Facebook now lets its Connect partners crowdsource translations
When Facebook began expanding internationally, instead of paying professionals to translate its site into other languages, it turned to its users. They quickly made it available in 65 languages.
Now Facebook’s turning around and offering that technology to other sites. Called Translations for Facebook Connect, it’s available to any of the 15,000 partners who use the company’s Connect service. (Launched last year, Connect lets people use their Facebook ID to log-in to partnering sites.)
The new Translations… Continue Reading
Miley Cyrus alone in heavy Facebook streaming
It’s been a couple of months since Facebook launched its streaming video pages powered by Ustream. Is it catching on? TechCrunch used the feature to simulcast the TechCrunch50 event week before last. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used it to stream a speaking appearance in Brazil. Reggae singer Matisyahu did a show from Twitter’s office.
Ustream’s aggressive (in a good way) marketing department called yesterday to let me know that Facebook streamers have racked up 4 million… Continue Reading
Facebook aims to boost advertising clout with Nielsen partnership
To boost its presence in big brand advertising, Facebook will unveil a partnership with media research firm Nielsen tomorrow to give better analytics on how ads fare on the social network.
Called Nielsen Brand Lift, the program will let advertisers who are also Nielsen customers figure out how their campaigns are performing by polling Facebook users who have seen the ads on the social network’s site.
[Update: The surveys will be in the sponsored messages space on... Continue Reading
Facebook’s self-serve ads “crushing it,” help turn startup cash-flow positive
When social networking company Facebook announced Tuesday that it was cash flow positive for the first time, the company was cryptic about the reasons. But here’s Facebook’s secret weapon: “Self-serve ads,” or those ads that advertisers can create on the site in a matter of minutes to target specific demographics of users.
“Self-serve ads are the gift that keeps on giving,” said Facebook’s vice president of growth, mobile and international expansion Chamath Palihapitiya (pictured), in an… Continue Reading
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 screen? Do you hope to find a way to shove all that data out of the way of your work?
My advice: Give up. What you need to do is go… 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 few weeks ago, if you lived in Katzrin (also called Qasrin), a larger town in the region, it meant you lived in Syria according to your Facebook profile.
Not so anymore…. 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 it on the FriendFeed site — whose parent company and staff Facebook acquired last month. Making it easy for more sites to maintain a huge number of continuously updated high-speed… 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 growing its asset base. The company isn’t changing its forecasts for 70 percent year-over-year growth in revenue.
The numbers will show up tech industry watchers who have been looking for signs… 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 to say something publicly to someone, or to include a link to their profile in your tweet, you put an ‘@’ symbol in front of their username. (Example: “At the… 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 1.3 million.
But if Facebook’s performance in Latin America so far is anything to go by, it may not be in eighth place for long, and Orkut should be looking over… 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 or slow.
The Lite interface was inadvertently shown to some first-world users a month ago, as the company was testing the service. Given Facebook’s gradual feature creep, there’s a chance it… 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 to include a link to their profile in your tweet, you put an ‘@’ symbol in front of their username. (Example: “Having a drink with @paulboutin.”)
Now Facebook is adopting that… 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 same time, which the company says makes it ideal for real-time web services.
Facebook, long seen as a walled garden with locked-in profiles, has been slowly opening up. It made parts… 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 that gain, according to HitWise. Connect makes users’ basic profile information portable so they can use their Facebook ID to access other services on the web. The company now has… 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 look at up to 125 friends’ phone numbers on the home screen. However, note that some basic features are missing. You can’t send private messages or manage events the way… 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 AIM’s Lifestream service would only let you read updates from the other sites, but you couldn’t post to them. The new features are in a newly-released beta version of the… 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 guide on how to evaluate social media and how to engage – if it’s appropriate.
It’s amusing to think that “Word of Mouth” marketing (which, essentially, is what Facebook, Twitter and… 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 so that they can carry their identity and friend-connections with them even outside of Facebook.)
“We can make the whole web social. Now we are going to do the same with… 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 with the iPhone version, it gives app developers an easier way to reach Facebooks’s users and their data. Availability on Nintendo’s DSi came earlier this month.
Facebook Connect, which was launched… 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, Inc. is setting its sights on this. The company has built a self-serve platform that lets businesses from mom-and-pop shops to international brands create contests. Sweepstakes are a way to lure… Continue Reading