Category: Social Media

Blogs posts related to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare etc.

Facebook launches “Share” Feature

Facebook has launched a “Share” feature, allowing users to post content to their Facebook profiles by clicking a button. This means you can post YouTube clips, Photobucket photos and more to your Facebook profiles and even have the videos play on the profile itself. In addition to this, if you want to share some article or news you might find Facebook logo at the bottom of the posts with other networks such as Digg or del.ici.ous. It means that thousands of content sites will start adding blue “F” buttons, thus promoting Facebook and helping the network to grow even faster. Facebook are announcing today that they’re making a “share on Facebook” icon available to site owners, meaning that any publisher, big or small, can allow users to share their content on the popular social network. They haven’t yet made this super easy for bloggers: after a brief scan of the Share Partners page, I’m none the wiser about how I could add this to my blog posts. But give it a few days and we’ll no doubt see plugins being developed for the popular blog platforms.

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Why Zuckerberg Won’t Accept Just $1 Billion from Yahoo

Following the YouTube-Google acquisition, many analysts were predicting that Yahoo would make their move and snap up Facebook. A few weeks later, it seems the deal has gone stone cold, with neither party particularly keen to get a deal signed immediately. Meanwhile, Facebook has rolled out a number of features that have received a mixed response: the decision to open up the site met initial resistance among core users, the news feed raised privacy questions, while another move last week put ads within the feed. Today they’re launching a social bookmarking tool. We’ve yet to see how Facebook’s more conservative users embrace these ongoing feature additions. Personally, I think founder Mark Zuckerberg is happy to continue loading on the features and building out his site: one billion from Yahoo won’t sway him.

Zuckerberg has always been very clear that Facebook will be a successful independent business. Zuckerberg isn’t doing any simple bluff. He is wise to maximize his options, as time is on his side. This mantra, just build the best business, makes internal sense in two ways. First, engineers and product people are singularly focused on building product. The business side is crafting deals to secure a long term viability. A good thing, focus is. Second, it suppresses internal expectations of immediate gratification.

The mantra is obviously valuable externally, since Facebook needs only one buyer, whenever. Several companies with a market cap in the 10s of billions have been repeatedly in negotiations. Designed from the start to be cash flow positive, Facebook is free from the time pressure, lacking the bandwidth bill urgency that YouTube must have felt. Calculating VC investments + revenue – obvious costs, YouTube had a horizon of several months before needing recapitalization. Facebook’s horizon is.. infinite. Wouldn’t you believe they will be back?

Zuckerberg is having fun. It is a dream position for him, and also for just about everyone in the building with him. It’s only 9pm and the DJs are just setting up.

Courtesy: Mashable.com

Yahoo’s bid to buy Facebook

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo has offered Facebook an amount that could be approximately $1 billion in a bid to purchase it. Facebook is second largest social networking website in the US. Yahoo has been talking to Facebook over the past year.  Facebook also had discussions with Microsoft and Viacom. Earlier as well there were rumors of its acquisition wherein Facebook reportedly turned down an offer of $750 million, deciding to hold out for $2 billion.

Currently Yahoo has social media websites (Flickr, del.icio.us & Yahoo Answers) however they do not have anything like Myspace; the largest social media website or Facebook. Lets wait and watch that weather we’ll see Facebook as a Yahoo company or not.

‘Events’ on Facebook

Facebook is attracting group of people to their website to connect through ‘Events’ feature allowing them to organize and plan events. This feature is proving to be very successful for organizing parties and other small events. Active users of Facebook can join events and submit their RSVP. Moreover, users can also invite and recommend friends and acquaintances to an event. Events feature of Facebook is giving a tough competition to the websites which are in operation with specific reasons to organize and publicize small events. It has to be noted that every feature or application on Facebook is tend to get an exposure to a large database of well knit online users.

Facebook Ads, Powered by Microsoft

Hot on the heels of the MySpace-Google deal comes news from the NY Times that Facebook (Facebook) have inked a three year agreement with Microsoft, making adCenter the exclusive provider of banner ads and sponsored links on the site. The deal is quite clearly a reaction to the MySpace (MySpace) ad deal, since the serious talks only began last week. No financial details are being given, which prevents a comparison to Google’s (Google) $900 million, but Steve Berkowitz of Microsoft has said the move is “not comparable to the MySpace deal because we focused on the right economics for both parties”. Uh-huh.

Founded in 2004, Facebook is the second biggest social network in the US – it has 9 million users compared to MySpace’s 100 million or so. The network already runs promotions with Apple (see iTunes on Facebook) and has struck other promotional deals like the recent Facebook credit cards, where companies form sponsored groups on the site. The Microsoft ads will go live this fall.

Courtesy: Mashable.com

Birth of Facebook

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg which was originally called as ‘Thefacebook’. He started it as one of his hobby projects when he was at Harvard University. He was able to get some financial help from Eduardo Saverin.

Mark Zuckerberg’s two more friends from Harvard; Dustin Moskovitz & Chris Hughes came in to help him further develop the website. Few months later Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to follow their dreams to run Facebook full time. They changed ‘thefacebook’ to ‘Facebook’ in August 2005 and they registered the domain name facebook.com for a reported $200,000.

Facebook is Fun

Wow! Its exciting. Yeah am talking about Facebook. Now I feel that Orkut was a shear time waste when you compare it with Facebook. It has applications, games, friends comments, wall and better interface as an icing over the cake. I think I am in love with it. My friend’s list is growing everyday, it has already touched 53 within a week. It means that atleast 53 friends of mine were having this fun a bit longer than I am. LoL…!!!
I have started playing one of its applications MAFIA WARS. It is slow but addictive rather Facebook in itself is pretty addictive, atleast better than Orkut.

Facebook Account

Finally after so many requests from friends and continuously deleting all of them to join Facebook, I announce my reactivation of Facebook Account. LoL…!!! Its pretty different from Orkut and it has many things to play around. I’ll definitely going to take some time to learn it. BTW, it has a nice feature of Notifications which wasn’t there in Orkut and forces everyone to hit refresh to check for any new scrap. This is going to be good learning and games might be fun.
Lets wait and watch.

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn has launched LinkedIn Answers today, a service similar to Yahoo Answers that lets you ask questions to members of your network. It should be noted that Google has recently closed down its Google Answers platform due to less activity and unacceptability by mass.

If successful, Linkedin can increase activity on the site. You enter your question, pick the members of your network who are likely to know the answer and receive answers from your connections, their connections, and experts who use LinkedIn. You can browse the questions by category and gain expertise points every time the question asker picks your answer as the best one. The top experts then appear in a ranked list. Unsurprisingly, most of the questions are currently about finding referrals and connections.