Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Friday, June 8, 2012
Monday, December 5, 2011
Facebook unveils New York recruitment expansion plan
Facebook has announced plans to open a software engineering centre in New York in early 2012.
The firm already employs an advertising team in the city. However, it is the first time the company has created a software base that is not on the US West Coast.Reports also suggest the social network has bought Gowalla - a location-based "check-in" service.
The moves come ahead of an expected stock market flotation.
Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, announced the New York expansion plan at a press conference attended by the city's Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and other officials.
"We are trying to grow at a clip that will allow us to get the very best people and integrate them," she said.
"We will be adding thousands of employees in the next year."
The new office will be headed up by Serkan Piantino. He previously led the engineering team behind Facebook's News Feed and helped develop its Timeline feature.
Ms Sandberg did not specify how many of the "thousands" of promised posts would be created in New York.
Social partnership?
Reports suggest the firm has also taken over Gowalla.
Texas-based Gowalla is a two-year-old social network based around the idea of allowing users to "check-in" to locations and share pictures from their visits.
Members used to receive virtual "items" at certain check-in points. However, the company struggled against a larger competitor, Foursquare. In September it refocused its efforts on becoming a travel service, offering "social guides" to 60 cities, including London, Paris and Chicago, based on its members' postings.
At the end of last week CNN reported that Facebook had bought the firm for an undisclosed sum and would move Gowalla's development team onto its Timeline feature.
Timeline turns users' Facebook profile pages into a digital scrapbooks, making it easier for users to view each others' life histories. The feature was announced in September, but has yet to be rolled out to many of the site's members.
Investing in location
Neither Facebook nor Gowalla have confirmed the takeover.
However, the All Things D website reported that Gowalla's chief executive, Josh Williams, had sent an email to investors.
"The ink on the deal is not dry, so our holding pattern is that we do not comment on rumours... A longer email will be sent soon," it is quoted as saying.
Facebook already had a location-based service built into its mobile device apps and website, but experts say the network may want to offer a richer experience.
"Facebook Places seems to work fairly well but they want to make a big play in this area," said Lee Bryant, the European managing director of Dachis Group, a social media consultancy.
"Location-based services are still in their early stages. Gowalla was interesting and slightly more story based than Foursquare, which Facebook may feel will help it strengthen its Timeline service."
Ready to float
Tech analysts expect Facebook to announce details of a share flotation in the New Year.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the firm could raise $10bn through the sale, valuing the company at $100bn.
It quotes sources saying that the initial public offering (IPO) could be completed by June.
Facebook has declined to comment, saying it does not want to add to speculation about the move.
BBC.co.uk
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Facebook IPO 'would value each user at $125
Facebook is considering raising about US$10 billion (£6.4 billion) in an initial public offering that would value the world's largest social-networking site at more than US$100 billion, according to reports.
The company is expected to file for the IPO before the end of the year, in a move which would place a value of around US$125 (£80) on each of its 800 million users.
The $100 billion valuation would be twice as high as it was in January, when the company announced a $1.5 billion investment from Goldman Sachs Group and other backers. At $10 billion, the offering would raise more money than any other technology IPO – dwarfing the previous record holder, Infineon Technologies AG, which generated $5.23 billion in an IPO in 2000.
Facebook expects to be required by U.S. regulators to disclose financial results by April 30, 2012, if it doesn’t go public by then, the company said in January.
Facebook decided to wait until 2012 for its IPO to give Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg more time to gain users and boost sales, sources said.
The news comes as Zuckerberg admitted Facebook has made "a bunch of mistakes" on privacy and agreed to overhaul its policy to make all major changes opt-in, following American regulatory criticism.
Writing in a rare blog post, the social network site's founder and chief executive said he “founded Facebook on the idea that people want to share and connect with people in their lives, but to do this everyone needs complete control over who they share with at all times”.
But he added that while overall the site had a good history of being open about privacy, "I am the first to admit that we have made a bunch of mistakes".
He also admitted that the site's executives "can always do better" on the controversial issue.
His comments came after the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused Facebook of systematically invading user privacy on seven specific counts, including when the social network had changed settings to make more of its users' information publicly visible.
The new plan to settle the complaints marks a major step on the social network’s road to its initial public offering, which had been widely expected to value the company at $100 billion.
Facebook will now be “required to obtain consumers’ affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences”.
This will effectively make all major future privacy control changes opt in. Facebook must also submit to privacy audits every 2 years for the next 20 years, stop any access to content on deactivated accounts, and present its policies on privacy or security of user data more clearly.
Although new settings can apparently be added without requiring users to opt in, new services will now require users to explicitly give their consent if they are to take part. Facebook Places, for example, which allows users to check-in online to physical locations, was cited as an example of a service that Facebook would not now be able to turn on for all users without their consent.
Zuckerberg conceded that the site had made major mistakes with users’ privacy, citing the launch of the ‘Beacon’ system which showed users’ friends their shopping habits, and the company’s previous changes to privacy policies.
He claimed, however, that “When I built the first version of Facebook, almost nobody I knew wanted a public page on the internet. That seemed scary. But as long as they could make their page private, they felt safe sharing with their friends online. Control was key”.
Zuckerberg put the social network’s success down to making it “easy for people to feel comfortable sharing things about their real lives”.
“Overall, I think we have a good history of providing transparency and control over who can see your information,” he wrote.
"That said, I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes. In particular, I think that a small number of high profile mistakes, like Beacon four years ago and poor execution as we transitioned our privacy model two years ago, have often overshadowed much of the good work we've done.
"I also understand that many people are just naturally sceptical of what it means for hundreds of millions of people to share so much personal information online, especially using any one service."
He added: "Even if our record on privacy were perfect, I think many people would still rightfully question how their information was protected. It's important for people to think about this, and not one day goes by when I don't think about what it means for us to be the stewards of this community and their trust.
Facebook has always been committed to being transparent about the information you have stored with us – and we have led the internet in building tools to give people the ability to see and control what they share.
"But we can also always do better. I'm committed to making Facebook the leader in transparency and control around privacy."
The new agreement with the FTC “means we're making a clear and formal long-term commitment to do the things we've always tried to do and planned to keep doing – giving you tools to control who can see your information and then making sure only those people you intend can see it”, Zuckerberg said.
The social network will now also have two Chief Privacy Officers; former lawyer Erin Egan will be responsible for Policy, while Michael Richter will become Chief Privacy Officer, Products. Richter is currently Facebook's Chief Privacy Counsel.
Overall, the changes are set to alter Facebook’s development of new products, as well as its attitude to users. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said ”Facebook’s innovation does not have to come at the expense of consumer privacy. The FTC action will ensure it will not.”
The proposals will now be put to a 30-day consultation period. They are likely to meet the majority of the concerns raised be European privacy regulators, although those issues remain unresolved.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Google+ takes different, inclusive approach to social networking
And if you’ve spent any time with Facebook, you’ll notice a striking resemblance to the social network. Its main page is a “feed” of users, among them your friends, co-workers and family members, updating and sharing content. You have a “profile” detailing where you live, where you work and whom you’re friends with.
But Google+ is empirically different from Facebook, from their methodologies and thoughts on privacy to its philosophy of how you should (and want) to interact with your social network. While Google+ is still in the early stages of public testing, it does make, and stand by, a bold statement that the Web isn’t a place to expand your network of friends — it’s a place to strengthen and more tightly enclose the groups of friends you already have.
The site’s main conceit is its Circles feature. It forgoes the niceties of Facebook friendships altogether by forcing you to own up to the fact that you don’t interact with all of your friends in the same way. Typically, your best friend and boss are not privy to the same details of your life, nor would you want them to be.
In Circles, you divide your friends into different groups of your choosing. For example: closest friends, family, co-workers, loose acquaintances and your fantasy baseball league. These “circles” of friends will never know what Circle they’re in, just that they’re in one.
Now when you share a message, video, link or some other ephemera, you can choose to share (or not to share) with individuals or entire Circles. Ostensibly, your feed, or as it’s called in Google+, your Stream, is only populated with information relevant and meant for you to read and consume. In Facebook terms, think of it as if the only feed you had was your Wall.
Circles does multiple things in one application that Facebook requires some legwork to mimic. Primarily, it makes tinkering with your social network privacy settings a thing of the past. Instead of having to make sure you have the right criteria set to shield any embarrassing bits of information from your family, you can simply decide not share it with your family Circle. Where Facebook requires a workaround for specific privacy controls, Google+ makes it a guiding element.
Of course, this privacy is exclusive to Google+. The rest of Google’s services are prominently integrated into the site; when you log in to Google+, you are also logged in to Gmail, Google Docs and all its other factions. You may be able to keep your Google+ Circles private, but the rest of the Google machine is still doing everything it can to keep track of you.
But by putting the user in control of essentially every facet of information shared, Google+ is as private or as public as preferred. But the more private, exclusive and closed off, the better, at least to Google+.
Traditionally, with sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the mantra is to share abundantly and with as many people as possible. On Google+, anti-social tendencies are encouraged. If you wanted to, you could exclusively interact with only your small group of friends — to hell with everyone else.
And it provides the tools you need to strengthen your Circles’ insularity. Such as the Hangout feature, which can support up to 10 users in a video chat and works snappily for a testing version. You can group chat and even watch a YouTube video alongside each other on a shared screen.
Another big part of Google+ is the plus one feature, styled as “+1”. Now in Google searches, you’ll have the option to +1 a link you like or recommend. Very much in the vein of “liking” or sharing a link with a webpage’s Facebook link, the +1 approach takes it one step beyond. Now when you’re searching Google, if one your friends has given a +1 to a link, you’ll see it in line with the link. Not only can you exclusively interact with certain Circles, you can also make sure that they’re your primary source of news as well. Another feature is Sparks, which provides you with a feed of links tailored to the keywords of your choice. Have an obsession with amateur hip-hop dance crews? Google+ is glad to nourish your addiction.
And that’s a huge basis of the social network, keeping your interactions at the specific, micro level. Unlike Facebook, it’s not about the overlap of multiple streams of information — it’s all about cutting out and combing through the ether for just the stuff you want.
That’s where Google+ becomes divisive. It essentially opens up a competing school of thought about how the Internet should work and how we should use it. As it is, Google+ does a great job at curating your friends and organizing them into groups, but it doesn’t actually do anything new or better to enhance the experiences you share with them. The debate between whether you should use Google+ or Facebook shouldn’t be about the features — it’s how these social networks want you to use them.
Dailytexanonline.com
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Facebook & Twitter users richer than MySpace users
They're more likely to live in the city too!
The research firm also revealed that Facebook and Twitter users are more likely to be based in the city.
"Nielsen's online data shows that about half of the US population visited a social networking website in the last year and that number grows every quarter," said Wils Corrigan, an associate vice president with Nielsen.
The survey, which studied the top seven social networking sites, showed that Facebook users generally have an "upscale profile".
Nielsen also said that people who are more affluent than the other two-thirds of the population are 25 percent more likely to use Facebook than those in the the lower third.
And conversely, those in the bottom third of the financial chart are 37 percent more likely to use MySpace than those in the top third.
Other recent studies have shown that as Facebook and Twitter grow in popularity , their user bases are growing older .
A July report released by iStrategyLabs shows that while the number of Facebook's US high school and college-age users declined over the past six months, its popularity among the 55-and-older crowd is booming.
In fact, the number of 55-and-older Facebook users showed staggering growth - 513.7 percent - in the last six months, the digital consulting firm said.
That means Facebook and Twitter, which both have shown phenomenal growth in the past year, apparently appeal to an older, wealthier demographic.
And with expectations mounting for Twitter executives to finally come out with a business plan by the end of the year , the demographics of the site's users will have to be factored into the equation
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk
The research firm also revealed that Facebook and Twitter users are more likely to be based in the city.
"Nielsen's online data shows that about half of the US population visited a social networking website in the last year and that number grows every quarter," said Wils Corrigan, an associate vice president with Nielsen.
The survey, which studied the top seven social networking sites, showed that Facebook users generally have an "upscale profile".
Nielsen also said that people who are more affluent than the other two-thirds of the population are 25 percent more likely to use Facebook than those in the the lower third.
And conversely, those in the bottom third of the financial chart are 37 percent more likely to use MySpace than those in the top third.
Other recent studies have shown that as Facebook and Twitter grow in popularity , their user bases are growing older .
A July report released by iStrategyLabs shows that while the number of Facebook's US high school and college-age users declined over the past six months, its popularity among the 55-and-older crowd is booming.
In fact, the number of 55-and-older Facebook users showed staggering growth - 513.7 percent - in the last six months, the digital consulting firm said.
That means Facebook and Twitter, which both have shown phenomenal growth in the past year, apparently appeal to an older, wealthier demographic.
And with expectations mounting for Twitter executives to finally come out with a business plan by the end of the year , the demographics of the site's users will have to be factored into the equation
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk
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