Editors Spotlight: AdBlock Plus (Download)

Adblock Plus (ABP) is an open-source content-filtering and ad blocking extension for Mozilla Firefox (including Firefox for mobile), Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari web browsers.

Adblock Plus is the world’s most popular browser extension, and is used by millions of users worldwide. It is a community-driven open source project, and hundreds of volunteers are contributing to the success of Adblock Plus to make sure that all annoying ads are automatically blocked.

Adblock Plus blocks:

• Banners
• YouTube video ads
•  Facebook advertisements
•  Pop-ups
•  All other obtrusive ads

Michael McDonald of Provo, Utah, created Adblock Plus 0.5 that improved on the original AdBlock by incorporating the following features:

• whitelisting
• support for blocking background images
• subscription to filters with a fixed address and automatic updates
• the ability to hide HTML elements, allowing a greater range of images to be blocked
• the ability to hide ads on a per-site basis, instead of globally
• memory leak fixes
• improvements to the user interface.

PC World chose Adblock Plus as one of the 100 best products of 2007.

A site with and without AdBlock Plus

The owners of some websites which use third party hosted online advertising to fund the hosting of their websites have argued that the use of ad-blocking software such as Adblock Plus risks cutting off their revenue stream.While some websites such as The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph have successfully implemented subscription and membership based paywall systems for revenue, many websites today rely on third party hosted online advertising to function. In 2007, web developer Danny Carlton described the use of adblockers as tantamount to theft, and called for other site owners to block the Firefox web browser from their websites to deter its use.

He also stated that "We have an initiative called Acceptable Ads to support websites with unobtrusive ads. Every website can participate. The [Pallenberg] article on purpose just slanders our good name".

In response to the "acceptable ads" whitelisting, forks of Adblock Plus were created such as Adblock Edge and the now defunct Adblock Lite.

Download AdBlock Plus For  :

• Opera 
• Safari
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Android
• Internet Explorer

Facebook buys WhatsApp messaging service for $19bn

Facebook has bought WhatsApp for approximately £11.4bn or $19bn making it one of the largest acquisitions in tech history. To give you some idea it's over double the amount spent by Microsoft buying Nokia last year.

The app, which is available for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 8 has over 450m users and counting. If the deal goes ahead Facebook will be buying one of the largest independent messaging services in the world, beating the likes of ChatOn and Line both of whom have also been seeing steady growth.

In a statement made last night Mark Zuckerberg said, "WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people. The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable, I've known Jan for a long time and I'm excited to partner with him and his team to make the world more open and connected."

For those of you wondering if WhatsApp will become integrated into Facebook's own messaging service fear not. According to the company it'll be employing the same approach it took with Instagram, leaving the company to remain separate whilst sharing expertise across the brands.

Use Facebook Paper for social news or stick with Flipboard?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote during a Facebook f8 Developer Conference. (Kimihiro Hoshino, Getty Images file)

With a new app called Paper, Facebook is hoping to make it easier for users to find more than just their long-lost friends.

Recently released for the iPhone, the app represents a wholesale rethinking of how users interact with the social network. Instead of focusing on a single "news feed" filled with posts from other users, the app is designed to be more like a newspaper, with sections that focus on particular news topics or interests, such as technology, sports or food. Users can choose to see content from up to 10 sections at a time from among 20 choices.

In each section, the top half of the screen is devoted to a "centerpiece" area that highlights a handful of stories, cycling through pictures related to each one. In the bottom half of the screen, users will find numerous headline cards representing individual stories. Users can either select a particular story to read by tapping on it or scan through the cards by swiping left or right.

Facebook's new Paper app. Provided by Facebook

If your primary exposure to Facebook is viewing your friends' status updates, you might be surprised at just how much real news you can find on the site. Paper does an excellent job of highlighting that content.

Although you'll find many stories from major news sources in Paper, you'll also find content from less prominent ones. Michael Reckhow, Paper's product manager, said the app was meant to highlight not only major publishers but lesser-known artists and content producers. The stories you'll find in each section have all been posted somewhere on Facebook and selected by a combination of human editors and algorithms.

Facebook designed Paper to be a much more immersive experience than Facebook's website or its primary mobile application. Unlike those venues, Paper has no "chrome," which is the borders around an application that typically include buttons, search boxes and other interface elements.

As a result, Paper is able to use the phone's entire screen to display pictures, videos and stories. The effect is often quite beautiful and makes the main Facebook app look clunky and outdated by comparison.

Because Paper has few buttons, users have to rely on gestures to navigate the app. To zoom in on a story card, users swipe up or reverse pinch. To return to the story card or a section page, users swipe down from near the top of the screen or pinch.

Facebook offers new users hints at how to use these gestures, but they can take some getting used to. The first several times I used the app, I kept going back to a story card from an article page when I wanted to just scroll through the article itself.

Although Paper focuses on news and story content, it can be used to do many of the things you might do with the primary Facebook app. The first section in Paper is your Facebook news feed.

You can view your Facebook alerts inside the app, and you can carry on conversations with your Facebook friends in much the same way that you would in the main app.

You also can view reformatted versions of your friends' Facebook pages, search across the social network for other users and post new status updates.

Despite its capabilities and fresh design, the app is very much a work-in-progress and suffers from some notable limitations. The biggest is that, for now, it's available only for the iPhone and Apple's iPod touch; Facebook isn't offering a Paper app for the iPad or for any Android devices.

But it has other shortcomings. Ten sections may seem like a lot, especially compared to what you'll find in a real newspaper today, but one of those sections is dedicated to your Facebook news feed, so you really have only nine choices. If you have a broader range of interests than that, you're out of luck — 10 sections is the limit of what you can see.

Although users can choose which sections they want in their Paper, they have no control over what news sources or types of stories they view in those sections. In your news feed, you can't choose to see only the most recent posts, as you can on Facebook's website.

And unlike Flipboard, a news reading app that looks and works similar to Paper, you can't focus sections on stories on particular topics or from individual news sources. Instead, you have to rely entirely on Facebook to decide which stories you'll see.

Unfortunately, for now, Facebook isn't personalizing sections in Paper for each user. Instead, everyone who chooses to see the "technology" section, say, will see the same stories from the same sources.

What's more, Paper is a new way of interacting with Facebook — not with the wider Web.

So you can't use it to see what's happening on Twitter or LinkedIn. And if a particular story hasn't been posted to Facebook, it won't show up in Paper either.