Facebook

After its rapid rise to the top, Facebook next challenge is to monetize its mobile platform. Barring Facebook Credits, the company does not gain anything from its mobile app as its main source of revenue — advertisements — is not served on the platform. But news reports suggests things are about to change soon. But First…Mobile Traffic Is Growing According to StatCounter’s latest released data, global Internet usage through mobile devices, not including tablets, has almost doubled to 8.5% in January 2012 from 4.3% last year. In 2009, mobile traffic accounted 0.7% of overall web traffic, which has now risen [...]

Guest Post By Stephanie Kopf Europe’s relationship with Facebook has been strained of late. The social platform has been facing criticism from both politicians and users regarding its privacy policy and using of personal data. And now it’s on: a team of students from Vienna, Austria is pushing for more transparency and user control from the social networking website. Chances are that you are on Facebook. And maybe recently or a while ago you vented to a friend about something in a message. Then you cooled down and deleted it. No use clogging up your inbox. So how would you [...]

If you haven’t read it already, Facebook has partnered with brands allowing them to host applications for you to use on your Timeline. You can grab some of your favorite apps from the market and add them to your Timeline. Last year, in its f8 conference, Facebook announced Open Graph and introduced the concept of frictionless sharing. Since then, many apps have been built on this platform that can send your trail of activity back to Facebook. Facebook uses this information to display your activity to your friends in the form of “Alan read XYZ” or “Alan listened to XYZ”, eliminating the [...]

Facebook has done the unthinkable — at least from the users’ point of view — by introducing ads in News feed. First revealed by the company back in December, the feature has now gone into effect. On the face of it, it appears Facebook is finally opening the door for advertisers to tap into its unadulterated News Feed section. But, keeping the users’ experience intact is still its highest priority, and while this may sound like yet another way to advertise, it does change the dynamics of how brands and users engage on the platform. So How Does It Work? [...]

Zynga captivated the Facebook audience back in 2009 with its first game FarmVille requiring users to manage farms, plow lands, harvest crops and raise livestock. The social aspect allowed users to share gifts and compete with one another, propelling Farmville to the top of the list as the most played game on Facebook. The game maker added millions of users overnight and captured the imagination of a wide, but loyal audience that was willing to spend cash and time on their properties. Having found the secret sauce to success, Zynga launched couple more games that utlised the original idea, but [...]

  Frictionless, a Chrome extension that was released yesterday redirects you to the original source when you click on the links that have been shared by Social news apps like WSJ Social Reader, The Independent and The Guardian.  Currently, these social news apps — which by the way are growing like crazy on Facebook — ask you to add them in your Facebook account when you click on the news links, which can be quite annoying for most of us. Further more, once added, these apps leave a trail of activity as to what has been read by you and [...]

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 [...]