New targeting on Pages gives Facebook leg up over Twitter for marketers
Facebook unveiled what could become a pretty powerful marketing tool for large multinationals and brands last night. You can now target specific locations and languages when you send out updates on a Facebook page. A brand like McDonald’s could use the new feature to send out coupons to Japanese followers, for example.
Why is this important? “Drip marketing”, or social media marketing — whatever term you want to use for it — has become increasingly essential… Continue Reading
5 O’Clock Roundup: Moving into a networked era, Tumblr envy, Open Web
Watch out Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw! Google’s coming: You can now read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts with Google Scholar. Expect an oligopoly (as in the legal research industry) to feel some pressure as Google rolls out another free and disruptive service. You can search by cases, topics or specific phrases. You can also explore how different rulings are cited by other judges and later opinions.
Google also experiments… Continue Reading
How much has Facebook’s valuation grown this year? Not much, says Sharespost report
Has a bull market help lift Facebook’s value in the eyes of investors?
Not really, says a report by NeXt Up Research, a firm founded by Michael Moe, a former director of global growth research at Merrill Lynch. Expectations of $1.5 billion or more in annual revenue by 2014 have already been priced in, plus much of Facebook’s growth is now taking place in the developing world, where it’s less profitable per user.
NeXt Up pegs Facebook’s… Continue Reading
Speak truth to power: Facebook’s Joe Hewitt on abandoning iPhone development
Joe Hewitt, the one-man powerhouse behind Facebook’s iPhone app, explained more of the reasoning behind his decision to leave the project earlier this week. He stopped developing Facebook’s popular app out of frustration with Apple’s review process.
The issue (as it has been for a long time) is Apple’s draconian selection process and the resulting bottleneck for new apps on the platform. He argued that the last decade on the web has been about weakening… Continue Reading
Blogger gives Google Friend Connect a 9-million site lead on Facebook
Google released some interesting statistics today about Friend Connect, which is part of the search giant’s push to build a social layer across the web where visitors can get tailored experiences depending on their interests and friend network. So how has Friend Connect done since its launch last year?
It’s on nine million sites
Friend Connect sites attract about half a billion unique viewers over a 30-day period
And over two people join a site every… Continue Reading
Mark Zuckerberg on how to build hacker culture inside a company
(I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. Mark Zuckerberg is on-stage for a question-and-answer session and I’ve embedded a short clip from the talk below. This is paraphrased.)
Jessica Livingston: First I want to go way, way back. I know you built a few things in high school. What did you learn from those experiences?
Zuckerberg: I mostly built stuff I liked. I built games and I built AIs (artificial… Continue Reading
Facebook pulls highlights back into the main news feed
Taking aim at information overload, Facebook is now allowing users to see its news feed in two ways. They can either see a live stream with updates ordered by time, or the most interesting content as judged by comments and likes.
“While seeing real-time activities is extremely valuable, we also want to be sure you don’t miss other interesting content,” wrote Raylene Yung, a Facebook engineer, in a company blog post today.
Stories in the “News Feed”… Continue Reading
Web 2.0: Sean Parker on why Facebook will win, and Google will lose
Sean Parker, a managing partner at Founders Fund and an early president of Facebook, argued that a new breed of “network” companies will overshadow tech giants like Google over the next decade.
At just 10 years of age, Google will decline in importance relative to companies that effectively harness the power of networks like Apple and Facebook, he said during a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today.
What’s a “networked” company? It’s a… Continue Reading
Facebook shows off new homepage for touchscreen phones
Facebook is testing a new mobile homepage designed for touchscreen phones. You can try it here at http://touch.facebook.com. After launching apps for both the iPhone and Google’s Android platform, Facebook still has to work with a number of other systems, including the Palm OS. Clearly, apps have a better overall experience. But this is a welcome upgrade from Facebook’s standard mobile homepage.
More details: Facebook, Lala turn music tracks into virtual gifts
Perhaps there’s hope for record labels yet. While album sales tumble, virtual goods are on track to become a $1 billion industry.
Then what better way to solve the ailing music industry’s problems than by turning songs into virtual goods?
Well, there’s one initial problem, virtual goods in games can only be consumed in one place — inside the gaming environment. By contrast, songs can be copied at virtually zero cost and be consumed anywhere.
So Facebook and… Continue Reading
Facebook dives deeper into virtual goods with music, sports
Facebook’s making a deeper foray into the world of virtual goods by adding songs and sports merchandise to its gift store. The company’s partnering with Lala.com to offer tracks for about 10 cents each. They’re free of digital rights management (DRM) and you can download them. Users have to pay for them with Facebook’s virtual currency called Credits, which can be purchased online with a credit card.
Facebook’s also launching a partnership with the NBA and… Continue Reading
Web 2.0: Facebook’s challenges in scaling to 300 million users
When Facebook’s main site takes an extra fraction of a second to load, it can be hard to appreciate the job the company’s done in building a unique home page for each of its 300 million monthly active users.
Furthermore, it’s not a homepage that’s siloed or separate from the experiences of others. Every time you log-on, Facebook has to pull data and updates from hundreds or thousands of friends and condense them into the 45… Continue Reading
Friendfeed lives! Co-founder says it’s in “chrysalis stage”
When Facebook bought pioneering social sharing site FriendFeed in August, the fate of the service seemed uncertain. FriendFeed never captured the same kind of traction its competitors did, but it win deep loyalty from its limited user base.
Today, Paul Buchheit, who is also the creator of Gmail, said, “FriendFeed isn’t dead. It’s just getting started.”
He wrote in FriendFeed today:
There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is… Continue Reading
Facebook Groups become more like business-friendly Pages
Like many early Facebook users, I joined way too many groups like “Gotta have more cow bell” and “Burma Aid,” but my attention to them fell by the wayside as I’d have to constantly check for updates. So Facebook is overhauling Groups and making them more like Pages, with a constant stream of updates that can pass through your homepage. If one of your friends posts within the Group, you’ll also see that activity in… Continue Reading
Facebook Lite starts to go international with translations
Facebook Lite, a faster-loading and simpler version of the site meant to speed adoption in developing countries, is finally starting to go international after a test in the U.S.
As the social network pushes past 300 million users worldwide, the company is looking abroad to fuel user growth. To get there, it needs to accommodate slower Internet connections and unfamiliarity with the site. So the company decided to test out a simpler, parallel version of the… Continue Reading
Facebook tells us how happy we are
Status updates, limited as they are in character space, can make up an intriguing barometer for the public’s mood if they’re taken as a whole.
That’s just what Facebook is doing, engaging in some basic sentiment analysis by looking at the share of positive and negative words in status updates across English-speaking, U.S. users. They’ve launched a Gross National Happiness index. (That’s inspired by the gross national happiness metric from the Bhutanese government, which criticized traditional… Continue Reading
Facebook’s Latin support lets you get your lorem ipsum on
Latin is one of the five new tongues added today to Facebook’s 70-plus supported languages for the site’s interface, along with Azeri, Faroese, Georgian and Nepali.
The new languages aren’t rolled out for me, but I’ll post some screenshots when they are.
How is a Latin Facebook any different from a Klingon one? Easy: Latin’s been branded a stuffy language whose surviving works lack the necessary ironic underling humor to get them onto the Internet. A Latin… Continue Reading
Russia’s DST raising stake in Facebook at $6.5 billion valuation
Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies is boosting its stake in Facebook by buying from existing shareholders, Reuters is reporting.
Offering the same $14.77 a share it put forward earlier in July, the Russian investment firm is turning to shareholders who aren’t Facebook employees to raise its holdings by up to $100 million. DST held a 3.5 percent stake in the company after a $200 million direct investment plus $100 million it spent purchasing current and ex-employee shares… Continue Reading
Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO
About six months ago, critics pummeled Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
He’d made questionable management decisions, or so it appeared from the outside. He’d fumbled the site’s redesign and botched the company’s terms of service agreement — moves that whipped up negative publicity and user backlash. Some people asked whether it was time for Zuckerberg to go.
Six months later, those critics have gone. The company is enjoying astounding momentum — blowing through user growth forecasts… Continue Reading
Facebook eases Connect sign-up to expand reach across the web
Facebook is simplifying how outside companies can integrate its Connect service today, in an effort to boost the company’s impact far beyond the borders of its social networking site.
It’s launching a Facebook Connect Wizard that compresses the process into three steps. Facebook Connect is a crucial prong of the company’s strategy to spread a social layer across the web. It lets users sign-up and interact with outside Web sites with their Facebook ID and share… Continue Reading