Doug October 1st, 2009
A company called GetJar may help Facebook obtain a considerably bigger foothold in the mobile market than it would have managed otherwise. Tricia Duryee reports, “The service does this by alerting users to the fact that a mobile application is available for download when they go to the company’s web site from their phone’s browser.” And apparently, Facebook “has seen an additional one million downloads a week, or about 8.5 million in total during a two-month trial period.” That’s impressive stuff.
Doug September 3rd, 2009
If you don’t access Facebook using your cell phone, well, odds are that you will before long. Facebook released stats today indicating that the use of Facebook Mobile has more than tripled in the past eight months (20 million to 65 million people), and there’s no end in sight. Henri Moissinac, a member of the mobile team, wrote on the Facebook Blog, “[W]e are continuously making updates to our mobile products and working with some of the biggest names in mobile to make sure that Facebook is available on the latest devices and mobile operating systems.”
Doug August 27th, 2009
People put a whole lot of personal information on Facebook, and a lot of unfortunate stuff could happen if it fell into the wrong hands. As what’s hopefully a proactive measure, then, Facebook’s announced a new focus on privacy. Much of the effort deals with awareness – getting people to recognize what privacy options exist and actually tinker with them. Otherwise, there will be new limits on what third-party applications can do in order to seal off a major source of “outside” leaks.
Doug July 30th, 2009
The average Facebook or Twitter user may soon be seeing – or producing – a lot more stuff about shooting zombies or aliens. A new Nintendo DSi update has introduced Facebook photo uploading, and Twitter and Facebook applications for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are supposed to be out before Christmas. This may go a long ways towards making social networks an even more regular and accepted part of daily life.
Doug July 23rd, 2009
Facebook doesn’t want to cater exclusively to early adopters with expensive smartphones. The social network is going to take a shot at embracing everybody, then, by letting users upload pictures and videos from anywhere they have email. Users can just visit the Facebook Mobile page, obtain their personal upload email address, and then send content to their accounts from all sorts of cell phones. Expect to see a lot more candid late-night and vacation photos as a result.
Admin July 15th, 2009
A new study from the Nielsen Group makes official what we’ve known all along: we waste more time on Facebook than any other website. In their compilation of U.S. Internet usage data for June, 2009, Nielson ranked by hours the amount of time that the Internet user spends on a website in one month. These are the top ten websites that take our time and consume our workday. At the very top, outstripping the next in-line by nearly an hour and a half was Facebook.com. Next in line was Yahoo, followed by Google, and Microsoft, respectively.
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Admin July 8th, 2009
A new spate of numbers has come out from Facebook-tracking labs, giving number-lovers some new factoids to ogle over. Among the most fascinating trend is a spike in the number of users over fifty-five years old.
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Doug June 25th, 2009
You may have heard by now that Facebook’s dabbling in real-time search – the ability to look up what your friends and other people are saying, as they say it. And that’s rather interesting. But a key point is the fact that a lot more information will, so long as individuals’ privacy settings allow, become public. So in accordance with the traditions established by MySpace and Twitter, it may soon become a lot easier to see different folks’ status updates, photos, notes, and all other sorts of stuff.
Doug May 14th, 2009
Towards the end of “Scrubs,” the janitor – who is the craziest regular character on the show – came up with his own type of money. Now there’s word that dear old Facebook is trying to do the same thing. Yes, a Facebook rep told Nicholas Carlson, “We’re starting a very small alpha test with a handful of developers that explores ways for users to use their Facebook credits with third-party applications on Facebook.com. The test hasn’t started so it’s too early to get into the details.” It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.
Doug March 5th, 2009
Believe it or not, the social network that used to serve just a few American colleges is becoming a global phenomenon. Ben Lorica reports, “Within Asia, the fastest-growing countries over the last 12 weeks were Indonesia (up 169%) and the Philippines (up 119%).” Also, “Among the smaller countries in Europe, Facebook grew fastest in the Czech Republic (up 144%) and Slovakia (up 137%).” To achieve world peace, maybe the U.N. should trade in all its fancy auditoriums and boardroom tables for a social network, eh?
Doug February 26th, 2009
When you use a search engine to look someone up, it’s quite possible that you’ll want to contact them, right? Or make friends, view their other pals, or administer a poke. So from this point forward, Yahoo intends to make Facebook enhanced search results automatically appear and allow for all of these actions. The move was made with Facebook’s blessing and thanks to SearchMonkey technology.
Doug October 16th, 2008
It seems that Facebook is becoming a lot more interesting for both users and developers. From the user perspective, a whole bunch of fascinating applications are on the way. As for developers, the fbFund just awarded the 25 teams that created the applications $25,000 each. An additional contest round will see the prize levels reach $225,000. Expect to see some top talent and a lot of random people drawn to the social network as a result.
Doug September 26th, 2008
Facebook is known more for wasting people’s time than changing the world. The social network is at least taking one step in that second direction, though, with its new focus on getting people to vote. In addition to allowing users register to vote through a page on the site, ads will make the effort more visible. And a post on the Facebook Blog states, “We’re proud to announce that in the few hours since launching this initiative, thousands of users have registered to vote through Facebook.” Not bad at all.
Tim April 11th, 2007
Facebook has undergone a facelift and rolled out a few new features to reduce the clutter of the previous menu. Of the most notable changes is the loss of the “Facebook Guy” icon in the top left, in addition to the more important features such as drop-down menus, network pages, and an inbox.
Tim March 6th, 2007
Facebook notices traffic shift from Grey’s Anatomy. Due to a cliffhanger in the storyline of the popular TV show, Facebook saw a drop of almost 200,000 users during the one hour period, with scattered “Facebook breaks” during the commercials.
