It is a common comment that the people that buy Apple products will pay more to get less. Although there are some that have “done the math” and calculated the hardware costs a proof of this it is still not where near a “fact” (it is fun to say though). People tend to like what they like and will pay for what they want. As I was told before during a class on sales “a good deal is a state of mind”. If you think it is a good deal then, guess what, it is.

When the movie “The Social Network” came out it depicted Mark Zuckerberg as a person with, let’s say, control issues. Both Zuckerberg and Facebook tried to play this down and say that he was and is not really like that. The problem is that time and time again the corporate personality injected into Facebook by Zuckerberg keeps rearing its massively ugly head.

There are sometimes items that show up in the market that seem to point to something on the horizon that could be quite interesting. Although when we first saw the news that Facebook had picked up another Apple employee (this time the UI designer for iWeb and Numbers) we did not think much about it. Now however, there is something else that is on the horizon and that seems to counter some information that we had before about a possible Facebook phone. This is the news that RIM might be considering selling off their handset business.

Facebook has finally bought facial recognition company Face.com. For those of you that do not know Face.com are the people behind the facial recognition API in Facebook and their Apps for both iOS and Android. This technology (that is also used in a few other apps) has brought about a wave of privacy concerns (as is tagging of any kind really). It is known that Face.com stores face information in a database and is capable up dating facial information as more pictures of an individual are tagged. This can be used to create a very accurate likeness model of someone regardless of what they do to change or conceal their appearance (with the exception of radical plastic surgery or prosthetics).

We have talked at length about Facebook and some of the ways they take advantage of their user base. One of the last ones we talked about directly was the paid promotions idea that they came up with. For a few dollars you can promote your advertising to reach more of the people that like your page. We have called this idea a lot of things (some not suitable for printing) and likened it to paid spam.

On June 11^th something happened across the internet that has reverberated through many online services that we take for granted. Starting with Facebook there was an unexplained (and Facebook still refuses to comment) run of legitimate sites suddenly being marked as spam, then just as suddenly being “fixed”. We saw this with our links where after posting an article on Microsoft we lost all links between June 11^th and May 28^th. When we tried to repost them we were told that the links were blocked because they were “spammy”. Our report of this issue resulted in well over 100 others stating the same thing was happening to them.

Do you remember the Facebook phone rumors that ran around the internet? There were articles both for and against a phone that centered on the social networking (and often privacy intruding) giant. I personally do not think it would be a good idea or that it will go over well with many consumers in the US (Europe is another matter though). However, when we talked with Paul Amsellem, CEO of Mobile Network Group, he mentioned that one of the things that Facebook would need to do is develop a better mobile payments system…

The internet has been flooded with talk about a Facebook branded phone (both for and against). There have been rumors of purchases, new hires and more floating around all that seem to point to the fabled device. We have talked about some of the market concerns with a device like this (mostly privacy and user data collection), but many of these concerns relate to the US where laws on consumer protection and privacy are still in their infancy. We took the time to speak with Paul Amsellem, CEO of Mobile Network Group about the drive behind and the importance (to Facebook) of this device.

Remember when we told you that Facebook was going to allow companies to pay to promote certain posts? Well it is now in full swing as it looks like Facebook has rolled out the service to everyone’s pages. Over the last week we have been having issues with posting links on the DecryptedTech Facebook page, yet when we reported the issue there was almost no response from Facebook about the issue. As it turns out this issue was due to the changes that Facebook was making behind the scenes.

So the rumors about a “Facebook” phone have begun to pop up again. This time they are claiming that the arrival date of the social device will be sometime next year. These rumors are being fueled by other rumors (which is how you do it) and all seem to back up the possibility that Facebook might indeed be looking to try and enter the smart phone arena. How smart this decision is remains to be seem, but for now let’s just take a look at some of the supporting evidence.