Facebook

You can now post longer status updates on Facebook as the company has increased the limit from 5000 to about 60,000 characters. The feature will help journalists and bloggers post epic updates or articles directly on the site. For rest of us, the news can be easily ignored, unless you have written a book that you would like to share with everybody. Facebook’s move doesn’t surprise me at all as it just wants to negate the advantages of Google+ and if you haven’t noticed already, it has most of its features. It all started with simplification of Friend Lists that [...]

Its ironical that on the day Facebook settled its case with FTC, the company has come out with comprehensive set of data about the state of social news apps that had launched during and after the f8 conference. Apps like WSJ Social reader, Yahoo News, Washington Post and The independent that are built on Facebook Open Graph API have generated millions of hits for their respective sites and it seems these apps have helped companies tap the younger audience on Facebook which until now was quite difficult to acheive. Facebook Engineer Austin Haugen has shared some interesting data about these [...]

OK, to begin with, let me admit that I have been covering a lot of Facebook news since last week so much so that Fastgush now almost looks like an unofficial Facebook web-blog. I offer my sincere apology to all the Facebook haters out there — but I can’t help but write about the company because a lot has been going on both inside and outside the social networking site that I am literally forced to cover it . So here I go again. In a recent study conducted by Sociable Labs, the company found that almost 50% of online shoppers are [...]

The press have gone gaga over Facebook’s new phone “Buffy”, but this isn’t the first time Facebook has ventured into the world of Mobile. Last year, Facebook partnered with hardware manufactures to deeply integrate itself into the handsets. These devices allowed users to log into the site or post updates with the push of a button. INQ had released couple of phones back then that were touted as Facebook-ready phones. But, I am not too sure how many were sold at the end of the day. It’s been almost a year now and the company until now hadn’t done any [...]

If you haven’t followed social media blogs over the weekend, bloggers have been lashing out at Facebook for breaking the ground rules of sharing, and ruining the overall experience on the site. It started with a blog post from Molly Wood of CNET, who pointed out that when you click on a news link that has be shared via WSJ Social Reader, it opens up a dialog box asking you to use the app instead of directly taking you to the article. This she believes creates friction rather than what Facebook wants to achieve – a frictionless sharing. Marshall Kirkpatrick [...]

Facebook will get two major features that will allow advertisers more real estate place on the site. First off, ClickZ has learnt that the company will soon open up News Ticker to include Sponsored Stories. Ticker displays the latest activity on the site and serves real-time updates from the social circle. While this should come as a great piece of news for advertisers, it might get thumbs down from users who aren’t used to seeing ads in the News feeds or the Ticker. There are also few unanswered questions as to how Facebook is going to manage ads in the Ticker. [...]

The biggest problem Facebook has been facing for couple of years has been the spam and the malware attacks on the site. The issue has been denting the image of the company, which is why it had even asked third party vendors and ethical hackers to join its anti-hack, anti-spam “Bounty” program.The situation appears to have gone out of hand now as users have been reporting wide spread attacks on their accounts. Over the last few days users have been flooded by links and images of porn and violence on their accounts. This time though, the effect is cascading onto [...]

While there isn’t exactly a formula to determine how much is too much on a Facebook Page, but as a matter of fact, frequency of updates should be handled with utmost care. The reason why this is so important is because as Mat Morrison finds out, frequent updates from your Page could literally lead to one big unhappy community. As an admin or a a marketer, you might be under the assumption that “more is better”, but there are couple of factors to be considered before posting your next update. Firstly, the EdgeRank algorithm is very choosy about what goes [...]

It is still not clear when Facebook is going to roll out the Timeline. Reports say the company is finding it hard to avoid privacy outrage once the feature is released. Since f8, the company has given a lot of emphasis on the feature and as a user — or as a marketer; you should be really excited about the product. Yesterday, I enabled the Timeline through my Developer account, but facebook has restricted me as to what I can control on my profile. It also asked me to publish it right away, but I chose to wait until it is [...]