Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Monday, October 29, 2012
One of my Bloomberg colleague's facebook comment prompted me to write this post. This is what Paras Doshi has to say:
He counted numbers of political posters up on Mumbai streets while driving to work. In 1.9 kms of stretch, there were 106 posters!!! Now I tried to think who are putting up these posters and why:
1. Political Party workers : To gain political mileage
2. RWAs : To please political leaders and get their society cleaned up
3. Associations like Yuva Morcha : To enter into politics or showoff or become local group leader (good for nothing)
Implications:
1. Illegal hoardings as these are politically driven
2. Revenue loss for local municipal as lot of commercial ads could have been put. I happened to call an ad agency (name confidential) who told me:
Illegal ad rate: Rs. 5000 near signal of Andheri Naka per month (he said "sab setting ho jayegi", it means everything will be sorted with relevant authorities)
Legal ad rate: Rs. 10000 including for same site including undertable payment for clearance in few days
3. Lost cause: Nobody would be looking at them. Damn it, people are fed up.
4. City looks awful. It makes entire surronding look dull.
This is not only trend on Mumbai roads but across the country. I remember me and Paras were going to Ghaziabad, city in Uttar Pradesh adjacent to New Delhi and we came across poster of Ms. Mayavati on every single pole on streets.
What can be done:
1. Public awareness
2. Empowering local municipal to remove such hoardings and not to give up from political pressure
3. Mass rallies from people like us to destroy such posters
4. Ban people in politics whose illegal hoardings are up on streets
These are instances that make me feel that we are living in uneducated and unregulated society. Keep posting your comments on this issue.
Monday, October 29, 2012 2
Monday, October 8, 2012
Facebook recently landed up in a new controversy after a U.S. security researcher discovered that the social networking site added 'Likes' simply by sending a web address to a friend using the company's private messaging feature. Facebook has admitted that it does scan the private messages for links, but does not use them as “Likes” or for user's personal information.
Facebook
also said that a number of websites using Facebook's Like, Recommend or
Share buttons carry a counter next to them. The counter shows the
number of times people have clicked the buttons, and also the number of
times, the link's been shared on Facebook. In case the count is
increased via shares over private messages, no user information is
transferred, and privacy settings of content remain unaffected. The
company further said that links shared via message does not affect the
Like count on Facebook Pages.
"We did recently find a bug with our
social plugins where at times the count for the Share or Like goes up by
two, and we are working on fix to solve the issue now,” the social
network told NBC News. "To be clear, this only affects social plugins
off of Facebook and is not related to Facebook Page Likes. This bug does
not impact the user experience with messages or what appears on their
timelines."
Earlier, Wall Street Journal reported about a video
that showed how social networking websites scan links sent by users,
and how the shared links are registered as the “Like”. The video the
Journal referred to had been posted on Hacker News, and "showed a person
who sent links in Facebook messages in order to inflate the number of
"Likes" a page had received. Each time the link was sent, the page’s
"Like" count went up by two, something that the Hacker News poster said
allows people to "pump up to 1,800 ‘Likes’ in an hour,'” says the WSJ
report. Check out the video below:
Source: BBC News
Monday, October 8, 2012 0
Friday, May 11, 2012
Microsoft has come up with another game changing idea in search engine space. It has introducted “personalised search
results" with data coming from Facebook and LinkedIn.
According to Derrick Connell, corporate vice president of Bing, the update will roll out in the next few weeks. Users will be receiving a notification after signing up at the Bing site. “Increasingly, the Web is about much more than simply finding information by navigating a topically organized graph of links,” says Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division. “We’re evolving search in a way that recognizes new user paradigms like the growth of the social graph, and will empower people with the broad knowledge of the Web alongside the help of their friends.”
Checkout the new enhancement at
http://www.bing.com/new and is available by registration. It has 3 panes
i) Left which is core search results
ii) Middle containing snapshot which has useful links
iii) Right which has content from social media
i) Left which is core search results
ii) Middle containing snapshot which has useful links
iii) Right which has content from social media
The right pane also features“ask friends” to
seek advice from friends on social networks, “friends who might know” to
link search with interest of known friends, and “people who know” to
display results from social networking sites.
This new avtar of Bing is believed to be another attempt of stealing market share from Microsoft's arch rival Google. Google has already intergrated Search Plus with social media however it misses Twitter and key social site Facebook.
Friday, May 11, 2012 0
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Facebook Timeline was rolled out globally yesterday, and now, the social networking giant has announced the Timeline interface will be available on the Facebook for Android app, as well as on its mobile portal – m.facebook.com.
According to Facebook, the mobile Timeline is a interface that “starts with your unique cover photo. As you scroll down, you’ll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened, back to the day you were born. Photo albums and other posts are horizontally swipeable, so you can quickly view multiple photos or posts inline without leaving timeline. You can also swipe through the views at the top of your timeline to navigate to your map, photos, subscribers and more.”
Apart from photo albums, maps showing the friends you are linked with, and your subscribers, users can show which apps they are using. Users will have 7 days to preview their timeline before it goes public, and in that time, they can decide what to highlight, and who will be able to see it.
You can download the new Facebook for Android app, from here.
Saturday, December 17, 2011 0
Sunday, November 27, 2011
In the past several years, businesses large and small have come to realize the positive impact of engaging their brand-loyal public and — more importantly — potential customers, via Facebook Pages. While fan pages are typically seen as a destination for users to remain privy to brand news, a recent comScore report shows that a Page is really just the place where content resides, as fans are 40 to 150 times more likely to consume branded material in their news feeds than on the actual fan page itself. This discovery led to Facebook’s expansion of “Page Insights,” including new metrics and analytics designed to constantly remind business owners of what truly matters: engaging content.
Facebook utilizes an algorithm that ensures the most relevant content for each user finds its way onto that particular user’s news feed. The relevancy of this content is determined by a number of factors, including how many times it is liked, shared, commented on, etc. When fans of a company interact with branded content, it can then be passed on to their friends and their friends’ friends. With fan acquisition as the main motive behind the Facebook strategy of most businesses, it is helpful to learn that friends of fans are more likely to visit a brand’s store, website and even purchase a product than the average, uninfluenced consumer. In addition, the average friends-of-fans group for the top 100 brand pages on Facebook is 34 times larger than the fan group. This means that a business can often have greater influence amongst its second degree connections, and the virality of a page’s content can be directly related to the success of a business. So, ultimately there’s a need for better insights into Facebook content consumption.
Facebook’s Advertising Communications Manager Elisabeth Diana states that the “real purpose behind Facebook Page Insights is to provide all page admins with ways to understand how to reach and acquire new customers.” New metrics have been created in order to provide businesses with not only information about how people are interacting with a brand Page, but also a glimpse into how people are connecting with the Page’s content in other parts of Facebook.
One of the metrics added to Facebook’s Page Insights is “People are talking about this.” This set of data counts stories that are eligible to appear in a user’s Newsfeed, such as any likes, wall posts, comments, shares, questions answered, RSVPs to events, Page mentions, photo tagging and location checkins. The metric allows the page administrator to know what posts have proven the most compelling and interactive.
Another metric added to the equation is the metric of virality, which allows for insight into how viral a particular post is. Virality is determined by dividing the number of “people talking about this” by the reach (the number of people who actually saw the content). Diana notes that because virality is a percentage, whether a business is large or small, the metric “can be used to compare across all Page posts.” The virality metric allows page admins to analyze the success of individual posts and will hopefully lead to an improved page strategy through a better understanding of the audience.
Along with these new metrics comes aesthetic changes as well. “Whether you want to get into the deep end or wade in slowly,” Diana says, Facebook wants to make their Page Insights “digestible for everyone, easy to sort and actionable.” She says most of the heavy numbers have been removed from Page Insights, but “for those needing something a little more hardcore, there is always the option to export to a spreadsheet.” Either way, Diana says, “this is just the first step in enhancing Page Insights for small businesses and brands; there is more to come” — so, look out for the Facebook Insight API. In the meantime, however, Facebook will continue to help business owners figure out how to provide their audiences with the most engaging content possible to guarantee the greater reach and increased sales.
Sunday, November 27, 2011 0
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Riding on strong users base, twitter has made one more step to woo second largest populated country. It is going to launch its services in Hindi for millions of Indian users.
"After launching Hindi, Filipino, Malay and Simplified and Traditional Chinese in the coming weeks, Twitter will support 17 different languages," says the company in its blog. It’s notable that both Twitter and Facebook are highly popular in India. Facebook has already launched its services in Hindi and five other Indian languages namely Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali, Telegu and Tamil. As per estimates, Twitter has now nearly 200 million registered users.
Earlier, Twitter had announced accomplishing 100 million active users worldwide. The micro-blogging site put up some interesting figures. It disclosed that 40 percent of its active users simply log on to the website to read out what’s others are posting. “Our 100 million active users range from passionate early adopters to recent coverts, notes the blog.
Twitter still trails far behind Facebook in the number game. Facebook recently announced it has more than 750 million active users worldwide. Twitter is also facing stiff competition from Google+. Earlier this year, LinkedIn had announced hitting 100 million users mark.
Sunday, September 11, 2011 0
Facebook users get shaken up every few weeks with some kind of threat, whether it’s regarding privacy issues from within the social network itself, or outside sources—like the now-rescinded threat from Anonymous to destroy Facebook entirely in November. If your photos, friends’ contact information, and other important data are wrapped up in your Facebook account and nowhere else, it’s not a bad idea to download a copy of all of it (and back up your other data, too) for safe keeping.
The site does permit users to download a Zip file of all their Facebook data, including wall photos, profile pictures, and messages, but I doubt many users have gone through the process, so few know how it actually works—what happens, how long it takes, and what steps are required.
The company makes it sounds easy enough, but in typical Facebook fashion, it's a lot trickier than you'd think. It took me about 80 minutes, start to finish, although most of that time (an hour) was spent waiting for an email for verification. It also took me two shots before I passed the verification test, and seeing as I am indeed who I say I am, I was rather surprised the test was so hard that I couldn't pass it the first time around. It's not a fool-proof test by any means, as you'll see in this step-by-step walkthrough of the process, complete with screens shots at every stage.
On the one hand, it does seem like Facebook made a good faith effort at security. It makes sense that it should be tough to download all your data from the site that hosts more user-uploaded personal information than perhaps any other. On the other hand, the verification process is very odd, and it wouldn't be hard for someone who's not you to pass it if they did a little poking around online. Before you try to back up your Facebook photos, message history, and information, make sure you know what you're getting into, and set aside enough time to do it. November 5 is sooner than you think.
Go to Account (upper right).
Select Account Settings.
Find and click the little link at the bottom that reads "Download a copy of your Facebook data" (why doesn't it appear in bold like the other important items on the page?).
Click Start My Archive.
2. Wait (and Wait) for an Email
Wait for an email letting you know the archive has been created. For me, this step took about an hour (although the Facebook account I used to test didn't have very much in it, so it could take longer for others).
Wait for an email letting you know the archive has been created. For me, this step took about an hour (although the Facebook account I used to test didn't have very much in it, so it could take longer for others).
Copyright © 2010 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
The holiday season came one day early for Facebook this year, as Santa bestowed the company the title of "third largest website ever." New metrics from comScore indicate that Facebook has finally passed Yahoo for third place, pulling in 648 million unique visitors for November 2010 versus Yahoo's 630 million.
Only Microsoft, with 869 million unique visitors, and Google, with 970 million, stand in Facebook's way at this point. Yahoo drops down to fourth, though that should really come as little surprise--Facebook has been chipping away at the search giant for some time now.
As of December 2009, Facebook's pageviews were already up to 193 billion versus Yahoo's 100 billion (and Microsoft's 109 billion, to note). As well, November metrics from comScore indicate that Facebook serves up more than twice as much display advertising as Yahoo—23 percent of all online ads within the U.S. compared to Yahoo's 11 percent.
Facebook leaped over Yahoo in a batch of September comScore metrics related to U.S. video properties. As of August 2010, Facebook delivered video to 58.5 million users versus Yahoo's 53.9, representing a total of 243 million viewing sessions to Yahoo's 229 million. The only metric where Yahoo actually beat Facebook out was on viewing time—Yahoo users viewed an average of 31.6 minutes of online video per person versus Facebook users' 20.5 minutes per person.
Yahoo nevertheless beats out Facebook when isolated to just U.S. visitors only. In this, the company is the top website on the Internet with 181 million unique monthly visitors. Facebook, at 152 million, sits in fourth place on this ranking.
Narrowing the category to search engines only, Yahoo still trails Google at a rate of 16 percent to 66.2 percent for U.S. search engine market share. Its second place ranking is a bit tentative as well, for November 2010 metrics from comScore show that Microsoft, at 11.8 percent, is slowly gaining ground based on October 2010 results.
"Our greatest competitor probably is Facebook, more so than Google," said Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz at a Bloomberg event earlier this month. "They're a hot site, but there's room for more than one of anything."
via Thinkdigit
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 0
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The much-awaited Facebook email service (Project Titan) was finally announced on Monday. Facebook email is actually part of a larger, simplified communication system called Facebook Messages. Facebook Messages will have email, SMS, chat conversations with your Facebook friends under one thread.
I have to respectfully disagree with my colleague, Nikhil Pradhan, and his views on how Facebook email could actually beat Gmail -- but in all fairness, his article was written before Facebook's email announcement. Although Facebook email (and Facebook Messages) definitely has convergence and simplicity of use going for it, but from the evidence of Facebook's announcement and Facebook Messages' first look, the service is far from upsetting Gmail -- let alone kill it. Here's why:
Threaded conversation: Most Gmail users prefer Gmail's email conversation view -- it was the first webmail service to have email conversation view back in 2004. Emails on the same subject appear as threaded conversations in Gmail, putting the latest email right on top of the pile. Facebook Messages will have emails, SMS, chats between two individuals as one thread -- irrespective of the subject. This may get confusing after a while, and the length of scroll over time difficult to manage if Facebook continues with posting the most recent update to a conversation at the bottom of the pile.
Spam: To put it simply, Gmail has a pretty robust spam filter deployed to prevent spam from reaching your Gmail inbox. It has a spam-filtering mechanism that learns when Gmail users report a spam email. Historically, Facebook has had trouble stamping out spam attacks in messages and chats. Facebook has said it will deploy an unnamed third-party filtering mechanism for inbound emails for Facebook email service, but as of now Gmail still triumphs.
Multiple Email Accounts: I currently use multiple email accounts (Gmail and others) to send and receive email from my Gmail inbox. This makes Gmail central to my webmail experience -- it works great for anyone who has multiple email accounts and doesn't want to use several email clients or access multiple inboxes.
IMAP support: Facebook email won't have IMAP support -- which is a popular email protocol. IMAP really helps if you're accessing your inbox from different locations or different devices. Gmail includes IMAP support.
Attachments: Facebook emails will only be able to preview attached Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Excel files within their browsers -- through Facebook and Microsoft's Docs service. It won't preview PDFs, for example -- something that Gmail does.
SMS/Chat/Phone: I understand it's great and will help Facebook users when email, SMS, and chat comes under one Social Inbox. But Gmail has already converged the three a while back -- it has Gmail chat, SMS, and Gmail free phone calls, all within your inbox window. Facebook just goes one step ahead by converging different forms of communication under one thread -- as far as services offered, there's nothing new or groundbreaking.
via pcworld
Sunday, November 21, 2010 0
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users' information , highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants.
Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users' email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users' information.
Facebook, with more than 500 million users, relies on email services such as Google's Gmail to help new users find friends already on the network. When a person joins, they are asked to import their Gmail contact list into the social network service. Facebook then tells the user which email contacts are also on the social network.
In a statement, Google said websites such as Facebook "leave users in a data dead end." Facebook did not immediately provide a comment on Friday.
While Google framed the move as an attempt to protect its users' ability to retain control of their personal data on the Internet, analysts said the move underscored the battle between Google, the world's largest search engine, and Facebook, the dominant Internet social network.
"The fundamental power dynamic on the Web today is this emerging conflict between Facebook and Google," said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. "Google needs to evolve to become a big player in the social Web and it hasn't been able to do that."
"If people do search within Facebook, if they do email within Facebook, if they do instant messaging within Facebook, all of these will chip away at Google's properties."
RECIPROCITY
Google said that while it makes it easy for other Web services to automatically import a user's contact data, Facebook was not reciprocating.
"We have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook, they are effectively trapped," Google said in an emailed statement.
"We will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users' Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites," Google said.
via ET
Saturday, November 6, 2010 2
Friday, October 15, 2010
Facebook Inc expanded its partnership with Microsoft Corp.s Bing search engine, letting people automatically see what their Facebook friends think about the topics they're seeking information on.
Bing's new search screen also will let users become a person's friend on Facebook or send a message to the social- networking service, Microsoft and Facebook said at a media event in Mountain View, California. Searches for restaurants or movies will spotlight the ones that a user's friends like. Terms of the partnership weren't disclosed.
"This is a new era," Qi Lu, president of online services at Microsoft, said at the event. "Can the search experience be better if all the people you trust are part of that experience? You will find that the experience will be much better."
Microsoft is counting on traffic from Facebook, the world's most popular social network, as it steps up competition with Google Inc. Microsoft is merging its search operations with Yahoo! Inc. this year in a bid to challenge Google's dominance in the market. The new features "offer a lot of promise," said Danny Sullivan, who runs the search-analysis website Search Engine Land.
"This opens the idea that your friends can somewhat mind- meld with your search engine," he said. "But there's still more to be done. The early implementation shows a lot of gaps so far to me."
Better results?
The queries from Facebook users will help Microsoft refine its searches, said Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice president at the Redmond, Washington-based company. Bing users can opt out of being integrated with Facebook, he said.
Microsoft aims to get an edge on Google, which is making its own search-engine refinements. Last month, Google unveiled a faster search feature called Instant that gives users results as they type in a query. Advertisers will spend $12.4 billion on search ads this year, up from $10.7 billion in 2009, EMarketer Inc. estimates.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, credited Bing with spurring innovation in search, saying at the event that search user interface hadn't changed for eight years before Bing.
"The thing that makes Microsoft a great partner for us is that they really are the underdog here," he said at the event. "Because of that, they're in a structural position where they're incentivized to just go all out and innovate."
Ad partnership
Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, paid $240 million for a stake in Facebook in 2007. Facebook uses Microsoft for search-linked advertisements, though it stopped running its partner's banner ads this year. Facebook opted to focus on its own efforts in that area.
Google's share of US Internet search rose to 66.1 percent last month from 65.4 in August, according to Reston, Virginia- based ComScore Inc. Microsoft's share edged up to 11.2 percent from 11.1 percent. Yahoo, which has begun using Bing for search, dropped to 16.7 percent from 17.4 percent, ComScore said.
via TOI
Friday, October 15, 2010 0
Friday, September 10, 2010
US web surfers, the best of all as many say are spending more time on Facebook than Google according to research conducted at comScore Inc.
In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said, about 9.9 per cent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 per cent, people spent on all of Google Inc's sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail email program, Google news and other content sites.
In August of last year, Web surfers spent less than 5 per cent of their online time on Facebook, about the same percentage of their time on Google and almost 12 per cent on Yahoo. In August 2007, Facebook captured less than 2 per cent of US surfers' total minutes. Google accounted for less than 4 per cent, and Yahoo for just over 12 per cent.
Is searching loosing its mark with more people remain connected online?
Well the answer will soon be clear. I myself finds most authentic information on twitter rather than on news sites.
Friday, September 10, 2010 0
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Recently Facebook beat Google in searches, and now Microsoft plays host to Facebook on the Azure Cloud. Isn't this interesting, well changing times even for search giant.
A new toolkit was released for Facebook. This toolkit enables Facebook apps to run in the Azure Cloud.
It can be easily downloaded on:
http://facebookazuretoolkit.codeplex.com/
The toll kit provides hook ups, but if you want to create a new application, you better get to this page and learn how to create an IFRAMES CANVAS application!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ee695841.aspx
You can find the following in this toolkit:
Facebook Developers Toolkit
Ninject 2.0 for Dependency Injection
Asp.Net MVC 2
Windows Azure Software Development Kit (February 2010)
AutoMapper Link
Azure Toolkit - Simplified library for accessing Message Queues, Table Storage and Sql Server
Automated build scripts for one-click deployment from TFS 2010 to Azure
So get going guys.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 1
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