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In an age of smartphone addiction, you'll find a Facebook user checking and updating from pretty much anywhere. But what about from the car itself?
Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have "liked" on Facebook. The feature will be available in the 2012 SL-Class Mercedes this spring as part of the mbrace2 telematics system, which includes cloud-based apps, traffic and navigation assistance, speech recognition and Internet browsing. mbrace also features a smartphone app, which allows drivers to send information to their vehicle before actually stepping into it.
Last week, news broke that Kodak was preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a long battle with digital photography and the proliferation of photo-sharing apps on the iPhone 4. Lest it be defeated, today at CES Kodak announced two new cameras that integrate with Facebook for easy photo sharing. The cameras also have two anti-social media applications for printing images from Facebook profiles. Kodak is banking on the idea that Facebook users may have a secret desire to print hardcopy photos from their Facebook profiles. Judging by digital-to-print image app Postagram, among others, they might be right.
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus named his gaming company after his late American bulldog, a beloved yet health issue-ridden breed with a short life expectancy. Ninety-five percent of four-year-old Zynga's business depends on Facebook. Will Zynga's overdependence on Facebook make it repeat the story of the bulldog it was named after?
Today Facebook launched the much anticipated Timeline and Timeline mobile for Android and its HTML5 mobile site m.facebook.com. But Timeline mobile for the Facebook iOS app is nowhere to be found. Timeline on the iPhone will be available in a future update of the Facebook iOS app, a Facebook spokesperson tells us. For now, iPhone and iPad users will have to use Facebook Timeline through the mobile site.
There's no doubt that Facebook Timeline will eventually go live for iOS apps. But for now, Facebook seems to be mostly focused on its HTML5 web app project. The fact that Timeline mobile isn't going live for iOS anytime soon is proof of that.
PayPal is aiming its peer-to-peer Facebook app, SendMoney, not only to Facebook users who want to send money to each other, but to those who want to drop an e-card in, too. According to a recent study from Pew, 64 percent of online adults use social media to stay in touch with family. Grandma can send her Facebook-addicted granddaugther a birthday card along with a nice chunk of change. Dad can pass along a nice "have fun on me" $50 to his college-aged son after the lad finishes a hard week of finals.
PayPal and Facebook want to bring together the world's biggest social network, and the world's largest online payments company - and e-cards may be the bridge to making that happen.
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.
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.
The changes that Facebook is making to the profile via the Timeline and media sharing are some of the biggest to ever come to the platform. Yesterday at Facebook's developer confererence, f8, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said with a smile, "We have been working on this for a year, we are extremely excited."
The Timeline, with its new media and lifestyle sharing features is a significant boost to Facebook's social graph. What Zuckerberg announced yesterday was the equivalent of putting the Open Graph API on steroids. That is good for Facebook and good for users, to a certain extent. But claims of invasion of privacy by Facebook and its ecosystem will skyrocket as well. What will Timeline do to user privacy and how will users respond?
Facebook developer George Lee threw down the guantlet at F8 today by saying that he wants each of its 800 million users to have a relationship with at least one developer and that relationship should be focused on content.
"Every single user who is on Facebook should have some relationship with some developer that creates distribution," said Lee.
Facebook is evolving its mobile messaging system. The company announced this afternoon a new mobile application called Messenger that stands alone from its original platform app. It will be available for Android and iOS and is a dynamic shift away from how Facebook has approached its mobile products, keeping everything within its dedicated platform app. Facebook is now stepping into the territory of Talk for Android and BlackBerry Messenger and is getting closer to having a true unified communications platform.
Messenger is fairly simple. If you have used BlackBerry Messenger before then you should be able to understand Facebook's newest offering (without the confusing PIN system of BlackBerry). Messenger can also do group chat, which puts it in competition with the Google Plus Huddle function in its mobile app on iOS and Android. What do you think of Facebook's new Messenger initiative? Is it something you plan on using?
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