Posts Tagged 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 »
The Top 12 Social Media Stories This Week
Posted by assichadi in Articles, Google, Social Media, Twitter on July 27th, 2009
Social media was even busier than normal as we got new info on some of the web’s most anticipated products. The first screenshots of Firefox 3.7, the revelation that 100,000 invites for Google Wave arrive in September, and the removal of the Alice in Wonderland trailer from YouTube made headlines this week.
Social media was not without controversy this week, though. Digg was engulfed in controversy when it changed its short URL service, the DiggBar, early this week, and a contest by Electronic Arts, “Sin to Win,” resulted in a Twitter backlash. Here are this week’s top 12 social media stories: 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 »
Want to Delete Your Facebook Account? Be Prepared For a Guilt Trip
Now that Facebook has 250 million members, with 50 million of them registering for the social site in past 90 days, we have to wonder what their secret is to retaining members.
Do people stay on Facebook so they can continue to share photos and updates with their friends, connect with their favorite brands, or get clued in to the latest events? Maybe, but we might have found the real secret to why you keep your Facebook — because Facebook guilts you into staying.
A tipster emailed us to let us know that clicking on the Facebook deactivate account link, takes you to a page where Facebook prominently displays photos of five of your friends, and pulls at your heart strings with the message, “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account, [friend name] will miss you.” Read the rest of this entry »
10 Impressive New Implementations of Facebook Connect
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 22nd, 2009
Facebook Connect is an exceptionally useful technology for web developers. Not only can they offer Facebook users one-click registration and sign-in, but by accessing profile and social graph information, Facebook Connect gives developers a way to create a richer experience for their visitors and gives publishers a brand new promotional channel.
In January, we brought you a list of 10 great Facebook Connect implementations, and developers across the web have been busy since then coming up with new and innovative ways to integrate with Facebook. So below is a list of 10 more great implementations of Facebook Connect that stand out for their creativity, their usefulness, or their seamless integration. Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Connect Adds Foreign Language Support
Thanks to its user-driven translation program, Facebook is available in 64 different languages. Now, the social network is extending its translations to Facebook Connect, the platform that lets third-party websites offer Facebook login to their users and push information back to the News Feed.
These websites will be able to change the language that Connect features are rendered in with some simple code that Facebook has posted to its developer blog. Meanwhile, when users submit items back to Facebook – like a review or a blog comment – they will show up as they were written on the site.The translation option also applies to Facebook’s recently released cut and paste Connect options like Fan Box and Live Stream Box.
The move follows Google Friend Connect adding support for 47 different languages last week. At the time, Google wrote that some 5 million sites are using its identity tool, but as we noted, that’s largely because it’s a much easier implementation than Facebook Connect, requiring no technical expertise. Between its new copy/paste widgets and foreign language support, expect Facebook’s offering to increase its reach significantly from the 15,000 websites it counts today.
See Also: 10 Great Implementations of Facebook Connect