Category: Facebook

The few Ivy Leaguers privileged enough to join “Thefacebook” nine years ago would hardly recognize the site today. It celebrates its birthday today!

Zuckerberg started with an invite only Ivy League college website, from where he took Facebook to a different level. These nine years for Facebook brought many changes to the social media platform bringing in features like social networking games, business pages and of course relationship status.

In nine years, the company has overshadowed the mobile platforms for not just social networking but also messaging. Change being its fixed feature, Facebook came up with an application called Poke which self-destroys message once it’s read. Facebook has proved its worth when it reached to a remarkable milestone of one billion users which many biggies like My space, Twitter and Orkut had only dreamt about.

According to a report by GlobalWebIndex, in Q4 alone last year, Facebook saw 693 million users globally, with a growth rate of 33 per cent.

In 2012 Facebook floated its IPO and the company went public with a peak market capitalisation of over $104 billion. The hype was short-lived and the stock of the company soon took a battering.

In January, this year Facebook announced the launch of Graph Search that allows users to search the site for photos, places, likes, people on the site.

After expanding the test to iOS users last week, Facebook has officially launched Photo Sync for both Android and iOS devices. Photo Sync allows users to enable automatic uploading of any photos they take with their mobile device straight to Facebook. No manual uploading, no hassle. Just seamless photo uploading.

Unlike Google+, the app will not proceed with the uploads unless you explicitly open the app, and you can choose whether to do so on 3G/LTE or only over WiFi.

[quote]“Today we’re excited to roll out photo sync, which makes it easier to share photos. With this feature, photos from your phone sync automatically to a private album on the web. When you want to share these photos, just pick and post your favorites,” says Facebook. “We began testing photo sync in August and will continue to make it available to more people.”[/quote]

The feature, titled Photo Sync, uploads photos to a private folder, but can easily be made shared to your timeline with a couple taps.

Photo Sync appears to have been included in the mobile apps already; Facebook merely flipped a switch in the backend to turn it on. While there are many services vying for the same space — Google+ and Dropbox are notable examples — Facebook clearly has the market share lead to make this feature stick.

The feature is rolling out in the coming days, so if you don’t see it in your Facebook app settings, try again in a little bit.

Facebook has turned on one of its most requested features, and it will make link hounds on the social network very happy.

A “Share” button has finally been added to mobile — first the mobile web, then Android and iOS apps — allowing users to take an existing post and duplicate it on their timelines with a comment or snarky remark.

While it’s possible that this will add a lot of unwanted content to users’ feeds, it may begin to replace the “Like” button as people choose to quickly action a post instead of liking it, which appears more passive.

Facebook has been iterating its feature set to compete with fast-moving Twitter, and a mobile “share” button is more akin to a retweet than a like, which endorses but does not move a post past its original location. Zuckerberg and Co. have likely been testing out the feature for some time, and are going to be cognizant of how it affect users’ experiences. It already consolidates posts that have been shared by multiple people, and companies are going to be very happy about this addition.

There’s no word when the feature is coming to the Android and iOS apps, but we’d expect it to roll out in the coming days.

For all those frequenting Facebook, the social networking website can now turn into a forum for promoting themselves as by paying a few bucks, people can now use the media for highlighting something they want to.

If you want more of your friends to see your funny one liner or personal announcement, pony up little cash and you will get more visibility. Although the price has not yet been fixed but Facebook already soft-launched its latest paid product ‘promoted posts’ yesterday as part of its effort to mop up more revenues,  charging users $7 to make their friends more likely to see their personal posts..

[quote]“When you promote a post – whether it’s wedding photos, a garage sale, or big news – you bump it higher in news feed so your friends and subscribers are more likely to notice it,” wrote Facebook’s Abhishek Doshi in a post announcing the test.[/quote]

For now, at least, the test is limited to people with fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers.

Of course, Facebook controls the algorithm for what shows up in members’ News Feeds, and in theory should already be running it in a way that shows us just the most interesting content. But owning the News Feed also means they can make money off of it from marketers – and now from members.

The service echoes one that Facebook first rolled out in New Zealand right before its IPO.