Last night Facebook made good on the rumours that have been flying around the internet for weeks, announcing it had filed for its initial public offering, or IPO.
The move sees the world's biggest social network aim to raise $5 billion (about £3.15 million) of funding, in part by offering the public a chance to buy shares in the company.
As part of the filing, Facebook had to make public some financial stats that have until now been only speculated on. The Ad Age collected a handful of the most interesting ones below:
Facebook's total ad revenue in 2011: $3.15 billion
Share of revenue attributed to advertising: 83%
Amount of revenue sourced from Zynga: 12%
Amount Netflix spent advertising on Facebook in 2011: $3.9 million
Amount The Washington Post spent: $4.2 million
Facebook 2011 profit: $1 billion
Revenue generated from virtual goods: $557 million
Global monthly active users: 845 million
Daily likes and comments: 2.7 billion
Amount Facebook spent on advertising in 2011: $28 million
Likely Facebook market valuation: $75 to $100 billion
CEO Mark Zuckerberg's total 2011 compensation: $1.5 million
Mr. Zuckerberg's ownership stake: 28.2%
Mr. Zuckerberg's voting power: 56.9%
Mr. Zuckerberg's annual salary starting in 2013: $1
Profit of $1 billion in 2011? Who knew that all the s%!t ___ say videos I've been posting were worth that much!
Facebook have launched a new series of apps for the Timeline update of the social network.
Using a revamped Open Graph system, Facebook apps will now allow for more complicated interactions beyond the standard "like", "comment" and "share" functions.
Using a "user-action-object" language, Facebook now allows for more app-specific interactions. So, a cooking app for instance could have see Gerald (the user) cook (performing an action) a Pot Noodle (object), or Anthony (the user) play (performing an action) Xbox 360 (object).
There will also be the possibility for apps to interact with each other (perhaps diet and fitness apps for instance) while Facebook is now open to all public app submissions too.
"Timeline apps are for the activities you want to share with friends. You choose when to add an app, and you decide who can see it. After you've added an app, you can always remove posts directly from timeline, and you can also edit your settings from your personal Activity Log," said Facebook's Carl Sjogreen.
"Soon, there will be apps for all types of interests, as more apps will launch over time. Whether you love snowboarding, gardening, hiking, or knitting, or something else, there will be an app for you."
Over 60 new partners have already begun building and launching apps on the platform.
Click here for a list of all the new apps currently available for the Facebook Timeline
Facebook have announced a new social music feature, rolling out across their network today, called "Listen With Friends".
Music fans on Facebook will now be able to see what their pals are listening to from within the Facebook Chat pane, and jump into playback of a track at the very same point their friends are listening to. Up to 50 people can listen at once, which then opens a group chat window where they can discuss the music being played.
"You can listen to the same song, at the exact same time--so when your favorite vocal part comes in you can experience it together, just like when you're jamming out at a performance or dance club," said Facebook product designer Alexandre Roche on the Facebook blog.
You'll be able to identify who is listening to music by a small musical note icon that pops up next to their name. However, the service is currently limited to songs being played through Facebook partners Spotify and Rdio. While more services are set to be added, you'll likely be out of luck if you're playing locally stored files through a platform like iTunes.
The service should be rolling out to all users today, so keep an eye open for it when you're browsing the network.
Designed to "bridge the gap between online and offline" social networking, buisness card firm Moo.com are today introducing a line that capitalizes on all the snazzy pictures you've added to the new Facebook Timeline.
Each card can have a separate picture from your Facebook photo albums fitted on it, alongside your unique poignant quote of choice and contact details.
"It's clear that consumer habits of sharing business and personal information are evolving, and the lines between online social networking and offline business networking are not just blurring, but vanishing," said Richard Moross, CEO and founder of Moo.com.
"This integration places Moo and Facebook at the leading edge of this new trend: seamlessly turning your dynamic online presence into a beautifully designed, high quality offline social business card. We're very excited about this new and unique way to share your contact details, and other profile information, with friends in the real world."
Interested? The first 200,000 people to sign up for Moo's Facebook cards will get 50 cards printed free of charge. Head on over to Moo.com for more details.
Lady Gaga is the latest celebrity to see her social networking accounts hacked by scammers.
One of the true "Twitterati" with over 17 million Twitter followers and 45 million Facebook "Likes", the Bad Romance star fell foul to a hack that saw her fans lured towards a fake iPad 2 giveaway.
Unbeknownst to the singer, her Twitter account posted the message; ""Monsters, I'm giving away FREE iPad2's to each one of you in the spirit of the holidays :)", a seemingly genuine post, considering she uses the name "monsters" to refer to her fanbase.
However, the message also contained a link to a dodgy Blogspot site (which has since been removed) that collected the personal details of her fans.
A similar attack was made on her Facebook account. Two posts were made, one reading "Lady Gaga's new iPad comes out in 3 days!" and another that said: "So for the next 72 hours we will be hosting a massive giveaway to all the Mother Monster fans. Sign up and receive your special Lady Gaga edition iPad in time for the Holidays! For contest rules and registration visit the link below."
Likewise, these links were also scams. Gaga has since re-gained control of her accounts, posting "Phew. The hacking is over! And just in time, I'm on my way to Japan! So excited to spend Xmastime with my TokyoMonsters!"
Lady Gaga would have been quite out of pocket had the offer been real. Had she given each of her Twitter and Facebook fans a free iPad 2, as the posts suggested she would, she'd have racked up a whopping bill from Apple in the region of $25 billion!
The Facebook Timeline update has finally began rolling out to all users across the globe, with lucky folks in New Zealand the first to get their hands on the new-look social network.
Announced at the f8 developers conference alongside the massive Spotify partnership, the Timeline turns the traditional Facebook Wall into something akin to a digital scrapbook, letting you highlight key moments from your entire life.
Facebook describe the new Timeline features as "an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect your most important moments.
"It also lets you share new experiences, like the music you listen to or the miles you run."
You can gain access to the Timeline update by visiting the Introducing Timeline section of Facebook.
As the massive update will be drawing on many status updates and photo posts from your past, Facebook are giving a 7 day window within which you can organise the information shared on your Timeline, letting you hide those embarrassing moments before the mandatory update goes live to all your pals.
Timeline will also be rolling out to mobile apps and the m.facebook.com mobile site too.
Facebook have revealed the most often-discussed topics on their social network for 2011.
Ranking topics based on the amount of times they appeared in status updates across the year, the top global lists are a mixture of major news events and entertainment highlights.
Unsurprisingly, the death of Osama Bin Laden was the most mentioned in statuses across the globe, followed by the Packers win at the Super Bowl, showing the heavy numbers of US users of Zuckerberg's social network.
The rest of the top ten is rounded out with Casey Anthony being found not guilty in 3rd, Charlie Sheen's crazed antics in 4th, the passing of Apple co-founder Steve jobs in 5th, the Royal Wedding in 6th, the death of Amy Winehouse in 7th, console shooter Modern warfare 3 in 8th, Libyan military operations in 9th and the effects of Hurricane Irene in 10th.
So what were the UK's specific hottest topics of the year? Showing just how classy us Brits are, we found the onscreen exploits of TOWIE (reality TV show The Only Way Is Essex, sitting in 3rd place on the list) more worthy of discussion on Facebook than the deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi (positioned at 5th and 6th place respectively).
The rest of the UK's top 3 status trends for 2011 finds the Royal Wedding in pole position, and the UK riots in second. The death of Amy Winehouse was the 4th most discussed status trend in the UK, while gaming behemoth Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 was also popular in the UK, sitting in 9th position.
Facebook, the social-network overlords of our personal lives online, have bought out up-and-coming location based network Gowalla.
Gowalla's location check-in service will be integrated into Facebook's newest "Timeline" homepage interface, allowing people to more precisely attach a location to the important moments in their lives shared on the network.
"As far as the big picture, Gowalla's vision is about people telling stories, and Facebook's vision for Timeline is about stories about important moments in life," an anonymous source told CNN.
Gowalla currently connects with other social networks such as Foursquare and Twitter, but it's likely to lose this functionality as it becomes part of Zuckerberg's empire.
It is not known how much Facebook paid for the service.
UPDATE
We've just been sent this message from Facebook, confirming the partnership:
"We're excited to confirm that Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond, along with other members of the Gowalla team, are moving to Facebook in January to join our design and engineering teams. In talking with the Gowalla team, we realized that we share many of the same goals: building great products that reach millions of people, making a big impact quickly, and creating new ways for people to connect and share what's going on in their lives. While Facebook isn't acquiring the Gowalla service or technology, we're sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time."
It has only been a matter of weeks since the iPhone 4S was released but already it has made an impression on Google Chairman Eric Schidt. The functionality of Apple's voice command technology, Siri, has made Schmidt admit that it is already a threat to Google's search engine dominance.
He was speaking in September in front of an antitrust committee to defend Google over claims that it abuses its power as the world's number one search engine and that they are rigging search results. These claims came from some of Google's main rivals Bing and Yahoo, so take them with a pinch of salt.
At the hearing Schmidt described Siri as "a significant development - a voice activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search." Siri, which was released alongside the iPhone 4S, uses voice commands to answer questions and complete tasks accordingly. This includes using its network connections to search the internet for answers which Google is seeing as a threat coming from a new piece of technology that could really harm their position at the top.
Schidt also commented on the advancement of social networking, how they are evolving into a big hitter in the search engine field, which came in response to earlier statements he made about Apple and Facebook not being web search competitors.
"The importance of social networking to consumers' online experience has changed remarkably - even in the past year. Consumers are looking for answers when they conduct searches online, and social search has become a serious competitor in helping people find those answers online."
Apple says that it has plans to expand Siri, with additional language support as well as bringing over some U.S. only features like maps and local searches at some point next year.
It will certainly be something that the people at Google will need to keep their eyes on but they have built up such a reputation as the biggest and best search engine that it will be many years until someone will be able to knock them off the top spot.
Facebook have come under fire from a German watchdog group following allegations that the world's largest social network aer using cookies to create tracking profiles of users without their consent, allowing the network to keep tabs on a user's web-browsing habits.
The site has denied the claim made by the Hamburg Data Protection Authority (DPA), stating that "Facebook does not track users across the web".
"We use cookies on social plugins to personalise content (e.g. show what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do (e.g. measure click-through rate), or for safety and security (e.g. keeping underage kids from trying to signup with a different age).
"No information we receive when you see social plugins is used to target ads, we delete or anonymise this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information."
Facebook also stated that all user-related cookies are deleted once a Facebook member signs out of the site.
"We do not receive personally identifiable cookie information when logged-out users browse the web," Facebook stressed.
News flash: the internet isn't some otherwordly place of no consequence to the "real" world. What happens on the internet does NOT stay on the internet, it will follow you around.
After all, the curious animal that is us humans has taken to googling like fish to water, so there's no reason to think your new employer will do a bit of that too. As much as we'd like to think otherwise, job hunting isn't the equally opportunity event we're led to believe it is. Think about it: once a potential employee has been seen with their behind hanging out in some foggy bachelor party shot, it's impossible to forget.
Acas, the arbitration service, recently issued a new guide to employers, telling them to go easy on employers caught mouthing off on the internet. In a guide that for some reason took nine months to complete (time flies when you're lolling away online, doesn't it), Acas concluded that employers should be careful about sacking people just for whining a bit on Facebook after coming back from holiday, which is what happened to one Argos employee.
"A manager wouldn't follow an employee down the pub to check on what he or she said to friends about their day at work. Just because they can do something like this online, doesn't mean they should," Acas chief executive John Taylor said to The Daily Telegraph. He did however add that employees need to be cautious about the information they publish on the internet: "Online conduct should not differ from offline conduct."
Rebel or Obey? Freedom or Control? Inspire or Oppress? Emancipate yourself!
Welcome to Unthink, a new social network set up as a contrast to Facebook. It's just opened up to the first round of beta testers, aiming to provide a more honest form of social networking.
That's a network where the users own their own data and won't see their personal information sold to advertisers, is the promise from the Tampa-based outfit. It remains to be seen whether $2.5 million in funding and a rebellious attitude is enough to take on the mighty Facebook, but we have to admit the thought of someone bold enough to try is intriguing.
Unthinking the rules
Unthink CEO Natasha Dedis said [according to TechCrunch] that the idea for Unthink came to her when her son wanted to sign up for Facebook. Dedis became uncomfortable with agreeing to sign up to the terms of service for Facebook, as they could change at any time. But her son became anxious when she told him this, because not being on Facebook was unthinkable: "He was really stressed about it, like he didn't have a choice - he HAD to be on Facebook."
Enter Unthink: "It's not a social network, it's a social revolution". Dedis explained: "The number one thing that had to be 'un-thought' about social media, is who does it belong to? We need to own everything that we put on our page. We can be as private or as public as we want, as long as it's our choice."
Unthink users can choose brands to sponsor their pages, picking one they like and act like an advocate for the brand. Alternatively they can pay $2 a year to avoid any sponsorship. The site at first glance set up similarly to Facebook, but iti has a few extra bits that look like genuinely good ideas, such separate sections for personal and business colleagues. Watch out, LinkedIn.
The "cool" factor?
"Elevate your attitude." "Value a creative environment like oxygen." "Always, always, always be optimistic." These are the kids of things you will find on Unthink's statement of "emancipation". It's a very American attitude, all this, which may seem overly sunny-side-up to us Brits. But then again you don't see us establishing any Silicon Valleys over here, so maybe we have a thing or two to learn.
Whether Unthink can trip of Facebook remains to be seen, as it's much too soon to tell. But as the Mark Zuckerberg character kept saying in the film Social Network: "It has to be cool." Is Facebook cool anymore? ... It seems Unthink may be in with a fighting chance.
Edward Saatchi, son of millionaire advertising mogul Maurice Saatchi, is being billed as the UK's answer to Mark Zuckerberg. His private, enterprise focussed social network NationalField is credited as a key tool in President Obama's successful election campaign, and, after successfully expanding the network to incorporate major US businesses, the 26-year old is now hoping that a UK and European launch will similarly drive productivity and efficiency for new member organizations like the NHS.
Articulate, and just as likely to reference statistician Edward Tufte as musician Art Garfunkel, the Oxford and Sorbonne educated Saatchi cuts a figure equal parts energetic and eccentric with his wild hair and unfettered beard.
We caught up with the NationalField CEO to see how the hotly-tipped network was getting on.
Edward, could you give us a brief history of NationalField? How did it get off the ground?
It started in 2007; I went over to the Obama campaign and met Aharon (Wasserman, now NationalField's chief product officer) and Justin (Lewis, NationalField's chief technology officer). One of the big ideas was to register a lot of new voters into the electorate.
Everyone on the campaign was using spreadsheets and Google docs to track the work that was going on, mostly quantitative work; doors knocked on, calls being made, that sort of thing. So two nights after the three of us got together, we'd built the first version of NationalField so that all of our teams could communicate and spread the numbers around.
How did you build the network? What informed its design and the way it works?
We decided that it had to be social. As young middle managers, one of the major problems we faced was communicating up and down the chain of command, moving great ideas from one isolated team to another. Building something that facilitated that was very important.
NationalField understands the hierarchical social graph of your organization. The social networks that cater for our personal lives work on the manual inputs of subscribing to feeds, following and adding friends, whereas this instantly understands who you are within your company.
Is this how it differentiates itself from other networks then? What can be done here that can't already with a combination of, say, Facebook groups and LinkedIn contacts?
A lot of our competitors ported over the ideas of Facebook and the way that that works to the enterprise. Take Yammer, which also does private social networks, all based on who you friend and who you follow. There you have to follow, say, a 200 or a 1,000 co-workers and contacts, so again you're creating your own little silo. The difference here is that it's not based on friending and following. NationalField understands what office you're in, who you report to, who reports to you, and what your role is, what departments need regular contact with you. It builds the feed based on that. You can search for specifics, but the feed is a predictive "push" model.
Hierarchical structures can be a little scary, but it's actually really helpful to understand that in order to present the correct information to the correct people. Also, you're only going to get really sensitive and interesting information going into this if people feel it's secure within the organisation. People are less honest if it's public to the world , but once you start to make it a bit more structured, people are confident to talk through problems; team morale dropping after a staff member leaving, a meeting not going as planned, things like that. It's actually really important stuff that can fall through the cracks until problems really explode, and then all a sudden you've lost a deal and you don't know why there was no communication.
So is it fair to say part of the appeal of NationalField is the way it encourages a competitive edge in the workplace?
Yes. With Facebook, there are interesting psychological processes involved. It's almost a subconscious thing, when you see people sitting there clicking through photos, like some weird primal thing. We focus on metrics, where sites like Yammer have leaderboards of "Likes" and comments, things like that. We have that too, but sometimes that sort of information can be tangential to what's really important to running a business. Is it that important to know who is the most liked employee? Maybe they're really helpful, but maybe they're just liked because they wear cool clothes! Here it's the actual metrics that are the focus, and we heard campaign trail stories of people refreshing the site just to see how their numbers were shaping up compared to other teams. Social can be great in making that data really transparent.
But despite the competitiveness, I've never seen anything mean put up on NationalField. Because it's social, it constrains the negative side of competitiveness, but it awakens in people the fact that everything they do at work is really transparent. People can show just how well they're doing, so it's also much more about recognition in the workplace, what people are proud of. What social can do is make recognition really easy to share, for a manager to give credit where it's due. And with NationalField best practice can be shared too; because we can get what your role is, recognised strengths can be shared to other team members or managers. Did you see the F8 stuff?
Yes.
Facebook were using a phrase that we love: "Visualise data in ways which tell a story". It's what we felt we were doing right from the very launch of NationalField on the Obama campaign, trying to give each individual enough data so they could tell the story of the past few months of their work.
How did NationalField evolve during those early Obama campaign days? It must have been an intense time and environment within which to be working on a fledgling project?
Me and Aharon were really close friends for several months, and it all clicked when Justin came onboard. Justin was terrible at registering voters! He didn't like doing that. So we were in Savannah, Georgia, and together came up with a way to make the most of Justin's talents, hacking together something really fast for ourselves. It spread and grew in a similar way to those early Facebook days, with universities asking to come onboard; we did the same with the state and national campaign teams, staying up late to make sure they all got onto NationalField smoothly. Because it was based on Facebook in terms of design, it wasn't like we had to go around the country teaching people how to use it, it was really easy, intuitive.
Does NationalField cater for anonymity, if say you had a major or controversial complaint that you were worried about attaching your name to?
One of the interesting moments when we first started was around the "Ups and Downs" feature we have, which lets you flag the recent pros and cons of working at your company. We started with it completely bypassing middle management. We thought people would have no fear speaking their minds as, in larger corporations, often you've never met the top level executives if you work further down the chain. But then middle managers started saying, "actually, this is really undermining us". Which was a valid point. So we went back and worked in every single manager up the chain, and we found then that people felt completely protected, as middle management couldn't block something reaching the top levels. It changes working cultures, creates a place for constructive criticism and makes companies responsive and understanding. Once people start using it, people don't feel the need for anonymity. It's honest; social networking has brought down dictators, and it'll democratise the work place too.
So Barack Obama is obviously very social media savvy, and NationalField was instrumental in driving efficiency in his campaign. How does social media affect the public's perception of a potential candidate?
The cliché is that it presents a "connected person", but it really is a very practical tool, connecting with a lot more people. I don't know quite how all the party leaders managed to choreograph getting onto Google+ on exactly the same day! But it's helpful. President Obama is the best at harnessing it. He's actually comfortable with it and his campaign is organised around it. You still need an offline organising element, and for us technology was in service of the field. An online only campaign is very artificial. But if you do it in a way that emphasises community organisation and encourages volunteering and team building and so forth it's great.
Gearing up now for the Obama re-election campaign, has NationalField's role changed much in the interim years?
Yes, in the beginning its role was survival, like how the "hell do we keep this thing alive?" Now it's embedded in the organisation of the administration, and has been for a few years. It's becoming more of a platform, where you can build apps etcetera, so instead we're the portal for people who want to connect with organisations, letting them promote themselves, their work and internal apps. The emphasis now is on changing companies and work practice, and building the platform.
Does Obama make for a good boss?
He makes an incredible boss. At the inauguration ball he came and spoke to us all and said, "look, you're going to go back out into the world, back to companies or non-profits, and I want you to take with you the methodology that we created on this campaign, being bottom up and paying most attention to the field work". Because he'd been a community organiser far longer than any of us had, he had a real respect for the people on the ground. I got to meet him a few times through the course of the campaign, and he's very inspiring.
You're the first to admit that NationalField visually apes Facebook. Facebook's Chris Hughes is even on your board. Is visual familiarity important to the success of an online product?
Yeah, I've been saying it but I haven't really thought about it as a rule. I don't know why people would bother creating something for the workplace that isn't familiar to us through our consumer lives. At this point it just seems petty and pointless. It's ridiculous to be expected to learn a new system. The consumer world, through dealing with hundreds of millions of people, has figured out really smart ways to move information, so why should we ignore that? You should use systems that are really super familiar.
So moving onto the UK/ European launch. You've got the NHS as a new member, but running a national health organisation is a vastly different beast to running an election campaign. How can NationalField help the NHS?
We actually started in the US with Kaiser Permanente, the largest American health organisation. We got a real insight into how healthcare works with that. I think the thing that is important in health is that your patients remain the most important people, so if you can get people on the ground really connected, working together to cut costs while improving patient care, you can make a big difference. Because the NHS is so big, getting people to share best practices around cutting costs is really helpful; great ideas can be isolated in one place for years, but as we've seen with Kaiser Permanente, you can use NationalField to move such information around really really fast.
We met a woman when going up and down the country with the NHS who said "I can go home and tell my daughter I just got Facebook training." The positive energy that goes towards this, compared to if we were creating clunky intranets (which we're out to destroy), makes people feel they're not being forced to learn a new clunky thing. That should be a paradigm for what people are building. Have there been many tweaks needed to bring the network to Europe?
It's interesting, I haven't been asked that before. Nothing drastic comes to mind. Language; so we added international localisation, having it in the language of your choice. But we haven't even needed to make any terminology changes. Because Facebook again has given people a feel for how information, should move and what they can expect from a feed, it hasn't had to be changed that much. It's kind of like a global thing, something that plays into that paradigm we mentioned earlier, building things that are familiar from our consumer lives. In the English speaking world we're all going to the same websites. Take the Huffington Post's UK launch; it has a little flag saying it's our version, and that's very nice, but it doesn't matter, I'm familiar with the way they present something and I'd be perfectly happy to read the content just through the way they present information.
How about international, cultural differences? Have their been any particular nations that have been more or less receptive to NationalField?
I think it's the same as what you'd imagine with Facebook and Twitter. The speed of uptake really parallels it. Younger generations in each company tend to get it first, say a new leader in a new department of an organisation, they want to make a change. I wouldn't say it's nation by nation, it's more about somebody wanting to build something that a new generation coming into the workforce can understand.
Do you still see a generational gap between youth and older members of society when it comes to the uptake of new social media ideas?
I think so, to a degree. We've seen it hit a tipping point now where we're conducting more communication points through social networking than email. A good leader is one that can see the trend and say "OK, let's get ahead of it". Social is a huge wave; there are films made about it, it's a big deal now. Look at the trend lines, look at things that are doing well in the consumer world, and that always points towards how things are going to change in the enterprise world. Our personal systems are much more sophisticated now than our enterprise ones, and a good leader should, or instance, be able to see the decline of email and adapt to that, using a system that everyone understands. It's not just young people who use Facebook, but it is young people who drove its growth.
We've spoke a lot about very large companies. Is using NationalField beneficial to use in smaller companies of, say, 10 or so people?
We actually find that organisations of around 25 people or larger is where you see the sweet spot kick in. Once you're at that point, you cant fit everybody in a crowded meeting room. Communication starts to break down at that point, and that's the ideal point to put the system in place. Beyond 25 people, into the hundreds and thousands of employees, it scales remarkably easily, with your feed out of the box.
How do you feel about being billed as the UK's answer to Mark Zuckerberg?
It's very nice! The thing that I think is cool about Mark Zuckerberg is the fact he was a psychology major. He has a moral mission. Every single time they change their privacy permissions, people feel like "Oh my god, they're trying to push more advertisements my way". But the aim is that really we should be more open about ourselves, which is obviously the end aim of psychology in a way. And I think that's really honourable, and really cool. Our moral mission is, considering we spend most of our waking lives at work, that if you feel like every single day you're working without getting any credit or recognition, that's a disaster, and a disaster we can prevent. The similarity there is the desire to figure out the underlying psychological need that a technology can answer, how we can use technology to make you feel good, make you feel productive.
So with Zuckerberg's story told in The Social Network, who would you like to see playing you in "NationalField: The Movie"?
Ahh, very good question. Who are people with big hair? Ah, Art Garfunkel! There you go. Though his poor hairline seemed to go up and up and up! He's actually a really good actor as well, you should see some of his stuff!
Can the world's most popular social networking game be turned into an Oscar-worthy blockbuster? Almost certainly not, but that isn't going to stop Zynga, makers of the mega-successful Farmville game, from turning their crop-growing simulator into a movie.
The rumours come follwing an interview by IGN with screenwriters Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohen, both of whom are credited with writing duites on the original Toy Story. The pair revealed that their future projects lie with Zynga, and while they didn't make direct reference to a Farmville flick, they did give a less-than-cryptic hint at what's in the pipeline:
"We're in conversations with Zynga to do something with one of their brands. Can't really say too much on that front yet, but 'Old MacDonald' didn't have a factory, if you get our drift."
No, we're no Columbo wannabes here at Tech Digest, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out what they're getting at here.
Certainly Zynga's projected plans would seem to facilitate such projects. With new website Project Z in the works and games like CityVille now on Google+, the company's expansive aims are apparent for all to see.
And while the thought of a Farmville movie sounds, frankly, horrific, at least they've got the right sort of talent on board. Everyone loved Toy Story, right?
The iPad App Store has had a pretty glaring Facebook-shaped hole in its repertoire since being released in April 2010. After many months of waiting, Zuckerberg and his crew have finally got together a Facebook app that they're happy with. And it's yours to download now.
Designed to maximise the extra screen real-estate offered by the iPad, the Facebook for iPad app takes many of its cues from the Twitter iPad app, with sliding tabs for profiles and other menu options.
Other improvements include swipe-friendly photo albums, now taking up the full screen in higher resolutions and working with multi-touch gestures (with gesure controls working with maps too), a drop-down messaging suite and light gaming support.
"Many of you have been asking about Facebook for iPad," said Facebook engineer Leon Dubinsky.
"Today, it's finally here. With the iPad app, you get the full Facebook experience, right at your fingertips. It's a fun, colorful way to keep up with friends, share photos, chat and more."
"Facebook on the iPad feels fun. Photos really shine on the iPad. They're bigger and easy to flip through, like a real photo album. It's like having a slideshow with all your friends and memories, wherever you go."
Facebook have also made a few improvements to the iPhone app and m.facebook.com mobile-optimised website. Simplified navigation, faster search and access to more games and apps are all included, with opportunities for Facebok app developers to drive wider distribution of their wares and greater engagement with their users too.
Grab the app for free by clicking here, and scroll down for shots from the new-look Facebook.
Facebook of course! At least if you're Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, who revealed himself as a massive addict of the social networking site.
"I spend way too much time on the computer and not enough time playing the guitar. There's an underlying problem of this screen life taking over all of your life," he told USA Today.
"It's easy to keep in touch with people, some of whom I wish I'd never kept in touch with. But there they are on Facebook! You can spend a lot of time on that when you should be doing something else."
Jagger also has a Twitter account, which he personally doesn't update. "But, really, who does?" he added.
By Gerald Lynch on September 29, 2011
Comments (3)
We're massive fans of Spotify here at Tech Digest. We've covered it from its first baby-steps up to the world-conquering music streaming service it has become today, with hardly a bad word to say about it.
However, the recent, deep integration with the new look Facebook raised a few eyebrows. Sure, we like sharing our musical tastes, but do we really want everyone to know every single track we're listening to at any given time? Does the world really need to know that Tech Digest are secretly massive BeeGees fans?
No, of course not. Which is why Spotify have sensibly added a new "Private Listening" feature to their service.
Now you can temporarily hide your guilty pleasures. We call it "Private listening" and you can find it in the Spotify/File menu.
Thankfully, it's a simple matter of selecting the feature from a drop-down menu in the Spotify desktop app, which makes the service hide your actions in much the same way a web browser's "private browsing" function does.
Which is great, because we all know being caught listening to Justin Bieber is just as bad as being caught watching porn.
It's been a busy few weeks for Facebook. Expanding upon the Open Graph model and introducing the site's biggest profile change-up since its launch with the arrival of the Timeline, Zuckerberg and co. are looking to lock you into the walls of their social network for even more hours each day.
Sure the scrapbook-like Timeline looks cool, but would you be so keen to fill it out with all the details of your personal history if you knew the extent of what Facebook already knows about you? Things they store forever?
According to a report by Forbes, two anonymous European Facebook users asked for access to the database dumps of their Facebook profiles. One of them recieved a reply that ran 880 pages long.
Here's what one of the anonymous pair, dubbed "LB" by Forbes, found Facebook to have on them:
- Records of all friend requests LB had rejected.
- Records of the friends LB had unfriended over the years.
- A list of all the PCs, mobile phones and other devices from which LB logged in to Facebook. They also tracked which other users had logged in using the same devices, which could be a sensitive issue if you're spending time with folks that you perhaps shouldn't be, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
- Records of more than 50 "pokes" since 2008, including most often by a friend named "T.V."
- 75 event invites, and the 38 RSVPs sent with them.
- A history of messages and chats.
Scary huh? Still, grabbing a database dump could prove useful in filling out the many gaps in my Facebook Timeline. Zuckerberg knows more about me than I do!
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has introduced a major new feature to the world's biggest social network today in the shape of the Timeline, which is set to replace the regular Profile pages we've become accustomed to. Speaking at the company's annual f8 conference, Facebook is setting its focus not just on your current interests and whims, but also on documenting every aspect of your life.
The new Timeline feature will present all of your actions on the network in a chronological, vertically scrolling timeline, potentially scrolling from the present day back to your birth. It'll be a digital diary of sorts, initially populated by the status updates, shared items and photos you've already placed on the network, but also giving you the ability to add items from before your Facebook sign-up date.
Of course, you'll be able to pick and choose exactly what you want to be published on the Timeline, and if you want it to be public at all.
Very visual (and taking more than a few cues from popular Tumblr themes) it will also make use of the newly re-vamped Facebook apps system. Timeline posts for instance can include links to the song that you were listening to on a significant day, or a map of a marathon route that you took part in.
Timeline wont be exclusive to PCs either, working on all mobile versions of Facebook too.
"Millions and millions of people have spent years curating the stories of their lives, and today there's just no good way to share them," Zuckerberg said.
"We think this is a real problem, and we think that we have the solution."
So who will benefit most from Timeline? Remarkably, people who do not yet use Facebook.
Or more specifically, your newborn children.
Assuming that Facebook as a website/network/product lasts that long, your children (with your help during their early years, or course) will be able to document their entire lives through the Timeline. From their first day at school through to the day their own first children are born, every photo, song, or event that has punctuated their lives can be documented here.
Scrapbooks around the globe are about to get very, very dusty.
Facebook Timeline opens in beta form today. You can sign up to try it early by clicking here.
By Gerald Lynch on September 22, 2011
Comments (9)
Facebook! Stop! MY EYES! MY BRAIN! IT HURTS!
If you've logged onto Facebook in the last 24 hours, you'll likely know what I'm getting at. A new-look Facebook has just been launched and it's...well...a bit busy. Prior to tonight's f8 Facebook conference, Zuckerberg and co have rolled out a slew of new features, including a real-time "ticker" of all your friends' and pages' updates, and a "Top Stories" section that brings what the network assumes are your most pressing interests to the fore.
Oh, and there are bigger pictures in your news feed now too. But no one ever complains about anything being prettified, do they?
The "Ticker" and "Top Stories" are sparking a wave of protest across the net, with backlash being focussed in the comments section of the update post on the Facebook blog.
The main issue seems to be the "Twitterfication" of Facebook. It's almost information overload, with the constantly ticking list of new stories in the top chugging away at an incessant rate.
It reminds me of a book I've been reading recently called "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr. In it he describes how the web is causing actual physical changes in the make up of our brains, affecting our attention spans and the way we store memories. Facebook's new-look would surely get a tear down by Carr; there are now so many distractions and pieces of information vying for our attention in one single page that there is only time for surface connections to the content being offered up to us, before a few seconds later a new item is luring us away once more.
My other personal issue with the new-look Facebook is the "Top Stories" section. I appreciate the idea; it takes the "information overload" I mentioned earlier and tries to curate it. The problem is, it reminds me once more of how much information Facebook are keeping on me and my interests, and the way they turn my personal whims into 1s and 0s of code, second guessing my own personal tastes in an attempt to cage me inside their network.
No dice, Facebook, I'm a human, I'm fluid and my tastes are constantly evolving, at a rate your processes currently can't keep up with. Sure, you may assume based on my clicking habits that I'm only interested in Star Wars, tech and Xbox. But I've got a sudden urge to read up on some new corn farming techniques, and your new system of curation doesn't cater for that.
So ner.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up on Facebook. Far from it, it's still the most important digital meeting spot on the web, and the best forum through which to share my thoughts and funny finds amongst my pals. There have been changes in the past that I didn't like, and I'm sure now I've grown not only to accept them, but probably to like them too.
In terms of the web, familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt. Give it a few weeks and all will be forgiven, I'm sure.
Or at least it always turned out to be when there was no alternative. The tidy Google+ network, which until now hasn't really grabbed my attention, suddenly looks quite a bit more appealing. Why? Because it now looks closer to the old Facebook than the new Facebook does. Which is a very strange, and potentially troublesome position for Zuckerbeg's empire to find themselves in.
Last night Facebook made good on the rumours that have been flying around the internet for weeks, announcing it had filed for its initial public offering, or IPO.
Facebook have launched a new series of apps for the Timeline update of the social network.
Facebook have announced a new social music feature, rolling out across their network today, called "Listen With Friends".
Designed to "bridge the gap between online and offline" social networking, buisness card firm 
The Facebook Timeline update has finally began rolling out to all users across the globe, with lucky folks in New Zealand the first to get their hands on the new-look social network.
Facebook have revealed the most often-discussed topics on their social network for 2011.
Facebook have come under fire from a German watchdog group following allegations that the world's largest social network aer using cookies to create tracking profiles of users without their consent, allowing the network to keep tabs on a user's web-browsing habits.
We're massive fans of Spotify here at Tech Digest. We've covered it from its first baby-steps up to the world-conquering music streaming service it has become today, with hardly a bad word to say about it. 
From: MWC 2008: Second Life now runs on... an iPhone?!