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When Facebook started out, their problem was getting more users. That goal is now evolving to a more mature one: getting users more engaged. In a recent talk with some Facebook people, they mentioned that an important metric for them is users that are active in 6 out of every 7 days. Facebook is constantly tweaking its experience to increase engagement and to drive people back into Facebook. A major problem is that we’re not on Facebook all the time.
Why Facebook's Web Browser is Google's Worst Nightmare
FACEBOOK has released details of the extraordinary security infrastructure it uses to fight off spam and other cyber-scams. Known as the Facebook Immune System (FIS), the massive defence network appears to be successful: numbers released by the company this week show that less than 1 per cent of users experience spam. Yet it's not perfect. Researchers have built a novel attack that evaded the cyber-defences and extracted private material from real users' Facebook accounts. It took just three years for FIS to evolve from basic beginnings into an all-seeing set of algorithms that monitors every photo posted to the network, every status update– indeed, every click made by every one of the 800 million users. There are more than 25 billion of these "read and write actions" every day.
Inside Facebook's massive cyber-security system - tech - 26 October 2011 - New Scientist
Interactive video turns Facebook fears into 2 minutes of horror - CNN.com
(CNN) -- A sweaty, wild-eyed man in a stained undershirt hunches over his computer in a shadowy basement. He's broken into your Facebook account and is reading your posts as his dirty, cracked fingernails paw at the keyboard. Rage (jealousy? hate?) builds as he flips through your photos and scrolls through your list of friends.
The Democratic Republic of Facebook - FT.com
Once upon a time Facebook did not exist. There were forerunners but it was only with Facebook that everyone suddenly took full advantage of the chance to re-engage with people we’d spent the past decade forgetting; school friends with whom we never had that much in common; that couple we met on holiday but probably wouldn’t like if we invited them to dinner. This fabulous new opportunity to stay in touch with people we didn’t care about very much came free of charge. Yes, free; this is important.The notion that certain ideas spread like viruses is ingrained in everything from product marketing to political campaigning. It is also wrong, say researchers who have studied the spread of Facebook. They say that people are more likely to accept an idea that has been adopted by several social groups. The result has implications for anyone wanting to promote a message. The theory that ideas can be "contagious" is an old one.
Variety, not viral spread, is key to Facebook growth - tech - 02 April 2012 - New Scientist
As the age-old battle between citizens and consumers moves online, it becomes possible to make out the contours of an Internet optimized for consumption. This Internet is fully transparent (e.g., all of our activities are observed, recorded, and analyzed with a view of predicting our future behavior), highly efficient (e.g., everything is organized and stored for us; all of it is findable within seconds), and extremely reliable (everything is interconnected but backed-up; cybercrime disappears along with pseudonyms).
Salman Rushdie and Facebook’s pseudonym policy. - Slate Magazine
Facebook is steamrolling forward. It now boasts 800 million active users. The company is reportedly preparting for an initial public offering . It’s laying plans to sell a Facebook phone , strengthening its presence on the mobile web.
Facebook is starting to lose its touch | MediaFile
Facebook's Surprisingly Humble, $1 Billion Acquisition of Instagram - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
That's a big deal in Silicon Valley both because Instagram has been one of the hottest social networks of the last few years and because Facebook has never made an acquisition of a company this large. And if you believe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, they may never make another purchase like this again. "This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users," Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook , of course. "We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together." If you're a Facebook user, you should be ecstatic.
Facebook: The Ultimate Dot-Com
History will record that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t the first college student to have the idea of enabling people to set up Web pages and share stuff with their friends. Yesterday, my colleague Silvia Killingsworth wrote about the Winklevoss twins, two Harvard grads who famously accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for Facebook while working on their fledgling site Connect U. Before the Winklevii, there were the folks behind MySpace and Friendster. And before them, way back in 1995, there were Todd Krizelman and Stephen Paternot, who launched TheGlobe.com from their dorm rooms at Cornell.Two days after a disastrous initial public offering , shares in Facebook are collapsing . They’re down to $33, well below the IPO price of $38. Zachary Karabell weighs in on the Facebook IPO. That makes sense since, at $38, the shares were wildly overpriced, valuing Facebook at more than $100 billion .
Zuckerberg Bombshell: Did Facebook Bankers Quietly Slash Forecasts Before IPO?
Wed May 23, 2012 9:03am EDT (Reuters) - Facebook Inc, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, and several banks led by Morgan Stanley were sued by shareholders, who claimed the defendants hid the social networking leader's weakened growth forecasts ahead of its $16 billion initial public offering.
Facebook, banks sued over pre-IPO analyst calls
At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy. The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency.
The Facebook Fallacy
Facebook and its bankers are engulfed in complaints related to the initial public offering of the company’s stock. The IPO has been a disaster, with Facebook shares almost immediately collapsing below their original $38 offering price. (At the closing bell today, they were trading at $32.) The mess got worse on Tuesday, when Reuters reported that analysts for Facebook’s underwriter banks apparently lowered their future-revenue estimates for Facebook, and told some investors—but not all. So as the smart money was warned off the offering, the dumb money was rushing into the deal. That would seem bad enough, but some reports say that even as Facebook apparently was guiding down future-revenue estimates, the company and its underwriters were raising the price of the offering and adding extra shares.