Posterous Adds "Like" ButtonsWritten by Curt Hopkins / April 21, 2010 7:50 PM / 2 Comments
Building on Facebook's OpenGraph API, Posterous has added Facebook Like buttons to all of its standard themes today. Click a Posterous Like button and the blog it's on is "shared" to Facebook
For designers, inserting a "like" tag in a theme and adjusting the href attribute to whichever page they want a user to Like will create a Facebook-facing button for that theme.
Continue reading »Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two YearsWritten by Marshall Kirkpatrick / April 21, 2010 5:01 PM / 3 Comments
Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy.
Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, "is the vector around which Facebook operates." Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview, Zuckerberg said that Facebook's new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today's new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now.
Continue reading »Facebook Consolidates Its Virtual Currency with Facebook CreditsWritten by Audrey Watters / April 21, 2010 4:17 PM / 2 Comments
One of the many announcements at Facebook's f8 conference today included an expansion of the Facebook Credits program, the social network's official virtual currency. Expansion of the Credits program could have a huge impact on how and how much revenue Facebook applications will generate.
Already in beta testing with over 100 applications, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Credits would soon role out to the whole network. Credits allows users to purchase virtual currency through Facebook that can be used to purchase virtual goods across multiple applications.
Continue reading »Live Blog: Mark Zuckerberg's F8 KeynoteWritten by Frederic Lardinois / April 21, 2010 9:50 AM / 2 Comments
Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00).
Continue reading »First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off OAuth 2.0Written by Mike Kirkwood / April 21, 2010 1:15 AM / 1 Comments
The OAuth 2.0 draft specification is out there. The efforts of the group working on the specification are paying off in the form of an IETF working group submission. One thing is clear, there is a natural tension in following the processes of IETF and the hyper-innovation cycle of web standards that are now powered by the growth of social media.
In this world, keeping up with all the work in the community itself is a feat in itself. As proven recently, even aligning the naming of standards in our small community (xAuth, XAuth) proves challenging enough. With that said, we'll share we what we've learned about this version and what work has been incorporated into it.
Continue reading »500 Billion Impressions: 16% of Users Generate Majority of Brand Impressions on Social Media SitesWritten by Frederic Lardinois / April 20, 2010 10:07 AM / 0 Comments
Today, about 145 million Internet users in the U.S. use social web applications. In total, all of these users generate close to 500 billion online impressions on each other. According to a new report from Forrester Research, a mere 16% of online consumers generate a grand total of 80% of these peer-to-peer online impressions. Over 60% of all of these impressions come from Facebook.
Continue reading »Thoughts From the Man Who Would Sell The World, NicelyWritten by Marshall Kirkpatrick / April 19, 2010 9:05 PM / 18 Comments
"My background is in Artificial Intelligence and my last business was building predictive data. Most of our customers were oil companies, and you can hold that against me if you like. But my pitch back then was 'just give me enough data, I'll figure out something.' And often enough I did figure out something."
That's how Houston-based 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar describes his background. Tonight his Web-crawling-as-a-service company will put up for sale tens of millions of data points extracted from public social networks and other websites. He says it's only a matter of time until everyone's doing it and he wants to be one of the good guys. "You can figure something out from just about anything," he says. That's the kind of geek Shion Deysarkar is.
Continue reading »Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other WebsitesWritten by Marshall Kirkpatrick / April 19, 2010 7:34 PM / 7 Comments
Facebook appears to be preparing to launch a recommendation service that will be used on sites around the web. On the day before the F8 developers' conference, independent developer Jesse Stay has posted code found on Facebook's GitHub open source code repository account.
Facebook is already very practiced at offering recommendations on-site: its News Feed technology pulls the items out of its Live Feed based on who and what you've shown is most important to you among all your friends and their activities. Facebook knows more about you than probably any other consumer service online, probably more even than Google. Recommendation could in fact become bigger than search, and so this feature could become one of Facebook's biggest moves.
Continue reading »Facebook's Community Pages Unleashed Upon WorldWritten by Curt Hopkins / April 19, 2010 7:00 PM / 3 Comments
Today on the Facebook blog, Alex Li announced that Facebook would institute a number of new, or newish, features that will multiply the connectivity of the community. These features are Community Pages and Connected Profiles.
"Community Pages are a new type of Facebook Page dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it." Unlike a Facebook page devoted to, or run by, a company, a Community Page might be devoted to an area or an activity that cannot be legitimately claimed by a limited group such as a corporation.
Continue reading »XAuth: The Open Web Fires a Shot Against Facebook ConnectWritten by Marshall Kirkpatrick / April 18, 2010 9:36 PM / 25 Comments
A consortium of companies including Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meebo and more announced tonight that it will launch a new system on Monday that will let website owners discover which social networks a site visitor uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network. The system is called XAuth and serves to facilitate cross-site authentication (logging in) for sharing and potentially many other uses.
582diggsdiggFacebook and Twitter, the dominant ways people share links with friends outside of email, are not participating.
Continue reading »Facebook, Happiness & The User Data Black MarketWritten by Marshall Kirkpatrick / April 16, 2010 1:20 PM / 7 Comments
Facebook says that people who actively share updates and messages on Facebook score higher on happiness tests than people who passively consume updates on the site. The company shared findings today of a user survey cross referenced with historical data about respondents' use of the site.
"The results were clear," the company said. "The more people use Facebook, the better they feel. They have higher levels of both kinds of social capital, and feel less lonely...Regardless of how much time people in the study spent on Facebook, how many friends they had, and how many News Feed stories they read, those directly interacting with their friends scored higher levels of well-being."
Continue reading »Glympse: Real-Time, Private Location-Tracking May be the Winning FormulaWritten by Sarah Perez / April 16, 2010 7:14 AM / 8 Comments
A Redmond-based startup is introducing a location-based social sharing service called Glympse. With a mobile application that works on iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile devices, users share their location (aka a "Glympse"), allowing their friends to see that location on another phone or on any other Internet-connected device. Senders can customize who gets to see the Glympse they post, whether the recipient is just one person, a group, or even everyone they've added as a friend on a social network like Facebook or Twitter.
The interesting twist to this service isn't the location-sharing aspect, of course - there are dozens of companies that allow for that today - it's the service's real-time nature and the thoughtfully included privacy features. Using a patent-pending timer option, Glympse users specify how long their location is visible to which select group of friends, with a maximum time of four hours before the location data expires.
Continue reading »What's a Little Cyberbullying Among Friends? Facebook Launches New Safety CenterWritten by Sarah Perez / April 13, 2010 7:30 AM / 6 Comments
"Safety is Facebook's top priority," writes Facebook's Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan on a company blog post introducing the social network's new Safety Center, a revamped help portal featuring educational information for users, with sections dedicated to parents, teens, teachers and law enforcement professionals. It's a somewhat ironic statement from a company that recently prompted its 400-plus million users to accept "recommended" changes that opened up their data - including status updates, photos, videos, links and friend lists - to a public audience, revealing details that many users assumed were private.
Around the same time as the "privacy debacle," as we like to call it, unfolded, Facebook also announced a "Safety Advisory Board," a group whose purpose is to review safety-related procedures and documentation as well as make suggestions regarding best practices and other procedures. How about this safe practice, Facebook: don't publicize people's private information?
Continue reading »Cartoon: This User Has Been SuspendedWritten by Rob Cottingham / April 11, 2010 12:00 PM / 9 Comments
Anyone who's run afoul of Facebook's, um, fluid rules for user behaviour can tell you it's like a Kafka novel. (Remember the one where nobody would friend the giant cockroach? Shudder.)
Here's one of the latest lucky contestants: Social Media Today, a Web venture with an active presence on Facebook, was posting URLs twice a day, until one day they discovered they'd run afoul of the site's rules and had their ability to post links blocked.
Continue reading »Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games DevelopersWritten by Audrey Watters / April 10, 2010 3:00 PM / 7 Comments
Most of the initial buzz surrounding Apple's announcement on Thursday of its new operating system, iPhone OS 4, centered on the support for multitasking. While this feature has been long anticipated by users and developers alike, another important but less discussed aspect of the update involves Apple's Game Center - a social gaming network to be launched for iPhone and iPod Touch later this summer. Similar to the networks already prevalent in console gaming, Apple's Game Center will allow friend invitations and multiplayer game-play and will include matchmaking and high-score tracking.
Continue reading »Social Gaming: Legit Gameplay or a Play for Your Cash?Written by Curt Hopkins / April 5, 2010 8:00 PM / 12 Comments
There is a question being bandied about by people in the game industry. It effects something you do, or, if you don't, your friend, roommate, wife or fencing opponent does. Social gaming.
Is social gaming - games played on social networks, like Facebook and MySpace - actually gaming? Millions of users have already given their tacit approval that there is indeed entertainment value in those games. But what puts hardcore gamers' skivvies in a knot is the idea that there has been total sacrifice of gameplay in exchange for filthy lucre - that these "games" have been so neutered that they only outwardly resemble gaming. And so the more important question is this: Are hardcore gamers simply demanding that all cars on the road be sports cars, or are they a bellwether of a shift in social gaming from click-click-click, to quality?
Continue reading »As Startups Grow Up, More Seem to Hold Their GroundWritten by Chris Cameron / March 30, 2010 9:00 AM / 4 Comments
I've learned a lot about startup culture since I started writing about it at the beginning of January, and there is a trend that I have noticed that is different from the stereotypical outsider's point-of-view - one that I had not too long ago. There seems to be a growing number of companies that are holding off from either being bought out or going public because they are more vested in the interests of their company or their idea than they are about having a big payday.
Continue reading »Cracking Facebook's Dominance: New Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game ChangerWritten by Marshall Kirkpatrick / March 29, 2010 10:50 AM / 30 Comments
Two companies outside Silicon Valley say they are the first implementers of a new open source protocol called Salmon, which allows comments to be sent over the walls of one social network to communicate with users of another. Imagine being able to post a message on Facebook to "@janedoe@twitter" and then seeing Jane receive the message in real time on Twitter. It's a vision comparable to being able to call any telephone number, whether it's part of your phone provider's network or not.
Facebook isn't implementing Salmon, but that's what Canadian open-source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold.
Continue reading »ReadWriteStart Weekly WrapupWritten by Chris Cameron / March 28, 2010 2:00 PM / 1 Comments
In this weeks edition of the Weekly Wrapup, we discuss the implications of the recently passed health care reform bill on startups and small businesses, as well as some hiring tips, and 6 venture capitalists weigh in on what they look for from an entrepreneur's pitch. We also discuss how to make better use of email, and we look into lingering concerns about the stability of Facebook's application development platform.
Continue reading »Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites AutomaticallyWritten by Marshall Kirkpatrick / March 26, 2010 4:54 PM / 52 Comments
Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that "the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless." There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in.
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Wednesday, April 21, 2010
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