Facebook

The much awaited Facebook IPO has happened today. On its eighth birthday, Facebook came out of the closet and decided to go public to raise $5 Billion. While filing for IPO Facebook also revealed a number of mindboggling stats on its user base, its revenues, and more. Here is the Facebook IPO by the numbers. [...]

Facebook announced that it is opening the registration for Facebook’s second annual Hackers Cup. Facebook Hackers Cup is a global programming contest to solve challenging algorithmic problems. Hackers Cup has five rounds of programming challenges and the winner who hacks through the challenges get to be be World champion and win $5000. Runners up get [...]

It’s official. Gowalla, the location based social app start up, announced in its blog that it has been acquired by Facebook. The acquisition news was first reported by CNN Money last Friday and Gowalla has made it official. Gowalla is a Austin based Geo-Social startup company founded by Josh Williams and Scott Raymond in 2009, [...]

Princeton University’s team comprising of four students won this year’s Facebook Hackathon for college students. Fourteen college teams competed at the final Facbook hackathon event at Facebook’s headquarterd in Palo Alto, CA. The field for final competition was competitive with 13 college teams from the top US universities, including MIT, Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. Princeton [...]

Facebook has settled the charges made by Federal Trade Commission and promised to behave better on privacy issues in the future.  FTC accused Facebook of deceiving users by telling them their private information is private while repeatedly allowing it to be public. Listing seven privacy violations of Facebook, FTC claimed that Facebook violated federal law. [...]

Facebook has acquired Friend.ly a Mountainview based startup company that help you find right questions to ask based on Facebook profiles. Friend.ly started two years ago by Bryan Guillemette, Ed Baker, and Joachim De Lombaert and is now a 10 member team. Announcing the acquisition news in its blog post, Friend.ly said Friend.ly service will [...]

Facebook has finally made Facebook for iPad ready for Facebook users. Launching the Facebook app for iPad, Facebook said with the iPad app, you get the full Facebook experience, right at your fingertips. It’s a fun way to keep up with friends, share photos, chat and more. Some of the highlights of the new Facebook for [...]

Facebook announced at its developer conference F8 that it is revamping Facebook profile page and bringing in media with new kind of social apps to Facebook. The biggest news is as leaked before Facebook is partnering with Spotify for Music and Netfix for movies (Not for US users). Calling out the profile page of Facebook [...]

With upcoming F8 Facebook developer conference tomorrow, Facebook has been making lot of changes off late. Earlier today, Facebook sent a mail to its users announcing that users will be seeing less mails from Facebook. Instead of sending individual mails, Facebook will be sending only a summary. We’re trying out a new feature to reduce [...]

Nielsen’s latest report on Social Media finds that more people are spending more time and money on social media, and more people are going mobile with social media. The Social media report looks at trends and consumption patterns across social media platforms in the U.S. and found that social network accounts for 25% of time [...]

Facebook announced that the much anticipated Facebook Developer Conference f8 (f8 2011) will be held on September 22 at Concourse at the San Francisco Design Center. The f8 2011 is the fourth edition of Facebook’s conference for developers, entrepreneurs and innovators building a more social web. Facebook began registering yesterday and the open registration is [...]

Facebook has put to use its recent acquisition and launched a stand alone Messenger app. With Facebook’s new Messenger app one can send or get to a messages to everyone irrespective of whether they are on Facebook or just in your phone contacts. Launching Messenger, Facebook said Messenger is faster way to message in a [...]

Google Plus is at news again. The recent survey conducted by Bloomberg/YouGov studying social media trends after Google Plus launch found that in the next year, Google Plus could rise to become the Number Two Social Network after Facebook. YouGov conducted the survey by sampling 1003 adult US residents-nationally representative of the US online adult [...]

Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, a San Francisco based new kind of digital publishers founded by two former Apple employees. Push Pop Press was founded by Kimon Tsinteris and Mike Matas. With the grand ambition of changing the way we read books, Push Pop Press produced Al Gore’s Our Choice, the next gen digital [...]

Facebook launched video calling in partnership with Skype. Now one can do one-on-one video chat with your Facebook friends right from your Facebook account. At the special event launching “awesome product”, Facebook also unveiled group chat that allows multi-person sharing on Facebook chat window. Video Calling Lands at Facebook Just like other messaging systems, Facebook [...]

Check out today’s XKCD comic strip and it is about Google+. And it clearly explains why we will like Google+ and join.

Google is making an yet another attempt to be part of the world of social networks. After a long time rumors, Google fully plunged into social and introduced a Facebook competitor called Google+. Blaming it on the current social life online Google said “subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of [...]

Facebook has acquired Sofa, a software and interaction design company. Sofa is founded in 2006 and based in Amsterdam. Sofa has designed for companies like TomTom, Nike, and Mozilla. Sofa has also developed softwares like Kaleidascope and Versions. Announcing its acquisition Sofa said the team will move from Amsterdam to Palo Alto and hope to [...]

Bing announced a number of new features that piggy-backs on Facebook to attract more users and fight Google and its new +1 product. Bing search got deeply integrated with Facebook to provide a more social search. With the new features, Bing wants to change the notion that search is all about about links and fact. [...]

Facebook launched Facebook Deals, the much anticipated Facebook move to counter the success of Groupon and LivingSocial, in select cities. Facebook is testing “Social Deals” in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco and is hoping to expand the testing in to other cities in the future. Facebook says that the Deals on Facebook [...]

Facebook announced that it is adding new features to Facebook Groups to make it easier to share within a smaller set of your Facebook friends called Facebook Groups. And also Facebook unveiled a new send button to communicate with your Facebook group members. Last year, Facebook launched Facebook Groups to help you share with important [...]

T-Mobile announced that it is launching a new VoIP app, Bobsled for Facebook, that lets you call your Facebook friends for free. In addition to bringing the ability call Facebook friends with a click of a button, Bobsled also allows users to send voice messages to their friends either privately or via their “walls”. The Bobsled [...]

HTC announced at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona that it will be launching two Android smartphones HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa that are completely social. Both will have a dedicated Facebook button to enable one touch access to Facebook service. HTC says that the Facebook button on these smartphones is context-aware and will pulse a light [...]

Ever wondered what happened with the Internet in 2010? And how many sites, users are there, Pingdom, website’s uptime monitoring company has collated answers to a number of such interesting questions on Internet 2010. Pingdom used a variety of sources to get these interesting numbers. Email By Numbers In 2010, the total number of emails [...]

Facebook announced that it is extending the Facebook Fellowship program to support international Ph.D. students. The Facebook Fellowship program started last year, but only for Ph.D. students from a U.S. university working in a broad area of Computer Science and Social computing. In addition to extending the Fellowship to international students, Facebook also expanded the [...]

Time Magazine announced that the Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the Person of the Year 2010. Announcing Mark Zuckerberg as the Person of the Year, Time Magazine explained that he is chosen For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of [...]

Facebook announced 2011 Hacker Cup, a multi-round programming competition for engineers around the world.  Hackers are in the news for wrong reasons, but these hackers solve complex problems by coming up with interesting algorithms. Such hacking is part of Facebook culture and it is known for the hackathons organized by Facebook employees within Facebook. Facebook [...]

Facebook revamped its profile page to make it easier share. Facebook launched the revamped profile on Sunday before just before Founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared on 60 Minutes.The new profile offers a quick overview of a user’s basic information, like what one starts with a real conversation. In addition, the new profile is more visual now [...]

Diaspora, the open Facebook alternative announced that it is releasing the first set of alpha invites. In its blog it said it will invite more people, starting with its supporters. Diaspora was started by four NYU students with the goal to build an open alternative to Facebook. In late April, Diaspora wanted to raise just [...]

It seems Google is on a hiring spree.  For a report,  Reuters literally counted the number of jobs available in Google across the world and found that it has 2076 job openings. Yes, Google has jobs from more then 2000 people. It is kind of surprising given that Google already has more than 23,000 people [...]

Facebook is continuing its march to get hold of the internet. The latest report by Hitwise shows that Facebook.com attracts 10 percent of all internet  visits in US. People not just visit Facebook, they seem to consume a lot of content in Facebook. Hitwise says that 25% of all page views in US belong to [...]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched a modern messaging system at a special press meet today. The next generation messaging system crosses the barrier of devices and type of messages like SMS, email, and chat. Mark Zuckerberg called it a Social Inbox for all of our online communications. The new messaging system has three features; seamless [...]

Drop.io, a small startup that offers innovative file sharing service announced that it has been acquired by Facebook. Drop.io is a New York based startup founded by Harvard Graduate Sam Lessin in 2007.  Drop.io describes itself as fully realtime enabled. this means realtime rich-media streaming collaboration and chat like never before. in one click set [...]

An investigation by Wall Street Journal on Facebook Privacy revealed that the top Facebook apps reveal cewrtain information that can be used to obtain personal information like name, and friends’s names to advertising companies. The report claims that this is not an isolated case and millions of people who uses the apps are affected by [...]

Skype announced the new version of Skype 5.0 for Windows with a number of new features and it is ready to download now. The major highlight of Skype 5.0 is it has found a friend in Facebook. Skype has added a Facebook table by integrating Facebook News Feed with Skype. Skype says the with the [...]

Facebook and Microsoft announced new features in Bing that will make search more social and personalized.Bing has added Facebook’s instant personalization to its search results. Bing will seek the help of your Facebook friends to answer your search queries on Bing. Bing unveiled two new features,”liked” search Bing results and people search powered by Facebook, [...]

Facebook announced in its blog that it is rolling out more features to keep Facebook account safe and secure. Facebook hopes that the new security features, one-time password and ability to log out remotely will help Facebook experience make more secure. Facebook has been working hard to improve the security by adding new features regularly. [...]

Facebook today launched a new product called Facebook Groups, which tries to solve one of the most common problems that Facebook users face. In real life, we have different group of friends and share specific information with each group. Currently, if you want to share certain information only to a specific group of friends, say [...]

All Things Digital’s BoomTown reports that Facebook is partnering with Skype and the partnership will include deep integration of SMS, voice chat and Facebook Connect. The prospect of 500 million users using Skype is a huge positive news for Skype, as it is facing competition from Google Voice. And also it will help its plan [...]

A study by PEW research shows that the tech company that got most media coverage from press is Apple.  The PEW report says that, Apple is had more coverage from the mainstream press than any other tech giants. Not just coverage, but most of the coverage has something good to say about Apple and its [...]

In an interview WSJ’s Alan Murray, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that Google’s main rival is Bing, not Apple or Facebook as widely reported. In a 20 minute long interview with Alan Murray, Eric Schmidt discussed a variety of topics including Privacy, Net Neutrality, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. Check the video below for Eric Schmidt’s [...]

Facebook has been bitten by “twitter-whale bug” and has been down on and off since yesterday (although for different reasons). Apologizing to Facebook users for the outage Facebook said the key flaw that cause the outage was “an unfortunate handling of an error condition”. Facebook said an automated system used for checking configuration ended up [...]

Earlier this weekend, TechCrunch reported that Facebook is secretly building its own smartphone. TechCrunch said Facebook is working on the software for the phone, like Apple and other phone makers, and a third party will build the phone. Immediately after the report came, Facebook issued a denial statement on Sunday and said The story, which [...]

Facebook promising a better gaming experience on Facebook, launched new features that will give users a better control over the updates one sees in his/her News Feed. Facebook said games are an important way to connect with people and it is one of the most successful categories of applications in Facebook. Facebook User Love or Hate Facebook [...]

Early this morning, TechCrunch reported that Facebook is secretly working on building “Facebook Phone”. The rumor got little bit more interesting as Silicon Alley Insider reported that Facebook Phone will run on Android “For Sure”. Facebook: We are not building phone Facebook representative denied the rumor on Facebook Phone to Mashable and gave the following [...]

The hottest tech news/rumor for the weekend is pretty hard to believe with potentially huuuuge impact. TechCrunch reports that Facebook is secretly building its own low end smartphone to arrest the growing power of iPhone and Androids. Just like Apple and other phone makers, Facebook is working on the software and a third party will [...]

Diaspora, the open social network project that gained popularity and raised over $200,000 from Facebook Privacy backlash, announced that it is releasing the dource code for Diaspora for developers. Diaspora said This is now a community project and development is open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network [...]

Inspired by Google Instant, Google’s new way to search before you type, Feross Aboukhadijeh – a Stanford undergrad created a cool little app that mimics Google Instant, but for YouTube. Just like Google Instant, YouTube Instant predicts the query as you type and shows a YouTube Video. Feross Aboukhadijeh tweeted about the product and it [...]

If you thought Facebook’s new service Facebook Places is boring and not interesting, you are not alone. Even Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare that offers similar features, thinks so. In an interview to The Telegraph UK, Dennis Crowley said Facebook places is “not that great or interesting”. He thought it is pretty boring service given [...]

Facebook unveiled a much rumored and much anticipated product called Places. Facebook Places lets users broadcast their locations in real time and let them “Check In” at places. By checking in, a user is letting his friends know where the user is. After checking in, the user can also easily see any of his friends [...]

Google Buzz announced in a buzz that it will be offering suggestions to users for new people to follow. Google buzz says “Suggestions for people to follow” is one of the things users wanted. When you click on Buzz in Gmail, you might see the suggestions from Google Buzz. If you are wondering how does [...]

Google to Acquire Like.com Fresh off buying Social Gold, Google is reportedly buying a company to boost its visual search for products. Techcrunch reports that Google is pretty close to finish a deal to acquire like.com. Like.com with the tagline “Shop Visually” uses visual search technology to shopping. It focuses on visual search on things [...]

Facebook brings its new privacy control options to its mobile users. Facebook introduced its simpler privacy controls in May, after undergoing a huge privacy policy crisis. Now, the Facebook simpler privacy controls are available to any mobile device that has a browser. Facebook has over 150 million active users who access Facebook using mobile devices [...]

Facebook unveiled a different kind of search feature to Facebook, with the aim of getting right answers to your questions.  Facebook introduced “Facebook Questions”, where users can pose questions to Facebook community and get most reliable answers from them. Imagine, you have question. One of the first things you would do is ask your friend. [...]

Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is building its own version of Social Networking site to take on Facebook. Google has attempted to get into social networking before with Orkut and Google Buzz. However, Google failed to make an impact in Social networking domain, where Facebook and twitter are the top two players. Google [...]

Facebook announced today that the number of active members in the social networking site has reached 500 millions. Founded in  2004 at dorm rooms of Harvard, Facebook has been growing at a dramatic pace. Facebook took five years to get to 250 million users. However, with in a year (since last summer) the number of [...]

In its blog today, Facebook said that everything about Facebook is making the the world more social, starting from friends birthdays to everything that is connected to the users. Explaining the role of advertising in Facebook said it wants the world of users and the advertisers be more social. Only then a user can easily connect and [...]

The open social network project Diaspora, started by four NYU students to build an open alternative to Facebook raised more than $200,000 in month. Diaspora is a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network” aiming to be the next Facebook. Diaspora started out in April 24 to raise just $10,000 by June 1. [...]

Facebook CEO, Mark Zukerburg, today unveiled a new simpler way to control the privacy of Facebook users. These changes are in response to the huge outcry over the recent changes in Facebook privacy and the complaints about how complicated the privacy settings are. Facebook CEO accepted that it made too many changes in too little [...]

Amidst the Facebook privacy bashing and a hacker trying to sell thousands of Facebook user’s account information, Facebook unveiled a new feature aimed at protecting Facebook users. The new feature can detect an unusual activity in your Facebook account and warn you immediately. Using the new feature you can pre-approve a list of devices from [...]

MySpace is trying to make use of the Facebook privacy bashing by making its privacy setting simpler. MySpace, the other social network pushed to the background since Facebook started its ascendancy, is trying to hard woo users. In today’s press release MySpace announced the new and simpler privacy settings. By default, MySpace visibility settings will [...]

Facebook has been hit by privacy tsunami, since they announced open graph and a lot of new features. Numerous posts have explained how difficult to keep your privacy in Facebook account. New York Times article nailed how difficult to understand and change the privacy settings in Facebook. If you want to manage privacy settings on [...]

Facebook is undergoing a major privacy crisis.  Came across this nice blog post from Matt McKeon on the Evolution of Facebook Privacy with a nice graphics to look at how privacy is vanishing from Facebook.  This infographics shows who can access your personal information from your Facebook account at given time. Then: Facebook Privacy in [...]

A recent study by Consumer Reports show that millions of people who use social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, expose sensitive personal information and put themselves and their families at risk. The study showed that about  9 percent of social network users were abused in some form, like malware infections, scams, identity theft, or harassment. most [...]

In an effort to thwart the threat from Google Doc,  Microsoft has teamed up with Facebook to come up with an MS Office app called Docs. Docs is a cloud version of Office 2010, which is officially slated to be released on 12th May. Docs for Facebook In today’s F8 keynote address, Facebook CEO Mark [...]