Facebook News & Updates

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RE: Fonetwish...access Facebook on mobile without GPRS

This service is NOT free (SMS based service). Daily deduction charges is applicable.
Some users had complaint about unable to deactivate service once subscribed.
Be careful and read all terms & condition before applying for this service.

:c
 
RE: Fonetwish...access Facebook on mobile without GPRS

Found a article on it just now.Here it is explained more- http://techwek.com/2012/01/16/access-facebook-without-internet-and-dataplan-on-any-mobile-handset/
 
Facebook has announced minor yet noticeable upgrades for its mobile application – images in users' news feed will now appear larger. The update will first be available for the mobile website and then will roll out to its official iOS and Android applications.

Apart from the larger image upgrade, Facebook has slightly updated the mobile browser version of the Facebook ecosystem. The upgrade is likely to come to apps for all platforms very soon. The latest upgrade is currently announced for mobile Facebook users only, while the desktop browser version of the social network has the same interface.

“When it comes to viewing photos, we think bigger is better. We've begun increasing the maximum size for photos on Facebook by almost 20 percent to 720 pixels to give you higher quality photos and make viewing them more enjoyable,” says Facebook in a blog post. “You'll start to notice the larger size as you upload new photos to Facebook or browse new photo albums from your friends. Older photos will remain in the previous maximum size of 604 pixels.”

Bigger%20Photos%20for%20Better%20Viewing.jpg
Bigger%20Photos%20for%20Better%20Viewing.jpg


Old photo size (left) compared to the new size

It is believed that Facebook's new features are inspired from Instagram, which was acquired by the social networking giant last month.

Facebook recently rolled out new features to its applications. Its messaging application received eatures such as location from where the message originates and “read receipts”, an acknowledgment that friend has seen a message. Its EveryPhone app photo filter options. For more read, Facebook messenger app gets updated with locations, read receipt features and Facebook adds photo filter options to its Every Phone app

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Facebook hoping to release its own smartphone by 2013: Report

This past week, Google completed its acquisition of the hardware maker Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which could lead to the search giant's making its own smartphone. But another software titan might be getting into the hardware game as well: Facebook.

Employees of Facebook and several engineers who have been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on Facebook's plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. These people spoke only on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their employment or relationships with Facebook.

The company has already hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, the employees and those briefed on the plans said.

This would be Facebook's third effort at building a smartphone, said one person briefed on the plans and one who was recruited. In 2010, the blog TechCrunch reported that Facebook was working on a smartphone.

The project crumbled after the company realized the difficulties involved, according to people who had worked on it. The website AllThingsD reported last year that Facebook and HTC had entered a partnership to create a smartphone, code-named "Buffy," which is still in the works.

Now, the company has been going deeper into the process, by expanding the group working on "Buffy," and exploring other smartphone projects too, creating a team of seasoned hardware engineers who have built the devices before.

One engineer who formerly worked at Apple and worked on the iPhone said he met with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, who then peppered him with questions about the inner workings of smartphones.

It did not sound like idle intellectual curiosity, the engineer said; Zuckerberg asked about intricate details, including the types of chips used, he said. Another former Apple hardware engineer was recruited by a Facebook executive and was told about the company's hardware explorations.

When asked Friday, Facebook did not deny or confirm that a project to build a smartphone existed, but pointed to a previous statement it gave to AllThingsD last year that said in part, "We're working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers."

For Facebook, the motivation is clear; as a newly public company, it must find new sources of revenue, and it fears being left behind in mobile, one of the most promising areas for growth.

"Mark is worried that if he doesn't create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms," a Facebook employee said.

Facebook is going to great lengths to keep the phone project a secret, specifically not posting job listings on the company's job website, but instead going door-to-door to find the right talent for the project.

But can a company that is wired as a social network learn how to build hardware? Mixing the cultures of hardware and software designers is akin to mixing oil and water. With the rare exception of Apple, other phone makers aren't very good at this.

The biggest names in consumer electronics have struggled with phone hardware. Hewlett-Packard tried and failed. So did Dell. Sony has never done very well making phones.

"Building isn't something you can just jump into," explained Hugo Fiennes, a former Apple hardware manager for the first four iPhones who has since left Apple and is starting a new hardware company, Electric Imp. "You change the smallest thing on a smartphone and you can completely change how all the antennas work. You don't learn this unless you've been doing it for a while."

He added, "Going into the phone business is incredibly complex."

Facebook also faces hurdles, often of its own making, on mobile. Twitter, for example, is fully integrated into the Apple iPhone and allows people to seamlessly send Twitter messages with photos or article links. Facebook, which has had a contentious relationship with Apple, is still not integrated into iOS.

One Facebook employee said the phone project had been rebooted several times because Facebook originally thought it could figure out hardware on its own. The company has since learned that it needed to bring in people with previous phone-making experience, several people said.

So it is hiring hardware engineers to work with a phone manufacturer and design the shape, style and inner workings of a Facebook phone. Despite the difficulties, Facebook seems well positioned in certain ways to enter the smartphone market.

It already has an entire operating system complete with messaging, calendar, contacts and video, and an immense app store is on its way with thousands of highly popular apps. There's also that billion-dollar camera app, in the form of Instagram.

If Facebook fails with its own team of engineers, it could buy a smartphone maker. The company took in $16 billion from its bumpy IPO.

It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research in Motion, which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed Facebook operating system on top of RIM's phones. HTC is upset with Google for buying Motorola, which is worth about $11.8 billion and becoming cheaper by the day.

Facebook would not necessarily challenge Apple if it enters the smartphone marketplace. Instead, it could be Facebook vs. Google, which makes the Android operating system, with both companies going after a huge number of buyers of lower-priced smartphones.

"When you offer an advertising-based phone, you're targeting all the users on prepay that are budget-conscious of their communications costs," said Carolina Milanesi, a vice president and analyst for the Gartner Group.

Milanesi said that at a mass market level, both companies could take the same approach as Amazon, offering low-cost hardware, like the Kindle, and subsidizing some of the costs through advertising.

After all, both Facebook and Google make their money through advertising. If the companies have the opportunity to continually put ads in front of people on a smartphone screen, you would think the only question left would be to pick the right ringtone that makes that ka-ching sound.

source
 
RE: Facebook hoping to release its own smartphone by 2013: Report

I'm sure it would be a flopshop...

FB shouldnt try to enter into Google's arena !
 
Facebook working on Facebook Exchange

Facebook is working an a real-time bidding feature for advertising on its website. According to reports the technology, already used by Google and other Internet companies, is aimed at more effectively targetting ads at consumers.

The service, to be known as Facebook Exchange, will provide advertisers access to various types of social network users, categorised on the basis of their browsing history. Facebook's real-time bidding is expected to roll out within few weeks.

With Facebook Exchange, advertisers will be able to show up time- sensitive ads to users. Advertisers can show more relevant ads, as they will be based on code that tracks users' web activities or cookies. Which means, if a user who has accessed various travel sites, he might see travel-related ads on Facebook.

It's learnt that the social networking site will allow users to close the ads in their browser, and then a link will direct users to a website for opting out of the cookie tracking. According to a Facebook spokesperson, users can find out more info on opt-out procedures at the company's ads page.

"We do not share any user data with advertisers and people still have the same control over the ads they see on Facebook that they do today," a spokeswoman said in a statement.

Facebook advertisers currently target consumers based on the interests they mentioned in their profiles and the pages they 'Like' on the social network. Facebook says it will continue to offer these advertisements and such interests will not be based on the real-time bidding service.

The new service comes just days after ComScore in its report claimed the social networks prompt consumers to do shopping (online and offline). The report said users were influenced by the social marketing messages.

In a contradictory report, Reuters said very few were influenced by the Facebook ads. It said only 1 out of 5 people on Facebook actually purchased products because of the ads or comments they saw on the network.

What do you think of Facebook's new real-bidding service? Let us know in the comments section:
Digit
 
Facebook reports $157 mn loss in Q2

MUMBAI: Facebook reported a net loss of $157 million for the second quarter ended 30 June against a net profit of $240 million a year earlier.

Facebook's revenue for the second quarter totaled $1.18 billion, up 32 per cent from $895 million in the second quarter of 2011. Its advertising revenue was $992 million, representing 84 per cent of total revenue and a 28 per cent increase from the same quarter last year. Payments and other fees revenue for the second quarter was $192 million.

The US-based company said its costs and expenses were $1.93 billion, an increase of 295 per cent from the second quarter of 2011, driven primarily by share-based compensation expense.


The loss from operations was $743 million in the second quarter, against income from operations of $407 million a year earlier.

Capital expenditures for the quarter were $413 million, a 213 per cent year-on-year increase. Additionally, $52 million of equipment was procured or financed through capital leases during the second quarter of 2012.

Cash and marketable securities grew to $10.2 billion, which includes $6.8 billion in net proceeds from our initial public offering.

"Our goal is to help every person stay connected and every product they use be a great social experience. That's why we're so focused on investing in our priorities of mobile, platform and social ads to help people have these experiences with their friends," said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.


Facebook's Monthly active users (MAUs) were 955 million as of June 30, 2012, an increase of 29 per cent year-over-year. Daily active users (DAUs) were 552 million on average while Mobile MAUs were 543 million.

During the quarter, Facebook rolled out a new Facebook Camera app for iPhone, an improved version of the mobile messenger app for both iOS and Android, and several updates to the Facebook Android app.

The social networking major also launched global App Center where users can discover relevant apps for mobile and web. Apple announced plans for a deep Facebook integration throughout the next version of Apple's iOS and OSX.

The company rolled out sponsored stories in News Feed and enabled advertisers to buy sponsored stories in mobile News Feed. Facebook now has independent ROI data from more than 60 advertising campaigns using a variety of third-party methodologies like panels and marketing mix models.
 
Facebook: Now get notification fo other tagged photo likes..!!

Now if someone has tagged you in his photo and another fb user has liked it then you will also get notification. They are doing changes regularly.
 
RE: Facebook: Now get notification fo other tagged photo likes..!!

They should add a notification settings page, by that users can mark which notifications they want and which not..!!
 
Three years later, deleting your photos on Facebook now actually works

After years of photo hoarding, Facebook now deletes user photos within 30 days.

erase-photo.jpg

It has been more than three years since Ars first started covering Facebook's inability to remove "deleted" photos from its servers, but this particular saga appears to be coming to an end. The company told Ars that its new photo storage systems are in place and are now deleting photos within a reasonable period of time, which we were able to independently confirm.

But this doesn't mean Facebook's privacy problems are gone. There are plenty of other issues that Facebook users have run into in recent years. As the company moves forward into its new role as a public entity, those issues will have to be addressed if Facebook wants to remain on top.

How we got here

We first began investigating Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter in 2009 to see how fast our drunken-escapades-slash-cat-photos disappeared from the Internet after we deleted them from each of the social networks. Our method for checking for the photos was to save a direct link to the JPEG in question—easily obtainable by even the most computer illiterate by right-clicking on a photo and telling your browser to open it in a new tab/window, then copying the URL.

Though it took mere seconds for Twitter and Flickr to remove the photos from their content delivery networks (CDNs) after deletion from the site, MySpace and Facebook weren't so quick. MySpace got around to deleting the photos from its CDN several months later, but Facebook ended up being the embarrassing holdout. It took more than a year after our coverage began for Facebook to delete my photos from its CDN, but it seemed like only my photos were deleted—numerous Ars readers wrote in with links to their own photos that they tried to delete, and nearly all of those remained online (in direct-linkable form) for three years or more.

All along, Facebook had maintained that users having direct URLs to deleted photos was rare (I have piles of Ars reader mail to the contrary), and that the photos were only available online for a "limited amount of time." But in February of this year, the company finally admitted that its systems may not have been working correctly in the past, confirming that not all photos were deleted within a reasonable amount of time after all.

"The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens told Ars in February. "We have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted."

Gone in 60 172,800 seconds

That has now changed. Since February, all of the direct photo links that were sent to me by Ars readers disappeared, and I began deleting my own photos again from Facebook's site to see how long it would take for them to be removed from the CDN. I tested this with two photos while saving their direct URLs, and both photos became inaccessible within two days of deletion.

Wolens confirmed to Ars that this was a result of Facebook's new photo deletion policy and storage systems.

"As a result of work on our policies and infrastructure, we have instituted a 'max-age' of 30 days for our CDN links," Wolens told Ars this week. "However, in some cases the content will expire on the CDN much more quickly, based on a number of factors."

Wolens wouldn't elaborate on what those factors are, but he did emphasize once again that people casually surfing Facebook would stop seeing the photo immediately upon deletion.

"As you know, the photos stop being shown to other users on Facebook immediately when the photo is first deleted by the user. The 30-day window only applies to the cached images on the CDN," Wolens said.

Better late than never, but 3+ years is still quite a while for the world's most popular social network to figure out how to remove images from its CDN properly. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is probably glad the company's policies have finally changed, too, because there may be even more embarrassing photos that weren't downloaded by outsiders before they were "deleted" from the site.)

Instagram: even faster

Facebook bought photo sharing service Instagram in April of this year, so I thought I'd take a look at Instagram's photo deletion procedures as well. The two companies are unlikely to be completely integrated at this point, so it made sense that Instagram might operate a little differently from Facebook at the time of this writing.

I tested by deleting two photos over a period of four months. The first one was "deleted" in April but didn't disappear from Instagram's servers until last week, while the second disappeared instantaneously. There was no two-day delay, or even a two-hour delay, or a two-minute delay. The moment I deleted the image, it was inaccessible from Instagram's servers. Curious about the discrepancy, I asked the company about its policies.

"We mark photos as deleted on [Amazon S3] after a user deletion, though they may be cached in our CDN for up to 24 hours after. There was a short time period where photos weren't getting marked as deleted in S3, but that has been fixed," Instagram spokesperson Kevin Systrom said in response to the four-month delay in deleting my first photo. "It's easy for us to re-delete if there are images where this is the case, but they should be few and far between the billions of photos that we have up there."

Indeed, followup tests from different accounts yielded instant deletions on Instagram.

Where do we go from here?

If there's anything I've learned from covering this issue for the last 3 years, it's that this—and other privacy-related issues on Facebook—are quite widespread. Users have an exceptionally hard time getting anyone at Facebook to listen to their complaints, too; I know this because they usually Google around, find my old coverage here at Ars, and start begging me for help in finding a real person to answer their inquiries. I have received almost unreal levels of e-mail on just Facebook-related privacy problems over the last 37 months.

One reader named Joachim Schipper wrote to me with a devious plan to trick Facebook into removing his "deleted" photos from the CDN. The theory involved transferring the US rights of the photo to a friend (complete with notarized document and payment), and then having that friend send a DMCA takedown to Facebook in order to have the photo removed from the original poster's account. I was unable to confirm that this strategy would work, but when your users are resorting to this level of inconvenience in order to make sure their photos are really offline, you have a serious user experience problem.

Other readers wrote to me about different aspects of their Facebook experience remaining online indefinitely. Many pointed out that Facebook chats are only hidden and not deleted when a user thinks they're deleting them. Others said that deleted private messages seemed to magically resurrect themselves when using any one of Facebook's mobile apps or outside applications. And more than one user told me horror stories about how their friends-only Facebook albums somehow ended up being publicly accessible, and there's at least one unanswered Get Satisfaction thread on the topic.

Facebook is now a public company as of February of this year, so these kinds of issues will only get more and more attention from users and regulators alike. How Facebook handles those issues going forward will help determine how Facebook is seen by the public as more competitors enter the social networking space. So while the issue of photos staying on Facebook's servers indefinitely appears to be laid to rest, there's plenty of work left to do when it comes to handling user privacy, transparency, and user communications—and we're sure Ars readers will continue telling us their Facebook privacy problems while they wait for Facebook to come up with a solution.

Via arstechnica
 
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