Seesmic and TweetDeck: Two ways to immerse yourself in your social nets
Do you still use Facebook and Twitter by opening facebook.com and twitter.com in a browser? Or, have you tried using a desktop client to organize all the incoming status updates, tweets, comments, and other notifications into one little window on the side of your computer’s… Continue Reading
Facebook lets users decide who has the Golan Heights
As Facebook ramps up its growth abroad, it will have to contend with more highly-charged political conflicts. One of them is how to manage disputed territories like the Golan Heights, a mountainous region connecting Israel to Syria that was captured by Israel in 1967.
Until a… Continue Reading
MySpace plays catchup to Facebook’s open-source tools
Last Thursday, Facebook released Tornado Web Server, an open-source software library that “can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections.”
Facebook’s motive was no secret: Tornado was designed to make it easy for other web sites to connect to Facebook, to scrape customer info and to reuse… Continue Reading
Update: TC50: Facebook is cash-flow positive, surpasses 300 million users
Facebook bolstered its position as the world’s leading social network, surpassing the 300 million user mark and becoming cash-flow positive ahead of schedule.
In non-accountant terms: Facebook is making money. “Free cash-flow positive” means that the company is profitable after setting aside capital for maintaining or… Continue Reading
Facebook adds support for Twitter-like @ symbol
Facebook is now supporting the @ symbol for tagging friends in posts and status updates. The company said last week it would move toward adopting the convention, which started on Twitter.
The symbol has been part of Twitter etiquette for a long time. When you want… Continue Reading
Battle of social networks: How long can Orkut keep Facebook at bay in Brazil?
Orkut still dominates the Brazilian market: it attracted 22.7 million unique visitors last month. The next closest competitor, Windows Live Profile, brought in roughly a third of that traffic with 8 million visitors, according to the Comscore numbers. Facebook comes in at eighth place with… Continue Reading
Facebook Lite goes live; slimmed-down version hones in on the stream, sharing
Facebook rolled out a slimmer, faster version of its site today called Facebook Lite. It’s meant to support Facebook’s expansion internationally to developing countries, where bandwidth constraints and the lack of knowledge about how to use the service might make the current version too complicated… Continue Reading
Facebook adopts Twitterspeak for tagging friends in updates
Facebook is taking cues from Twitter’s playbook by supporting the ‘@’ symbol when you want to tag friends in a status update or post.
The symbol has been part of Twitter’s grammar for a long time. When you want to say something publicly to someone, or… Continue Reading
Facebook open-sources parts of FriendFeed’s real-time infrastructure
Facebook is making use of FriendFeed just a month after it acquired the pioneering social sharing start-up.
It’s making parts of the real-time infrastructure behind FriendFeed open source. Called Tornado, the framework is written in Python and is designed to handle thousands of connections at the… Continue Reading
Hitwise: Facebook’s lead over MySpace balloons with Connect
Facebook attracts almost twice the number of visits that MySpace does, widening its lead with Connect, according to web analytics services HitWise.
The social networking site first surpassed News Corp.-owned MySpace back in May, but mobile applications and its Facebook Connect service allowed it to boost… Continue Reading
Facebook debuts on Android phones
The first version of Facebook for Google’s Android platform has quietly come out.
Like the iPhone edition, you can send out status updates, check the news feed, upload photos and browse profiles. It has the bonus of consolidating phone contacts into the app — you can… Continue Reading
AIM sends and receives status updates from Twitter, Facebook
A social hub born in the 1990s is finding new life by piggy-backing off today’s ones.
AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) is becoming a proper Twitter and Facebook client, letting you send status updates to both social networks and receive a feed about your friend’s items. Before… Continue Reading
Is social media worth your marketing dollars?
As social media has reached mainstream consciousness this year, businesses have been inundated with the message that they must immediately get on board or risk doom and calamity. The hyperbole (and the frenzied buzz it creates) is confusing and many businesses could use a practical… Continue Reading
Move over Apple app store, here comes Facebook
Now that Facebook’s announced that Facebook Connect is available across the mobile web, it’s poised for a race to see which company can provide the best way to discover useful apps. (Facebook Connect is the company’s platform for allowing app developers to access users’ data… Continue Reading
Facebook Connect expands beyond iPhone to mobile web
Last March, Facebook released Facebook Connect for iPhone, which allowed iPhone application developers to integrate Facebook’s social features into their mobile applications. Today, at Nokia World in Stuttgart, Germany, the company announced a version for other smartphones.
It’s called Facebook Connect for Mobile Web, and, as… Continue Reading
fbFund’s Wildfire builds contests on Facebook for brands
Remember marketing sweepstakes? You’d fill out a card with your personal details for a chance at a Caribbean vacation or a free steam cleaning.
They’re moving online into Facebook Pages and Twitter in a way that could have farther reach and a fbFund-backed startup called Wildfire Interactive,… Continue Reading
fbFund’s dating site Thread raises $1.2 million from Sequoia, Founders Fund
Thread, a dating site that uses Facebook’s social graph to suggest potential matches, raised $1.2 million from Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and angel investor Ron Conway.
The site, founded by some of PayPal’s original product managers, helps people find dates through their Facebook… Continue Reading
Facebook revamps sharing as users share 1 billion pieces of content a week
Facebook revamped its design for sharing content off other websites as the company pushes users to actively distribute links and videos through the social network. The update is a slight improvement over the older one: the design is cleaner and gives more space to the content… Continue Reading
Negotiating with the mob: LivingSocial harnesses Facebook-organized buying
If the online masses can be harnessed to the millions for YouTube videos and protests, it’s only a mental hop, skip and jump to organizing the same for shopping deals.
That’s what LivingSocial is trying to tap into with its “Deals” service launching in New York… Continue Reading
Facebook’s latest iPhone app is out now in Apple’s store
Apple finally approved the latest version of Facebook’s iPhone app, which pulls in broader functionality from the Web.
You can upload videos and photos and RSVP to events. The news feed is closer to what you’d see on Facebook’s site and you can “like” posts or… Continue Reading