Displaying items by tag: Facebook

Twitter celebrated their sixth anniversary back in March. During the celebration the company announced that they had reached over 140 million active users per month and that there are around 340 million tweets made daily. [This is not a bad achievement, but it does make use wonder about the sheer amount of inane information that gets broadcast around the globe every day; 140 words at a time. –Ed]

When I first heard that Instagram now had the right to sell user photographs to third parties I was not surprised or shocked. This was not the case with many news outlets or with many Instagram users apparently. What we find funny is that Instagram is owned by Facebook… you remember them, the same company that did this with their own users’ pictures (Actual profile pictures of their users) without permission and just settled a lawsuit over it.

Facebook has released a new edition of their application for use on devices based on Android. Unlike previous versions the new is not based on HTML, but a native app for Google's mobile OS. Frank Qixing Du, an engineer on the Facebook for Android team said that “This new release creates a solid foundation for the Facebook for Android app moving forward. The infrastructure in place will let us continue to make the app even faster, smoother, and feature-rich.”

Facebook is negotiating over the purchase of the company behind the  IM application WhatsApp. Details of the agreement are not known so far, but it is known that Facebook sees this mobile technology as the "next big thing". The rise of smartphones certainly was the best possible thing for applications like WhatsApp and Viber due to increasing pularity of mobile internet.

The firm Morrison & Forrester has published statistics which are intended to show the online habits of Americans. Among other things; they Compared Facebook and Google+ for relative traffic. You can already make some predictions yourself from personal experience about these two. Facebook was here first, picked up tons of users, over time there was more and more spam, ads and irrelevant things. Meanwhile Google Plus came along, was announced as a revolution, but failed to attract a larger number of users. However from a personal point of view and of several people I talked to, Google Plus has a lot less spam and "stupid" things, also discussions have higher quality, and there is no so many people that have their profiles solely to get 50+ likes on half naked pictures.

According to several rumors, Yahoo could soon expand areas of cooperation with Facebook. One consequence could be a cessation of the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. Will the two ladies Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg change the way we search the internet, or at least give some decent competition to Google and other search engines.

Most of us probably remember having our news feeds on Facebook bombarded with status updates of the once prolific game, Farmville. Perhaps, like me, you even played the game for a period of time, enjoying the dull, repetitive “grinding” pace of progress in the game. For a time, it was enjoyable, and very popular, as have several other of Zynga's games. However, despite their original success with Farmville, Zynga's stocks have been constantly slipping for the past several months.

As Facebook looks for a new ways of making money they have introduced the Android Software Development Kit and Developers center. They have prepared Facebook widgets for app developers to implement into their apps. They also provided guides for building in friends so you can annoy your friends with app requests once they are done.  As they stated on their site “This release includes several tools that simplify authentication and authorization, including a Fragment and a Button that manage login state automatically.”

Mark Zuckerberg announced today that “This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month”, and around 600 million of those are mobile users. The average age of Facebook users continues to decrees, as now is 22. When they hit 500 million users back in July 2010 the average age was 23. Zuckerberg also posted an interesting fact sheet, so according to that there have been over 1.13 trillion “likes” since the launch in February 2009, 219 billion photos uploaded, 17 billion location-tagged posts (check-ins included), and about 210,000 years of music has been played on Facebook so far.

Today Facebook added a new and redesigned Help Center to help it's users to solve their issues with less trouble than they might have had so far. The new Help center has new layout and design with the addition of a list of popular questions users ask when they have problems (FAQ). The new Help Center design contains 6 large areas that contain major items that could be interesting to users based on how they use Facebook, if they go to Help Center while not logged in, they will see information about how to create your own account or resetting your password, while the standard users will have suggestions to learn privacy basics, report an issue, see what's new on Facebook and to discover new annoying features.