Facebook is partnering with French cellular operator Orange to bring cheap cellphones with dedicated Facebook functionality to emerging markets in Africa and Europe. Orange will release three devices with a special "F" button for unlimited Facebook access to 15 countries starting in the fourth quarter of 2011. The move fits well in line with Facebook's desire to increase its presence worldwide to people that may not have access to a computer but access the Internet solely through mobile devices.
The phones will be from Alcatel's series of Android phones. These are not feature phones with Facebook integration but actual economy class smartphones. The roadmap for Facebook in the emerging world is clear: get smartphones in the hands of people everywhere and an easy avenue to access the social platform.
In a new study released today, Pew Internet Research found that 66 percent of American adults online use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. They cite staying in touch with family and friends as one of the major reasons for using these sites. Seventy-one percent of the younger demographic, ages 18-29, cites staying in touch with current friends as a major reason for using social networks. Fifty-five percent of users ages 30-49 are on social networking sites to connect with old friends they'd lost touch with.
In a study released today, Edgerank discovered new insights into the value of Facebook comments and likes. Every time a post gets liked, it receives approximately 3.1 clicks. For every comment, a post will receive 14.678 clicks, which is 4.73 times or almost 5 times as many clicks as a like. Edgerank also examined shares and clicks by day of the week, and discovered that Wednesday had both the highest shares and clicks ratios.
Buffer, an app that stacks your tweets and publishes them at the best times for engagement, has just added Facebook to its repertoire. Now you can either schedule your Facebook posts using the default posting times (11am and 6pm) or just pick your own. What sets Buffer apart from the other tools is that with it, you can use the buffering pattern feature (paid only) to do post time-release posting instead of regular scheduling. This is not something you can do on other social media posting tools like HootSuite.
Last week Google+ introduced brand pages, an almost exact match for Facebook Pages. While Google now claims that Google+ is not a competitor to Facebook, the Pages products are so similar that they are bound to go head-to-head. Brands are going to end up getting more value out of one or the other.
In this post we look at the early efforts of two leading luxury car brands: BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The comparison shows that Facebook has a clear first-mover advantage in user numbers and its comparatively advanced developer platform. But Facebook shouldn't get complacent, Google+ has a lot of promise as a destination site where brands can truly engage their fans.
Facebook is close to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that it acted in a deceptive manner in regards to its privacy settings, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal.
The settlement would require Facebook to receive user consent before making "material retroactive changes" to its privacy settings. It would also require independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.
Sixty-two percent of teens set their profiles to private (friends only) on social media sites, according to results from a recent study by Pew Internet entitled "Teens, kindness and cruelty on social networking sites." Nineteen percent set their profiles to partially private, and 17% leave their profiles completely public.
Teens with public profiles tend to have had negative experiences on social media sites. They are nearly twice as likely as those who didn't have a bad experience to say that their profile was public (23% vs. 12%).
Today Facebook announced an update to its much contested news feed. This new version builds upon the current hybrid news feed, and has some aspects of the old one. But instead of being able to toggle back-and-forth between "top news" and "recent news," users will see a "sort" button at the top which gives them the option to see highlighted stories first, or recent stories first.
"The highlighted stories are the ones which have the most likes or the ones which are featured to you," a Facebook spokesperson told ReadWriteWeb. "The most recent stories will be under those top stories. There will be a button where you can sort chronologically."
One thing that won't change in this news feed update is the larger-sized photos.
The update will rollout out tonight and continue over the coming weeks. See screengrabs after the jump.
In a post on the Facebook developers' forums, Manager of Facebook's Preferred Developer Consult Matt Trainer wrote that they had "made some changes to our Page posts ranking system, which added more signals to determine Page post quality." Yet he also wrote the following: "We will continue to add in more Page post quality signals over time to ensure that people are always receiving engaging and relevant content in their News Feed." Does this mean that the News Feed no longer penalizes third-party apps?
Apple had a great month in the new app department, mostly spurred by the release of the iPhone 4S and all the iOS5-based applications that developers have been working on throughout the summer. Android also had an interesting month for new apps but the real intriguing flood will come whenever Ice Cream Sandwich becomes widely adopted and, finally, we can start adding real Android tablets apps to our apps of the month column. Check out the selections for October 2011 below. We again brought back the updates portion of the column, with a list at the bottom of important app updates users should be aware of. Check it out below.
The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.
