Facebook is the world’s largest social network for a reason. When the social network was first made public years back, no one could’ve predicted that it will leave the likes of MySpace, Orkut and Hi5 biting the dust, but the social giant did so. This did not happen overnight, either; steady updates and continuous improvements of the feature set took credit for the the website’s success. Whether Facebook sells users’ data or if it’s privacy policies are lax (to say the least), it’s no hidden fact that Facebook is the top choice for everyone out there for keeping in touch with friends, sharing the ups and downs of their life and almost every other aspect of daily routines.
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.
Remember that persistent rumor regarding the potential existence of a Facebook phone that just won't go away but doesn't actually seem to have any merit? Well it would seem that the speculation has risen once again around a Facebook smart devices of sorts thanks to an event being held by the company and the overheard murmurings of words like "mobile" and "this is going to be a big deal". In the past all we have heard are rumors without much substance behind them, but it seems that a number of different sources are expecting Facebook to show off a mobile device this coming Tuesday, in one form or another.
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.
If big stories in tech are your forté, 2012 will have been a real treat. This year has had it all - buyouts, lawsuits, great releases, and of course, great fails. Here, we round up these past twelve months with a quick look back at the revelations that had us all fixated.
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.
