Facebook Inc’s shares headed towards their biggest one-day jump on Wednesday after the company reported a surprising rise in mobile advertising, easing concerns it was having trouble capitalizing on soaring use of smartphones and tablets.

Facebook shares, sold for $38 each in their initial public offering in May, were up 20 percent at $23.61 in late morning trade. The stock was the top percentage gainer on the Nasdaq.

Several brokerages raised their price targets on Facebook shares. Barclays Capital raised its target to $26 from $23, [...]

Facebook is making a “huge effort” to weed out fake profiles to prevent misuse of such identities, a senior company official has said.

[quote] “Absolutely, there is a huge effort,” Facebook India business manager Pavan Varma told PTI when asked about the company’s action on this front. The doubt about the authenticity of the account will arise if an account has a generic name instead of a proper name, uses images of celebrities/ cartoon characters as display pictures, or does not have “enough friends”, Varma said.  [/quote]

“It [...]

Facebook has rolled out new iPhone and iPad apps rebuilt from the bottom up in a drive to boost speeds and give better performance.

The long-awaited move was part of the social networking giant’s effort to appeal to the growing number of users accessing Facebook from mobile devices.

It was also an attempt to placate mobile users who for years have complained that the old apps were clunky and sluggish.

But while Facebook ads are well-established on its website, the company only recently started [...]

If you’ve been keeping it old school on Facebook with the previous generation single-column profile page, your days are officially numbered. Big Blue says it is preparing to move all 955 million of its users over to the newer Timeline-style profiles this fall.

Timeline, which organizes all of your wall posts and status updates into a continuous two-column stream dating back to the day you first joined Facebook, was first introduced late last year. Since then, many users have already been forced to make the switch, but some others have managed to fall through the cracks.

Until now, the change to the new-look Facebook has been voluntary, but the site’s [...]