Davis ThinkingGoogle+ Pages is the game-changer for brand presence on the web in a leap over the social networking garden wall and the next digital manifest destiny combining search and social.
Mark Zuckerberg says social dynamics of the kind Facebook pioneered will one day be a core part of every industry. In the first installment of our new series, we take a look at some companies that are "baking in" social right from the start.
A poll reveals that many investors think Facebook is overvalued. Google's outgoing CEO, meanwhile, insists Facebook is not a threat. Is Zuckerberg's baby an actual colossus--or just an inflatable one?
Mark Zuckerberg is pacing before a crowd in Facebook’s Palo Alto, California, cafeteria just before lunch on a Wednesday in November. Fit and jovial, with pale skin and curly brown hair, his boyish face gives away his 26 years. “Zuck”, as friends call him, is wearing what he always wears: a grey T-shirt with an embroidered Facebook logo, blue jeans and tennis shoes. With this perennially casual demeanour, he is showing off new technologies to a few hundred employees, partners and the press. “It’s a good day to launch some stuff,” he says with a laugh. And with that, Zuckerberg introduces Facebook Deals, a new service that in a matter of days will transform the way local businesses reach consumers as they walk down the street.
Recently, I’ve been working on a big research project. Yesterday, I had Delicious links, PDFs, spreadsheets and Word documents open on my desktop when I came across a couple of useful presentations on Scribd. I’ll have them, I thought. So I clicked. What happened next surprised me: I was given the choice of logging in via Scribd or Facebook. Facebook? Why should I sign into Mark Zuckerberg’s site to download a presentation written by someone else and made available from somewhere else? Although the invitation was optional, it still felt like a kind of category error. This was Facebook pushing its nose too far into someone else’s business.
Facebook announced a new Places product Wednesday evening that will let users check-in from a mobile device, see who is around them, let friends or the public know where they are, and find interesting, new places. The announcement extends, yet again, the reach of the immensely popular social network, in hopes that the new service will convince its 500 million users to feed more information as they move around in the physical world.
Facebook is looking east for its next phase of expansion, as it prepares to take on entrenched competition in China, Russia and Japan and become the first social network company to connect 1bn people. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the world’s largest social network, said that after relying largely on organic growth to reach almost 500m members, Facebook would soon begin to make its first strategic local moves.
There’s no shortage of big initiatives going on at Facebook these days. We sat down with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week to talk about the state and future of Facebook and its surrounding ecosystem. Zuckerberg shared his thoughts on recent changes to the Facebook Platform, competitive dynamics he desires amongst developers, the surprising growth of the social games business on Facebook overall, his vision for Facebook Credits, market perceptions of Facebook’s revenue streams and overall revenue numbers, what the company learned from its period of serious interest in Twitter, and Facebook’s company culture around money.
Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg defended the company's privacy practices and expressed regret for some of his behavior during the company's early history, speaking at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital technology conference Wednesday.
Facebook's rapid response to privacy concerns may just have saved the world's fastest-growing internet brand from long-term damage. The company, which has undergone a month of withering criticism, today introduced a simplified new dashboard to control privacy settings, rolling back some of the changes made last month that confused users, concerned privacy advocates and drew the attention of Congress.
Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook will officially log its 500 millionth active citizen. If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world's third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S. More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not only have a Facebook account but have returned to the site within the past 30 days.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't shy away from grand promises. At the release of Facebook's ill-fated Beacon content-sharing platform in November 2007, he called it a once-in-a-century shift in media. Last week, he made another grand pronouncement, this time when introducing Open Graph, Facebook's audacious plan to serve as the de facto social operating system for the Internet. The new system, he said, is "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the Web."
Facebook Inc. announced an ambitious plan to get its tentacles further out into the Internet by better linking people, places and things, as it looks to turn a massive audience into a pool of well-understood consumers.
Launching its universal "like" button, Facebook extended its tentacles across the internet today, setting up pipes to gather user data from anywhere on the web. And now that users can add what topics, products or content they like to their Facebook profiles, the social-networking site is sitting on a data treasure chest. At the F8 developers conference today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a platform that aims to connect the entire internet through the social network. With those like buttons appearing on major publisher sites directly after the announcement, users can thumbs-up individual pages with one click and publish that to Facebook. Meanwhile, that Like is stored for later.
Today at Facebook’s F8 conference), Mark Zuckerberg laid out his plan to turn the Web into “instantly social experiences.”
Facebook is beginning a roll-out of a redesign to its Web page that places more emphasis on notifications. It'll improve things for users for sure, but it's just the first step of a plan to give Facebook serious Web emailing powers.
Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world’s Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.
When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that 'the age of privacy is over', I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this: * People I knew didn't used to like to be public. * Now "everyone" is being public. * Ergo, privacy is dead. This isn't new. This is the exact same logic that made me want to scream a decade ago when folks used David Brin to justify a transparent society. Privacy is dead, get over it. Right? Wrong!
The growth of social services enables us to share an ever-increasing granularity of our lives with complete strangers who opt in to sample our updates. From traditional blogging to Twitter to location sharing services, and now, Blippy (which displays my purchases online and lets me follow others' spending habits), I can live my life open and transparent, letting you know what I like, what I do, where I go, and how I spend my time. In parallel, we are also asking businesses to be more open. Thanks to SEC regulations and Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as best practices, we expect public companies to tell us how much money they have, how much profit they made, where they made that money, how many employees they have, how much they intend to make next quarter, and a blizzard of other things that fall under the guise of information.
Facebook Inc. took steps to solidify the control of founder Mark Zuckerberg and other existing shareholders in the event the social-networking company goes public. The closely held Silicon Valley firm, emulating one of Google Inc.'s well-known strategies, established a dual-class stock structure that would increase the voting power of Mr. Zuckerberg, who is the company's chief executive, and other existing shareholders if they hold onto their shares during an IPO.
Last week, Facebook did something it had been urged not to: listen to its customers. At the end of last week, Facebook partially rolled back a redesign to its home page newsfeed that had been introduced late last winter. Before March 2009, the Facebook home page presented highlights from a user's friends who were of greatest interest, deduced based on their history browsing Facebook. This was changed into a news feed made up mainly of status updates in real time, which gave the site a Twitter-like feel.
If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populous country on earth behind China and India - but now Facebook thinks it can play Switzerland and lead a push for world peace. I'm not so sure that's a good idea. Facebook and the Persuasive (no, not pervasive, persuasive) Technology Lab at Stanford launched what they call the "dot peace" campaign today. There's reason to pause before enthusiastically supporting the effort. There are other ways that Facebook could make the world a better place and there are some reasons why the company deserves caution more than trust when it comes to its political agenda.
Fed up with a barrage of letters that arrived at the FCC last week from net-neutrality opponents (or lawmakers urging a cautious approach toward the new rules), a coalition of Internet companies are urging the FCC chairman to hold steady. “We believe a process that results in common sense baseline rules is critical to ensuring that the Internet remains a key engine of economic growth, innovation and global competitiveness,” a group of 24 CEOs and Internet company founders wrote in a letter to be delivered to the FCC Monday in support of the proposed net-neutrality rules.
Scratch Facebook from the list of web 2.0 startups that don't make money: The world's largest social network said today it has become profitable. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook had crossed the 300 million registered-user milestone and that it had become "cash-flow positive" in the second quarter, ahead of schedule. Previously, Facebook had said it was targeting profitability "sometime in 2010."
Picture this: it's the year 2062 and Mark Zuckerberg, having recently celebrated his 78th birthday, is still, against all odds, running Facebook. The once-invincible social-networking behemoth has seen better days, and financially it's coasting on fumes -- Facebook's 38th round of venture-capital funding is about to run dry -- but no matter. Zuckerberg's still large and in charge, even as competitors eat away at his market share. The problem, of course, is that he never took TCOL -- total consciousness osmotic lifestreaming -- seriously, and now upstarts are using the device-free technology to run circles around Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg proudly announced on the Facebook blog this week that the popular social network continues its global dominance jumping from 200 million to 250 million users. To commemorate the milestone, Facebook created a map that visualizes connections and adoption worldwide.
Back in April I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg as part of my research for Wired’s Great Wall of Facebook piece. Here is an edited transcript in which the Facebook founder and CEO talks about the limitations of walled gardens, the evolution of privacy online and why Home Depot should “humanize” itself.
Facebook, by its very nature, is mostly about our past, sometimes about our present, but very rarely about our future. Being symmetric, it’s important that we have some sort of a prior relationship with a person in order to friend them on Facebook. Your classmates, neighbors and the folks you met at a party — these are all relationships from your past. Facebook doesn’t really allow you to discover new people — and that has been the part of its charm (and utility).
If there were one word to describe what Facebook has added to my life, I would use it. It’s a multidimensional pleasure: It’s given me a tool for exceptionally mindless, voyeuristic, puerile procrastination; crowd-sourced pesky problems like finding a new accountant; stoked my narcissism; warmed my heart with nostalgia; and created a euphoric, irrational, irresistible belief in the good in men’s hearts among the most skeptical people I know—people who should know better.
When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.
For the last several months, social-media pundits have busied themselves debating whether Twitter was the new Facebook. But last week Mark Zuckerberg & Co. hoped to change that dialogue, launching a pair of modifications that had people asking if Facebook was the new Twitter.
President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. Can CEO Mark Zuckerberg make those connections pay off?
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