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.
No app has ever broken my heart quite like Vine, Twitter’s six-second animation maker. You capture a scene, then pocket your phone while you think of a witty way to describe. But when you open it a few minutes later or the app randomly crashes, it’s gone. That moment, that memory, deleted. I still love Vine, but I’ll never forgive it for the visions it stole from me. → Read More
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is a father figure to countless startups he’s helped accelerate, but had never taken a board of directors seat until now. Today he announced he’s accepted board seat with Watsi, a site that lets people donate money to pay the medical bills of needy people. Watsi came out of this season’s Winter 2013 Y Combinator class and is the first non-profit… → Read More
“Success Theater” means only sharing an idealized version of yourself where you’re always happy. Now a bug in Facebook’s new mood sharing feature is taking that concept way too literally. Select that you’re “Unhappy” and Facebook adds a smiley face to your post instead of a frown emoticon. → Read More
If terrorism requires an audience, than the recent mainstream adoption of social media has given violent actors a bigger stage than ever before. There are many reasons people lash out at the world, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that becoming the center of the attention could be a factor pushing some to commit atrocities. Our retweets could be delivering their messages of fear. → Read More
Yahoo has just announced a change in strategy designed to prep it for the mobile age and let it concentrate on core products like the Mail and Weather apps it launched yesterday. Soon, it will shut down Upcoming, Deal, SMS Alerts, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone (J2ME) apps, and some older versions of Yahoo! Mail. People simply don’t have the bandwidth for dozens of apps, so… → Read More
Formation 8 wants to bring venture capital back to its roots: investing in solutions to hard technology problems that could change the world. It just raised its first fund of $448 million — but with a twist. Formation 8 plans to draw on its extensive network in Asia to win its portfolio of smart enterprise and energy technology companies’ huge deals with conglomerates in the region. → Read More
Most people are too scared to seriously play the stock market. Few amateurs know enough to confidently invest on their own. Luckily, free iOS app Robinhood launches today to put crowdsourced finance wisdom in your pocket. Track stocks, view advice on what to buy or sell from other users, share your predictions, and build a reputation. Robinhood could turn a new generation into investors. → Read More
Now the Facebook can really start to replace your phone. Today Facebook rolled out its free VoIP voice calling feature to US users of Home and its Android Messenger app. That means even less reason to open your standard “phone” app, and more data for Facebook about who you care about the most. Now all iOS and Android users in the US can Facedial their friends. → Read More
“FBX was my baby that I staked everything on. We shipped it fast, scaled it up, and now the baby talks and can walk to school, but I don’t feel I need to babysit it,” says Antonio Garcia-Martinez, product director of Facebook’s ad exchange who announced he’s leaving the company today. After selling his company AdGrok to Twitter, then defecting to Facebook two years ago, Antonio deserves a… → Read More
Whether you’re an Etsy seller or a multi-national conglomerate, maintaining a sync’d an stylish web and mobile is presence is harder than it should be. You either use a cheap toy website creator or an agonizing enterprise content management system. But now there’s Brandcast. Founded by a former Salesforce engineer with $1.8 million from his old boss Marc Benioff, Brandcast could fill the void. → Read More
Investors hope Facebook will eventually sell lucrative demand-fulfillment search ads, but it’s starting conservatively. Today it begins a small test of its first ads on Graph Search, but they’re not targeted to your search queries. Instead, they use standard Facebook targeting and retargeting, look like sidebar ads, and appear at the bottom of the page, and only if there’s over one page of results → Read More
How do you make sports gambling more addictive? Make it role playing game where you level up by completing quests of placing specific fake-money bets. And how does a sports community app like Hitpost build such a smart game? It hires lead producer Courtland Alves from games giant Crowdstar as its new CEO. After four years in sports, Hitpost is making a play for the social gaming big leagues. → Read More
Where do you put the videos you find around the web, and how do they express your identity? #Waywire 2.0 aims to be the answer. Co-founded by Newark Mayor Cory Booker and launched nine months ago, Waywire focused on original and user-generated content. But with today’s update the beta recenters around you collecting videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Vine and news sites into themed playlists. → Read More
People around the world are hoping their friends in Boston are safe after today’s horrific bombing. But calling and texting friends can clog phone lines hindering response crews. Facebook offers an alternative. By Graph Searching “Friends in Boston” or viewing the Boston Page, you can pull up friends who live there, see if they’ve said they’re safe, ask if they haven’t, and pass along some love. → Read More
Just 3 percent of small business ad spend goes online right now, but that’s going to change, and Facebook wants to become these merchants’ channel of choice. There are already 2 billion connections between people and small businesses on Facebook, and their Pages get 645 million views and 13 million comments a week, Facebook announced today. The challenge for Facebook is now educating moms and… → Read More
“Distributing a desktop browser is hard and expensive (especially if you don’t have an operating system or the world’s most trafficked website to promote it)” says Rockmelt, so today it announced it will soon stop supporting its social browser. As consolation, existing users (and those with TechCrunch’s invite link) can access the private beta of its new site that ports its… → Read More
Leaders from Facebook, Google, and other tech giants today announced they’re banding together to form a political advocacy group called FWD.us, designed to promote policies that will keep the American workforce competitive. The bipartisan group’s first priority is pushing for comprehensive immigration reform, but it will also support education reform and scientific research. → Read More
Why trust one reviewer to tell you what phone to buy? Better to get a consensus, and across reviews by seven leading publications the verdict is that the HTC First features a stylish yet casual design, efficient messaging, reliable battery, and an addictive feed-reading experience. But its “apperating system” is confusing, the camera fails in low light, it sacrifices widgets, and has privacy… → Read More
After years of rumors, the Facebook Phone aka the HTC First finally launches April 12th for $99 on AT&T. It’s light and supple, plus comes with a suped-up version of Facebook Home pre-installed that pipes in non-Facebook notifications, but the 5MP Camera is a let down. If you’re highly social, want a mid-range handset, crave email alerts, and aren’t a photo buff, the First could be a great… → Read More
It could make us more willing to express how we feel. Or you could say it over-simplies our complex moods and lives. But today the Facebook status update box began offering the option to “share how you’re feeling or what you’re doing” through a drop-down menu of emoticons and media. We’re entering a more structured era of communication, where both friends and big data know exactly how we tick. → Read More
“It’s absurd that people won’t go to a restaurant unless they’ve read reviews but they won’t do that for their healthcare.” That’s why top electronic medical records startup Practice Fusion’s CEO Ryan Howard said his company built Patient Fusion, a site where you can compare reviews of nearby physicians and book appointments as soon as within an hour. You could call it Yelp meets Uber for doctors. → Read More
Single-tasking has been a hallmark of mobile. But Facebook Home lets you chat in an overlaid drop-down window as you use Google, Yelp, Maps or any other app, bringing the productivity of the desktop to the small screen. Home’s cover feed and responsive design are nice, but you could call them mediocre. Chat multi-tasking, though, merges the communication and computing sides of the smartphone. → Read More
“Wow, that was a cool ad” is not something I say often. But I was recently browsing Wookiepedia, a Star Wars Wikia site, and when I clicked an external link it popped up a half-screen interstitial for 15 seconds before redirecting me to my destination. Instead of cluttering its site with more ads, Wookiepedia let me bounce around internally for free, but “charged” me to… → Read More
Making you feel comfortable didn’t get Facebook to a billion users. It had to push your limits of “open and connectedness”. That’s why so many of its product launches are initially met with outrage, or uncertainty. But Zuck is convinced the amount we share will double each year. So if you don’t want Home yet, fine. It’s designed to handle how we share in 2016 so no one steals Facebook’s future. → Read More
While Facebook’s press event focused on the “Home” app that runs on unforked Androids, HTC and Facebook have confirmed to me they modified Android to give the HTC First phone features not available in the downloadable Home app. This lets the First pipe in email and calendar notifications to its homescreen. And with the Facebook Home Program, other OEMs can get Facebook’s help fiddling with Android → Read More
The Facebook Home experience is based around next-level gesture control. Here you can watch us swipe, fling, and pop Facebook content in our hands-on demo of the new HTC First handset that comes with Home pre-installed. Compared to Facebook’s flagship suite of native mobile apps, Home on the HTC First is much more responsive. You could even call it (gasp!) fun to use. Watch that in the video… → Read More
Facebook today announced a new apps called Facebook Home that replaces your standard Android’s homescreen with an immersive Facebook experience featuring full-screen photos, status updates, and notifications. It won’t require a forked Android operating system, as Facebook wants it to be available to a wide audience. Facebook also announced a special version of Home will come pre-installed on the… → Read More
Facebook’s next billion users don’t have smartphones or even the Internet yet, but the Facebook Phone could change that. Through savvy carrier deals, subsidized handsets, and free limited data access, Facebook could ensure emerging markets come online with friend requests as their first experience. That could turn populations of Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America into Facebookers for life. → Read More
Ambient intimacy, accelerated social life, thawed relations between Google and Facebook, and an iPhone that looks impersonal by comparison. These are just a few of the short-term ripple effects of the Facebook “Phone” project to be unveiled April 4th. In this video, I recap leaked intel from my sources and 9To5Google, show photos of the phone itself plus its software, and discuss why you should… → Read More
Nir Goldschlager just saved your identity. One of the world’s top white hat security researchers, Goldschlager this week helped Skype and Dropbox fix a critical security flaw that could have let hackers take control of their users’ Facebook accounts. Tomorrow Goldschlager will detail how he found the exploit, but he gave TechCrunch the early heads up. Here’s how hackers exploit the hole. → Read More
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