The Tribune

• FACEBOOK has added the option to play games with your contacts on the messaging app. You can access the feature in the latest version of the app by tapping a game controller icon.

Games available include classics such as “Pac-Man”, ‘’Space Invaders” and “Galaga” as well as newer titles like “Words With Friends”. It’s the latest effort by the world’s biggest social network to get people to spend even more time on its properties. Messenger has a billion users. The app will recommend games based on whether your friends play.

Called “Instant Games,” the feature launched yesterday will begin in 30 countries, with 17 titles, though more will come.

• BLACK Friday 2016’s reign as the biggest US online sales day ever didn’t last long. Three days to be exact.

That’s because Cyber Monday hit $3.45 billion in online sales, up 12 per cent from a year earlier, according to the latest statistics from Adobe Digital Insights.

The day edged out Black Friday by roughly $110 million, which comes as no surprise as it has done that in plenty of years past. What is a surprise, though, is that Black Friday nearly caught up.

As far as the best sellers on Cyber Monday, Adobe said the top toys were Lego sets, Nerf, Shopkins, Barbie and Pie Face Game, and the five best-selling electronics were Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox, Samsung 4K TVs, Apple iPhone and Amazon Fire.

• A FEW online services are aiming to replace cable, but they haven’t attracted many users yet. AT&T’s DirecTV hopes to change that with a new service announced on Monday.

While anyone will tell you cable costs too much, the vast majority of Americans don’t think it’s bad enough to cancel. Cheaper online live-TV services, like Dish Network’s Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue, remain relatively unknown compared with Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.

And while they’re easy to order and cancel online and fairly simple to use, they still have drawbacks. AT&T’s new service, which will be available from today, will initially offer more than 100 channels for a teaser price of $35 a month.

• JAPAN is spending nearly $175 million to build the world’s fastest supercomputer in an effort to reclaim the record from China.

The AI Bridging Cloud computer is expected to run at speeds as high as 130 petaflops, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported.

That would be faster than China’s Sunway TaihuLight, the current titleholder, which has a theoretical maximum of 125 petaflops. A petaflop equals a quadrillion floating point operations (a step in a calculation) conducted in one second.

AIBC, which Japanese authorities hope to complete before the end of next year, will be used to analyse huge datasets and could be used for medical research, improvements in autonomous car software and designing robots.

• DONALD Trump’s midtown Manhattan building on Google Maps was renamed briefly at the weekend - and the new moniker was not flattering.

Instead of Trump Tower, it was designated “Dump Tower”.

Users of the mapping service began noticing the new name for the Fifth Avenue building on Saturday. A Google spokeswoman said the company has changed the name back to its original.