by Admin on October 30, 2009
Welcome back!
Social networking website Facebook was awarded $711.2 million in damages relating to an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace, court documents show.
Wallace did not oppose the motion or appear at the hearing on September 18, 2009, according to a filing on Thursday in a San Jose, California federal court.
The site filed an anti-spamming case against Wallace in February for accessing people’s Facebook accounts without their permission and sending phony mail and posts to the individuals’ public message wall, the company said in a blog post.
“While we don’t expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent,” Facebook said in a blog post.
Wallace did not immediately respond to a Reuters email seeking comment. His email address was obtained from the court documents.
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by Admin on September 15, 2009
There was a post on Facebook’s Blog recently mentioning that Facebook would soon be launching @Mentions like Twitter. Facebook enabled this functionality to its users yesterday.
Now, when you type a status update and type ‘@,’ an auto-updating drop-down menu with the names of your Facebook friends will appear. While users could always write the name of their friends in a status update, these names are now linked to a user’s profile.
Whenever somebody tags you in a status update, a notification will appear. For now, however, there is no place where you can easily find all the updates where somebody tagged you. It is also worth noting that while Twitter actually displays the @ symbol in status updates, Facebook just replaces it with the full name of the tagged person.
Obviously, this now makes Facebook even more like Twitter than ever before. At the same time, though, this is also a very useful feature, as it allows your friends to easily head over to the profile of the friends you tagged in your updates. Facebook’s Twitter-like new Facebook Lite interface, however, doesn’t support @mentions, yet.
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by Admin on June 11, 2009
Facebook is planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. Facebook also expects to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future. So, get your username before somebody else does!
Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. It will be like Twitter. (http://twitter.com/username) This feature of Facebook will be easier to find people via search engines like Google, etc.
Currently your Facebook profile url looks like this
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789
Now you can change it to
http://www.facebook.com/yourname
Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You’ll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.
Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it.
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Social networking site Facebook has been blocked in Iran since Saturday, according to the country’s opposition, as opposition voters increasingly turn to online tools like social networking to promote their candidates.
Iran will hold elections in June for a new president.
Lacking other suitable media, youth in Iran were using Facebook to promote opposition candidates, and to convince people to participate in the elections, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former vice president of Iran and a reformist politician, said in a post on his blog.
Abtahi blamed supporters of current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for blocking Facebook.
Facebook, blogs and similar websites are a key component of the election strategy of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi as he tries to mobilize Iran’s youth.
There is an account on Facebook in the name of Mousavi which claims over 6,600 supporters, besides a number of other accounts that are mobilizing support for the candidate.
Some reports from Iran suggest that the ban on Facebook may have been lifted. Other bloggers and users of Twitter in Iran are worried that these services may also be cut off.
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by Admin on April 27, 2009
Internet social media company Facebook plans to allow outside developers access to core parts of the website so they can build new services, a person familiar with the situation said.
The person said the company is expected to announce the plans on Monday. The new capabilities would let third-party developers build services that access content uploaded by Facebook users such as pictures and videos with the users’ permission.
Facebook, which has more than 200 million active users worldwide, does not plan to charge for the service.
The company is expected to brief developers on the plan, first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, at an event it is hosting for developers at its Palo Alto, California headquarters on Monday.
Facebook would not comment on the plans to open its service to outside developers, but the company said it was preparing an announcement on Monday related to developer opportunities.
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by Admin on April 25, 2009
With MySpace falling behind Facebook as the world’s largest online social network, MySpace tapped a former Facebook executive Friday as its new chief executive.
Owen Van Natta, 39, replaces Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of MySpace, who stepped down as chief executive Wednesday. News Corp., which owns MySpace, said Van Natta’s new role begins immediately.
Van Natta faces the lofty task of reinvigorating MySpace at a time when Facebook is growing at a faster clip and Twitter, the short messaging site, is grabbing scores of headlines and celebrity attention. While MySpace is still the largest social network in the United States, it has only 130 million users worldwide, compared with more than 200 million for Facebook.
Even so, MySpace may be making more money, at least for now. Research firm eMarketer estimates that the company brought in $585 million in U.S. ad revenue last year, nearly three times that of Facebook. A big chunk of that, however, comes from an ad-sharing deal with Google Inc. that expires next year. Neither Beverly Hills, Calif.-based MySpace nor Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook discloses how much money they make.
The executive change could be energizing for MySpace, said Charlene Li, an industry analyst and founder of Altimeter Group.
“MySpace has a very interesting product and a loyal user base,” Li said. But from a technology perspective, they’ve been stagnant, she added.
Facebook, meanwhile, continues to redesign and update the site, even if doing so often leads to user rumblings.
“Owen is coming from Facebook and the history they have with being much more technologically innovative than MySpace,” Li said. Shaking things up, she added, is the “whole purpose of a change in management.”
At Facebook, Van Natta was chief operating officer and helped negotiate a $240 million investment from Microsoft Corp. that valued the company at $15 billion — though it later emerged that Facebook placed its value well below that.
With Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ensconced as the site’s CEO, Van Natta left in February 2008 in hopes of landing the top job at another company. Later in the year he became CEO of Playlist.com, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based online music company.
On Friday, Playlist named John Sykes, a board member, as the company’s CEO and said Van Natta will be adviser to the company. Sykes is a co-founder of MTV and has been president of VH1.
MySpace’s other co-founder, Tom Anderson, had been president of the company and has been in talks about taking on a new role. News Corp. did not give an update on that Friday. Van Natta will report to Jonathan Miller, News Corp.’s chief digital officer, who was named to the post April 1.
Facebook, where Van Natta spend about three years as chief operating officer and then as chief revenue officer, declined to comment on the appointment.
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by Admin on April 1, 2009
Facebook’s finance chief, Gideon Yu, is leaving the fast-growing social-networking site as the company looks for a replacement with “public company experience.”
It’s the latest sign that the site may be looking to go public in the not-so-distant future, though the company has said it has no immediate plans for an initial public offering.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook said Tuesday that Yu, 37, has played an important role in establishing the company’s core financial operations. He became Facebook’s CFO in July 2007 after stints with Yahoo Inc., Google Inc.’s YouTube and a venture-capital firm. At YouTube, Yu helped negotiate the site’s sale to Google in a deal valued at $1.76 billion when it closed in 2006.
Facebook, which is nearing 200 million users worldwide, said that despite the recession it is pleased with its financial performance and that it’s in a good position for its next stage of growth.
A person close to the matter, who asked not to be named because privately held Facebook typically does not disclose financial details, said the company is on track to grow its revenue by 70 percent this year. And Facebook expects to generate positive cash flow, an important measure of a company’s financial health, by 2010.
The company has also been profitable by one measure — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA — for the past five quarters.
It is not clear how much Facebook would be worth if it were to go public. In 2007, an investment by Microsoft Corp. implied a market value of $15 billion. Facebook has noted, however, that Microsoft’s investment, which was for preferred stock, does not necessarily compare with what the company’s common shares would be worth on the open market.
A court hearing last June revealed that Facebook’s own appraisal had priced its privately held shares at $8.88 each, giving the company a market value of roughly $3.7 billion.
Facebook’s 24-year-old founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has said in the past that the company is open to additional investors, but it has to be at the “right valuation.” But the company is not saying what this valuation would be.
Nick Einhorn, research analyst at Renaissance Capital, said that if Facebook were to go public, it probably would not be anytime soon given the poor state of the overall IPO market. Companies that aren’t about to run out of money are more likely to hold off going public until market conditions improve.
Businesses planning an IPO must also prove that they are viable.
“It’s not enough to say in this market that ‘we are growing a lot,’” Einhorn said, adding that while five-year-old Facebook is certainly not brand new, it needs to prove that its business model can be profitable over the long term.
Einhorn said it’s still unclear whether social networking — Facebook and others like Twitter — can be sustainable and generate long-term profitability.
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by Admin on March 31, 2009
Adobe has partnered with one of the most popular social networking Web sites, Facebook, to give developers a new set of tools to create applications.
The applications will use Adobe’s Flash platform and the new ActionScript 3 Client Library for Facebook the two companies developed together. The client library is a free open source programming language that supports Facebook application programming interfaces (APIs) including Facebook Connect.
Adrian Ludwig, Adobe’s group manager for platforms, told Macworld that the companies will release the library and then gather feedback from developers. The libraries will be updated, adding functionality based on that feedback, allowing developers to make better applications.
The number and types of developers using Flash is increasing all the time. Some of the developers are focused on Flash, while others are coming from more traditional segments of the market.
“We are seeing that it’s becoming quite easy for traditional developers to start using Flash,” said Ludwig. “That’s quite a change from where it was five to eight years ago when Flash was focused on animation.”
Adobe said that Flash Player 9 has 98 percent penetration, meaning that 98 percent of all Internet connected computers have the application installed. The company did a study two months after the release of Flash Player 10 and found 55 percent penetration. While not released yet, Ludwig said he expects the latest adoption rate for Flash Player 10 to top 80 percent.
Those numbers give Flash Player 10 the fastest adoption rate of any version of Flash Player, according to Adobe.
Writing Facebook applications in Flash is not new. In fact, 12 of top 20 apps on Facebook use Flash. However, the new tools should make it easier for developers in the future.
Adobe is making documentation, example applications and code available for download from its Web site.
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by Admin on March 26, 2009
As Facebook users remain in a huff over the site’s new layout, which was unveiled a few weeks ago, it appears change may be coming.
Or so Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg suggests in a cryptic update he posted to his public fan profile on Friday, referring to the “updated designs”.
“Right now I’m reading feedback from users and looking at some updated designs that include ideas from people’s comments,” he wrote Friday. People familiar with the matter confirm that there are likely to be some tweaks.
In a statement, Facebook said they were “listening carefully to what people are saying about the new home page” and take the feedback seriously.
What ideas are in store – and when they might hit – remain unclear.
Major changes are unlikely. Zuckerberg is known for sticking to his guns. When users resisted the launch of news feed in 2006, Zuckerberg defended it in a blog post entitled “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” The company enhanced some privacy settings and it became one popular feature on the site.
Facebook has always said that the new design is a work in-progress, so a few changes wouldn’t be surprising. In the new design, Facebook made the area where people get updates on their friends more prominent and more dynamic.
But any significant changes would be a setback for the company, which has pumped the new approach as a way to enable its 175 million users to share more information more easily and more rapidly.
Hundreds of thousands of users who have joined groups to protest the design are unconvinced, complaining about everything from the font being too large and the photos too big to overall confusion about where to find things.
Of course, the real way users vote is with their attention. You can bet that whatever changes Facebook makes are in response to some trend about what people are doing – or not doing – under the new design.
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by Admin on March 15, 2009
Facebook on Saturday announced the new Facebook Connect for iPhone service at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX. Dave Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook, took the stage to explain the new iPhone integration, the recently released new homepage design that began rolling out last week.
Facebook Connect for iPhone is available now with several participating apps, and does for iPhone apps what Facebook Connect does for Web sites: users can link their apps with their Facebook profile to share their data with friends.
“For the first time, your iPhone apps can now have friends,” said Morin. “I can pull out my iPhone and play it not only my other friends with iPhones, but I can also play with my mom—she can join in and play with us on her computer.”
Morin invited several iPhone developers to show off their new functionality. Representatives from Playfish, Tapulous (of “Tap Tap Revenge” fame), and SGN showed off how Facebook Connect for iPhone will work with games. For instance, you can share you scores in your Facebook feed, see which of your friends are online, and invite both iPhone- and non-iPhone-using Facebook friends to play with you.
The most exciting game looks to be “Agency Wars” from SGN, which went live on Saturday. It’s a spy game that uses geolocation to let you leave clues and set traps in specific real-world locations. Recruit friends to your spy agency, or play against them and “assasinate them.”
Other apps that are utilizing Facebook Connect include the popular Urbanspoon and Flixster Movies apps. Urbanspoon now lets users post restaurant pictures and reviews on their Facebook feeds, and Flixster does a similar thing for movies. Look for Facebook Connect-enabled apps soon from Citysearch, CitizenSports, Loopt, MTV, EA Sports, and several other companies.
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