Facebook just released its 2011 Memology, which gives a complete rundown of top Facebook's most talked about topics and biggest memes of 2011. In the top global topics on Facebook category, the death of Osama bin Laden wins, closely followed by Packers win the Super Bowl and Casey Anthony found not guilty. We've also picked out the most read/write web-y Facebook trends on the list, so be sure to take a look.
Ten weeks ago Facebook said it would launch Timeline in the next few weeks. Today Facebook began rolling out the Timeline user interface to users in New Zealand. Facebook's Product Manager Samuel W. Lessin made the announcement today on the Facebook blog.
We reached out to Facebook about why Timeline began rolling out in New Zealand. Here's what they said:
"As a global company, we need to gain perspective and insights from outside the US. One benefit of starting rollout in New Zealand is that it's English speaking, so we can read the feedback and make improvements quickly."
A couple of weeks ago, Facebook started rolling out semantic changes to the Events feature. The options "Yes," "Maybe" and "No" have changed to "Join," "Maybe" and "Decline," essentially making Facebook Events seem more like Facebook Groups.
Facebook also added a new additional events button to every Event. If you click, it will lead you to all the other Events in your queue at facebook.com/events.
Why would Facebook make going to an event feel more like joining a group?
Today we received confirmation that Facebook is officially hiring Gowalla's engineers and designers. They will move to Facebook in January.
Facebook is not acquiring the actual Gowalla service or the technology behind it. Gowalla states that Facebook will not inherit any of Gowalla's user data, and that it will soon provide users a way to export their Passport data, Stamp and Pin data (along with legacy Item data) and photos. What does the end of Gowalla mean for the launch of Facebook's Timeline feature and the new era of lifestreaming?
CNNMoney reports that Facebook has just acquired the location-based sharing service Gowalla. Sources say that Gowalla's employees will move to Facebok's Palo Alto offices and work on the Timeline feature, which is all about telling stories. Gowalla had recently shifted its vision to storytelling.
When Gowalla launched in 2009, it faced off against rival location-based social network Foursquare. Since then, Foursquare grew leaps and bounds in the location space, transitioning from a check-in service to a partner of daily deals giant Groupon. Gowalla got lost in the dust.
Read our full coverage of Gowalla, 2010 up to right now, after the jump.
Facebook has made an important new hire, bringing in a head of mobile developer relations to help steer the company's mobile ecosystem in what is sure to be a huge growth period over the next several years. James Pearce, formerly in charge of developer relations at Sencha, has accepted the job and leaving the framework company today, according to post on his personal blog.
Bringing in a person like Pearce is a very clear indication of where Facebook would like to go with its mobile platform. To understand where Facebook wants to go you have to know where it, and Pearce, have been.
Color, the photo-sharing social app that took the tech industry by storm when it announced $41 million in prelaunch funding shortly after SXSW in March, is almost complete with its pivot. As announced at Facebook's developer conference in September, Color has attached itself to the social network and wants to fundamentally change the notion of the status update. Augmented are the notions of the "elastic" implicit social graph and many vestiges of what Color was when it originally launched.
Color has now launched in private beta around the concept of visual Facebook status updates, called "visits." We explore the new color and its evolution below.
The Facebook+Journalists Page announced that now everyone can write posts with 60,000 characters, making status updates feel more like the not-so-often used notes feature, which doesn't appear at all in the Facebook Timeline-version at all.
The amount of characters one can write into a Facebook status update has been steadily increasing over the years, growing from 160 (how Twitter-like!) to 420, then to 500. In September, it reached 5,000. This new jump seems abrupt; the last big increase was 4,500 characters. This one is 55,000 characters, or 12 times as many characters as before.
Secure.me is a new security service that "offers consumers a way to regain control over their privacy on the Internet and social networks." Parents, too, can now monitor (stalk?) their children online.
"Our life has long merged with the online world," says co-founder Christian Sigl. "We use online services, social networks and mobile apps so actively that it's hard to keep track of every personal information about us, which is visible to others on the Internet - whether we put it there ourselves or it was placed there by friends, acquaintances or even completely strings."
Should young people and especially children be required to read the legal jargon found on social networks like Facebook and just take more control of their online security, or is that the responsibility of parents? Or should that actually be in the hands of services like Secure.me?
Today Facebook finally reached a settlement with the FTC over privacy concerns that have been haunting the social media behemoth as of late.
Facebook can't just up and change its privacy settings whenever it wants to. It must now obtain express consent from its users, first.
Since the settlement, Zuckerberg has penned a blog post outlining the Facebook features that the site has launched, which include friend lists, the ability to review tags before they appear on a profile, mobile versions of privacy controls, amount other notable updates. He also announced the splitting of the Chief Privacy Officer position into two parts, to be held by Erin Egan and Michael Richter in product and policy, respectively.
