Although its original, digital gifts solution went down like a lead balloon, Facebook has placed much emphasis on its intention to offer a streamlined gift services to its 1.06 billion active user base. The social network enjoyed a very successful last quarter, and although there was little in terms of an update on the state of play of the Facebook Gifts during yesterday's earnings report, Mark Zuckerberg and Co. have been busily preparing the foundations for a fully-fledged assault on the associated market, manifested by today's launch of the Facebook Card.
Facebook has today shared its financial stats for the fourth quarter of last year, and in doing so, has dropped yet another installment of its ever-impressive user statistics. As has been the case consistently over the past few years, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook has exceeded quite a few milestones, and the world's most popular social network of all time has has now passed the 1.06 billion monthly active user (MAU) mark.
At its event at Facebook’s new headquarters on Tuesday, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Graph Search, a new social search engine that aimed at competing with other search engines on the market today, leveraging Facebook’s already vast knowledge of its members.
The standalone Facebook Messenger app has proved to be an extremely worthwhile addition to the company's ever growing range of mobile apps. Although it has already achieved enviable success through download and user adoption rates, it seems that Facebook is intending to build on the Messenger platform by announcing a native iPad version of the app, a first official glimpse of which could potentially be seen during their planned event tomorrow.
Facebook is on the modification path once again and are currently in the early stages of rolling out some Timeline based changes that will see profiles adopting a new single-column based Timeline setup. Facebook is hoping that the changes will provide a less cluttered user experience and allow those affected members to not only find and locate their favorite pages a lot more easily, but also promote communication between those they are connected with.
For a long time, Facebook was always thought of as a web-based company that didn't put a lot of importance on users who prefer to access their services through mobile devices. The official Facebook app was built around cross-platform technologies making it notoriously slow, unpredictable and unstable, and their mobile website didn't really make things much better. That focus started to shift with the acquisition of Instagram, followed by the updating of their mobile apps into native languages as well as the release of standalone apps such as Messenger and Camera. For the first time, we can now actually get an insight into Facebook's mobile users and devices and firmware that they actually use, thanks to some meticulous data collection from Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis.
Facebook's Poke app has taken the App Store by storm, and in less than a day, already sits aloft the iTunes Free app chart. The app, which, in essence, is a chat app with a few twists, only just released for iPhone, but already, has become the most popular free on the App Store.
The Facebook messaging platform has been on aspect of the social network that has changed dramatically over the years. When Facebook first launched the service, it was driven by the upload of photographs and proved to be an extremely media heavy social gathering place and while that is still true, the built-in messenger functionality has been significantly beefed up recently. Facebook have also recently announced that they are making additional changes to the conversation streams within messages as well as putting a pay-to-message test in place with a subset of United States based users.
If you are an Angry Birds and Stars Wars fan, then chances are high that you were overwhelmed with excitement when Rovio signaled their intention to release an entire themed version of the smash-hit mobile game thanks to a deal with Lucas Entertainment. The Stars Wars version of the game has since landed on the iOS and Android platforms and continues where previous versions of the franchise left off, but the news is filtering through today that Rovio has brought their latest Angry Birds creation to another one billion people, with the immediate release of the game as a Facebook application.
Facebook has announced some big changes to mobile ads via a post on its its Developer Blog. The social network, which has made no secret of its desire to monetize the mobile market, has enlisted a sleuth of new options to both developers and users with regards to how advertisements interact with the audience. Those using Facebook for iOS 6 will be able to install apps straight from ads within the official app, and thanks to deep Facebook integration on the latest iteration of Apple's mobile OS, users won't even need to leave the app.
