When it comes to privacy and data protection, Facebook is hardly thought of as a leader among big technology companies. It should be somewhat troubling, then, that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has ranked Apple worse than companies like Facebook, Amazon and Comcast when it comes to protecting your data from the government. More →
Facebook isn’t in any danger of experiencing a MySpace-style implosion anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean the social networking giant isn’t in danger of seeing its clout slowly erode over time. The Guardian reports that a new study from SocialBakers shows that Facebook lost around 6 million visitors in the United States in just the last month alone, which represents a 4% decline of its total user base. The most recent drop in American Facebook visitors is part of a sustained decline, since SocialBakers estimates that the social networking site has seen a drop of around 9 million visitors over the past six months. The good news for Facebook is that its own photo-sharing social network Instagram has apparently picked up the slack and has “seen surges in popularity with younger age groups.”
Facebook unveiled Facebook Home, an application that replaces your Android phone’s homescreen with Facebook photos and status updates, earlier this month for select Android smartphones. Google chairman Eric Schmidt previously called the software “fantastic” and said it was a creative tweaking of the operating system that fits in well with Google’s conception of Android as an open source platform. He isn’t the only Google executive who finds Facebook Home intriguing, however: Android design chief Matias Durate told ABC News that Facebook’s homescreen replacement “shows an incredible amount of polish and attention to design detail,” which is impressive especially because it “didn’t come from a hardware manufacturer.” More →
Google on Friday changed one of its Play Store policies to prevent apps from being updated outside of its marketplace. The company states that “an app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play’s update mechanism.” The change comes shortly after Facebook tweaked its Android application to allow users to update it without using the normal Google Play update system. It could be a coincidence, however it would appear that Google is worried that other developers might have followed suit and would therefore become less dependent on its Play Store.
Facebook Home may have been downloaded more than 500,000 times in its first week but new research from BTIG suggests that it could take significantly longer to get its next 500,000 downloads. Using data from AppAnnie, BTIG found that Facebook Home’s ranking in the Google Play charts peaked at No. 50 on April 19th before quickly declining to No. 130 less than a week later. While Facebook debuted its Home application to great fanfare earlier this month, the app has been poorly received by many Android users who have been bombarding it with one-star reviews that account for more than half of all its total reviews on Google Play. BTIG says that because Facebook plans monthly updates to Home, it stands a chance to rebound if it can improve the user experience.
In many circles on competing services like Twitter, Facebook is the Nickelback of social networks. People love to discuss how awful it is and to joke about it constantly, mocking various aspects of the service and business such as how fast and loose it plays with users’ privacy. Everyone seems to have a Facebook account and yet no one seems to use the service actively. But just as Nickelback manages to sell millions of albums each year despite seemingly having no fans, Facebook — the social network people love to hate — has a billion monthly active users. More →
Facebook’s new Home software saw mixed reviews from those who took an early look at it, but tech bloggers and reporters aren’t exactly Facebook’s target market. Among Facebook’s heavier users, the software seems to have piqued a fair amount of interest. As TechCrunch noted over the weekend, Facebook Home downloads from the Google Play app store topped 500,000 on Sunday. The figure doesn’t seem terribly impressive at first sight considering that more than a billion people use Facebook each month, but the software is only available on five different handsets for the time being so it’s certainly a respectable start. More →
Facebook Home will never be available on the iPhone — at least not as we know it on Android. The software that turns every Android phone into a “Facebook Phone” is simply too intrusive to get around Apple’s strict developer guidelines. Facebook brought one of Home’s more intriguing features to the iPhone earlier this week, however, when it updated its app with support for “chat heads,” the small round avatars that pop up on the screen when a Facebook friend messages you. Chat heads obviously only work while iPhone users have Facebook’s app open, but a new jailbreak tweak launching soon bypasses Apple’s restrictions and makes chat heads available on any screen. More →
iOS Maps was obviously not one of Apple’s better efforts but that doesn’t mean the executive who oversaw its implementation has nothing to contribute to the tech world. Bloomberg reports that Facebook has hired Richard Williamson, the former Apple executive who headed the development of the ill-fated iOS Maps, to work as part of its mobile software team. Although iOS Maps was certainly a disaster for Apple, it doesn’t tell the full story of Williamson’s career — as Bloomberg notes, he worked at Apple for more than 10 years and was “one of the engineers assigned by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to build software for the iPhone.” So unless Facebook hired Williamson to oversee the creation of its own mapping application, it seems safe to say the company has found itself an experienced executive who can help improve its mobile offerings.
Facebook seems intent on testing its users’ patience for annoying and invasive content. Unnamed sources have told AdAge that Facebook is working with ad agencies to bring video advertisements to users’ Facebook timelines that will likely “be autoplay and presented in a video player that expands beyond the main news-feed real estate to cover the right- and left-hand rails of users’ screens.” AdAge says that Facebook hopes to make more than $4 million a day just from the new video ads, which it says “could be eagerly sought after by agencies that have plenty of TV ad creative on their hands and not enough TV-like web inventory to place it in.”
If early reviews are any indication, Google doesn’t have to worry too much about Facebook Home winning the hearts and minds of Android users. Facebook Home’s Google Play page shows that roughly 47% of Android users have given the new software just one star so far, while another 14.5% have given it two stars. Taken together, 61.5% of Google Play users so far have given Facebook’s newest Android software a below-average rating and Facebook Home’s overall rating on Google Play stands at 2.3 stars. Among other things, negative reviewers complained that Facebook Home “hid most of my other apps,” that it had “no support for my other widgets” and that it “made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours.”
Facebook (FB) on Friday was true to its word and released Facebook Home for some Android devices. The application, which was announced last week, is only available on select smartphones in the U.S. running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or higher. Compatible devices include the HTC One, HTC One X, HTC One X+, Galaxy S4, Galaxy SIII, Galaxy Note II and of course HTC’s (2498) First. Facebook Home gives Android smartphones a complete overhaul with a constant feed of pictures and status updates from users’ Facebook friends. The company also updated its Android Messenger application to include the new Chat Heads feature, which allows users to interact with friends even when another application is open. Facebook Home is available now as a free download on the Google Play store.
You can still send Snoop Dogg links to streams of your demo tape over Facebook (FB), but it’s going to cost you. The Sunday Times reports that Facebook has started rolling out a program in the United Kingdom that allows Facebook users to send celebrities direct messages if they pay a fee. Facebook says that the charges are intended to help people reduce the number of unwanted messages they receive from people don’t know since paid messages are delivered directly to the user’s inbox at the top of the page while unpaid messages from unknown people are dumped into a less prominent folder. Facebook also says that it’s “testing a number of price points in the U.K. and other countries to establish the optimal fee that signals importance.”
