TECH CRUNCH - Sep 11 - Facebook is launching a new social networking platform, Facebook Campus, which offers college students a private place to connect with classmates, join groups, discover upcoming campus events, get updates from their school's administration and chat with other students from their dorm, clubs or any other campus group. The new platform requires a school email address (@.edu) to join and will live within a dedicated section of the Facebook app. Facebook likely wanted to address its "teen problem". Facebook has been losing its grip on the younger demographic, as they've shifted their attention to other social apps, like YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. According to Pew Research Center, only 51% of U.S. users ages 13 through 17 said they used Facebook, down from 71% who said the same in 2015. At launch, Facebook Campus is only available at 30 colleges and universities across the U.S.
1,410 posts categorized "Facebook"
Facebook Returns to Its Roots With Campus, a College Student-only Social Network
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Lawsuit Alleges Instagram Harvested User Biometric Data Without Consent
IDROPNEWS - Aug 13 - Facebook again is facing charges for reportedly harvesting biometric data from its users. This newly filed lawsuit targets Instagram. The complaint, filed in the state court system in Redwood, California, claims Instagram violates the state's strict biometric privacy law. This law prohibits companies from collecting biometric data without a user's consent. If Facebook is found guilty, the company could face a fine of $1K per violation or $5K per violation if its noncompliance was intentional. Facebook recently settled a similar suit, also out of Illinois, targeting Facebook's photo-tagging tool. Facebook claimed the suit has no merit but ultimately settled for $550M.
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China's Tencent Is Now Bigger Than Facebook
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Social Networks Aim to Erase Hate But Miss the Target on Guns
ECONOTIMES - July 23 - Mark Zuckerberg recently announced plans to ban a "wider category of hateful content in ads." Twitter, YouTube and Reddit have also taken additional steps to curtail online hate, removing several inflammatory accounts. But they all overlook a gun talk. The word "gun" appears but once in Facebook's policy on "Violence and incitement" to bar the manipulation of images to include a gun to the head. And neither "guns" nor "firearms" are mentioned in Twitter's policy on "Glorifications of violence," or YouTube's guidelines on "Violent or graphic content" or within any of these networks' rules on hate speech. Gun references have become prevalent in social media dialogues involving the nationwide protests over racial injustice, police reform and the BLM movement.
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The Rise of Niche and Vertical Social Networks
FORBES - Dec 21 - According to eMarketer, Facebook lost ~2M users under the age of 25 in 2018, and the number of Facebook users keeps dropping. Other social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn are losing young users as well. The reason is the growing interest in vertical networks. A vertical social network is a specifically targeted social network that connects people with very specific interests, hobbies, and passions. People on vertical networks can receive specific and targeted content on a daily basis and, even connect with people who share the same interests. There is a variety of vertical social networks catering to different individuals, including Behance, StackOverflow, Goodwall and ResearchGate. Behance is an advanced vertical network for creative individuals. It allows artists and designers to showcase their work and discover new art every day. On 2012, Adobe acquired Behance for $150M. StackOverflow provides questions and answers related to code development and the surrounding challenges. Goodwall is a community of 1M students and young professionals who connect to discover opportunities from $1M+ in scholarships to 5M+ jobs and internships. ResearchGate is the platform for scientists and researchers to share research articles.
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Facebook Has Declared War On YouTube
VENTURE BEAT - Feb 3 - Facebook’s autoplay feature on videos is extremely engaging. This key feature is not only pushing YouTube videos off Facebook, but also contributes to an increased rate of video watching and ad revenue from videos. YouTube reacted immediately by autoplaying the “related videos” at the end of each YouTube video play. What YouTube can do, which will have a bigger impact on numbers, is to simply activate the autoplay (not just related videos) in all embeds, without audio, just like Facebook.
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Facebook Beats Estimates In Q4 With $3.85B Revenue
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 28 - Facebook now has 1.393B users (890M daily users, 1.19B mobile monthly users), up 3.18% quarter over quarter. The company brought in $0.54 EPS on $3.85B in revenue. Mobile made up 69% of ad revenue compared to 66% last quarter, showing its business is now firmly mobile.
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Facebook Q4 Earnings Preview: $10B Annual Revenue
MASHABLE - Jan 27 - Facebook is expected to post earnings of $0.48 per share on revenue of $3.77B. If Facebook comes anywhere near that estimate, it will top $10B in annual revenue for the first time in its history.
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Facebook Takes Blame For Service Outages
REUTERS - Jan 27 - Access to Facebook and its Instagram was blocked around the world for up to an hour on Tuesday, which the company said later was due to an internal fault and not an outside attack. Tinder was also down around the same period, but recovered. A hacker group associated with other recent high-profile attacks on other online services sought to claim responsibility for the outages, but Facebook said the fault was its own.
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Facebook Releases Facebook Lite
LIFEHACKER - Jan 26 - A super lightweight version of its app directed at developing markets, currently only available officially in Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. The APK is about 252KB, as opposed to the 27MB.
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Facebook Accused Of Playing Monopoly With Virtual Currencies
FORBES - Jan 23 - In an antitrust lawsuit, Social Ranger LLC claims that Facebook parlayed its dominance of social gaming into an unlawful monopoly. They claim game developers were invited to its social network platform to attract subscribers, telling the developers that they could keep any money earned. When Facebook purportedly saw how much money developers were making, it launched its own virtual currency and service provider and made game developers use it instead of the variety of virtual currencies and service providers available. The social gaming market in the US was valued at over $5B for 2015 - Facebook reported around $200M in revenue from the sector for the Q1 of 2013.
by Peter Geier
See full article at Forbes
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1.35B Facebook Users Have $227B Global Economic Impact
VENTURE BEAT - Jan 20 - According to a new report commissioned by Facebook and conducted by Deloitte, the social networking site had a global economic impact of $227 billion and indirectly created 4.5 million jobs in 2014. Deloitte says Facebook generates economic activity through its marketing tools, its app platform, and the incentive it creates among its users to consume more mobile broadband and data services.
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Facebook Wearable By 2025?
DAZEINFO - Jan 16 - Zuckerberg did not elaborate as to how we would be wearing a device to be able to Facebook with each other in a decade from now though he went on to assure that the wearable will not look weird like some of the stuff that exists today. In fact, he suggested that the Facebook wearable of the future could look pretty much like a pair of glasses does today. Zuckerberg owned network is now working on developing the next major computing platform which, according to him, is augmented reality and Oculus.
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Facebook Unveils Facebook At Work
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 14 - The company is launching new iOS and Android apps simply called “Work,” along with a version of Facebook at Work accessible via its main website, which will let businesses create their own social networks amongst their employees that are built to look and act like Facebook itself. Employers can create separate log-ins for employees to use with their Work accounts, or users can link these up with their other profiles to access everything in one place.
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Facebook Will Start Showing Mobile AMBER Alerts
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 13 - Beginning this morning, Facebook will begin sending AMBER Alerts about missing children to the newsfeeds of mobile Facebook users in the area. The alert system built into most smartphones is limited to a few lines of text — enough for a license plate, and perhaps a super brief description of a vehicle involved in the abduction. Facebook’s system, meanwhile, can send just about anything that’ll help get the kid home, be it pictures of the child, shots of the involved vehicles, or specific details about the situation.
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