Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Facebook and Yahoo, Working Together
In January, Yahoo had taken on a new CEO and she goes by the name of Carol Bartz. Almost right away, the President and now CEO, Carol Bartz had decided to give Microsoft Corp. the opportunity to continue researching the Internet search technology.
Infact, earlier in the year, Yahoo had re-designed their home page, and in doing so added an option for the user to check his/her Facebook messages from the Yahoo homepage itself.
Now, almost any activity performed from the Yahoo site can be brought into Facebook's news feed. The main goal of this is to drive users back to Yahoo of course, generating a little more buzz around it's own website.
Yahoo has been doing a lot to transform their image including working with Facebook in an attempt to re-vamp its brand.
This new change to Yahoo, is a big one, and Facebook has been adjusting to its vaslty growing community as well, actually, currently Facebook has about 350 million members.
Facebook Connect is a program that has been around for about a year now, and what this does is it allows the user to make their personal ID from Facebook, more universal around the web, meaning your Identity would be known from Facebook so this website you are on now has a way to trust you and or know who you are.
Is Identity 2.0 taking a lift off? It seems like it.
Labels: carol bartz, facebook, Identity, yahoo
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Some Privacy Please, Facebook
In 2006, more than 700,000 people signed an online petition to prompt Facebook to be more strict with its privacy issues.
Currently there is an application running with Facebook called Beacon. Beacon is program that shares with users the websites you have been to and even the purchases you have made.
Obviously this could be a problem. If you are friends with someone on Facebook, and bought them something, they could be alerted and the suprise blown, instantly because of Beacon.
"One of the reasons Facebook is popular is that it makes it so easy for users to follow their friends' activities" Says Andy Carvin, NPR's senior product manager for online communities.
This program Beacon, was protested against and petitioned by as many as 50,000 Facebook users. Facebook took a stand and made this program optional with a check box, but there is still way that it stay active anyway.
I personally use Facebook, and I agree, it makes it extremely easy to follow your friends and see what they are doing. I haven't had issues with the privacy policies, but I can certainly see where people do. Facebook is just the start of privacy issues on the internet.
Google currently saves every search ever done, forever.
Beacon "may collect information on non-Facebookmembers." Any computer that is used to log onto a Facebook profile instantly becomes a tracking number for Facebook computers. Facebook says it deletes all this information received in this way ... but we will never know.
Labels: Beacon, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, social networks
Monday, November 03, 2008
Facebook Founder Interview 2007
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg interviewed by John Battalle at Web 2.0 Summit, October 17, 2007.
Labels: facebook, social networks
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Current Event Blog: October 25th
In looking for a current event's article that has to do with things we have talked about in class, I was able to stumble along an article in the New York Times about the ongoing battle for a stake in Facebook and in this article, it goes on to say how Microsoft won that battle with a bid of $240 million.
In a battle staged against Yahoo and Google, Microsoft won the battle with an offer of $240 million. In spending all of that money, Microsoft will receive a 1.6 % stake in Facebook and will also get the opportunity to sell banner ads appearing on Facebook outside of the US, splitting the revenue with the previously mentioned company. This will add to the agreement already in place between Microsoft and Facebook which is a contract through 2011 which allows Microsoft to run banner ads on the site but only in the United States.
It only goes to show you how a free website, created for advertising and social networking (ala MySpace), can create such an astronomical amount of revenue by virtue of the public's reaction to the website and company, thus forcing larger and more powerful companies to get involved and expand their industry, creating more of a money making opportunity for the little, free to sign up social networking website. Just think about this. Mark Zuckenberg, the 23 year Harvard drop-out who is also the founder of Facebook, owns a 20% share of Facebook, which is valued at about $3 billion. Unbelievable.
In a battle staged against Yahoo and Google, Microsoft won the battle with an offer of $240 million. In spending all of that money, Microsoft will receive a 1.6 % stake in Facebook and will also get the opportunity to sell banner ads appearing on Facebook outside of the US, splitting the revenue with the previously mentioned company. This will add to the agreement already in place between Microsoft and Facebook which is a contract through 2011 which allows Microsoft to run banner ads on the site but only in the United States.
It only goes to show you how a free website, created for advertising and social networking (ala MySpace), can create such an astronomical amount of revenue by virtue of the public's reaction to the website and company, thus forcing larger and more powerful companies to get involved and expand their industry, creating more of a money making opportunity for the little, free to sign up social networking website. Just think about this. Mark Zuckenberg, the 23 year Harvard drop-out who is also the founder of Facebook, owns a 20% share of Facebook, which is valued at about $3 billion. Unbelievable.
