Tag Archives: social-networks

Facebook Wants You To Post to Twitter

This week Facebook will reportedly be rolling out the ability to send status updates to Twitter directly from the publisher box. There are apps that cater to the cross-posting of updates between the two social networks, but this would mark the first time Facebook itself actually encouraged it. The move is an interesting one, considering that Facebook has spent much of its time making itself more Twitter-like. Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook has a good piece chronicling the company's "Twitterfication" over the past year, which includes events like opening the Status API, letting users subscribe to their friends and Pages and receive status updates via text message, releasing @replies-style tagging, and encouraging users to make status updates public. O'Neill says the only step left is to open a search API. Of course Facebook has also just released its own URL shortener . Facebook employees are already testing the Facebook-to-Twitter functionality: The feature will utilize the new Facebook URL Shortener, which could actually lead to more widespread awareness of it. Once Twitter is flooded with Facebook links, people may start gravitating to that to shorten their own URLs, although the service at FB.me is not live for everyone to use yet. Either way, things are really starting to heat up in the URL-shortener space. Not only does Facebook now have its own, but so does Google . On top of that, Twitter-favorite Bit.ly has just launched Bit.ly Pro . Related Articles: > Facebook URL Shortener Makes Appearance > Facebook Shows a Glimpse of Twitterness > Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged already-testing, apps, between-the-two, facebook-shows, feeds, glimpse, mark-the-first, more-widespread, review and story, search api, shortener-makes, social-media, social-networks, status updates, utilize-the-new | Leave a comment

LinkedIn Launches Faceted Search Feature

LinkedIn has launched a new addition to its People Search Experience. It's called "Faceted Search". Faceted search allows you to search for a person and narrow that search down by specific "facets" as you go along, in order to quickly find the most relevant profiles possible. Users are presented with categories under the following facets as they search: current company, past company, location, relationship, industry, school, and profile language. The following clip nicely sums up how it works: "The filters are generated in real time for every query by parsing all matching results and extracting the most important attributes," explains LinkedIn's Esteban Kozak. "We then present those to you in an intuitive interface that lets you select one or multiple filters per facet. You can refine, expand or stumble upon insightful information by simply clicking on the search options that matter to you." Kozak says that Faceted Search improves precision, increases efficiency, and reduces the need for complex queries. "It significantly reduces the need for complex Boolean queries," he says. "This was a particular need we heard from many of our power users." LinkedIn gave its entire search interface an overhaul earlier this year, and has recently made significant design changes . A couple months ago, the company announced that it had surpassed the 50 million-user milestone. Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged 50 million, attributes, facet, facets, milestone, people, power, power users, related articles, search, search experience, social-networks, videos | Leave a comment

PayPal Launches “Send Money” Facebook App

PayPal has introduced a new Facebook app for sending money. The app is designed to allow uses to use PayPal to send money to anyone starting from Facebook. Users only need the person's email address. PayPal Director of Product Marketing Heinz Waelchli explains how it works: Visit our send money application page and click on the "Get Started" button to install the application. Next just fill in the fields in the form and click the "Continue to PayPal" button. You’ll be taken to the PayPal site to log-in (if you don’t already have an account, you can create a new account in minutes). You’ll then choose your method of payment, if you use your PayPal balance or bank account to send money to friends and family within the U.S., it’s free. You can enter a personal message to your recipient if you like. Finally, click on the "send" button and that's it! Your recipient will be notified by email right away. The receiver can then log-in to PayPal to claim the money or quickly sign up for a new account. It's probably a good idea on PayPal's part to have a Facebook app in place before any really significant Facebook e-commerce system takes over . Last month PayPal opened up its global payments platform called PayPal X, which provides APIs and a developer portal. This is likely an important move for keeping PayPal relevant in the social eye as well. On another PayPal-Facebook-realted note, PayPal is in the middle of its second annual " Regift the Fruitcake " campaign, an event, which calls upon people to create virtual fruitcakes and give them to their Facebook friends to raise money for 25 different charities. You can read more about that here . Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged apis, Business, developer portal, director, e commerce system, ebay, money application, paypal, social-networks | Leave a comment

New Film Website Offers 12,000 Clips From Major Studios

Clip sharing site Movieclips.com has launched in beta with a catalogue of more than 12,000 two-minute streaming clips. Movieclips has struck licensing deals with six major Hollywood studios including 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. The clips are available for free on an ad-supported network that links to third-party sites where users can rent or purchase full length films. Movieclips features a video player that can be embedded in social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and shared on blogs, Twitter and other personal websites. Users can search the site based on dialogue, mood or actor as well as browse by subject such as best kiss, tearjerkers, birthdays, holidays, awkward moments, scariest bad guy and best fight scenes. "Our goal was to build a place where we could easily find, watch, and share all the best movie scenes," said Co-Founder and CEO Zach James. "Our content partners are incredible. They made it possible for us to build the greatest collection of licensed movie clips online today. It's pretty cool to be able to send a clip from Sixteen Candles to my sister on her birthday or a Wayne's World 'Party on!' clip to my friends on a Friday night." Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged content partners, facebook, hollywood, major hollywood studios, movie-service, personal, review and story, social-media, social-networks, twilight-saga, twitter, video player, websites users | Leave a comment

Facebook Cracks 350 Million Users, Adjusts Privacy Settings

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced last night that the social network now has over 350 million users around the world. The number indicates continued strong growth, because just in September, Facebook announced that it has surpassed 300 million. In early November, it was reported that Facebook had reached at lest 325 million. Zuckerberg announced the news in an open letter, which was made available on the company blog, and linked to from a prominent spot on users' Facebook homepage. The letter was not written simply to brag about the impressive number, however. Zuckerberg also addressed steps Facebook is taking to improve user privacy as it continues to grow . Here's a sample of the letter : Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students. Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China. However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information. Facebook's plan involves removing regional networks completely and allowing users choose who can see their content: friends, friends of friends, or everyone. Facebook is also adding the ability to control who sees any particular piece of content a user creates or uploads. This has been a heavily requested feature. Finally, the privacy settings page will consolidate some of the settings to make them simpler. As Facebook begins integrating its new changes, it will be reminding users to review/update their privacy settings. Users will see a message about it soon. Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged 100 million, Business, cracks, facebook, facebook-most, fellow students, india, reached-at-lest, review and story, social, social-media, social-networks, zuckerberg | Leave a comment

Number of New Twitterers Declines

We've been looking at Twitter's growth on a monthly basis, in terms of new user registrations and number of tweets. In October, new Twitterers were down, but tweets were up. November's numbers paint a similar picture. Matthew Daines, the lead developer of Twellow, has shared a couple of new graphs for last month. "It looks like new registrations continue to decline, yet tweets continue to increase," he says. "If you take the number of tweets sent divided by the number of users registered, November saw 9.5 tweets per registered user. This is up from 9.3 in October, and continues an upward trend for the entire year, except July which saw 10.5 tweets per user." Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged announcement, Business, dictionary, made-geotagging, matthew-daines, number, numbers-show, registrations, social-media, social-networks, take-the-number, tweets, twitter, twitterers | Leave a comment

Facebook Tests “Many” New Design Changes

Reports and screenshots have surfaced indicating possible further design changes to the Facebook home page. These changes would include an altered header with drop-down menus for things like chat, messages, and notifications ( Via SAI ). There would also be greater emphasis placed on the search box. It would be moved further to the left, and more into the center of the page. Such emphasis on search would make sense, as Facebook has greater real-time search functionality these days than what it once had (particularly since its acquisition of FriendFeed ). Screenshot from French publication PCInpact.com (they have several more). Let's not get too carried away though. These changes are only tests at this point, and may or may not ever see the light of day for Facebook users at the mainstream level. A Facebook spokesperson tells WebProNews, "We are continually experimenting with new designs on the site that are meant to simplify and improve the user experience. These are just a couple of the many changes we're testing." Whenever Facebook makes design changes, there is usually some amount of backlash from users. That doesn't stop them from continuing to make tweaks, however. In the end, users are likely to get used to or accept the changes either way. I don't think the world is ready to abandon Facebook for the next big thing just yet. Do you like what Facebook has been doing with its design so far? Share your thoughts . Related Articles: > Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged acquisition, backlash, design, design changes, drop down menus, facebook-makes, mainstream level, redesigns, screenshot, search box, search functionality, social-networks, spokesperson, think-the-world, time search | Leave a comment