begins rolling out today to Chat in Facebook for iOS and Messenger for Android. Designed by UC Berkeley “compassion researcher” Dacher Keltner, the downloadable Finch sticker set lets friends send each other vivid emotions, not… → Read More
Facebook doesn’t own a mobile operating system, and that’s a problem. Developers don’t need Facebook to build apps, and it doesn’t get a 30% cut of payments. But today Facebook acquired Parse, and while it’s not an OS, it’s the next best thing. The mobile-backend-as-a-service could keep Facebook top-of-mind for developers when they pick an identity provider, integrate sharing, and buy ads. → Read More
Facebook has just acquired Parse, marking its entry into a whole new business category: paid tools and services for developing mobile apps.
The company is buying the mobile-backend-as-a-service startup (yes, the industry acronym is mBaaS) in a deal that we’ve heard is worth $85 million. Neither company is commenting on the size of the deal, except that Facebook said it’s not “material.” → Read More
Datalogix’s offline purchase data is the not-so-secret weapon giant publishers use to target their ads, and measure if they boost consumer spending. Businesses like Facebook are becoming dependent on this ROI data, allowing Datalogix to raise a $25 million Series B. Since its based in Denver you don’t hear a lot about Datalogix, but the 250 employee startup is crucial to the future of advertising. → Read More
Facebook’s gotten into trouble over the years for auto-sharing e-commerce activity. Determined to avoid another Beacon fiasco or scare people away from offers they don’t want to tell friends about, Facebook now lets you choose to privately claim an offer rather than automatically share the news to friends. Facebook tells me Offers, which let brands post coupons, is getting other new features too. → Read More
Search advertising became such a popular and lucrative juggernaut because it offered businesses the ability to reach and persuade people with true purchase intent. But now keyword targeting is available on Twitter and Facebook, which could loosen Google’s stranglehold on ads that convince us what to buy. → Read More
Spaceport.io has just announced that part of its team, but not its technology, is moving to Facebook, and the social network has confirmed the talent deal to me. But instead of shutting down, Spaceport.io will continue to operate its Adobe Air alternative under the direction of co-founder Peter Relan and the team from his incubator YouWeb that backed Spaceport. → Read More
People go to Yelp for reviews, but also for phone numbers, addresses, and hours. Facebook wants that traffic, so today it rolled out a global redesign of mobile Pages that features details about local businesses, star ratings, and buttons to Like, Call, or Check-In to them up top. Facebook tells me this is the first “truly mobile-first” redesign, with no immediately scheduled parallel web makeover → Read More
Do you target kids with cheap ads or more expensive adults? Nanigans has just raised a $5.85 million “Series A.1″ from Avalon Ventures to build SaaS technology that predicts which audiences earn advertisers more money. With revenue up 6x in 18 months, Nanigans hopes to keep up with Facebook’s progress by pouring its funding into R&D. It’s already discovered a surprising trick to supercharging… → Read More
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