Entries Tagged 'Facebook News' ↓

I was trying to check the what’s new on the Facebook Application front but alas the error window popped again

People are doing the craziest of things on Facebook. An American banker who took break from his work after a request to his boss has been busted after a photo of him in a tutu at a Halloween party turned up on Facebook. Apparently, the banker had cited family emergency as the reason for taking time off.

The man’s name is Kevin Colvin, and he works as an intern in Anglo Irish Bank,based out of North America. He emailed his boss saying he could not make it into work.

Mr Colvin wrote,”Something came up at home and I had to go to New York this morning”.

His Facebook pictures were discovered by his colleagues and the pics show him in a neon fairy dress. He also has a beer in one hand and a “magic wand” in the other.

News of Facebook’s interest in China has been doing the rounds for quite some-time now. Facebook has also registered its Chinese domain Facebook.com.cn. However, Jack Zhang, President & CEO of one of the largest Chinese social networking site - Zhanzuo.com doesn’t think Facebook will be a threat.

Jack says, "We don’t think Facebook will become our real threat here in China".  He adds on, "On the contrary, few foreign Internet companies have done a great job in China up to now and we are confident of our future development."

Zhanzuo.com has been regarded as one of the largest social networking websites in China for college students since its establishment in 2006. It has 7 million active users and enjoys a good reputation among Chinese students abroad.

"As China’s economy develops, communication among people become less close," he says. "In the future, we want to make Zhanzuo.com not only as part of people’s online life but also part of their daily life."

Facebook also has competition from Xiaonei.com, which now claims to have 8 million active users in almost 8,000 colleges and universities in China.

Joseph Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific Interactive, also thinks likewise.

He refers to Facebook as a "paper tiger" and adds, "Facebook can hardly become a success in China, since social networking websites are culturally oriented, which means a successful business models in the US may not work simply by copying them to China," he says.

[Edited] Like I said, Israel is amongst the regional networks on Facebook. Also featured are Washington, South Africa, Edmonton and Portsmouth.

Facebook is hitting the world with fire at a rapid rate. Israel’s members on the Facebook network have risen by 100% during the last one month or so. According to news reports, the numbers have bettered by 100 percent since mid-October, from 74,000 to 152,000.

Essentially, the members comprise the quality target audience between the ages of 25 and 40 who are “early adapters,” or among the first users of new technologies. The upsurge in the site members has also lured the Israeli advertisers to publicize on the popular site. 

Ark Interactive’s CEO, Tamir Gordon, said  that their clients expressed interest in joining Facebook after hearing about it from their friends. He also talked about the cheap costs associated with advertising on Facebook which is roughly NIS 15,000-20,000, approximately ten times less than the cost of doing so via Walla, the Israeli Internet portal. 

Till last week, a company could advertise on Facebook only through banner ads, but this changed when Facebook launched a new advertising system that enables organizations to introduce ads into the user pages of its 50 million members, and launch dedicated pages on the site for their brands. 

The phenomenal growth of Facebook has been highlighted by the Web portal Lycos in its top 50 searches. This is for the first time that Facebook has made appearance in the top 50 list. Ranked at number 25, Facebook has generated more searches than the biggies Dragonball (27), RuneScape (31) and Wikipedia (34).

The fact that Wikipedia has been left behind speaks high volumes of Facebook’s growth. Although MySpace (19) still ranks higher in search activity, Facebook’s open source rules about developing  applications would ensure that Facebook would catch up soon.

The Top 10 Search terms for Lycos last week were ‘poker’, ‘Halloween’, ‘golf’, ‘fashion’, ‘Dancing with the Star’s, ‘YouTube’, ‘Disney’, ‘World Series’, ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Britney Spears’.

Facebook Users Will Soon be Able to Vote On News Feed Items

According to Valleywag, Facebook employees are currently beta testing a news feed item voting system. There is no word on if or when this feature will be made public. The idea behind the voting system is simple. As an new items appear on your news feed, you can vote them up (+) or down (-), adding increased user interaction with news feed items.

As Valleywag points out, the actually functionality is not the big news so much as how this new feature increases user interactivity with the news feeds given the increase focus on advertising within the news feed. The more you get people “using” the news feed rather then just looking at it, the higher the chances that users will actually interact with the advertisements that will be present. The more user interaction with the ads, the more effective they will be. The more effective the ad, the more advertisers will want to use the medium. The more advertiser want to use the medium, the more Facebook can charge advertisers. The more Facebook can charge advertisers, the more money they will make.

Does anyone else think that Facebook is treading a fine line between delivering a valuable utility and building a platform for user exploitation by advertisers?