Displaying items by tag: Facebook

If Mark Zuckerberg and crew needed any more evidence that people are not interested in a FacePhone they only have to look at the HTC First. This new phone has already dropped down from its introductory cost to the $.99 bucket which is normally reserved for products that are at or near the end of their sales life. The HTC First is less than a month old so why is it already in the bargain bucket? Is this showing that people do not want Facebook running their phone or simply a reflection that people are do not want a phone that is too social network oriented?

Online privacy is a big issue in the US and around the world. Every day we as consumers dump information about ourselves into the web in the form of email, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, documents purchasing habits and more. We put our trust in the companies that maintain that data and have faith that the laws that should protect our private information are being followed and even more to the point enforced. Sadly it seems that we have never really had a right to have our personal information protected after it leaves our computers and enters the Internet.

When you think of Privacy issues two names come to mind; Facebook and Google. For some reason both of these companies feel they have the right to mess with their users’ right to privacy. In some cases, like Facebook, you see services that are set to opt-out suddenly popping up or a collection and use of personal data that is not clearly defined (like the use of personal pictures in ads). For Google this has been an ongoing issue and one that has gotten them into a great deal of trouble in the EU. Not that long ago Google was asked to fix this and it seems that they have not only maintained their course, but have also made things worse by their inaction

It looks like the rumors of the death of the “Facephone” could have been exaggerated. According to some interesting rumors flying around the internet, Facebook might release their own branded version of Android on HTC hardware. This means that the potential for a Facebook banded phone is more likely than many (including us). Interestingly enough we did catch this potential in an article we wrote last year in May. We had spoken with Paul Amsellem, CEO of Mobile Network Group about the possibility of a Facephone and he had indicated that if this were to be a reality we would need to see a real product (OS or Phone) in 12-18 months. That article was published on May 30 2012. This seems to be a very unusual coincidence.

Research conducted by Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge has shown that the "likes" that we give to posts and articles can draw upon us the stunning amount of information and all that with a probability of 80%. Researchers managed to collect enough data to unravel the religious and ethnic background, political views, sex and many other things by using applications on Facebook like MyPersonality. According to the Wall Street Journal, the percentage of guessing the political affiliation of American respondents (ie - Democrats or Republicans) just based on their “likes” was over 85%, the race could be hit in 95% of cases, and sexual orientation in 88%.

icrosoft's Atlas platform is now owned by Facebook. According to the official announcement, Atlas will provide advertisers on the Facebook opportunity of comparing the efficiency of campaigns on Facebook with other ways of advertising on computers and cell phones.

Over the past year or two we have watched as companies like Microsoft, Crytek, Ubisoft and others push their business model into the cloud. At the same time we have watched as the number of cyber-attacks and data breaches increase. These attacks have also increased in sophistication and in some cases have not been detected until after the breach has been made and data lost. Still companies try to make the claim that their services, out of all of the others, are secure. Simply put (as we have always said) there is no such thing as a secure service, operating system, network or anything else. If it is connected or even powered on it is in danger.

Although many would say there are far more fake accounts, Facebook has admitted that in the past year about 76 million "fake" profiles have been opened on their service that has just over a billion users. These fall under the double accounts, wrongly classified and unwanted accounts and those where users deliberately identify themselves with a false name. In total, therefore, according to Facebook the fake accounts amount to 7% of the total number of users.

With more than 240 billion photos that have been published on the largest social network, Facebook is still the undisputed king of images on the Internet. Because of this it is not surprising that during the period between (12-31-2012) to the end of 01-01-2013 saw 1.1 billion photographs posted by users. This means that during these two days, the daily average of published images totaled 550 billion. This is a sign that users demolished last year's record when, during that period, Facebook announced 844 million photos of cheerful people.

Google’s CEO Larry Page told Wired that Facebook is strong in its main area, but bad at releasing new products. This statement came shortly after the launch of Facebook’s service called Graph Search, for searching and linking information within a user's group of friends. Although Page did not directly commented on the Graph Search (the interview took place in December), it is certainly a service with which Facebook is breaking into Google's territory of internet search.