Facebook Announces Searchable Hashtags, Promises More Features For Following Public Conversations. Facebook just announced that it is indeed launching ability to follow conversations via hashtags, as was reported in March. To be clear, there was nothing stopping you from including hashtags in your Facebook content before — it’s just that they didn’t have any real functionality. In its blog post announcing the new feature, the company acknowledges that this isn’t exactly a new idea, noting that it will be “similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest” — when you click on a hashtag, you’ll get a feed of comments using the hashtag.
Facebook says its capabilities will include searching for hashtags, clicking on hashtags that come from other services, and writing posts directly from the hashtag feed. Here’s how Facebook explains the reasoning behind the addition: Every day, hundreds of millions of people use Facebook to share their thoughts on big moments happening all around them. Public Conversations on Facebook. By Greg Lindley Every day, hundreds of millions of people use Facebook to share their thoughts on big moments happening all around them.
Whether it’s talking about a favorite television show, cheering on a hometown sports team or engaging with friends during a breaking news event—people on Facebook connect with their friends about what’s taking place all over the world. During primetime television alone, there are between 88 and 100 million Americans engaged on Facebook – roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night. The recent “Red Wedding” episode of Game of Thrones, received over 1.5 million mentions on Facebook, representing a significant portion of the 5.2 million people who watched the show. To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what’s happening or what people are talking about.
Introducing Hashtags on Facebook Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Now you can: • Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar. Facebook Now Lets US Users Pay $7 To Promote Posts To The News Feeds Of More Friends. Facebook is expanding to the U.S. the controversial Promoted Posts feature that lets users pay to get their posts more visibility in the news feed. It will cost $7 per post and Facebook hopes it will be used for garage sales, parties, wedding photos and other important announcements. Promoted Posts has already been rolled out to 20 other countries and is available to people with fewer than 5,000 total friends and subscribers. Promoted Posts could help surface important announcements and earn Facebook money.
However, I worry that Promoted Posts could change the atmosphere of Facebook from one where the most beloved content gets seen most to one where the rich can dominate the news feed. Facebook first began testing the product, then called Highlight, in May in New Zealand. It’s still testing price points for the U.S. so it could go up or down from $7, and cost varies across international markets to sync with what’s appropriate for local economies. How Promoted Posts Get The Word Out.
Is Facebook “broken on purpose” to sell promoted posts? In recent months, some Facebook page owners have noticed that their accounts are driving much less traffic to their websites than they used to. In some cases, Facebook clickthroughs are down by as much as half, despite a huge growth in likes. Even worse, some brands noticed that this drop in traffic coincided with a new Facebook feature called "promoted posts" through which brands can pay cold hard cash to push their content out to more news feeds than they would normally reach—and the brands are not happy about it. This juxtaposition of events makes it look like Facebook is artificially driving down traffic, then holding the old level of traffic hostage in order to generate some new revenue.
But Facebook insists it's doing nothing of the sort; instead, the company says that it's just trying to keep its users' Facebook feeds from getting too crufty with promotional posts they don't want to see. Broken on purpose? Poor posts will cost you So perhaps the complainers have a point. Facebook Platform Exec Ethan Beard Departs - Mike Isaac - Social. The question on everyone’s minds after Facebook’s May IPO — How long till the brain drain starts?
Apparently, not that long. Ethan Beard, director of platform partnerships at Facebook, announced on Wednesday via Facebook that he will soon leave the company. Shortly thereafter, platform marketing director Katie Mitic also announced her departure from the company. If that wasn’t enough, a third announcement came on Wednesday, as mobile platform marketing manager Jonathan Matus also announced his impending departure from the social networking giant.
Beard has been at Facebook for more than four years, and has been in charge of developing relationships with some of the top app makers that work with the company. “I’ve had the pleasure of helping build an ecosystem of incredible developers from innovative startups and established companies,” Beard wrote on his Timeline. As you’d expect, Mitic and Matus offered similar pleasant sendoffs in their own Facebook posts. Washington state to register voters through Facebook. Washington state residents will soon be able to register to vote through Facebook, thanks to a new app announced Tuesday. The app, developed by Microsoft, allows users to file voter registration forms directly from the secretary of state's Facebook page. Users will have to authorize the app to access their basic personal information (name and date of birth), which will be used to pre-fill each registration form.
In order to finalize the process, aspiring voters will have to manually enter their drivers license or state ID numbers. When the app launches early next week, Washington will become the first state to offer voting registration through Facebook. Shane Hamlin, the state's co-director of elections, hopes Washington's approach will make it even easier for citizens to register. "You are giving your information to us, not Facebook," Hamlin told Ars Technica. Facebook Finally Redesigns Events, Adds Calendar and List Views So You Don’t Miss Birthdays. Facebook has finally redesigned Events so you don’t miss another party, birthday, or cool get-together your friends are going to. Today the site launches the Events Calendar so you can see what coming up weeks in advance, and a List view that highlights each day’s birthdays, RSVPs, and suggested events (though these links won’t work until you get the rollout.
The redesign started as a Hackathon project a year ago and will replace the old Events for all users over the next few hours. You’ll access the new look the same as before, through the” Events” link in left-side navigation menu of your home page. Maybe Google+ launching a high-tech Events feature lit a fire under Facebook. Facebook Events has become the defacto way people organize parties with friends and promote shows at clubs, concert halls, and art galleries.
Calendar View Upcoming months can be seen by endlessly scrolling down. List View A deeper integration with Facebook Photos would certainly be appreciated at some point.
Congress members tout Facebook's new organ-donation tool - The Hill's Twitter Room. “Being an organ donor can make a difference in the lives of the 114,000 people in the United States waiting for a life-saving organ,” posted Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.). The senior Republican noted his past legislative work on the issue with former Sen.
Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). “I used to transplant hearts weekly but too many of my waiting patients would die before an organ became available,” Frist wrote on his Facebook page, adding that Facebook has now made it easier to “commit, register and then brag to your friends” about organ-donor status. “23 years ago I tried to increase organ donation the old way, by writing a book on the new miracle of transplantation,” Frist wrote. Facebook has around 900 million users, and a recent study found that the average user spent 405 minutes per month actively engaged on the site. “The organ donation crisis is not a medical crisis, it’s a social crisis,” Sandberg told ABC News’s Diane Sawyer in an interview set to air on Tuesday night’s “World News.”
Rep. Decline Of Reader Apps Likely Due To News Feed Changes, Shows Facebook Controls The Traffic Faucet. No, Facebook news reader apps aren’t declining because users suddenly got fed up with auto-sharing. The user loss is likely due to the transition to “trending articles”, a new way of surfacing recently read articles in the news feed that Facebook is testing.
Update: The Washington Post confirms my hypothesis: “Social reader “collapse” is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: “double-double,” 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon – drove growth.” Previously, Facebook had been driving huge numbers of installs and re-engagements to news reader apps with a “recently read articles” box that would often appear at the top of the news feed. But in mid-April following a massive reader app user count spike it replaced this with a redesigned “trending articles” box that shows fewer articles, and that seems to appear less prominently. What the these user count fluctuations really mean is that Facebook is in firm control of what apps and content types receive traffic from its news feed. Facebook Introduces Open Graph Action Links. Move over, action verbs, and make way for action links, which Facebook introduced today as a way for users to interact directly with timeline applications.
Action links are customizable links that permit app developers to allow users to perform additional actions when the apps’ open graph stories appear in the news feed, ticker, or timeline. Facebook provided more details in a post on its developer blog: For example, when someone checks in on foursquare and shares it on their timeline, friends can already like or comment on the resulting post through the links that appear as part of the story.
Now with action links, foursquare added another link, “Save This Place,” which enables people to save a place to their foursquare to-do list directly from Facebook. Fab.com allows people to add a product to their own Fab.com favorites with the “Fave This Product” action link. With Interest Lists, Facebook Wants to Be a Personalized Newspaper - Lauren Goode - Social. First we had Twitter Lists. Then Facebook Friends lists. Then smart lists. And now, Facebook is introducing Interest lists as a way to push relevant content up in the increasingly cluttered news feed. Facebook users will be able to subscribe to broadly defined Interest lists, such as sports, or more specific ones, like NFL football. The lists are created by users, and are comprised of public-figure profiles and pages. Facebook says this is a separate product from Friends lists, but users can add friends to an Interest list.
The social networking giant, which recently filed to go public, said Interest lists would be rolled out to users in the coming weeks. The blog Social Fresh first reported that Interest lists were in the works after spotting them when Facebook introduced brand-focused Timelines last week. But Facebook has already attempted to smarten up its Friends lists.
The importance of Facebook profile photos [Infographic] - TNW Facebook. Just how important are Facebook profile photos? Very, it seems. Social photo app startup Pixable has pulled together this infographic showing (among other things) that every year we’re changing our profile photos more often. The number of profile photos posted per user has tripled since 2006, while the average Facebook account has 26 profile photos. How did the company collate this information? “When users connect to Photofeed (Pixable’s app), our system has access to all Facebook photo related information, and this allowed us to run different analytics queries specifically around profile photo uploads. Former MySpace Exec: Facebook Must Avoid These 3 Mistakes. Facebook goes back to college, releases Groups for Schools. It’s back to school time for the world’s largest social network. Partially returning to its roots as a locked-down site just for college kids, Facebook has launched Groups for Schools, or university-centric Facebook communities restricted to active faculty and students with .edu email accounts.
“You can join a group for your major to discuss classes, for your sorority to plan upcoming events, or for your dorm to share photos,” Facebook engineer Michael Novati said of the new product. Groups for Schools, unique to each college, house all student and staff-created groups in a directory-like fashion, and offer up functionality similar to that of Facebook’s existing Groups product — except with one important addition. Group members can upload and share files, up to 25 MB in size, to exchange notes, assignments, and so forth with their college cohorts. “Facebook will continue to iterate on Groups for Schools as the feature is rolled out to more schools. Photo credit: drjazz76.
Mark Zuckerberg is a CIA Agent [Satire] Inside Facebook's Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where 'Camel Toes' are More Offensive Than 'Crushed Heads' A camel toe is not a vulva, nor does it have a more proper name. Er, well, not just a vulva. I think it's clear to everyone that your labia cannot be visible in your profile picture. I had never heard the term "moose knuckle" before.
The more you learn! You haven't seen much variety of labia have you? Yes, we all have labia on our faces as well. The problem with the genitalia visible through clothing thing is that it brings up the image of visible nipples or anything clearly visible through transparent clothing. I generally prefer proper terminology, but not where it is more cumbersome than simply using accepted slang that everyone will be familiar with. As Facebook grows up, it courts Madison Avenue. Facebook Kills Off Deals, Its Groupon Competitor. Foursquare wins major victory with death of Facebook Places. Facebook to use Microsoft’s PhotoDNA technology to combat child pornography.
Facebook Opens Viral Growth Channel for Pages, Delivering Invites to Like as Notifications. Ticketmaster Teams With Facebook So You Can Sit Next To Your Friends. Facebook's billionaires.