Mark Zuckerberg: TIME Magazine Person of the Year
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: News, Social Media, Social Networks,
TIME Magazine can’t stress enough the fact that their Person of the Year award “is not an honor”. In 1938, Adolf Hitler was named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. Unlike Hitler, however, Mark Zuckerberg fast tracked the world to complete connectivity through a global social network. And at a baby-ish 26 years of age, billionaire college dropout Zuckerberg is responsible for leading 550 million (or 1 out of every 12 people) into the social network at an astounding rate of 700,000 a day. If 700,000 is too big a number to comprehend, imagine that if you lived for 700,000 days you’d be 1,918 years old; which by that time Facebook would have added over 490 billion members, or about 72 times the Earth’s current population. Starting to get the picture? There’s no doubt that Facebook is a social revolution that won’t go the way of the dinosaur - *cough* MySpace *cough*. But the bigger question is where will it go?
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Facebook wants to be your browser home page
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Social Networks,
This week, you may have noticed something different the first time you went back to Facebook. The social networking site has started displaying a bar encouraging users to set the site as their default home page. By saying "See what's happening with your friends the moment you open your browser" it hopes that users will accept to put Facebook as the very first page that their browser opens. While it may not seem like a big deal going from a bookmark to your home page, sites like Yahoo! and MSN are some of the most frequented pages on the web, in large part because so many people simply left them as their default home page. This is yet another step for the biggest social network of the day to get more center stage.
Gallery: Facebook wants to be your browser home page
Facebook introduces revamped messaging
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Business Tools, Corporate News, Social Networks,
Facebook today announced a revamp of their messaging system. The new system, which will be released slowly over the coming months, will integrate known ways to contact people into the new Facebook Messages. While they were keen to specify that this isn't email, email is definitively one part of it. The goal of the system is to simplify and streamline messaging between people. Everyone will have the option of having a @facebook.com email address, and anyone will be able to send them messages through email, to that address. Those emails will then show up in their Facebook messages. As users reply, it will be sent back by email. But then, if that person sends them a SMS or IM, it will show up in the same conversation, and same history thread. The system will, behind the scenes, route messages between email, SMS, IM and Facebook messages.
The messaging system will include two folders, the Friends and the Others folder. By default, your friends messages will show up right away, while everything else will show in the Others folder. Users will be able to bring up a message from the Others folder up to Friends if they want to. In the questions part of the announcement, they did say that while this system will include attachments for images and even files like documents and spreadsheets, it will not include voice or video, but it's a possibility for the future. Also, if someone not on Facebook sends you an email, it will show up in the Others folder by default, but can also be brought up to the default one. Finally, forwarding will be available, apparently a feature users requested often.
Read More | Facebook Live Announcement
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Facebook set to unleash email service to compete with Gmail, Hotmail?
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: News, Social Media, Social Networks,
Facebook sent an invitation recently to news agencies for another announcement coming this Monday. While there is no direct mention as to what that announcement is, TechCrunch believes that this may be a major play on a new email service, aimed at competing with Google's Gmail service. Based on the invitation image, it seems likely that the announcement has to do with messaging, since that's what the graphic shows. Then, references to a secret project called Project Titan came up again recently. Finally, just this week, we reported on how Google and Facebook have started an all-out war concerning the exporting of contacts and friends information. It's all still rumors for now, but it will be very interesting to see if a Facebook based email service would take a big chunk out of services like Gmail. Since Facebook has done everything it can to become your primary contacts platform, it would sure make a lot of sense.
Read More | TechCrunch
Gallery: Facebook set to unleash email service to compete with Gmail, Hotmail?
Google warns users about Facebook data import
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Productivity, Social Networks,
Looks like Google agrees with the vast majority of us as it pertains to Facebook's insane policy where they will allow you to import the data of your contacts, but refuse to let you get that data back out of the service. When you attempt to export your contact data from Google to Facebook, you get the warning above, where Google lets you know that once you export your data to Facebook, it is stuck there, and that they "strongly disagree" with the practice. They don't stop you, of course, but they do make it known what's going on, while Facebook tries to hide it.
Read More | Google Contacts Export
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Livestream video directly on your Facebook wall
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Partnerships, Social Media, Video Services,
Livestream has had a presence on Facebook for a while now. It's been used to stream the Facebook announcements live on the social network, as well as provide other Livestream content that users could watch directly on Facebook. Now, the social site is introducing the Livestream app, which will allow any user of Facebook to stream video directly from Facebook, at a press of a button, onto their walls. This includes all the Livestream platform features such as making this a regular podcast, with archived videos, or even pay-per-view shows. If you already have a Livestream channel, you can embed it directly on your Facebook page. This will remove some of the steps where viewers would have to move from one site to the next, and show your content directly to your friends. While partners have had access to some of those services for a while now, it's the first time users can do it with a single click, at no cost. This is yet another move by Facebook to bring social components to every facet of the web.
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Read More | Facebook
Gallery: Livestream video directly on your Facebook wall
Why your site needs Facebook and Twitter share buttons
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Features, Marketing, Social Media,
It doesn't matter if you run a Fortune 500 company, or if you just have a personal blog. It's also not about whether you like Facebook or Twitter, or if you're active on the social scene. The simple fact is that the world is moving to social, and in a big way. Facebook has over half a billion users, growing every day, with Twitter following behind. Where people used to look up things on Google or Yahoo!, now they look it up on social networks. Instead of getting stories and links from news sites, they get them on Twitter. Instead of writing an email to a friend asking how he's doing, they sit on their Facebook walls and see what they're up to.
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Facebook introduces single sign-on for mobile
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Business Tools, News, Social Media,
This morning Facebook announced improvements to their iPhone and Android apps, as well as changes to how they handle their sign-on platform. First, the new Groups and Places features are now fully integrated into both apps, which also brings up the Android app to be on par with the iPhone one. This will allow you to take part of all those groups while on the go. Their mobile apps hadn't been updated in a while, so it's good to see the company commit themselves to the mobile space. As a side note, they did comment that Facebook had no plan to make a phone of their own, preferring to instead bring their platform to the devices that people use.
The second part of the announcement dealt with single sign-on. Mark Zuckerberg described the troubles and frustrations that entering usernames and passwords could be on a phone, and their approach to solving it. They are now providing developers with a way to integrate a single button that will log users to their services. Now, to log into any mobile site or service that supports this feature, all you'll have to do is click on the button "sign in with Facebook". No more username or password to remember. They showed the Groupon and Zynga apps which will support this feature soon, with many more on board.
Gallery: Facebook introduces single sign-on for mobile
Facebook acquires Drop.io
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Acquisitions, News, Social Media,
Late Friday afternoon, the Drop.io blog posted an announcement saying that they had sold most of their technologies and assets to Facebook. Included in the deal is the fact that the site's creator Sam Lessin will also move on to Facebook. This most likely means that Facebook is looking into easy file sharing for one of its future services. The site allowed users to create an account, and freely store data on the web where they could then share it with other users.
Of more interest to us, however, is the part where the actual Drop.io service will be shutting down on Dec 15, and all data deleted. This means everyone who used the site will need to download their data if they need it. This is a chilly reminder that any cloud-based service can shut down at any point, taking all your data with it. Just earlier this year Yahoo! shut down Geocities and they simply went ahead and deleted decades worth of user data.
As we rely more and more on web services, it's worth keeping in mind that no one cares about our files more than we do.
Read More | Drop.io blog
Gallery: Facebook acquires Drop.io
Barack Obama calls Facebook users to publicly commit to vote
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: News, Social Media,
President Barack Obama has had a Twitter account for a while now, which many think was influential in getting him elected. With the election season coming up once more, Obama sent a call yesterday morning inviting people to install a Facebook app on their profiles called "Commit to Vote Challenge". The app itself is also more than just an ad. In typical social fashion, it allows you to "compete with my friends to inspire the most commitments". This is perhaps the first time a head of state has recognized the popularity of the social networks to a point where they create actual apps, in order to push their messages and invite people to participate in the vote.
Regardless of political allegiance, this is an interesting step forward, with this kind of embrace of online social sites. This is only a first step, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming years, we could easily see iPhone apps, online forums, and so on.
Read More | Twitter
Gallery: Barack Obama calls Facebook users to publicly commit to vote
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