Facebook rethinks its ‘hackathons’ with an eye toward mobile
Facebook is retooling its famous "hackathon" all-night coding workshops to give engineers more time to conceive new products, hopefully with a focus on mobile.
The hackathons, a longstanding event at the company where "hacking" is central to the corporate mantra, have previously run as anything-goes, all-night workshops in which employees think up new product concepts and develop rough prototypes. If they impress, those prototypes sometimes end up as commercial products.
Some of Facebook's most popular features, including the "Like" button, Timeline and Chat, were conceived during hackathons, so they play an important role. Read more...
Facebook: We’ll show you our PUE, now you show us yours
The data center industry has come a long way from the days when organizations closely guarded their efficiency secrets. Facebook is now the poster child for green-data center openness: Not only has the company shared details about its data center equipment and designs through its Open Compute Project, it is now providing the public with a near-real-time view of its data centers' energy efficiency via online dashboards. Beyond that, Facebook is offering the code to let other companies create dashboards of their own to make public their data centers' ongoing efficiency metrics. Read more...
Browser plug-in, website warn Facebook users about data harvesting
Secure.me has developed a website and a browser plug-in designed to make Facebook users aware of the personal information that gets harvested by third-party applications.
The App Advisor Security Network website has profiles on more than 500,000 third-party Facebook applications that describe the user data they collect, what actions they can take and whether they are considered unsafe. The application profiles also display user ratings.
Meanwhile, the App Advisor browser extension, which works with Safari, Firefox and Chrome, gets activated when users visit either application sites or call up an application's page in the Facebook App Center. Read more...
Facebook’s new app bazaar ‘violates’ punters’ privacy – lobbyists
Facebook stands accused by a consumer lobby group of breaching Germany's privacy laws with the recent launch of its App Center.
The dominant social network has been threatened with possible legal action if it fails to respond to the Federation of German Consumer Organizations within the next seven days.
The lobby group claimed that Facebook was farming out customer information without informing its users that their data was being used, according to the Associated Press.
Facebook has until 4 September to resolve the matter, the group said, or else it could face potential legal action. Read more...
Facebook pokes devs’ wallets: Mobile app ad beta launches
Desperate to squeeze money from its mobile users, Facebook is trialling mobile-app advertising, auctioning news-feed slots to the mobile developer who bids highest.
The adverts for the devs' creations will appear in news feeds of mobile users and link directly to the relative app stores, iTunes or Google Play. Facebook reckons that it already sends 146 million people in that direction every month – via the news feeds of users 'Friends' as well as by way of the social network's App Center, so Zuck's firm might as well try to make some money from the process.
Mobile developers are being invited to register for the beta, which will allow them to bid something in the region of half a dollar per click. It will also let them specify their daily budget – along with the gender and even the region (creepily sourced from those who have location services switched on in their mobes) of those to whom they wish to advertise. Read more...
Fake users and an angry developer — Facebook’s bad week
As their company's stock continued to slump, Facebook executives had to face not one but two other pieces of tough news this week.
Just as an angry third-party developer blasted Facebook's allegedly high-handed negotiation tactics in an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company also reported that about 83 million of its user accounts are duplicates or have fake names.
"Any one thing isn't so bad but the cumulative effect is terrible," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research. "Why would any investor put more money into them? This was certainly a strange situation and it makes you wonder how many skeletons might be out there."
The trouble started Wednesday when startup entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell, co-founder of such sites as iMeem and PicPlz, posted on his blog an open letter to Zuckerberg in which he accused Facebook of bullying practices. Read more...
Facebook says mobile ads successful; analysts say challenges remain
Facebook seemed to answer at least one burning question about its mobile business on Thursday -- it doesn't plan to build its own smartphone -- but it's still not entirely clear how it will capitalize on its rapidly expanding base of mobile users.
"Building out a whole phone wouldn't really make much sense for us to do," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, when asked about Facebook's mobile strategy during a conference call to discuss its first financial report as a public company.
The number of people who access Facebook's service from mobile devices is expanding rapidly. The company had 955 million monthly active users at the end of June, of which 543 million accessed Facebook from a mobile device, the company said Thursday. That was up 67% from the same quarter last year, it said. Read more...
Eyes are on Facebook’s first earnings report
After a disappointing Wall Street debut, all eyes will be on Facebook on Thursday when it makes its first quarterly earnings report as a public company.
The world's largest social network is under a lot of pressure to show strong numbers and, more importantly, to show that the company has strong business potential. Shareholders and Wall Street will be paying particular attention to this first earnings report since Facebook's initial public offering didn't go quite as planned.
When the company went public in May, the stock was first offered at $38 per share and was expected to shoot up to $50, $60 or even $90 per share. The stock didn't meet those expectations, and didn't hold its opening price.
At noon today, Facebook's stock was trading at $28.64 a share on the Nasdaq. Read more...
Facebook, Last.fm and pals to reach deep into Ubuntu
Websites will be able to hook into the Ubuntu desktop in the Linux distro's next release - allowing, for example, users to receive "new message" pings from webmail services.
Canonical boss and spaceman Mark Shuttleworth announced the availability of "web apps" in Ubuntu 12.10, due in October, at OSCON, Canonical marketing veep Steve George blogged. The new feature will make it possible for users to quickly jump to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM, eBay and GMail from the desktop, he added.
To access a web app, visit a website participating in Canonical's project, click on a link and an icon is added to Ubuntu's left-hand launcher. Clicking on the icon will either take you to a tab in your browser where the site is already running, or open a new browser instance. This is roughly akin to pinning websites to the task bar in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to easily access sites. Read more...
Facebook user base drops in U.S., says report
Facebook appears to be losing users in the U.S. and other major markets, though its user base in parts of Asia is growing, according to an investment company report.
Facebook saw its U.S. user base drop by 0.7% over the past three months and 1.7% over the last six months, according to a report from Rory Maher, a senior Internet analyst at Capstone Investments.
The report was based on research that used proprietary software to analyze Facebook user growth in more than 200 countries. The report also noted that Hong Kong had a 1.7% drop in users and Singapore had a 1.1% drop.
In all three areas -- the U.S., Hong Kong and Singapore -- Facebook has more than 50% market penetration. Read more...
Facebook launches malware checkpoints for users with infected computers
Facebook on Tuesday launched a feature that allows users to lock down their Facebook accounts and perform malware scans if they suspect that their computers might be infected.
Facebook already uses internal scanners to detect spam and malicious messages that might have been sent from user accounts hijacked by malware.
When found, such accounts are temporarily locked down and their owners are asked to go through a multi-step account recovery process that involves downloading and running a malware scanner called McAfee Scan and Repair.
The new "malware checkpoints" feature will allow users who believe their computers might be infected with malware to initiate the account lockdown procedure themselves and perform an antivirus scan for free. Read more...
Yahoo, Facebook settle patent dispute
Yahoo and Facebook announced Friday they have settled a high-profile patent dispute with a deal that analysts said would likely be good for both sides.
As part of the agreement, Yahoo and Facebook have signed a cross-licensing deal granting access to each others' patent portfolios, they said in a joint statement. They've also forged an advertising partnership and will expand an existing content distribution agreement.
Yahoo sued Facebook in March under the leadership of former CEO Scott Thompson. It accused Facebook of infringing patents covering technologies related to social networking, advertising, privacy, site customization, and communications. Facebook's News Feed and the way it handles privacy were both in violation of Yahoo's patents, Yahoo contended. Read more...
Facebook: We need to create our own dev and management tools
With nearly 1 billion users worldwide and 500 million people visiting its social network every day, Facebook has its work cut out for it in managing its systems. To help do that, the company has been developing its own management and development tools tuned to its specific needs, rather than relying on commercial offerings.
Tools in use include Perflab, for testing site changes committed by engineers; Gatekeeper, for advanced A/B testing of code changes; and Claspin, providing a high-density heat map for viewing a large set of servers. "We spent a lot of time building up the internal tool stack," said Jay Parikh, Facebook vice president of infrastructure engineering, at the O'Reilly Velocity conference Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif. The conference is focused on Web performance and operations, with Facebook serving as a prime example of the demands being made on the Web. Read more...
Bye, bye Apple. Now Facebook’s the global app kingmaker
Facebook is helping Apple to solve the biggest problem facing mobile app stores: sorting through the quagmire of mediocrity endemic in the industry. But more importantly Facebook has found a way to turn mobile punters into profit.
The Facebook App Center (launched last week) isn't just about mobile apps, it's also a place where fans of web games such as Bubble Witch Saga can find out where their friends have gone (over to Candy Crush Saga, as it happens). Apple's decision to embed Facebook recommendations into its on-device store with iOS 6 shows Cupertino recognises that it can't fix its moribund application store on its own.
The existing discovery mechanism for mobile applications - searching and picking from the top ten - results in a starkly polarised marketplace where a handful of programs make millions while half a million make nothing at all. Read more...