Archive for category Facebook
Facebook for Mobile is Growing Rapidly
Just eight months ago, more than 20 million users were actively using Facebook on their mobile devices. Today, the company has announced that that number has more than tripled — bringing the current active userbase to more than 65 million.
The other big news today is that Facebook Connect will now start appearing on mobile sites and in mobile applications (iPhone is already supported). Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Captcha: What You DON’T Need to Type
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Facebook on September 3rd, 2009
*Update: Commenters pointed out that the methods explained below ruin the reCAPTCHA project, which Facebook uses for its bot detection, and it might be true, so let me clarify. I’m aware that reCAPTCHA serves a good cause – digitalization of books and newspapers, and I’m sorry if I’ve encouraged anyone to cheat the system, as that was not my intention.
However, as you can see in the example below, most “special” characters that appear in reCAPTCHA, such as those with umlauts, apostrophes or ampersands, are quite cumbersome to read properly, even for a human. Having encountered those on a daily basis, my idea was that skipping them can’t hurt more than entering the wrong characters. Of course, for the sake of reCAPTCHA project, if you’re sure you know what the word in the image is, you should always type it in its entirety. Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Friends For Sale: This Time It’s Not a Game
With all the buzz around social media, opportunistic and shady businesses are savvy to the fact that those with less than perfect intentions want to take the easy street to instant credibility.
Enter social media salesman, uSocial, a company that has become somewhat notorious for previously selling Diggs and Twitter followers. In both instances, the startups tried to have them shutdown, but uSocial is back at it, and this time their promise is thousands of Facebook friends or fans. Read the rest of this entry »
Five Best Instant Messengers [Hive Five]
Instant messaging has become so ubiquitous, an entire generation of internet users is probably unaware there was ever life without it. Check out the following five most popular instant messengers to to help you communicate across networks and the world. Read the rest of this entry »
Bill Gates Dumps Facebook: “Too Many Friends”
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles, Facebook on July 26th, 2009
Bill Gates confessed at an event in New Delhi today that he gave up on Facebook because he couldn’t keep up with the friend requests. Gates remarked that there were “10,000 people wanting to be my friends” after he tried out the service, and it was time consuming to decide if he “knew this person, did I not know this person”. Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Addresses Privacy and Photo Use for Ads
Posted by assichadi in Articles, Facebook, Social Media on July 25th, 2009
You may have read that Facebook changed its policy for third-party advertisers and the use of user photos. Facebook issued a statement on the company blog denying any such changes.
“The advertisements that started these rumors were not from Facebook but placed within applications by third parties,” says Facebook’s manager of policy communications, Barry Schnitt. “Those ads violated our policies by misusing profile photos, and we already required the removal of those deceptive ads from third-party applications before this rumor began spreading.” Read the rest of this entry »
Digsby Passes 1 Million Users; 3 Million IM and Social Media Accounts
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter on July 24th, 2009
The social IM client Digsby can not only connect you to your AIM and your Gtalk accounts, but log you onto Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, too. A recent release fixed its RAM-eating problem , and now it seems that all of that hard work (and RAM-fixing) is paying off.
The company announced this afternoon that it reached a major milestone: 1,000,000 users. Considering that Digsby only launched 18 months ago, that’s an average growth rate of over 50,000 users per month – not too shabby for an IM startup. Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Advertising: It’s All Local
We know that spending on social advertising is rising, but because it’s so new, the industry is still trying to figure out the most effective way to target these ads (thus why there’s still a social media monetization problem). There’s a new report though that sheds some light on how advertisers are utilizing social networks.
The research, published by Borrell Associates (embedded below), provides projections for social networking ad spending in 2009. While the $3.2 billion being spent on the medium doesn’t surprise us, what caught our attention was this: 20% of social ads are from local businesses. Even more surprising is that 74% of Facebook’s ad revenue this year will come from local businesses and advertisers. Read the rest of this entry »