In addition to announcing that Facebook (FB) now has 1 billion active users every month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the company’s first agency-created video ad. Created by Wieden & Kennedy, Facebook’s video titled “The Things That Connect Us” likens the social network to chairs. Yes, chairs.
Investors may still wonder about Facebook’s (FB) long-term business strategy but there’s no denying that the social network has been massively successful at drawing users. And on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his company’s news page that there were now “more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month,” a remarkable number that puts all other social networks to shame. Zuckerberg went on to say that “helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.” More →
Facebook’s (FB) newly acquired Instagram is growing like crazy. According the latest comScore research, Instagram pulled in 7.3 million active users per day on mobile compared to Twitter’s 6.9 million during the month of August. Not only that, but comScore found that Instagram users were actually engaging with photos longer than they were doing so with tweets. The research shows that the average Instagram user spent about 257 minutes browsing and using the service versus the 170 minutes spent on Twitter last month. More →
In a panel held at Buzzfeed’s headquarters, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams shared his view about how the follower count might not be all that important after all. As the social network sees more accounts attempt to buy their Twitter influence, Williams says that it’s possible the social network service might move away from measuring how many followers a user has and replacing it with metrics based on how many views a tweet receives. ”The thing I think would be more interesting than followers is… retweets,” says Williams. The Twitter board member went on to say that follower counts “don’t capture your distribution. Not only would an emphasis on how many times a tweet’s been read provide greater accuracy for influence outreach, but it would also stifle all the high percentage of spam accounts that Twitter sees.
Facebook (FB) knows it can’t keep growing without generating new revenue streams, and Reuters reports that the social networking giant may have found some potentially significant ones if it can get businesses to pay for its Offers service. Facebook Offers, which launched earlier this year, has so far been a free service that lets businesses send out special deals and coupons to their followers on Facebook. But Reuters says that within the next month Facebook “will require merchants to pay at least $5 on related ads to promote each Facebook Offer to a targeted audience of fans and friends of fans.” More →
Back when they were students at Harvard, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, along with their fellow alum Divya Narendra, had a vision for a hoity-toity social networking site that would only be available to the Harvard elite. To realize this vision, the story goes, they outsourced building the site to fellow student Mark Zuckerberg, who famously took the Winklevoss twins’ idea and transformed it into the largest social networking site in the world. But The Wall Street Journal reports that after the Winklevosses settled their lawsuit with Zuckerberg for $65 million, they began plugging it into a social networking site that looks a lot more like their original idea than what Facebook (FB) turned into.
Updated to clarify that Narendra, not the Winklevoss twins, founded SumZero in 2008. More →
Charlie Miller, the security expert who made his name exposing major security flaws in Apple’s (AAPL) iOS mobile operating system, has been hired by Twitter to make sure his fellow hackers don’t uncover similar gaping flaws in its own social networking site. Miller told Forbes in a phone interview that “he couldn’t offer any information on exactly what he’ll be doing at Twitter,” although the publication speculates that he will be a “full-time penetration tester to probe the service for hackable vulnerabilities and help fix them.” Miller was last seen over the summer giving Google (GOOG) software engineers ulcers when he successfully used NFC connectivity to push malicious code onto Android devices. More →
Aside from denying plans to build a smartphone again, Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed some insight to the social network’s search engine ambitions. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Zuckerberg said that ”Search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers, ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me,’ ” and that Facebook is currently handling more than 1 billion queries per day without even trying to compete in search. Put into context, Zuckerberg might be looking to create a service that rivals existing question-and-answer websites such as the popular Quora, and it will certainly compete with Google (GOOG) as well. “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. At some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on it,” said Zuckerberg. More →
In his first interview since Facebook’s (FB) IPO, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated once again at TechCrunch Disrupt that the social network is not building a smartphone to compete directly with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Google’s (GOOG) large assortment of Android devices. Echoing what he said in a July earnings call, Zuckerberg remained firm that a Facebook phone “just doesn’t make any sense” and that even if it was considering a bid to enter the mobile hardware market, it would probably only manage to attract “maybe 10 or 15 million people to use it.” Zuckerberg told TechCrunch that Facebook will double down on mobile by having direct system-wide integration a la iOS 6 or improving optimization for its apps by switching from HTML5 to native code.
Famed American business magnate Mark Cuban has some sharp words for investors who bought Facebook (FB) shares on their first day of trading and are now crying about the company’s plummeting stock. In a post on his personal Blog Maverick page, Cuban says that investors should have absolutely known what they were getting into when they plunged their money into yet another risky tech IPO and added that it’s wrong to blame Facebook for charging $38 per share when people were willing to pay for it. More →
Give Facebook (FB) some credit: The company can seemingly admit when it has screwed up. And now that it has made some much-needed improvements to the Facebook mobile app for iOS, it is now turning its attention to fixing the Facebook Android app as well. According to Business Insider, Facebook workers are “getting nudged, cajoled, and even ordered to give up their iPhones for Android devices” because “Facebook management realizes its Android app is subpar… and believes that the only way employees will take fixing it seriously is if they have to deal with its issues day in, day out.” Andrew Ravenscraft of Android Police, for one, welcomed the news by saying that he’d “be lying if I said this story didn’t just make my day” because “the Facebook for Android app sucks.” More →
Sad but true: Investing your life savings in Facebook’s (FB) IPO shares is now only half as bad of an investment as sending your bank account number to the deposed prince of Nigeria. Facebook shares once again got hammered on Friday and closed down 4% at $19.07, or just above half the $38 price that Facebook set for its IPO back in May. Facebook’s trading volume on the day totaled around 107 million shares, or roughly three times its average trading volume of 36 million shares. The company’s overall volume was down from Thursday, however, when it totaled a whopping 157 million shares after some company insiders got their first chance to dump their shares.
