With the majority of Facebook’s 1 billion users, and subscriber growth, now coming from outside the U.S., the company is taking ever more steps to building out its global footprint to reach that audience. To that end, today Facebook opened up an engineering center in London, its first outside of the U.S. and is now hiring for people to staff it, following through on an announcement it first made… → Read More
Remember when Path was super quiet with your nice group of fifty people? That’s all going to change now. As I broke at TNW, Path has been tinkering with the notion of importing items from other social networks. The feature has now been released in the latest update to the app.
You can now import Facebook status updates, Instagram photos and Foursquare check-ins right to your Path stream. Is… → Read More
This weekend, Nick Bilton of the NYT wrote an interesting piece called “Disruptions: Seeking Privacy in a Networked Age” about his experience at a recent dinner party he threw for friends. The crux of the article is that his friends used social tools to let everyone know where they were and what they were doing. This led to a few uncomfortable moments for Bilton, such as this:
I certainly… → Read More
Facebook today announced the winners from its Facebook Developer World HACK competition, a series of events the company hosted during the months of August through September 2012. The roadshow, which involves several day-long events across various cities worldwide, is meant to encourage both new and experienced developers to build apps that take advantage of the Facebook platform in some way. In… → Read More
Facebook’s first video ad is a bit strange. It compares chairs to Facebook. Because, you know, reasons. Obviously. The video parody here uses slightly naughty language and shows people sitting on toilets, thus earning the NSFW label. But it’s funny. And ironically more accurate and insightful then the original. → Read More
Editor’s note: Peter Vogel is co-founder and CEO of Plink, an online-to-offline loyalty program that rewards members for dining and shopping at their favorite national restaurants and offline stores.
Startups face an ever-changing series of challenges. Luckily for us, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we face a new problem. There are lots of companies out there that we can… → Read More
Congratulations, Workday. Its share popped 74% when it IPO’d today. Or should I say condolences? $470 million ended up in the pockets of investors instead of the cloud startup’s war chest.
Meanwhile, Facebook is called a flop for filling its coffers with $10 billion by pricing shares at nearly twice its current value. This all raises the question, how should Silicon Valley define a successful… → Read More
As The Next Web reported, users are finding that their Facebook status messages aren’t being cross-posted to Twitter even though they’ve set up their accounts to do so. I first noticed this the other night, but thought nothing of it, since I’m not really a fan of cross-posting.
We reached out to both companies and Facebook let us know that this was indeed a bug and that they’re working on it. → Read More
Facebook likes to test things out on the live site, getting feedback in real-time. Sometimes, things make their way to some of your friends, but not to you. Some would call this an “inconsistent experience”, but I actually like how Facebook goes about this. I would personally like to see all of the new stuff that the company tests, from a journalist perspective…but hey, you can’t have… → Read More
Just three weeks after Facebook formally launched Custom Audience ads that can target people by lists of email addresses or phone numbers, TechCrunch has attained the first reports on their performance and they’re promising. Not as amazing as Facebook Exchange retargeted ads, but they boost clicks and conversions, reduce costs, and deliver ROI according to Facebook and three adtech startups. → Read More
Facebook Gifts could make a lot of money on mobile by getting you to buy presents for friends, but birthdays were buried in Events and celebrations weren’t shown on mobile. So today Facebook for iOS and Android began displaying birthdays and celebrations atop the mobile news feed for users in the Gifts Beta, Facebook has confirmed.
You’ll be able to click through these alerts to buy Gifts. → Read More
Facebook doesn’t want to look like just another website, so it’s testing colorful new versions of Facebook.com on a very small percentage of logged out visitors. One features a 3D polygon art map of the Facebook universe, while another showcases an adorable couple.
So next time you login, or finally surrender and sign up, you might be greeted with something a lot more vibrant than text inputs. → Read More
A number of leading browser vendors and other tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Facebook, HP, Nokia, Mozilla, Opera and the W3C, just announced the launch of the Web Platform Docs project at WebPlatform.org. The project aims to create “a new, authoritative open web standards documentation site,” says Opera Software. The wiki-like site, says Opera, wants to ensure that developers… → Read More
Editor’s note: Jack Krawczyk is head of monetization at StumbleUpon, the discovery platform. Jack was a founding member of Google+ and tweets about stuff.
Have we forgotten that being social means connecting with the people in your life? In today’s world of growth hacking and viral marketing, we have taken social to mean acquiring likes and followers so that we can post a photo to Facebook… → Read More
Some of my friends are idiots. And by idiots, I mean they disagree with me about who should win the upcoming election. What’s worse, is that they continually post these erroneous opinions of theirs to Facebook, and back them up with statements which I can thoroughly debunk via Politifact. C’mon people, fact-check yourself! The thing is, I don’t have time to engage in inane political discussions on… → Read More
Facebook grew to 1 billion users by adding massive value on top of what came before it. Specifically, authenticated identity. There may be no greater leap forward another social network could take, and that’s why Facebook will hold the crown for a long time.
What’s emerged is network effect incarnate. No feature, no user interface, and no marketing campaign can trump that. Sorry, startups. → Read More
TuneIn, the online radio service that just raised $16 million from an impressive group of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, quietly amassed over 40 million monthly active listeners over the last few years. Lately, however, the company has been starting to make a bit more noise about its success while also consistently adding new features to its service. Today, for example, TuneIn announced… → Read More
According to The Next Web, sending someone a link to something on a third-party site using Facebook’s social system in a private message increases the “Like” numbers on public counters by two. → Read More
Last week, we noted that Facebook’s stock appeared to have gotten a nice little bump after it announced its move into the sale of physical gifts, potentially opening a new revenue stream for the company. Not all of Facebook’s big news is so kind. Today’s announcement that Facebook has reached 1 billion users has had no impact, or possibly a negative one, on its stock so far today. → Read More
Facebook also announced today that it will be kicking off an advertising campaign to promote its brand, specifically targeting 13 countries including Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Spain, U.K., and the U.S. The campaign will appear in 12 different languages and will be housed on Facebook itself. → Read More
So, Facebook launched its “Gifts” product, and I was keen to take it for a whirl. I proceeded to visit my fiancee’s wall and pick something out that she might like. There were a ton of options, including flowers and a bonsai tree. I opted for the bonsai tree. → Read More
On September 24, French newspapers alerted Facebook that there could be a bug that would display private messages written in 2009 and earlier on users’ timelines. It was then invalidated by Facebook. But the French data protection agency CNIL investigated on its own and delivered the same conclusions as Facebook. There was in fact no bug. → Read More
Facebook says that today 220 million people are visiting its App Center every month, with 40% likely to return the day after they use it for more. But with thousands of apps available, and visitors looking for guidance on what apps to use, recommendation is a huge part of the equation both for consumers, and for developers hoping their apps are the ones to hit the big time. Today, Facebook took a… → Read More
Facebook is expanding to the US the controversial Promoted Posts feature that lets users pay to get their posts more visibility in the news feed. It will cost $7 per post and Facebook hopes it will be used for garage sales, parties, wedding photos and other important announcements.
Promoted Posts could surface important announcements, but I worry it could allow the rich to dominate the feed. → Read More
There’s lots of criticism going around about Facebook’s monetization strategy, and in a similar vein, it’s pretty common to criticize startups that grow without worrying about revenue. But venture capitalist and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen said today that’s looking at things the wrong way. In fact, he argued that great companies have one thing in common — “a willingness to defer… → Read More
We know that Facebook is in full-gear when it comes to monetization. It was obvious the second that the company announced its “Gifts” offering, which lets you send a physical or virtual item to your buddies. It’s kind of cool, and the first gift I’ve ordered is in the mail.
One of the things that I enjoy doing the most on Facebook is saying “Happy Birthday!” to someone on their wall. Facebook… → Read More
Here’s the deal: Facebook is playing around with search right before our eyes. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even alluded to that fact at Disrupt.
Today, Facebook introduced a revamped Help Center on its site. That might not sound like a big deal at first, but when you think about how many users are on the site daily, it just might be the most important feature that the public company has to offer these… → Read More
Today, Facebook is launching a redesign of its Help Center, with the goal of making it easier for Facebook users to find the information they need and get answers to their questions about the social network’s product and policies. The update includes a new layout and design for the Help Center’s homepage, improved navigation, and the addition of a list of popular questions and top Facebook Pages… → Read More
Show someone a Facebook ad once and they’ll forget, 100 times and they’ll be annoyed. So Facebook is going to use offline purchase data to help businesses increase ROI up to 40% by showing them the “sweetspot” of ad frequency, it announced today at New York’s Advertising Week.
Privacy fears flared recently when the Financial Times revealed Facebook was working with in-store purchase tracker… → Read More
Facebook has just closed a deal to hire Dwight Crow and Christopher Berner, the two founders and only teammates of the Y Combinator used car price comparison site Carsabi. The founders are now looking to sell the site so it can live on even though Facebook won’t be needing it.
Facebook tells me there wasn’t something specific that attracted it to the co-founders other than that “they’re… → Read More
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