Three people are now confirmed to have been killed and 176 injured in the bomb attacks on the Boston Marathon. Two devices, thought to have been packed with nails and shrapnel, went off as runners crossed the finish line yesterday. An eight-year-old boy, there to watch his dad race, is confirmed to be among those who died. As details continue to emerge, the FBI has begun the hunt for whoever was responsible. In the last few minutes President Barack Obama has said it was an act of terrorism. WATCH - Mystery surrounds perpetrators of Boston Marathon bombs WATCH - Security talks are held in London in aftermath of Boston blasts
The Alharbi clan has long been active in
al-Qaida. Khaled bin Ouda bin Mohammed al-Harbi, for example, is a Saudi
national who joined Osama bin Laden’s mujahadeen group in the 1980s. He
reportedly became an al-Qaida member in the mid-1990s. He turned himself in to Saudi authorities part of an amnesty deal.
The BBC reported Khaled Alharbi was married to the daughter of
al-Qaida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahri. He reportedly appeared with bin
Laden Another
top al-Qaida operative is Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi, a Saudi
national identified by the State Department as “a key member of an
al-Qaida network operating in Iran.”
Facebook finally decided to concentrate on mobile late last year,
and its shares have recovered nicely from their post-IPO doldrums. To
keep that momentum going, Facebook needs to prove that its mobile
strategy is working.
Investors are scrutinizing the company's
moves, and at first, even tepid mobile growth was enough to send
Facebook shares soaring. That's because the company set expectations at
rock bottom: Right after its May 2012 IPO, Facebook said it wasn't
making "any meaningful revenue" from mobile.
Facebook turned a corner a few months later, when it launched a new Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500)
iOS app and began showing ads to mobile users. It worked: Mobile
accounted for 14% of the company's ad revenue in the third quarter,
which ended September 30. Investors were thrilled, sending shares up
21%. But some of that goodwill didn't last. A few months later, Facebook revealed that mobile comprised 23% of its ad revenue
in the fourth quarter. That was a solid bump, but investors focused on
the fact that mobile user growth slowed slightly -- and shares fell by
10%. Clearly, investors are no longer impressed by mere "we're working on it!" assurances. Still, shares are up nearly 16% since Facebook's (FB) strong third-quarter report in October. Related story: Facebook uses offline purchases to target ads
Expectations are high for Facebook's first-quarter report, due
Wednesday after the market closes. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters
expect sales to have grown 36% over the previous year to $1.4 billion.
Profit estimates came in at $308 million, after Facebook warned last
quarter that its expenses will rise by 50% this year. In the
first four months of the year, the company has already released three
major new products that are clearly aimed at maximizing ad revenue. The first came last month, when Facebook unveiled a News Feed revamp centered around a more visual design that also includes bigger graphics for ads.
The second and third came too late to be included in Wednesday's
results, but they're a clear sign of where Facebook is going. The
beginning of this month brought Facebook Home,
a custom startup screen for Android smartphones that will eventually
include ads. A week later, Facebook announced "Partner Categories,"
which lets advertisers target specific users based on their past buying history -- even if the purchases happened offline.
JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth said in a note to clients this month that
he is "encouraged by newer formats and products." He also reminded his
readers that social advertising is in its infancy. Facebook is
trying to prove that space has a viable business model. Its incremental
moves have generated cautious optimism. Now it's time to give investors a
real reason to believe.
Facebook: Beheading video 'doesn't violate' standards for graphic violence
On Monday, Facebook responded to a report of a grisly beheading video, saying it does not violate the social media site's policy regarding graphic violence. "We reviewed the video you reported, but found it doesn't violate Facebook's Community Standard on graphic violence, which includes depicting harm to someone or something, threats to the public's safety, or theft and vandalism," Facebook said. The video, which was removed from the page that was originally
reported, has been spotted on other timelines and clearly shows a woman
being decapitated, allegedly for cheating on her husband. A post by Celia Mellow at GoPetition
said that Facebook gave her the same response to the video. Shocked at
the video, she started a petition demanding it be pulled. "We, the undersigned, call on Facebook to review any reports to
remove the video posted by 'Freddy Guidi' and any other pages/users who
have posted 'Beheading videos' in order to protect its users, the
families of the victims and to prevent the spread of terrorist threats
unnecessarily published on social networks," the petition says. According to a post at the Daily Kos, the video was shared over 40,000 times from a different timeline. Due to the graphic nature of the video, we did not provide a link. Diane Sori, a Florida-based conservative blogger who was banned from Facebook over a link she never posted, was livid. "I got blocked because I didn't take down a still pic of a beheading
that I didn't even know was there and this actual video of one is
allowed," she said in disbelief. "I'm actually seething," she told Examiner. "If this isn't selective enforcement then I don't know what is." We reached out to Facebook spokesman Fred Wolens for an explanation, but Wolens did not immediately respond.
4/14/2013 @ 11:23AM
|785 views
Facebook Has Spring Awakening With 'Home' Launch And Newsfeed Redesign
MENLO PARK, CA - APRIL 04: A Facebook
employee holds a phone that is running the new 'Home' program during an
event at Facebook headquarters during an event at Facebook headquarters
on April 4, 2013 in Menlo Park, California. (Image credit: Getty Images
via @daylife)
Facebook, Inc. has been around for nearly a decade now, and not even
its disappointing IPO last May will curtail development. The company
continues to unveil new features for its 1 billion users. After laying low for about six months following its IPO, this spring Facebook is swinging back into action with new Android software and a newsfeed redesign.
Ever since the ‘Timeline’ launch in 2011, Facebook has
shown a heightened interest in creating a more personal experience for
its users. “We’re going to execute our mission of keeping the world
more open and connected by doing things that we think will build value
over the long term,” founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2012
interview with CrunchBase. These are the goals behind the company’s
latest developments. With over 600 million users of Facebook mobile, Zuckerberg deemed it
to be the most important frontier to expand over the next 3-5 years.
This April, Facebook released Home,
software that allows Android owners to replace their cell phone home
screens with their Facebook newsfeeds. Instead of having to launch the
Facebook mobile application to access their social networks, Home users
are constantly connected. Home software is downloadable on any Android
device, but Facebook also released its own $99 smartphone for At&T —
HTC First — specifically designed to run the Home interface. “The home screen is the soul of your phone. It sets the tone for
your whole experience and we think it should be deeply personal,”
Zuckerberg said. But skeptics wonder if these increasingly personal
digital experiences come at the expense of face-to-face interactions.
Microsoft’s Rakesh Agrawal believes this to be the case: “Already when
I’m at dinner, people are playing with Facebook on their phones. Do I
want it to be even easier for them to ignore me?” he said on an NBC segment about Facebook Home. Probably the less controversial of its two new offerings, the
redesigned newsfeed launch will roll out in the next few weeks.
According to Facebook’s March press release: “It is designed to reduce
clutter and focus more on stories from the people you care about.” By
enlarging newsfeed posts and adding extra vibrancy to
photographs, designers hope to make friends’ stories more engaging.
They also expect the new layout to be less overwhelming and more
interactive. For an even greater sense of personalization, users will
be able to sort newsfeed information using filters such as Photos, Music
and Friends. While the Home software for Android is meant to revolutionize a
user’s mobile experience via social networking, the newsfeed change is
more about improving Facebook’s aesthetics and overall ease of use. As
one Facebook spokesperson put it: “If this [newsfeed redesign] is a
success, it’s going to be something that most people don’t really even
notice.” Twitter @RaeOfSun91
OK, So This New Facebook Home Ad Is Actually Pretty Funny
The first ad for Facebook‘s new mobile phone software, Facebook Home, was OK but not riveting. “Airplane,” which was shown at the April 4 launch, featured a guy checking his Facebook feed on a plane, with updates appearing live in front of his eyes. Not bad, but not great either. Plus, it wasn’t entirely clear what the product is.
MENLO PARK, CA - APRIL 04: A Facebook
employee holds a phone that is running the new 'Home' program during an
event at Facebook headquarters during an event at Facebook headquarters
on April 4, 2013 in Menlo Park, California. (Image credit: Getty Images
via @daylife)
There was enough to like from FacebookFB-2.49%‘s
quarterly report last week for the stock to push even closer to the $30
a share level. Just don’t count Barron’s among the company’s newly
found friends. Barron’s again expressed a bearish sentiment on the social network in its most recent issue.
The financial newspaper says shares still aren’t more than $25 a share.
Facebook on Friday closed at $28.31 a share. For perspective, Friday’s
price is still nearly $10 below the company’s debut price ($38 a share),
but up considerably (some 60%) from its lows.
It’s not as if Barron’s is saying anything new, though.
It still doubts Facebook’s ability to make money from advertising, and
generally believes the ads you find there aren’t worth much. The
viewpoint does show the stark, black-and-white philosophy today on
investing in Facebook. Either you believe that Facebook, as well as
other newly public tech firms like GrouponGRPN-5.28%, Pandora and LinkedInLNKD+0.01%, will hone the ability to mint money from online advertising… or you don’t, and you generally think the whole ecosystem, save GoogleGOOG+1.02%, will eventually dissolve into pixelated glop. Regardless of which theory you conform to, there’s one thing that’s
indisputable. Facebook shares are damned expensive. Analysts expect
Facebook to make 57 cents a share this year, a 49.7 forward multiple on
the stock. If that happened, earnings would be growing only about 9%
year over year. Sales would expand by 32%, though, to $6.72 billion. Reach Abram Brown at abrown@forbes.com.
The new ad, though, is much better. It opens with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
giving his troops a pep talk for Facebook Home–so you know what the ad
is about right away–when suddenly updates that a bored engineer is
viewing appear in real life. First there’s a goat screaming at
Zuckerberg, then a friend playing squash, another friend cannonballing
into a pool–well, check it out, above. I especially like the screaming goat, which has to be a self-deprecating jab at Zuckerberg’s adventure killing a goat because he vowed to eat only meat from animals he himself killed. Best of all, this activity drowns out Zuckerberg’s prototypical
corporate rah-rah. (Kidding.) (Sort of.) Anyway, less than three years
ago, Zuckerberg couldn’t stop sweating during a very uncomfortable interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. In most of his public appearances, he was stilted and nervous. Those days are clearly over, and truth be told, they have been for
awhile now. You won’t mistake Zuckerberg’s appearance for, say, Morgan
Freeman with his meticulous vocal grace or even Dave Thomas, the folksy founder of Wendy’s. But his appearance in his own company’s ad works on his own terms.
A 49-year-old Nanuet man accused of illegally possessing firearms and
a metal knuckle knife, as well as making threats on Facebook to kill
state and federal officials, has been indicted by a Rockland County
Grand Jury on the charge of criminal possession of a weapon. The FBI and
U.S. Attorney’s Office have announced they will be handling the death
threats portion of the case. Mulqueen is a convicted felon and thus not allowed to own firearms.
The metal knuckle knife is an illegal weapon in New York State. The
police found a small cache of weapons in Mulqueen’s Nanuet home when
they searched the premises last week. Mulqueen had in his possession:
1 10.62×54 Bolt Action Rifle
1 Remington 35 Pump Action Rifle loaded with 6 rounds
Approximately 100 rounds of ammunition, including 27 rounds of .50 caliber armor piercing bullets (tank buster)
1 Sword
2 Rifle bayonets
1 Rifle scope
1 Metal knuckle knife
1 Bulletproof body armor
Mulqueen had been posting incindiery threats on the Internet site
Facebook in recent weeks under the pseudonym Lawrence Henry. Authorities
revealed some of the messages. According to authorities Mulqueen had threatened to kill mostly
Democratic politicians and officials including Governor Andrew Cuomo,
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator Charles Schumer, Rep. Nita Lowey, and
national political figures like Sens. Harry Reid Diane Feinstein,
Barbara Boxer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the “every Congressional Black
Caucus member” and several other congressmen and women. Mulqueen also surmised that any supporter of President Obama should be considered a traitor and shot, police said. “I can’t wait to start killing the scum,” was one quote of Mulqueen’s released by authorities. Other remarks he is said to have uttered on Facebook include a
promise to some local Dem politicians, “Your dirt nap is coming very
soon.” He exclaimed in one status update “I want these scumbags DEAD!!!” And
added, “That traitor scum, Obama subserviant eunichs, f–k them and
death to them all.” Mulqueen was outed to authorities by his landlord Fran Pillersdorf,
63. She had grown concerned that Mulqueen was going beyond venting to
actually representing a threat. Pillersdorf said she’s been in arguments with Mulqueen in recent
weeks and she found him to be unstable. She also said he was a drunk. Police believe Mulqueen is part of the so-called “sovereign citizens”
movement, which is comprised of persons who believe they are not
subject to any outside authority. The FBI considers this to be a
terrorist movement. Clarkstown police said Mulqueen had a felony DWI on his record as well as harassment and criminal contempt charges. Mulqueen was charged with third- and fourth-degree criminal
possession of a weapon, a Class D felony and a Class A misdemeanor
respectively, making terroristic threats, a Class D felony under NY
State law, and harassment. The FBI and US Attorney’s Office are also interested in pursuing Mulqueen’s terror threats under federal law.
Facebook is allowing advertisers to target individual users based on offline purchases.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
If you head to a department store to buy a pair of jeans, you might start seeing a lot of ads for pants on Facebook.
For the first time, Facebook ads will target specific users based on
their past buying history -- even if the purchases happened offline.
Facebook unveiled the new feature for advertisers, called "Partner Categories," on Wednesday.
The feature works with information from massive consumer data companies Acxiom (ACXM), DataLogix and Epsilon. These are companies that know all about you:
your income level, your online activity, your Social Security number,
what you've bought recently, and even whether you've served time in
prison. Facebook (FB)
Partner Categories matches the social network's user-generated data
with the information from the data companies to create dossiers on its
users. Facebook then groups those specific users into categories like
"people who are heavy buyers of frozen foods," and advertisers can serve
ads to those curated groups.
Previously, advertisers could target only general groups based on
user-supplied information: for example, women in California who list
surfing as an interest. In a blog post
about the new product, Facebook was quick to note that the data are
anonymized on both sides. That is, while advertisers can target groups
of specific users, they never know the identities of the users they're
advertising to. Partner Categories advertisers see only the
size of the group, and details about why these users were grouped -- for
example, they're customers with a grocery store loyalty card who buy
three times as much cereal as the national average. The pairing
of these data sources is sure to incense critics of the company's data
practices, though Facebook also noted in its post that "companies have
long used this type of targeting off of Facebook." "We think
that this new type of targeting is both more relevant for people and can
be even more effective for advertisers," said Elisabeth Diana,
spokeswoman for Facebook. "We think we can serve both in a privacy-safe
way." At launch, advertisers can choose from 500 of these
"partner categories," and further refine by data like gender or age.
Facebook said users will be able to see how and why they were targeted
for a certain ad, and they have the ability to opt out of ads from
certain advertisers or from partner categories altogether. By
adding this type of highly targeted advertising capability, Facebook
clearly wants to create more value for advertisers -- which could result
in more revenue for Facebook. The social network has over a
billion users, but in 2012, the company's average revenue per user was
just $5.32. That's only a 6% increase from 2011, and it's far lower than other companies that report the metric.
Still, advertising remains Facebook's bread and butter. Ads accounted
for 84% of Facebook's revenue in 2012, and the company has continued to
release site updates that toe the line between calling attention to ads
and not annoying users. For example, last month's News Feed revamp centered around a more visual design that also includes bigger graphics for ads in users' news feeds.
2:58 p.m. | Updated Added more details and analysis. MENLO PARK, Calif. — Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief
executive of Facebook, announced on Thursday that the company had
developed new software, called Home, to showcase the social network on mobile devices using Google’s Android operating system. “Today our phones are designed around apps, not people,” Mr.
Zuckerberg said at a news conference at Facebook’s headquarters. “We
want to flip that around.”
Home converts the Facebook news feed into the home screen on the
user’s phone. Pictures take up most of the real estate, with each news
feed entry scrolling by like a slide show. Messages and notifications
pop up over the home page. To “like” something on the news feed requires
no more than a double-tap. Facebook apps are in easy reach. The company will not show ads immediately on the phone home screen,
which Facebook is calling the Cover Feed, but it is very likely to do so
in the future. The first phone with the new package installed will be made by HTC
and will be sold in the United States with AT&T service for about
$100, starting April 12. Users of some other HTC and Samsung Android
phones will also be able to download the software starting on that day,
with Facebook planning to roll it out more broadly to other Android
devices in the coming months. It will be available in Europe soon with Orange as the carrier, Mr.
Zuckerberg said. He stressed that he wanted the new product to enable a
mass, global audience to connect to Facebook, especially those who have
yet to go on the Internet. “We want to build something that’s accessible
to everyone,” he said. The new product is also intended to prompt Facebook users to return
to their news feeds even more frequently than they do now. Every time
they glance at their phones, at the supermarket checkout line or on the
subway to work, they will effectively look at their Facebook pages. “It’s going to convert idle moments to Facebook moments,” said Chris
Silva, a mobile industry analyst with the Altimeter Group. “I’m ‘liking’
things, I’m messaging people, and when ads roll out, I’m interacting
with them and letting Facebook monetize me as a user.” Mr. Silva added that the no-frills Samsung and HTC phones that will
support the new interface suggest that Facebook wants to target
consumers who have yet to buy an Internet-enabled phone, both in the
United States and abroad. After the United States, the largest blocs of
Facebook users live in emerging markets like Brazil and India, and their
numbers are growing much faster there than in Facebook’s home market. But getting millions of less-affluent global users glued to Facebook
will not be easy. The service will rack up huge data charges for users,
unless Facebook manages to negotiate affordable packages with carrier
companies. It is also unclear whether anyone, including the phone carriers, will be enthusiastic about the device. Jan Dawson, a telecommunications analyst at Ovum, said that the
iPhone and many Android smartphones already do a good job of including
Facebook. And he said phone carriers are unlikely to give an HTC-made
Facebook phone much support because HTC’s past attempt at a Facebook
phone — the ChaCha, which had a physical button for posting photos on
Facebook — sold poorly. “HTC may be desperate enough to do this, but carriers aren’t likely
to promote it heavily,” Mr. Dawson said. “As a gimmick, it may bring
customers into stores, but they’ll mostly end up buying something else.” At Facebook headquarters Thursday,
HTC’s chief executive, Peter Chou, showed off a model of his new
Facebook phone, called HTC First, in lipstick red. “HTC First is the
ultimate social phone,” he said. “It combines the new Facebook Home and
great HTC design.” The new interface places a heavy emphasis on photos, much like the
recent changes made to Facebook’s news feed feature on the Web. “We think this is the best version of Facebook there is,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. Brian X. Chen contributed reporting.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is scheduled to be questioned in a lawsuit charging several technology companies for allegedly agreeing not to poach employees from each other, Bloomberg said today. The case is part of a civil suit filed in 2011 by five workers
against Google, Intuit, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Pixar, and Lucasfilm,
claiming that they tried to keep down wages through non-poaching
agreements. Six of the companies involved settled a Justice Department complaint in 2010. The civil suit was launched in 2011 and named Lucasfilm as a seventh defendant. Neither Facebook nor Sandberg are named as defendants in the suit. What's the connection between Sandberg and the case? Before joining Facebook as COO in 2008,
Sandberg was the vice president of global sales and operations at
Google. In a filing on March 29, Google offered six documents to the
court, according to Bloomberg, one of which was Sandberg's employment
agreement with the company.
The case is being heard by U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh in San Jose, Calif. At this point, Koh is still trying to decide if the complaint should
proceed as a class action lawsuit. Such a move would involve many more
employees than just the five workers and could lead to significant
damages if the companies lose the suit. CNET contacted Facebook for comment and will update the story when the company responds. Responding to a request for comment in January, a Google
representative told CNET at the time that the company has "always
actively and aggressively recruited top talent."
Special Features
CNET Spring Tech Preview 2013
Spring
is in the air and brings with it a new crop of exciting gadgets. CNET's
Donald Bell show's off some of our Editors' most-anticipated products
for Spring 2013.
Patcnews: The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network Reports Facebook makes risky bet on News Feed ads that track you
New Facebook smartphone to be announced Thursday
Jon Swartz, USA TODAY, @jswartz2:05p.m. EDT March 30, 2013
SAN MATEO -- The long-rumored Facebook smartphone, denied or side-stepped for years by the company, appears to be days away. On
Thursday, Facebook plans to unfurl the first phone designed to showcase
its social network. Made by HTC, and using a version of Google's
Android software, the device will be built into Facebook's services and
include a camera, according to a report in the New York Times today. Facebook
had no comment on the phone. Earlier this week, it sent an invitation
to the media for a new conference at the company's headquarters in Menlo
Park, Calif., on April 4. The invite promised a "significant
mobile-focused announcement." Rumored for years, a smartphone is a
natural for Facebook's more than 1 billion members, a majority of whom
use the social network network on a mobile device. Facebook has
banked its future on its mobile strategy, in an unending pursuit of
advertising. It's part of a larger directive internally to get customers
to congregate around its social network as much as possible. As a
result, the company has added several features of late -- including a
new news feed and Timeline to keep users on the site longer.
Increasingly, ads will be introduced in those areas to help monetize
Facebook's site. The new Facebook phone comes before the next anticipated Apple iPhone.
Facebook will introduce a special version of Google’s Android
software system next week that is modified to put the social network
front and center on a smartphone. The software will debut on a handset
made by HTC, according to a Facebook employee and another person who
were briefed on the announcement. Facebook sent invitations on Thursday evening to members of the media
for an event on April 4 at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The
Facebook employee, who asked not be named because he was not authorized
to talk about the company’s plans, said the company would introduce a
version of Android that makes Facebook’s software more prominent. For instance, when the device is turned on, it will immediately
display a Facebook user’s home screen, the source said, a fact reported
earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
Facebook’s camera and messaging apps will be the default apps for the
core functions of the phone, the Facebook employee also said. Derick Mains, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment on what would
be unveiled at the event. But he said it would be a “significant
mobile-focused announcement.” Mobile is a crucial part
of Facebook’s future. People are now spending more time using Facebook
through mobile apps than on computers. Facebook’s business strategy is
to get people to hang around its social network as much as possible to
eventually see more ads. A phone with a strong Facebook focus would
prompt customers to use Facebook more than competing apps and services. The Facebook employee said that the company’s portfolio of mobile
apps had been the vanguard of the Android-based Facebook operating
system. Over the past two and a half years, Facebook has been creating
standalone mobile applications. For example, this year the company
introduced Poke, a private messaging service as a standalone app. Last
year, it released a camera app that specialized in tagging and uploading photos to Facebook. And in 2011, it introduced Messenger, an app for free text messaging, which was later expanded to include free voice calls. Amazon has also modified Android for its Kindle Fire tablets. Facebook has been exploring making its own smartphone for the last two years, but the project, which was codenamed “Buffy,” kept stalling internally as the company could not determine whether to make its own hardware or partner with a phone maker. Facebook has recruited engineers who specialized in mobile phone
development, including former Apple engineers who worked on the
development of the iPhone.
Facebook makes risky bet on News Feed ads that track you
The social network's latest attempt to goose revenue exposes an elephant in News Feed: advertisers are always watching.
Susan Wellington from Security Team
WARNING : Your account is reported to have violated the policies that
are considered annoying or insulting Facebook users.system will disable
your account within 24 hours if you do not do the reconfirmation. Please confirm your facebook account below:
Forget the fluffy promise of increased engagement. Facebook knows
the quickest way to make more money is to give advertisers what they
really want: immediate results. The social network is doing just that by
opening up its News Feed to retargeted ads, eerily aware messages that marketers love and members won't be able to miss.
Facebook announced Tuesday that it had started a small test to let
advertisers and agencies use Facebook Exchange (FBX) to serve retargeted
ads -- specifically called "Page post link ads" -- to your News Feed,
which, of course, is Facebook's prime real estate. These ads take into
account people's browsing behavior outside Facebook, as captured through
cookies, with the aim of offering up messages about products they've
already shown interest in. Previously, Facebook was only letting
advertisers pitch members with these types of ads, which link out to
landing pages and allow for conversion-tracking, in the oft-ignored
right-hand sidebar of the site. Now that the ads are running in News
Feed, Facebook members can't ignore them. That's great for advertisers,
fantastic for Facebook, especially as its under pressure to boost
revenue, but it's a risky maneuver that reminds people that they're
always being watched. "It's going to be interesting to see if consumers balk at this," Rebecca Lieb, digital advertising analyst with Altimeter Group, told CNET.
It's not that consumers are unfamiliar with retargeted ads. These types
of units, which follow people as they browse the Web, have been around
for years, and are a particular favorite with display advertisers --
primarily because they work. Rather, Lieb cautions, it's the coupling of
personal data with prominent placement in News Feed, an unmistakable
zone, that could be off-putting and sound the creepy alarm. The ads are low-hanging fruit: so easy to harvest that Facebook can't help itself even though they may leave a sour taste.
"You looked at that laptop. You looked at that purse. You looked at
those shoes. And there they are in your News Feed," Lieb said. "There
are still plenty of consumers who don't understand how this works and
might find this a little jarring ... not that it hasn't happened to them
before, but because it happens in their Facebook News Feed." The placement is further amplified by the twice-as-big size of advertisements running in Facebook's redesigned News Feed.
Creepy though the ads may be, they bring with them the promise of
higher returns for advertisers and more immediate revenue for Facebook.
By December 2012, Facebook said FBX served nearly one billion
impressions and supported more than 1,300 advertisers each day, which
means demand was already high prior to the retargeted ads appearing in
News Feed. Adobe's advertising customers running retargeting campaigns
through FBX noticed 70 percent higher conversion rates than the average
rate from all eight supply sources studied, according to results published in February. "This is a quicker revenue win for Facebook," Lieb said.
These retargeted units, unlike Facebook's Sponsored Story unit, are far
from nuanced. Instead of garnering more "likes," shares, and comments,
advertisers can buy the right to sell you something they know you
checked out, and they'll know, not infer, whether the message worked. As
such, Lieb believes Facebook can charge a higher premium for the units
and sell more. The company is speaking to advertisers in a language they
understand, she said. Facebook, by adding retargeted ads to News
Feed, appears to be talking in a dialect that investors can better
interpret as well. The social network's stock, which has steadily fallen
since its fourth-quarter earnings
report, fared unusually well Wednesday. After losing 20 percent in
value in less than two months, Facebook shares ended the day up more
than 3.5 percent at $26.09.
FBX-delivered ads in News Feed are a potential stopgap -- a Plan B
revenue-growth strategy that appeases advertisers and investors as the
company figures out how to profit from units that are more native to the
Facebook experience. While Facebook educates advertisers on
more complex, more customized products -- a.k.a. content marketing in
the form of Sponsored Stories linked to status updates -- FBX-delivered
Page post link ads in News Feed offer advertisers a highly targeted, but
not highly customized product, Lieb said. Facebook's biggest
challenge will be proceeding cautiously enough so as not to scare people
away but expeditiously enough to grow revenue by large enough margins
that satisfy investors, a bunch that has proven fickle in its favor for the company's business.
Facebook child sex abuse video spurs nationwide alert for 'John Doe 8'
Law enforcement officials are seeking information which
will lead to the identification of this unknown suspect. Images of this
person abusing a young girl were found in a video on the Internet in May
of 2005 -- a video that is once again circulation thanks to social
media. His current whereabouts are unknown. (FBI)
Police and FBI agents across the country are receiving reports of a
disturbing video depicting child pornography on Facebook that has
spread on the social network like a poisonous weed. Reports began last week of a video showing a white male with brown
hair and a dark circular mark on his right forearm sexually abusing a
young girl -- a video that was reportedly shared tens of thousands of
times and received 4,000 “likes” on Facebook. The pornographic video itself is old and was first spotted online in
May 2005, an FBI spokeswoman confirmed to FoxNews.com. Authorities are
still searching for the perpetrator, known only as “John Doe 8.”
'Don’t comment on it. That’s like adding gasoline to the fire.'
- Sgt. Byron Fassett of the Dallas police child exploitation unit
Fred Wolens, a Facebook spokesman, told FoxNews.com the company has
removed all known instances of the video from the site. Yet disgust and
outrage have spread from Las Vegas to Dallas to Connecticut as users
post notes to each other’s walls, comments expressing revulsion and
outright anger. That visceral need to respond is unfortunately part of the problem,
helping to spread the video, said Sgt. Byron Fassett of the Dallas
police child exploitation unit. “Don’t comment on it,” Fassett told the Dallas Morning News. “That’s like adding gasoline to the fire.” With the viral power of Facebook and social media, the video made its
way across walls and the Internet like a creeping weed, often shared
unwittingly by users. Gary Mala, superintendent of schools in Avon,
Conn., sent a letter on Monday to parents and staff warning about the
video. He called it a “virus.” “The video is quite graphic and it will be very disturbing. If your
child has a Facebook account, please tell your son or daughter to
refrain from clicking and opening any shared videos. Students should
delete any shared videos upon their receipt to avoid viewing the
disturbing images and downloading the virus,” he wrote in a letter dated March 25. Mala was not immediately available to comment. The latest reports of the nearly 8-year-old video began in Las Vegas
before spreading to Dallas, the paper reported. Police in Naugatuck,
Conn., are also warning about the video, according to local reports, and
a number of other police departments in Connecticut have reported
receiving similar complaints. Facebook’s Wolens stressed the company’s no-tolerance approach to such material. “This material has absolutely no place on Facebook. We have zero
tolerance for child pornography being uploaded onto Facebook and we are
extremely aggressive in preventing and removing child exploitive
content,” he told FoxNews.com. Outrage about the disturbing video has crossed country boundaries as
well, said Michelle Collins with the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children. “This is a global issue,” Collins said on Friday. “We’re
getting inquiries from this all over the world.” The volume of reports
had slowed down by Tuesday, she told FoxNews.com, but continued to come
in -- too often fueled by social media. “A lot of people were sharing the file under the misguided hope of
trying to identify the child or offender. And unfortunately, that’s not
the best way to go about it," she said. A better approach is to contact
the site hosting the file, or visit the FBI's Endangered Child Alert Program (ECAP), which shows pictures of unknown perpetrators from videos. Anyone with information about the video can definitely help, said Katherine Chaumont with the FBI's Dallas Field Office. “The FBI is requesting that in this matter (like the other John Does
on the ECAP portion of the FBI Web site) that if the public has any
information regarding the identity of the toddler girl depicted in the
video, the identity of the individual known as John Doe 8, or the
location/jurisdiction of where the two might be located to contact their
local FBI office,” she told FoxNews.com.
They’re popping up on Facebook news feeds around the nation, but
without much explanation. Just what are those red equal-sign Facebook
profile pictures all about? Look no further than the Human Rights
Campaign, an organization in support of gay marriage that is running a
particularly successful social media initiative as the Supreme Court
discusses the issue over the next two days.
Social Trend: Facebook profile pictures changed to HRC's equal sign as SCOTUS argues gay marriage.
In a Facebook post today, the HRC asked gay marriage supporters to “paint the town red,”
wearing red in their wardrobe as well on their Facebook pages, changing
profile photos over to the HRC “=” logo. The idea has even caught the
eyes of Congress, with 13 members showcasing the symbol, according to
Ryan Beckwith. The campaign has left many on Twitter wondering what changing a profile picture will accomplish. Boston comedian Dana Jay Bein had a more optimistic outlook
in a Facebook post: “Seeing all of the people who support can inspire
people to take MORE action – small change. I’d much rather see red equal
signs than pictures of Grumpy Cat and ironic self shots.” The HRC initiative has seen a few spin-offs since this morning, with several profile picture explanation posts seeing high numbers of shares, in an attempt to clarify what the red profile pictures stand for.
I am deleting and removing/reporting as spam all posts from
friends who have this stupid image linked to their page. i am not in
favor of same sex marriage. I am part of the silent majority who feels
we will tolerate same sex marriage but not support it becoming legal. I
am not a bigot, homo hater, I just see this as paving the way for other
types of marriages, example Mormons and Muslims would like one man and
several women. Where do you stop once you open up Pandora’s Box?
Posted by: ellen | March 27, 2013, 3:25 am 3:25 am
The last thing I want is my 10 year old boy to see 2 grown men kissing and 2 women kissing how disgusting it that.
Posted by: george | March 27, 2013, 5:19 am 5:19 am
Glad to see the love thy neighbor is a value many practice. Stop the Hate and learn to live together is the only way the human race will survive.
Posted by: Lisa Jonas | March 27, 2013, 7:24 am 7:24 am
I see the Fudge Packer sign is now on Facebook.
Posted by: Dubber | March 27, 2013, 7:55 am 7:55 am
Who cares if muslims or mormons want to marry multiple people? Why can’t they… because your religion says they can’t? Who is anyone to tell someone else who they can and can’t love? Yet
you say you’re not a bigot – your comment is the definition of bigotry.
Posted by: Aaron | March 27, 2013, 8:56 am 8:56 am
That is right. Hollywood and the other media have been
brainwashigng us. They did it with extra marital sex, divorce, and now
with gay marriage.
Posted by: Michael Joe Thannisch | March 27, 2013, 9:11 am 9:11 am
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Craig Berkman,
71, a former Oregon gubernatorial candidate who now lives in Florida,
and his lawyer, with operating an investment scam peddling pre-IPO
shares in Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Zynga. An SEC investigation, which led to the cease-and-desist proceedings
started today, found that between October 2010 and September 2012,
Berkman fraudulently raised at least $13.2 million from approximately
120 investors by selling membership interests in limited liability
companies that he controlled. According to the SEC filing,
Berkman represented to investors that he had special access to pre-IPO
stock in high-tech companies that were about to go public. Instead of
purchasing shares on investors’ behalf as promised, Berkman misused
their investments in Ponzi–scheme fashion, including approximately $5.43
million to satisfy a bankruptcy judgment against him and another $4.8
million to investors who had invested either in this pre-IPO scheme or
in other schemes. Berkman also used approximately $1.6 million to fund
his own personal expenses, including large cash withdrawals and dining
and travel expenses. Also charged in the case is John B. Kern, 49, of Charleston, S.C., a
lawyer and general counsel to Berkman’s companies who aided and abeted
the fraud by making “certain material misstatements to investors that he
knew or recklessly disregarded were false and misleading,” the SEC
charged. Berkman, who FORBES included in a 2009 “Venture Rogues Gallery,”
has a history of prior securities law violations as far back as 2001.
In June 2008, an Oregon jury found Berkman liable in a private action
for breach of fiduciary duty, conversion of investor funds, and
misrepresentation to investors, among other things. The court entered a
$28 million judgment against him. The latest case is reminiscent of one the SEC brought last Fall
against John A. Mattera. It too, involved fraudulent offerings of
pre-IPO shares in Facebook, Groupon and LinkedIn. (See my post, “SEC Sues Mattera, Others In Alleged Investment Scam.”) He also had a history of a previous SEC enforcement action.
(Reuters) - Regulators on Monday approved a plan to compensate market makers who lost money in a botched Facebook Inc public offering in May on the Nasdaq exchange. Nasdaq, a unit of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc, has proposed a revised $62 million settlement to those brokerages that lost money.
The
decision from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was in
response to a series of high-profile glitches last year that shook the
market, including the handling of Facebook's long-anticipated initial
public offering.
The May 18 IPO, which raised $16 billion, was initially delayed by 30 minutes due to a technical problem at Nasdaq.
The
exchange then decided to get the stock trading by using a secondary
system that ended up leading to delays of many clients' orders and
confirmations. This cost some investors and traders big losses as the
stock price dropped after an initial gain.
(Reporting by Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Lisa Von Ahn)
A Florida investment adviser has been charged in New York in an $8
million securities fraud scheme that capitalized on enthusiasm for
Facebook Inc. shares.
Craig L. Berkman was arrested Tuesday at his home in Odessa, Fla.
He was charged with claiming to own Facebook shares before the company
went public last year when he did not directly own shares. Prosecutors
say he pocketed much of the $8 million he received from more than 50
investors.
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced separate civil charges against Berkman.
Prosecutors say Berkman began falsely claiming to investors in December
2010 that he owned Facebook shares. The government said he operated a
private company called Ventures Trust II LLC.
It was unclear Tuesday who will represent the 71-year-old businessman.
Facebook.comIf there is one thing Tiger Woods is great at, it's golf. If there is one other thing, it's keeping his private life extremely private.
So this announcement on Tiger's Facebook page was pretty surprising.
On Monday, Woods posted four pictures of himself and Lindsey Vonn, with
the following message.
This season has been great so far and I'm happy with my
wins at Torrey and Doral. Something nice that's happened off the course
was meeting Lindsey Vonn. Lindsey and I have been friends for some time,
but over the last few months we have become very close and are now
dating. We thank you for your support and for respecting our privacy. We
want to continue our relationship, privately, as an ordinary couple and
continue to compete as athletes.
I guess it wasn't a well-kept secret but yes, I am dating
Tiger Woods. Our relationship evolved from a friendship into something
more over these past few months and it has made me very happy. I don't
plan on addressing this further as I would like to keep that part of my
life between us, my family and close friends. Thank you for
understanding and your continued support! xo LV
(Reuters) - Facebook
Inc is looking to improve its search and indexing capabilities by
adding the hashtag symbol, one of the most recognizable features of its
social networking rival Twitter, according to media reports. The hashtag, which appears as
the # symbol, makes it easier for users to follow specific topics of
conversation within the ever-changing stream of comments posted on
Twitter. Users type the hashtag alongside a keyword - such as #election -
at the end of a Tweet, making it easy to group comments on the same
topic. Facebook
could similarly organize the conversations that take place on its more
than one billon member social network by incorporating hashtags, said
The Wall Street Journal which first reported the news on Thursday citing
anonymous sources, thought it noted that the feature wasn't being
introduced imminently.
Facebook declined to comment.
Facebook
introduced a revamped social search feature, dubbed Graph Search, in
January. The search tool allows users to trawl their network of friends,
as well as info shared publicly by other Facebook users, to find
photos, interests and places, such as restaurants that are "liked" by people on Facebook.
The
search tool does not currently allow users to search the contents of
the actual conversations that are posted on Facebook. Hashtags could
help Facebook make such searches possible, according to the technology
blog TechCrunch, which also cited anonymous sources as saying such a
feature was in the works.
It's not
clear that searching the stream of Facebook comments would yield the
breadth of results found on Twitter however. Unlike tweets, which are
public and viewable to all users, most of the comments posted on
Facebook are only viewable to a user's circle of friends.
Facebook to change News Feed to a ‘personalized newspaper’
Screengrab by Hayley Tsukayama/Screengrab by Hayley Tsukayama -
This screengrab of Facebook's streaming news feed event shows
the social network's new layout, which focuses heavily on visual
elements.
Facebook announced a revamp of its
News Feed Thursday, unveiling a minimalist design that puts a central
focus on photos, graphics and video the company hopes will attract new
advertisers.
The News Feed, which provides a running list of updates from a
user’s network, will serve as a “personalized newspaper” for Facebook’s 1
billion users, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at a news conference at the company’s California headquarters.
OPINION | Not all Wozniacks are brilliant. Berkeley City
Councilman Gordon Wozniak has suggested an email tax to raise money for
the failing United States Postal Service.
The redesign is critical in Facebook’s effort to convince
advertisers of the value of working with the social network. The company
already allows users to pay to promote posts, buy goods through its
network and buy gift cards directly from the site.
The tech giant
has struggled to convince investors of its business model, and Facebook
shares remain far below their initial public offering price of $38. But
investors cheered the new design Thursday, pushing the stock up
4 percent, to close at $28.58.
The redesign could benefit
companies that can quickly attract consumers’ attention with
eye-catching advertising. It could also hurt smaller companies that
can’t sink a lot of money into complex campaigns, said Peter LaMotte,
who leads the digital team at Levick, a District-based communications
firm.
“It’s no longer about being prepared to buy your way” onto a user’s News Feed, he said. “You have to make engaging content.”
The
page design will be the same on the company’s mobile site, which has
become increasingly important as Facebook users shift to accessing the
site mainly from smartphones and tablets. In the last quarter of 2012,
Facebook’s number of mobile daily active users outnumbered its desktop
users for the first time.
The effort could also help keep Facebook
users engaged — and on the site longer. The company has acknowledged
that some of its younger users have migrated to alternative social
networks.
The new design is open to a small test group and is set to roll out across the network over the next few weeks.
(Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham is a member of Facebook’s board.)
It's
a disaster. Every time one of my friends clicks "like" on a post that
has nothing to do with me, I see it on my news feed. Every conversation
they have with their Facebook friend who is not my facebook friend shows
on MY newsfeed. I hover over their name and un-check games, likes &
comemmnts et cetera, but it's not sticking. Ain't nobody got time for
that!
In my column this week, I wrote about how content I shared on Facebook saw a paltry amount of interaction unless I paid Facebook to highlight it on the company’s signature news feed. Other reporters and bloggers said they had seen a similar drop in connection. On Monday, Facebook put up a blog post saying “engagement has gone up 34 percent on posts from people who have more than 10,000 followers.” But Facebook did not share real numbers or metrics, leaving people guessing what 34 percent actually equals. Meanwhile, over the weekend my Inbox filled up with dozens of e-mails from people who owned small businesses and said they had also been affected by Facebook’s news feed changes. One of those e-mails came from a small father-and-son Web-based motorcycle company in Florida, BikersPost. The company said it had built most of its business around Facebook, but was now unable to reach its fans. Although Facebook is asking public figures to pay $7 per post to reach their subscribers, BikersPost says it is sometimes being told to pay as much $7,500 to reach the core of its subscribers and their friends. Kris Olivera, who co-runs BikersPost, said that when his fan page had 200,000 fans, it was getting much more traffic than it did today with more than 600,000 fans. “After Facebook introduced promoted posts, we see much less traffic than a year ago,” he said. In a statement to The New York Times, Facebook said it was not suppressing content to highlight paid posts. “We want to be really clear that the News Feed algorithm does not artificially suppress free distribution in order to get people to purchase promoted posts or ads,” the statement said. “News Feed should show you the most interesting stories from your friends, people you follow and Pages you are connected to,” the statement added. “As with other filtering algorithms, we look at numerous factors to decide which will be the most interesting story for each person. Over years of carefully monitoring how people engage with News Feed, we have found that algorithmically showing the most relevant content is a better user experience and leads to more engagement over all.” Mr. Olivera said he paid Facebook to acquire a large percentage of BikersPost’s 615,000 fans. “I have spent well over $50,000 with Facebook acquiring those fans, and now I’m being told I have to pay Facebook again to reach them,” Mr. Olivera said. “I don’t even make $7,000 a month, how do they expect me to pay that for one single post.” He noted that because he could not reach his fans anymore on Facebook, he recently had to lay off BikersPost’s only employee. “We’ve seen dramatic traffic drops over the past year, and the rug just got pulled out from under us,” Mr. Olivera said. “Had I known that we were going to be charged to reach those fans as well, we would of not spent a dime with Facebook.”
BEAVERTON, Ore. (AP) — A grieving Oregon mother who battled
Facebook for full access to her deceased son's account has been pushing
for years for something that would prevent others from losing photos,
messages and other memories — as she did. The Oregon Legislature
responded this week and took up the cause with a proposal that would
have made it easier for loved ones to access the "digital assets" of the
deceased, only to be turned back by pressure from the tech industry,
which argued that both a 1986 federal law and voluntary terms of service
agreements prevent the sharing such information — even if such a
request were included in a last will and testament. Still, the problem persists and discussions on the issue have gained momentum across the nation.
Facebook elects second woman to board
UCSF
Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann joins Sheryl Sandberg in adding a
womanly touch to the social network's once males-only club.
Facebook elected its second woman, Susan Desmond-Hellmann,
chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, to its board
of directors, the company announced today. Dr.
Desmond-Hellmann joins Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, in
adding a female dynamic to the once males-only club. Sandberg was elected to the board in June 2012 after months of pressure from organizations to diversify the governing group, which previously consisted of seven white men. The appointment comes with its perks. Desmond-Hellmann is getting a $50,000 annual retainer fee and 20,000 restricted stock units that will vest over four years. The benies are well-deserved. Facebook's newest board member brings
with her a remarkable medical pedigree. The UCSF chancellor currently
oversees the university's medical center strategy, and previously spent
14 years at biotech company Genentech, where she served as president of
product development.
Desmond-Hellmann also holds a board seat for Procter & Gamble
and is a trustee for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. You may
recall that she recently played host to Facebook Chief Executive Mark
Zuckerberg and other tech luminaries at a press event to discuss the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
With the appointment, Facebook's board now consists of nine members:
Sandberg, Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, James Breyer,
Donald Graham, Reed Hastings, Peter Thiel, and the newly elected
Desmond-Hellmann.
Jennifer Van Grove reports on social media for CNET. She previously worked for VentureBeat, Mashable, and NBC San Diego.
Facebook revamps site, tweaks mobile apps
By Heather Kelly, CNN
updated 4:29 PM EST, Thu March 7, 2013 | Filed under: Social Media
The biggest new feature in the
news feed is the option to filter posts by category. Users can view only
updates from friends or the latest from the pages they follow.
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Facebook updates its news feed
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STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Facebook has redesigned the news feed to fill more of the main page
Web version of Facebook will look much more like the mobile app
New categories have been added for music and photos
Update will begin rolling out Thursday; revised apps are coming in the next few weeks
(CNN) -- Facebook wants to cut clutter.
The social media site,
which has more than 1 billion users, on Thursday announced a newly
redesigned news feed that blows up photos and visual content, and adds
categories that focus on specific types of content. The Web version of
the social network now looks much more like the mobile apps, which are
also getting a revamping.
Facebook announced the
changes during a media event at its headquarters in Menlo Park,
California. The new Web version will roll out slowly to users starting
Thursday, and updated iOS and Android apps will be available in the
coming weeks.
Chief Executive Mark
Zuckerberg compared the revamped feed to a local newspaper and the new
channels to the traditional sections, such as sports and business, you'd
find there.
"I think that there's this important and social place in this world for this customized newspaper," Zuckerberg said.
He didn't note the irony of comparing Facebook to an industry that his site and others are marginalizing.
The news feed is the
first, and sometimes only, page people see when they log on to the
Facebook website or fire up a Facebook mobile app. The nerve center of
the Facebook experience, the news feed fills the middle of this home
screen with updates, photos, articles and other content and activity
from your friends, such as likes and app updates. Interspersed among
that somewhat-chronological content are posts from pages you follow and
targeted ads.
Mark Zuckerberg and members of his team present the redesigned news feed in Menlo Park, California, on Thursday.
The main page, which
Facebook is calling the "front page" to go with its newspaper metaphor,
is adding categories so people can look at a more narrow feed of
specific types of content as an alternative to the all-in-one view.
There are views for all friends, most recent, close friends, music,
photos, games and following.
Photos will show every single image your friends post as well as the photos posted by the pages you follow,including
anything shared to Facebook from Instagram. The music channel will show
a combination of nearby concerts, feeds from musicians you follow and
the songs friends are listing to with third-party apps such as Spotify.
The channels will appear on the mobile apps and Web versions of
Facebook.
"Everyone's going to
start on the front page like they do today. This just gives people more
power to dig into the topics they care about," Zuckerberg said.
The individual elements
that populate the news feed have been redesigned to fill the page
better, the company maintains. Text is taking a back seat to visual
content, which now makes up almost 30% of the content in the news feed,
according to Zuckerberg. Photos, videos and albums are bigger. Shared
articles show a bigger image and larger summary along with a logo for
the publisher. Content in the feed about individuals and pageswill
show a little slice of their timeline, including their cover photo and a
button to add them as a friend or to like the page. Maps and posts for
third-party apps such as Pinterest have also been cleaned up.
Previously, the news
feed occupied less than 40% of the real estate on the Facebook home
page, according to Julie Zhuo, Facebook's director of design. To cut
down on clutter and give the feed more room to breathe, navigation
elements on the left have been slimmed down to a narrow black column of
icons, similar to the mobile interface.
One thing that's not
changing is the algorithm that decides what posts are displayed in a
feed, which has received some criticism. Zuckerberg defended the
practice of not showing a full and complete chronological feed of all
content, saying people benefit from more important content, such as
major life events, being given a more prominent place in their feeds.
The filters might be
great for users, but they could have a negative effect on companies that
have sunk money into promoting their pages and gathering fans, said one
analyst. Those fans can switch to a more narrow feed of just their
friends (or music content or photos) that doesn't include brand pages,
potentially making it more difficult for companies to reach their
followers.
"It's going to continue
to erode the value of companies having Facebook pages and fans," said
Forrester analyst Nate Elliott. "Facebook is walking a really fine line,
they're not providing enough value."
Ads will still be
featured on the friends-only feeds, so companies and brands that want to
reach people who switch to those views can by buying advertising from
Facebook. Elliot says this could be interpreted as a "bait and switch"
by marketers.
Ads -- which are included in the redesign -- are Facebook's primary source of income. The company made$4.2
billion off advertising in 2012, which accounted for 82% of the social
network's total revenue, according to Engadget. Most of that ad money
comes from the Web version of Facebook, and 23% was from ads on mobile
devices.
The company may get
money from advertisers, but it needs to keep the users who click on
those ads engaged, active and happy on the network.
If you get a message sent to you: beware another Facebook Scam: Chat Warning - Reconfirm Your Information
WARNING : Your account is reported to have violated the policies that
are considered annoying or insulting Facebook users.system will disable
your account within 24 hours if you do not do the reconfirmation. Please confirm your facebook account below: ► help-account-security.at. vu/ DO NOT CLICK ON THIS Thanks, The Facebook Security Team Inc: Departemen 415 PO Box 10005 Palo Alto CA 94303
The message is not from Facebook. It is a phishing scam designed to
steal the user's Facebook and webmail login details as well as credit
card numbers and other personal details. If you receive this message, do
not click any links that it contains.
Be careful when seeing
messages like this and do not click on the links that you know are not
part of Facebook. if in your message box, delete the whole conversation
and then warn the person that sent it to you.
Beware of Socially Engineered Phishing Attacks on Facebook
Phishing
attacks are one of the most common scams on Facebook. The goal of these
scams is to obtain your Facebook user name and password. If successful,
the scammers can totally take over your Facebook account and use it to spread more spam and scams to your friends. They can also mine everyone in your network for data they can later use for identity theft or other socially engineered attacks. Here are some examples of popular phishingschemes on Facebook:
Facebook Lottery – You’re likely to receive an email stating you’ve won a sum of money. These can also be advanced fee scams.
Confirm Your Account – Any messages asking you to
confirm your account should be viewed with extreme suspicion. If you
receive an email like this, don’t follow any links. A better option is
to log in to Facebook directly.
Violated a Policy – Hacked accounts often send
messages posing as ‘Facebook Security.’ If you encounter one of these
scams, you’ll notice that Facebook Security will be spelled with
non-traditional characters. This is done to bypass Facebook’s filters. Click here for more information on this popular scam.
Photos & Videos - The scammers
attempt to capitalize on our curious nature. You will receive a message
from a compromised friend’s account asking you to look at this photo or
video. A popular theme is to say the picture is embarrassing or they
can’t believe you did that, etc. Other variants of this scam contain
files laden with malware.
Most all of these scams direct you to external links to pages
designed to look like Facebook. Before logging in to any site, always
verify that you are indeed on the main site. Careless and unsuspecting
users are often fooled by these tricks. Below is one example of the photo phishing scheme mentioned above. “do you notice that they were rrecordingu lol this is unpleasant lol !!” Other Alternate Messages: Is this you in this video on facebook, what are you doing LOL? Search on this website for your name HAHAHAHAHA i can not believe whaat you did in thisssvideeo it’s sooo stupid its all over facebook! Coooopy and Paaaste the url below into your web browserr to seeeee , its craazy! Removeeethee Spaces —> OMG have u seen ur video on here. u should check this out! Clicking on the link in the scam post will at first direct the user to a Facebook application and then ultimately to a phishing URL: Scams like this are very common on the Facebook platform. Humans are curious by nature, and the scammers
often use this and other emotions to their advantage. Also consider
that these messages or updates may come from a friend’s hacked account.
Don’t assume any links or messages are legitimate just because they came
from a friend. In fact, if you receive them via Facebook chat /
message, then there is a good chance that your friend’s account has been
compromised. Double check your friends list and remove or block any
name that looks suspicious (awkward and non-traditional spellings of
Facebook Security, Account Confirmation, etc.) Never enter your login information when a web page redirects you
without first double checking to make sure you are on the legitimate
site. A better option is to bookmark Facebook, and only log in from
there. If you ever fall for a phishing
scam, then try to reclaim your account as quickly as possible. Check
out the following article for additional steps you should take: Four Things you need to do if your Facebook account gets hacked Be sure to let your Facebook friends know that your account has been
compromised and not to click on any links that are sent from you. If you or your Facebook friends are falling for tricks like this,
it’s time to get yourself informed of the latest threats. Be sure to
join the Facecrooks page on Facebook to be kept informed of the latest security issues. Also check out:
SocialSafe
helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your
online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly
searchable. Supports most major social networks. BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook. PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it. DoNotTrackMe protects your privacy by blocking online tracking. Abine – Online Privacy Starts Here.
Facebook 'Likes' can reveal your private secrets, researcher says
Published March 12, 2013
Associated Press
A sign with Facebook's "Like" logo is posted at Facebook
headquarters near the office for the company's User Operations Safety
Team in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
March 7, 2013: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveils a new
look for the social network's News Feed at Facebook headquarters in
Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Clicking those friendly blue "like" buttons strewn across the
Web may be doing more than marking you as a fan of Coca-Cola or Lady
Gaga. It could out you as gay. It might reveal how you vote. It might even suggest that you're an unmarried introvert with a high IQ and a weakness for nicotine. That's the conclusion of a study published Monday in Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers reported analyzing the
likes of more than 58,000 American Facebook users to make guesses about
their personalities and behavior, and even whether they drank, smoked,
or did drugs.
Men
who liked TV song-and-dance sensation "Glee" were more likely to be gay.
Men who liked professional wrestling were more likely to be straight
... The link between curly fries and high IQ scores was particularly
baffling.
Cambridge University researcher David Stillwell, one of the study's authors, said the results may come as a surprise. "Your likes may be saying more about you than you realize," he said. Facebook launched its like button in 2009, and the small thumbs-up
symbol has since become ubiquitous on the social network and common
across the rest of the Web as well. Facebook said last year that roughly
2.7 billion new likes pour out onto the Internet every day -- endorsing
everything from pop stars to soda pop. That means an ever-expanding
pool of data available to marketers, managers, and just about anyone
else interested in users' inner lives, especially those who aren't
careful about their privacy settings. Stillwell and his colleagues scooped up a bucketful of that data in
the way that many advertisers do -- through apps. Millions of Facebook
users have surveyed their own personal traits using applications
including a program called myPersonality. Stillwell, as owner of the
app, has received revenue from it, but declined to say how much. His study zeroed in on the 58,466 U.S. test takers who had also volunteered access to their likes. When researchers crunched the "like" data and compared their results
to answers given in the personality test, patterns emerged in nearly
every direction. Since the study involved people who volunteered access
to their data, it's unclear if the trends would apply to all Facebook
users. The study found that Facebook likes were linked to sexual
orientation, gender, age, ethnicity, IQ, religion, politics and
cigarette, drug, or alcohol use. The likes also mapped to relationship
status, number of Facebook friends, as well as half a dozen different
personality traits. Some likes were more revealing than others. Researchers could
correctly distinguish between users who identified themselves as black
or white 95 percent of the time. That success rate dropped to a still
impressive 88 percent when trying to guess whether a male user was
homosexual, and to 85 percent when telling Democrats from Republicans.
Identifying drug users was far trickier -- researchers got that right
only 65 percent of the time, a result scientists generally describe as
poor. Predicting whether a user was respectively a child of divorce was
even dicier. With a 60 percent success rate, researchers were doing just
slightly better than random guesses. The linkages ranged from the self-evident to the surreal. Men who liked TV song-and-dance sensation "Glee" were more likely to
be gay. Men who liked professional wrestling were more likely to be
straight. Drinking game aficionados were generally more outgoing than,
say, fans of fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. People who preferred pop
diva Jennifer Lopez usually gathered more Facebook friends than those
who favored the heavy metal sound of Iron Maiden. Among the more poignant insights was the apparent preoccupation of
children of divorce with relationship issues. For example, those who
expressed support for statements such as "Never Apologize For What You
Feel It's Like Saying Sorry For Being Real" or "I'm The Type Of Girl Who
Can Be So Hurt But Still Look At You & Smile" were slightly more
likely to have seen their parents split before their 21st birthday. Some of the patterns were difficult to understand: The link between curly fries and high IQ scores was particularly baffling. Jennifer Golbeck, a University of Maryland computer scientist who
wasn't involved in the study but has done similar work, endorsed its
methodology, calling it smart and straightforward and describing its
results as "awesome." But she warned of what the work showed about privacy on Facebook. "You may not want people to know your sexual orientation or may not
want people to know about your drug use," she said. "Even if you think
you're keeping your information private, we can learn a lot about you." Facebook said the study fell in line with years of research and was not particularly surprising. "The prediction of personal attributes based on publicly accessible
information, such as ZIP codes, choice of profession, or even preferred
music, has been explored in the past," Facebook's Frederic Wolens said
in a written statement. Wolens said that Facebook users could change the privacy settings on
their likes to put them beyond the reach of researchers, advertisers or
nearly anyone else. But he declined to say how many users did so. For the unknown number of users whose preferences are public, Stillwell had this advice: Look before you like. The like button is "quite a seductive thing," he said. "It's all around the Web, it's all around Facebook. And it's so easy."
While
this might incite some to rehash rumors about a Facebook phone, Mobile
DevCon is more about educating developers on Graph Search and better
engaging users across apps and games.
Facebook has revealed details about Mobile DevCon 2013,
a trio of events this spring, in three of the largest cities on the
planet, that's intended to connect Facebook engineers, product managers,
and "like-minded mobile developers."
The Mobile Developer Conference series will kick off in New York City on
April 18, followed by a stop in London on May 2, and then concluding in
Seoul on May 7.
Noting that there are more than 680 million active users on mobile,
Facebook reasserted that it has been focused on improving mobile
offerings over the last year, citing improvements across both the iOS and Android apps, the re-engineering of the iOS and
Android SDKs, and the launching of dedicated developer centers for iOS, Android, and mobile Web.
Furthermore, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also stressed Facebook's
commitment to mobile at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last fall while knocking HTML5 in favor of native apps.
With news of these mobile-focused development events, it may seem
natural for some to rehash rumors of a dedicated Facebook smartphone.
Nevertheless, based on Zuckerberg's repeated denials of such a device as
well as the list of topics that will be covered at Mobile DevCon, it
still seems very unlikely.
Facebook engineer Simon Cross also mentioned in a blog post today that these are "highly technical" events in which "we'll be deep in product and code."
For reference, some of the topics that will be covered at Mobile DevCon
include how to implement mobile SDKs to drive installations and
engagement, how to implement Facebook Login and Open Graph, and more
about which techniques Facebook uses to build its own mobile apps.
Interested mobile developers, engineers, and product managers -- or
anyone else "at the sharp end of mobile app development" -- can
preregister for these one-day summits now.
This story originally appeared at ZDNet's Between the Lines under the headline "Facebook announces Mobile Developer Conference 2013."
Facebook is calling the press back to its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., again -- and this time it's to show off a new Android-based product.
The invitations to the April 4 event, which were sent to members of the
media this evening via e-mail, reveal only that the company will be
showing off its "new home on Android."
Already, rumors are beginning to fly about what Facebook might announce.
TechCrunch reported
that Facebook will unveil phone software based on Google's Android
operating system. The software will have "extra Facebook functionality
built in." According to the report, the phone software will run on
hardware made by HTC.
According to 9to5Google, the two companies have been working on a marketing campaign for the phone.
HTC, a Taiwanese phone maker, released The Status in 2011, an Android
phone that had Facebook branding and specialized Facebook software. The
phone wasn't marketed by Facebook and received poor reviews. The company
recently announced its new HTC One Android phone. RELATED: Facebook Says New Mobile Products Coming, but No Facebook Phone
Amazon has taken a similar route, creating its own version of Android
software to run on its Kindle Fire. It places Amazon's services front
and center.
Facebook has been rumored to be working on a phone
of its own for a number of months now. However, while Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg has said the company is focused on mobile and is a mobile
company, he has denied the existence of plans for a "Facebook phone."
"We want to support an ecosystem where other apps can build on top of
Facebook," Zuckberg said on an earnings call last year. "There are a lot
of things you can build in other operating systems, as well, that
aren't really taking, that aren't really like building out a whole
phone, which wouldn't make much sense for us to do."
In the last number of months, Facebook has released a slew of new mobile products, including its Poke app and additions to its Messenger app, which added free calling.
ABC News will have the latest on Facebook's Android announcement on April 4.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief
operating officer of Facebook: campaigners hope that she might 'lean
in' on offensive sexism on the site. Photograph: Laurent Gillieron/EPA
Last week, Laura Bates, of the Everyday Sexism Project,
tweeted a message to FinnAir, asking the company if it knew its
advertising appeared on a Facebook page endorsing violence against
women. The company responded:
"This is totally against our values and policies."
Several other angry advertisers felt the same way. I
doubt that most advertisers are aware of how regularly this situation
occurs. For example, this morning, a Duracell battery ad is visible on a
group page called "I kill bitches like you;" Sexy Arab Girls,
"join our page for more porn videos," was sponsored by the
Wilberforce Dinner "Honoring Cardinal Timothy Dolan," and the
now-removed page, "Domestic Violence: Don't Make Me Tell You Twice," populated by photos of women beaten, bruised and bleeding, was the platform for Vistaprint. "We
occasionally see people post distasteful or crude content. While it may
be vulgar and offensive, distasteful content on its own does not
violate our policies," a Facebook spokesperson explained, when I asked
what Facebook's response to similar pages is.
"However,
there is no place on Facebook for content that is hateful, threatening,
or incites violence, and we will not tolerate material deemed to be
genuinely or directly harmful."
Facebook has detailed procedures for handling complaints
and clearly states that user safety is a company priority. Given the
astounding volume of people and content that Facebook deals with (more than 1 billion users),
the company only acts when content is reported. The issue is,
therefore, how words like "hateful" and "genuinely" "harmful" are
defined, and, importantly, whether or not men and women understand
"safety" differently. Facebook moderators deal with real instances
of violence and crime every day. "Not real" content depicting rape and
the physical abuse of girls and women is often categorized by Facebook
as [Humor] and readily viewed. Recent examples include a photograph of
a man carrying a limp girl with the caption, "Rohyphnol: When
Traditional Dating Methods Just Aren't Cutting it!" and the page "I Love the Rape Van".
The company tries to address complaints within 72 hours, but pages like
"Raping Babies Because You're Fucking Fearless" can remain up for more
than a month. To the founders of Rapebook,
a page started last fall to "tackle misogyny on Facebook by sharing and
reporting pages", content trivializing sexualized and domestic abuse is
intrinsically hateful and harmful. Immediately, the page became the target of massive trolling and administrators were threatened with
violent rape and death and bombarded with graphic images and porn.
Posts, such as one urging people to give a donation to an anti-violence
campaign at Amnesty International, generated more than 100 comments,
including "fuck that. hit that hoe (sic)," and "Domestic violence is a 2
way street you hypocritical cunt." This suggests hostility. Which might
provoke anxiety. And create an environment that does not feel safe to
the average woman. Studies show that content like this is triggering and degrades the ability of consumers of the content to empathize with victims. When
I spoke to Facebook representatives, they responded quickly and were
forthcoming about their policies. Guidelines are clear about harassment,
bullying and hate speech – which is why this problem is not about
constraining people's "free speech". It's about how mainstream misogynistic norms are embedded,
not only in Facebook's interpretations of "free speech", "safety",
"humor" and "credible threats", but in the very way their review process
is structured. First, what is notable about cases like Rapebook co-founder Trista Hendren's is the comfort and speed with which opponents resort to violent rape and death threats using misogynistic language.
Facebook's guidelines prohibit hate speech, even though hate speech is,
in fact, protected in the US by the first amendment. Users comfortable
with denigrating women manipulate a review process that does not
recognize sex-based hate speech and is not set up to consider context.
Specifically, Facebook has no reporting mechanism for considering how a
hostile environment (treating rape and violence against women literally
as a joke or ignoring content that is viscerally threatening) might
affect its female users. Second, what people like Hendren are protesting is not
easily mocked hurt feelings, but systemically tolerated hate,
degradation, objectification and marginalization of girls and women,
behind which loiters actual violence. Women, acculturated to a world where one in three women will be sexually assaulted (in the US, that number is one in five; for men, one in 77), cannot separate this reality from their online experiences. Domestic violence statistics reflect a similar epidemic. The vast majority of perpetrators in either case are men. This dynamic is reflected in online misogyny. "At
first, people started posting pictures of women and young girls
being raped or beat up and commenting on the page saying things like, "I
will skull-f**k your children," explains Hendren. "Then the harassment
moved offline after our personal information was posted all over
Facebook. I was called and emailed repeatedly. Later my address and
children's names were posted as well." Despite the fact that
Facebook representatives may have done their best to work closely with
Rapebook, the administrators closed the page after months of receiving
up to 500 messages a day, including photographs of actual rapes and
child pornography. Hendren's photo was used to create rape memes. She
has left Facebook. It's important to note that people who supported
Rapebook's efforts were unwilling to publicly show their support in
Facebook, for fear of similar targeting. How is this not a loss
of free speech for these users (overwhelmingly women), resulting from
bullying, harassment and misogyny? The people left feeling comfortable
at Facebook are rape apologists and those who create content glorifying
the debasement of women. A common retort to all of this is: "This is the internet.
It's offensive. If you don't like it, leave." That is correct: speech
on the internet can be offensive and the right to be offensive is vital
to democracy. But Facebook is not "the internet". Facebook is a company with principles and community standards
that create a reasonable expectation in users that it will enforce
rules it itself has established in an unbiased manner. Facebook is
perilously close to allowing "freedom of speech" to be used as a defense of unjust actions that are clearly intimidating and silencing female users. If Facebook is already considering these issues, they aren't sharing that fact. Last week, a new page was created on Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg LEAN-In And Remove Misogyny from FB.
According to Bates, Facebook is resolute in not responding to the
Everyday Sexism campaign. Advertisers are, however, and as the saying
goes, money talks. But is it too much to hope for that Facebook's
famously pro-woman chief operating officer might do something about
Facebook's misogyny problem before she is simply forced to act because
it's hurting the company's bottom line?
Simple algorithms that make
'friend' suggestions don't cater for huge complexities found in human
relationships, especially within families, finds Becca Bland
Facebook launches new tools for mobile, including Open ...
Facebook launches new tools for mobile, including Open Graph
Social-networking
giant also reveals that it has more than 680 million mobile users, and
more than 81 percent of top grossing iOS apps and 70 percent of top
grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the recent Home launch.
(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)
Facebook on Thursday announced three new products, including Open Graph for mobile, to boost its presence in the fast-growing smartphone and tablet markets.
The company said in a blog post and at its mobile developer conference
in New York that along with making it easier to implement Open Graph on
mobile, Facebook also is improving Facebook Login and is releasing a new
SDK 3.5 for iOS.
In addition, Facebook also announced a new partner program to
help developers integrate Facebook on a variety of mobile platforms.
Some early partners include C# SDK for
Windows 8 by Microsoft, Corona SDK by Corona Labs, and Kinvey.
"With the new tools we're unveiling today, we're excited to see even
more high-quality mobile apps integrate with Facebook to engage with our
680+ million mobile users," Douglas Purdy of Facebook said in a blog
post. He added that more than 81 percent of top 100 grossing iOS apps
and 70 percent of top grossing
Android apps integrate with Facebook.
Facebook has been touting its new "mobile first" strategy for some
time, with all engineers tasked on first figuring out how a product
works for smartphones and
tablets and then moving to the Web version. That led to the creation of Facebook's Home app, as well as other features.
Facebook introduced a new version of Open Graph in 2011 at its f8
conference, seeking to give users "frictionless experiences." It
provides developers the ability to deeply integrate their apps into the
core Facebook interface. Open Graph stories appear in the news feed and
ticker of friends and on the person's timeline. Now, it will
be easier for developers to integrate Open Graph into their mobile apps.
To help with that, Facebook rolled out the "object browser," a simple
interface that helps developers easily interact with the object data
they publish. Facebook also introduced native share dialog to allow
users to share from their native mobile apps without needing to log in
to Facebook first. Facebook also rolled out faster mobile log-in
dialogs that have been redesigned to give people greater clarity and
control of their app permissions.
Facebook adds free calling for Android Messenger app users
Facebook has begun expanding the free voice calling feature on its Messenger app to Android users. Earlier this year, the company introduced free voice calling for iPhone
users, letting them use the Messenger app to call other Facebook
members. The app uses smartphones' Internet connections to make the
call, either through a Wi-Fi network or over 3G or 4G networks. Now, three months after introducing the feature for iPhone users,
Facebook started rolling it out to some U.S. Android users Thursday
afternoon and says more users will get the feature throughout Friday.
They don't need to update the Messenger app to use the free voice
calling feature. Once users get the feature,
they can access it by tapping the circled "i" icon from within a
conversation. After that, they can tap the "Free Call" button and the
app will attempt to call the friend they are chatting with. PHOTOS: Top 10 must-have smartphone apps A colleague and I tested the feature on the iPhone earlier this year,
and we thought the call quality was poor -- the caller's voice sounded
fuzzy and tinny. I'm not sure what the quality of the calls sounds like
on the Android app, but at the very least, Facebook's free voice calling
feature could be helpful if you're trying to save on your voice
minutes. Recently, Facebook has been beefing up its messaging service in both
its main app and its Messenger app. Along with voice calling, the
company has also added voice messages and stickers -- which are big emoticons. Facebook also introduced a feature called Chat Heads earlier this
month for both its iPhone Facebook app and for Android on its Facebook
Home interface. That feature lets users chat with their friends while
they go through the app. If a friend sends a message, users can simply
tap on their floating head and the conversation will expand. When they
want to get back to surfing Facebook, the user simply taps on their
friend's head again and the conversation minimizes.
MENLO
PARK -- Facebook is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings
Wednesday, after opening the year with a series of high-profile launches
for new products aimed at sparking users' interest to keep them
returning to the world's largest social network.
Wall Street is
expecting Facebook to report adjusted earnings of 13 cents a share,
excluding one-time charges, on revenues of $1.39 billion for the quarter
that ended March 31, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. That
would be an increase from the year-ago adjusted earnings of 9 cents a
share on revenue of $1.06 billion. Analysts say it's probably too
early for Facebook's newest features -- including a redesigned News
Feed, a beefed-up search engine and a new interface for Android phones
-- to produce much additional revenue. But they're looking for evidence
that Facebook is keeping users engaged while the company continues to
build its mobile advertising business, amid signs that some people are
losing interest in visiting the network, at least on their desktop
computers. Recent data from the comScore research firm shows a
"modest deterioration" in the number of monthly visitors and minutes
spent on Facebook in the United States, according to a report this week
from Mark Mahaney of RBC Capital Markets, who said the numbers suggest
"potential disengagement" by some Facebook users. But Mahaney noted that
those numbers only reflect desktop computer usage, so the numbers may
reflect a
trend among many consumers, who are using smartphones and tablets rather than traditional PCs to go online.Some
of Facebook's latest products, including the redesigned News Feed and
its new Android interface, are designed to highlight photos and other
eye-catching visual elements on the smaller screens of smartphones and
tablets. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the changes are also intended to
help the company show more engaging advertisements on those mobile
devices. But at least one new innovation, the much-vaunted
Facebook Home interface for Android phones, has had what Sterne Agee
analyst Arvind Bhatia called a "rough start." While the new interface
reportedly has been downloaded more than 500,000 times onto Android
phones, it has drawn critical comments and a relatively low rating of
just two stars out five in the Google Play online store. Although
some users complained the Home software is balky, others said they just
didn't like having Facebook's interface taking over their phone's home
screen and making it less convenient to access other apps. In a note to
investors, Bhatia wrote, "Home will probably be great for the avid
Facebook users, but it is unlikely to have mass appeal -- at least not
in the current version." Analysts are hoping to hear more about
Facebook's mobile ad revenue, which grew to $306 million in the final
quarter of 2012, and about the company's plans for selling new types of
ads including video. Facebook also recently announced that it had
purchased the Atlas online ad platform from Microsoft. Facebook's
stock price started to climb toward the end of last year, as the company
showed signs of progress on the mobile front. But it peaked at $32.47
in late January and has fallen off since then. It's stayed below $28 in
recent weeks.
CORRECTED-UPDATE 3-Facebook's mobile business expands in first quarter
(In 7th paragraph, corrects analyst Ronald Josey's firm to JMP
Securities from Jefferies & Co) By Alexei Oreskovic May 1 (Reuters) - Facebook Inc's mobile advertising
revenue growth gained momentum in the first three months of the
year as the social network sold more ads to users on smartphones
and tablets, partially offsetting higher spending which weighed
on profits. New types of ads designed for smartphones, particularly ads
aimed at enticing Facebook users to install mobile apps on their
phones, helped lift revenue while traffic to the social network
remained strong. The results reassured Wall Street that the world's largest
social network was keeping up with consumers' shift from PCs to
smartphones, even if the company provided few big surprises
during the first quarter. Mobile ad revenue accounted for 30 percent of Facebook's ad
revenue in the first quarter, compared to roughly 23 percent in
the fourth quarter. Sales of ads on mobile devices have been a
key element in the recovery of Facebook's overall ad revenue
from a sharp slowdown early last year. The first-quarter mobile ad revenue was at the higher end of
expectations, said Macquarie Research analyst Ben Schachter. But
he said it "needed to be higher for people to get really excited
about trend lines". Shares of Facebook, which are down roughly 12 percent since
the end of January, were up 7 cents at $27.50 in after-hours
trading on Wednesday. "Everyone was focused on two things, one was mobile and how
big it could be, and the other thing was engagement," said
Ronald Josey, an analyst with JMP Securities. Facebook delivered solid results on both fronts, Josey said,
noting that consumers' use of Facebook does not appear to have
declined despite a growing array of popular social networking
and mobile messaging alternative services, such as Pinterest and
WhatsApp. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 28-year-old co-founder and chief
executive, told investors on a conference call on Wednesday that
there was room for Facebook and rival services to thrive. He
said mobile photo-sharing service Instagram, which Facebook
acquired last year, was now growing faster than Facebook did at
a similar stage in its history. Facebook said it now counted 1.11 billion monthly active
users and about 665 million daily active users. The company said the number of monthly users who logged on
solely through mobile devices more than doubled to 189 million
users from a year ago. Graphic: link.reuters.com/ryp77t NEW AD PRODUCTS Created in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, Facebook, along with
other established Internet companies such as Google Inc
and Yahoo Inc, are moving to reposition their
businesses for a world in which consumers' primary Internet
access occurs on small-screened smartphones rather than PCs. Facebook has rolled out a string of big product launches and
revamps in recent months, including an overhaul of its newsfeed
and search feature, as well an app for Android smartphones that
puts Facebook features front and center on phone homescreens. The various initiatives have contributed to rising spending,
with Facebook's 60 percent year-on-year increase in costs and
expenses outpacing the 38 percent revenue increase. Facebook said it earned $219 million, or 9 cents a share, in
the first three months of the year, compared to $205 million, or
9 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Excluding certain items, Facebook said it earned 12 cents a
share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S were looking
for adjusted EPS of 13 cents. Facebook executives reiterated previous guidance that
spending would be up in 2013 as the company invests in new
products and in improving the efficacy of its ads. One nascent type of mobile advertising pioneered by Facebook
- ads that encourage users to install third-party apps - could
grow meaningfully, Zuckerberg said. "We're starting to see real revenue from mobile app
installs," Zuckerberg said, without giving details. "It's one of
our most important new ad products." Facebook's revenue in the first quarter totaled $1.46
billion, versus $1.06 billion in the year-ago period, and
roughly in line with analyst expectations. Advertising revenue
was up 43 percent in the first quarter, the fastest growth rate
since the end of 2011. "You are seeing pretty strong revenue growth right now,"
said Raymond James analyst Aaron Kessler. But he warned that the
revenue growth could slow in coming quarters as Facebook faces
tougher year-on-year comparisons.
(With additional reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Stephen
Coates)
Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky. Photo: Brian Frank / Wired
We know that Facebook writes a lot of the software that underpins its massive social network. And we know it designs its very own computer servers
to juggle your every Like, comment, and cat photo. But to get a sense
of how deep the tinkering goes inside the company, consider this:
Facebook now works with Intel to customize microprocessors for its
particular needs. According to Frank Frankovsky — who oversees hardware design at
Facebook — this started as far back as 2009. That’s when the company
first asked Intel for certain changes to the design of the silicon chips
it builds for computer servers — the machines that drive the internet
and the private computer networks inside the world’s businesses. Since
then, Frankovsky says, Intel has worked hand-in-hand with the company to
accommodate such changes. For the most part, he explains, these changes are rolled into the
same processors that Intel sells to the world at large, though there are
cases where the changes are unlikely to benefit anyone but Facebook.
“The more insight we can give our technology suppliers about what makes
our software work the best, the more we’re able to influence their
design roadmaps,” Frankovsky says. “We do influence their roadmaps — way
upstream — but then they are able to bring these changes out to all of
their customers.”
‘Sometimes OEMs and end customers will ask us to put a feature into
the silicon and it sort of depends upon how big a deal it is and whether
it has to be invisible [to other buyers] or proprietary to a customer.
We’re always happy to, if we can find a way to get it into the silicon.’
— Intel’s Jason Waxman
This longtime collaboration between Facebook and Intel, the world’s
dominant chip maker, is just one sign of a larger shift in the
multi-billion-dollar market for server chips and other hardware that
powers the web’s most popular services. For years, says Intel’s Jason
Waxman, the chip giant has worked to tweak chip designs at the request
of big-name server manufacturers along the lines of Dell and HP and IBM —
original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs — but more recently, the
company has been customizing processors for companies along the lines of
Facebook — companies that run more computer servers than almost any
other operation on the planet. In some cases, he says, Intel will even make changes that are only
available to a particular customer. “Sometimes OEMs and end customers
will ask us to put a feature into the silicon and it sort of depends
upon how big a deal it is and whether it has to be invisible [to other
buyers] or proprietary to a customer,” Waxman says. “We’re always happy
to, if we can find a way to get it into the silicon.” Waxman says that Intel typically makes custom changes for about “five
to eight” OEMs and about five “end customers,” meaning companies like
Facebook that use servers rather than sell them. But he declines to name
the particular companies involved. Meanwhile, chief-Intel-rival AMD says it customizes chips in similar ways.
Facebook works with all sorts of other hardware makers on custom parts,
from memory outfits to server makers, as it seeks to build data center
hardware that’s more efficient and less costly than the norm. And Google
and Amazon have indicated they work in much the same way. Both Facebook and Intel decline to identify specific changes the two
companies have made to Intel servers chips with Facebook’s operation in
mind, but Frankovsky indicates that some changes involve hardware that
can accelerate certain software tasks and that others involve tools for
managing the way chips behave. “We do some management engine work,” he
says. “Some of that may make sense for broad communities to adopt — but
other parts are pretty Facebook-specific.” Waxman adds that at the request of certain customers, Intel will go
so far as to etch new instructions or new logic into a chip. Typically,
this logic is worked into the chips the company sells to the rest of the
market, but he indicates that the company will offer specialized chips
only to a particular customer — if that customer is willing to purchase
an usually large number of processors. Sometimes, he says, Intel will
turn this logic off for most customers, but then provide one buyer with a
way to turn it on. He also says that there are cases where Intel will crank the chip
clock speeds to unusually high levels at the request of certain buyers —
if the buyer is willing to deal with the extra heat this generates. According to Frankovsky, Facebook has long worked with Intel in an
effort to squeeze more performance per watt out of the company’s
processors. “Early on, we collaborated with Intel on how many cores you
could put into a package and what the maximum clock rate you could run
those at,” he says. This sort of thing, Waxman says, is common among the
large “cloud” companies. Some companies, he says, will even request
chips with a certain number of “cores” per chip, where each core is
basically its own processor, and then ask for a clock speed tuned to
that particular number of cores. But this is just one way the market is changing. Facebook is at the
forefront of a movement to fashion all sorts of hardware that’s better
suited to running the world’s largest web services. It now designs its
own machines in tandem with manufacturers in Asia, and it “open sources”
these designs, sharing them with the world at large. Other companies,
including cloud-computing-outfit Rackspace, are already using these
designs to fashion their own hardware. This process has shrunk the the supply chain for computer servers,
bringing the likes of Facebook much closer to the companies that
actually manufacturer the hardware. According to someone familiar with
the matter, Facebook negotiates directly with Intel on the price of
chips, and the chips are then sent to manufacturers in Asia, who build
machines on behalf of the social networking giant. Google and Amazon
work in similar ways, and so many others, including Rackspace, are
following suit. Processor customization is the most complicated part of this new
server world. But it will likely become more prevalent as more and more
chip makers get into the server game behind designs from Intel-rival
ARM. For years, ARM has licenses its cellphone chip designs to a wide
range of manufacturers so that they can be tweaked and customized, and
it’s now doing the same thing with server chips. “Open source is having an impact on the hardware industry,” says
Frankovsky. “The [hardware] companies that are becoming the most
successful…are the ones that are setup to work with an open development
model and do that level of customization for their customers. Customers
know a lot more about what they need than the hardware world has
typically given them credit for.”
lllll
LLC 501C- 4 UCC 1-308.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE
March 7, 2013: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveils a new look for the social network's News Feed at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
marking you as a fan of Coca-Cola or Lady Gaga. It could out you as gay. It might reveal how you vote.
Click the chart for more on Facebook stock.
Billionaires Dump Stocks. Prepare For Unthinkable.
Facebook is allowing advertisers to target individual users based on offline purchases.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday.
Valentin Flauraud/Reuters Facebook has been putting increasing focus on its mobile products for over two years.
(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)
.”
Email
Deborah L. Jacobs, Forbes Staff
![Heckled Obama to students in Jerusalem: "It made me feel at home" (1:46)](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_t_qJFQEFZr2cGbsP6Jg4zKUWAVknQGFbX9k7VrdJW5iIpeum0Jif39VP5Lc21n-MJJ_a_u2nbiOZFlwFaLW7wDXPuqmMDGWw65utgoK7-x7yiLU2TSEByfAzGnh-domxwa9VqYFPRmHGu-9st37IyLZ-Iu7JWY9jTfUExkUyrXXofw=s0-d "Heckled Obama to students in Jerusalem: "It made me feel at home\" (1:46)")
Facebook.comIf there is one thing Tiger Woods is great at, it's golf. If there is one other thing, it's keeping his private life extremely private.
Facebook.com
Facebook.com
![Deborah Norville: "Devastated" By Rheumatoid Arthritis](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_s5fwBoKjeUX9I6FuL7xMY8YV5bAjKisLgp-rS-rN1M4SQhT1tHE2Nyy9mTJ2KAWgPJUQWb110_rBNYomOyWUl469PukSkrZqtm7jTlc9WXVcvmb4mXn8GmA2siTgDNAvQqFD8ZqF_0GsDvTXLAifrf1SZyTydF9KxF5itenDcS=s0-d "Deborah Norville: "Devastated\" By Rheumatoid Arthritis")
BikersPost BikersPost, a small business, is being asked by Facebook to pay $7,500 to reach its fans on the Web site.
(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)
The biggest new feature in the
news feed is the option to filter posts by category. Users can view only
updates from friends or the latest from the pages they follow.
Phishing
attacks are one of the most common scams on Facebook. The goal of these
scams is to obtain your Facebook user name and password. If successful,
the scammers can totally take over your Facebook account and use it to spread more spam and scams to your friends. They can also mine everyone in your network for data they can later use for identity theft or other socially engineered attacks.
SocialSafe
helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your
online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly
searchable. Supports most major social networks.
BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.
PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.
DoNotTrackMe protects your privacy by blocking online tracking. Abine – Online Privacy Starts Here.
(Credit:
Facebook Developers Blog)
Facebook has revealed details about Mobile DevCon 2013,
a trio of events this spring, in three of the largest cities on the
planet, that's intended to connect Facebook engineers, product managers,
and "like-minded mobile developers."
Phishing
attacks are one of the most common scams on Facebook. The goal of these
scams is to obtain your Facebook user name and password. If successful,
the scammers can totally take over your Facebook account and use it to spread more spam and scams to your friends. They can also mine everyone in your network for data they can later use for identity theft or other socially engineered attacks.
SocialSafe
helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your
online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly
searchable. Supports most major social networks.
BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.
PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.
DoNotTrackMe protects your privacy by blocking online tracking. Abine – Online Privacy Starts Here.
Stop the Hate and learn to live together is the only way the human race will survive.
Who is anyone to tell someone else who they can and can’t love? Yet you say you’re not a bigot – your comment is the definition of bigotry.