This weekend Google announced that it was shutting down Picnik, its handy dandy free photo editing software. I've used it on a number of occasions for fast, easy jobs that didn't require anything more than simple resizing. But let's be honest: How many of those types of quick photo editing jobs are just for Facebook photos? Aviary, a photo editor for Web and mobile apps, saw this opportunity and jumped on it, launching a photo editor app today for Facebook.
Facebook has finally surpassed Google's Orkut in Brazil. Launched in 2004, Orkut quickly caught on in Brazil and remained the number one network until the end of 2011. Facebook was Brazil's number three most popular social network in 2010. A recent ComScore report showed Facebook's steady increase throughout 2011. It only took the lead in December 2011, edging out Orkut with 36.1 million visitors.
Spotify was essential to Facebook's frictionless sharing plan. But not every app is down for cluttering news feeds with moment-to-moment information about what its users are doing, saying, thinking and listening to.
Music streaming service Pandora, for one, is staying out of Facebook's social apps completely. "It's true that music is a social experience, but it's also a very private experience," Pandora founder Tim Westergren recently told CNN. "We have to be very cautious."
Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg voiced his personal opposition to the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation, joining the ranks of fellow Internet powerhouses Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Reddit.
"The Internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world," writes Zuck. "We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the Internet's development."
Facebook is full of images and videos, many of which violate copyrights. Users peruse the news feed and their friends' walls for content. When they find images or videos that they "like," they share them to their walls and their friends' walls. They're not thinking about whether or not this content violates copyrights, and what posting it to their wall would even mean. No, Facebook users are too busy thinking about what they "like." In 2011 alone, Facebook users shared 30 billion pieces of content every month.
If Facebook had it their way, users would come to the site and stay. Ads would send users to other areas of the social network. No one would ever leave. So it comes as no surprise that Facebook's latest ad strategy focuses on subtle ways to keep users in the network.
In the second quarter of 2011, Facebook's advertising department offered an interesting incentive to advertisers: If your ad kept people on Facebook, it would cost you 29% less than an ad that sent users out to another website. For the fourth quarter of 2011, Facebook offered the same deal and pushed the number up to 45% off. Given that Facebook does as much as possible to keep you on the site, will it eventually become your one true social network?
Where were you on the Internet in 2010? What about in 2011? The folks over at Royal Pingdom have compiled a nice set of data for the Internet, by the Internet. That is, an entire list of data about email, websites, web servers, domain names by their .dot web addresses, Internet users by country, types of social media, web browser usage, mobile users, videos and images. We decided to take a look at the data points that tell us the most about the read/write web: websites and domain names, Facebook, Twitter and Internet users by continent. More importantly, we'll look at how the Internet of 2011 compares to the Internet of 2010.
A few weeks ago, I found myself at Chicago's New Wave Cafe in the very hip, artsy neighborhood of Logan Square. After ordering my requisite sandwich and coffee, I searched for a table. It was the lunchtime hour, and the place was packed. So I did what any normal person does: I walked up to a girl who was sitting by herself at a two-top table, and I asked if I could join her. She sat behind her laptop, with a smartphone and KindleFire on either side of her. "Sure," she said, removing her headphones only slightly. As I went to sit down, I noticed that she, like many folks at this cafe, had Facebook open. But the profile she was viewing belonged to me.
Facebook wants to win the race for the Internet. But one frontier that it hasn't yet mastered is video. If Facebook can capture the video-viewing Web audience, its users will stay on the site longer, sharing more with each other and to their Walls.
As the concept of social TV continues growing, Facebook has an opportunity to reinvent social sharing around frictionlessly sharing full-length television shows and movies rather than just YouTube channels and clips.
College students appear to have gotten over the creep factor of connecting with their professors on Facebook and would prefer to use the 800-million member social network for formal class assignments and discussions over other platforms, including Twitter.
Those are the preliminary findings of Dr. Rey Junco, a college professor who has been studying social media in the college classroom. Not too long ago, students often bristled at the idea of using Facebook in classes because it meant connecting with their professors. But Junco's more recent research shows students prefer Facebook because they're already using it.
"I think [using Facebook] would've been easier and a little more comfortable for people because I think pretty much everyone in my class had a Facebook and nobody had either one of these thing," one student in the study said of a class that gave students the option of using Twitter or Ning, a service that lets people create closed social networks.
Facebook is ready to unleash a string of verbs into your Timeline. According to a report from AllThingsD, the Facebook Open Graph will be unleashed on the ecosystem this week bringing more "read, watch, listen" applications to the social platform. Open Graph apps that track what you eat, where and how far you run and what purchases you make could be announced as early as tomorrow.
Open Graph apps are the final installment of what Facebook announced at its f8 Developers' Conference in San Francisco last September. Open Graph apps are the coup de grace to Timeline. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, "We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them."
