Facial recognition company Face.com has just released a new mobile application that takes advantage of its technology to identify the faces of your friends in photos. Called “KLIK,” the app is a real-time, facial recognition mobile camera app for iPhone that automatically identifies your friends by name before or after you take their their photo.
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ShoeBox, the mobile app that lets you scan old photos and post them online, is today announcing Facebook Timeline integration. Using the newly released version of the ShoeBox iOS application, users will be able to scan photographs of family and friends using their smartphone, tag users by name, and then share those photos to Facebook.
But here’s the really cool part: ShoeBox is one of the first Timeline-integrated apps that’s letting you post photos into the past. By that, I mean you can edit the date on your photo, and it will post to the correct place on your Facebook Timeline. Nifty! → Read More
4 months after it launched its Twitter-style asymmetrical Subscribe feature, Facebook and its Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik’s efforts to weaken Twitter’s stranglehold on breaking news are paying off. The company just announced that thousands of journalists now use Subscribe, including 50 reporters from The New York Times and 90 from the Washington Post. If Facebook can get your favorite journalists publishing through Subscribe, you’ll have less need for Twitter. Next I hear it’s setting its sights on getting celebrities and entertainment tastemakers onboard.
Additionally, Facebook released some best practices for how journalists can maximize the engagement (Likes, comments, and shares) on their posts. → Read More
Sometimes the nicest of people, when faced with the pressure of competition, make evil stupid decisions. That’s pretty much what happened to Google when it realized that Facebook was about to eat its lunch with regards to social data on the web — so it started doing dumb things, like building Google Buzz, Wave and most recently rolling out “Search Plus Your World” which to the rest of the world just looks like “Search Plus Google+.” → Read More
Facebook has partnered up with sixty different startups to add their “stories” to Facebook Timeline, through apps that span different verticals from Food, Fashion to Travel. Already apps like Fab.com, Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest,Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, and TripAdvisor have signed on to share these stories — which go beyond what we’re used to on Facebook.
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Facebook’s Open Graph app launch event is underway here in San Francisco, where over 60 new Open Graph websites and apps are either demo-ing or launching remotely. The apps can publish user activity back to Timeline and Ticker, even from offsite. Launch partners include Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Gogobot, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Carl Sjogreen, Facebook project manager, also announced that Facebook will now begin approving apps from third-party developers who aren’t partners. → Read More
In September at f8, Facebook announced partnerships with a slew of companies who would develop Open Graph Timeline apps. Airbnb, Path, Ticketmaster, Payvment, Causes and 30 others all said they were onboard to produce apps allowing users to share when they “traveled”, “purchased” something online, “donated” to a charity, and other activity. 4 months later and many of these Open Graph applications have yet to launch, but that will change on January 18th according to our sources when a new class of Open Graph lifestyle apps is unveiled at a Facebook press event. → Read More
When you’re in charge of getting people to rent a move like Abduction, with its Metacritic score of 25 and a truly remarkable 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, what can you really do? The answer: whatever the hell you want. Short of stuffing free money into every box, few things could really help this one take off — so you might as well experiment, right?
And experiment they shall. Throwing Abduction to the sharks for the sake of testing their teeth, Lionsgate is releasing the film on DVD and Facebook simultaneously. → Read More
The average news feed post by a Facebook Page receives Likes and comments for 3 hours after being published. To maximize the engagement, impressions, and traffic driven by the news feed, Facebook Page owners should wait at least 3 hours between posts.
This new finding from a study by Facebook Page analytics company EdgeRank Checker could help Page owners avoid cutting short the lifetimes of their posts and overshadowing them with new content. → Read More
Audience measurement firm comScore has just released its U.S. online video rankings for December 2011. There are few surprises: Google’s YouTube is still king of the hill, while VEVO remains firmly in second place with roughly a third of Google Sites’ audience.
In total, comScore says 182 million U.S. users watched online video content in December 2011 for an average of 23.2 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience viewed 43.5 billion videos.
What caught my eye, however, was that Facebook dropped from third place in November 2011 to fifth place, trailing Yahoo and Viacom properties again, in a single month. → Read More
Facebook is making significantly more money per ad now, charging 23% more per 1000 impressions than at the start of 2011. There are still cheap ad clicks to be had on Facebook — you just have to keep traffic bouncing around within the social network. Facebook appears to be incentivizing advertisers to grow their Facebook applications and Pages, with cost per click campaigns that point internally costing 29% less than those linking offsite. These figures from a new study by ad agency giant TBG Digital show strong monetization performance and potential for Facebook as it prepares for an IPO this summer. → Read More
Today’s launch of Facebook’s synchronous music listening and chat feature “Listen With” will grow the social network’s time on site and encourage streaming service usage and subscriptions. But another big benefactor will be the musicians themselves. When someone plays a song for a friend, their “Listen With” chat room will display a link back to that artist’s Facebook Page. This will help musicians accrue fans to whom they can publish news feed links to concert tickets, merchandise, and their websites. Driving traffic to these additional revenue streams is crucial since streaming royalties are just a fraction of a cent per listen. → Read More
Look out Turntable.fm, Facebook today launches its own simultaneous music listening group chat room feature. New “Listen With” buttons in Chat and news feed stories allow you to select a friend as your personal DJ. When clicked, you’ll instantly launch Spotify or Rdio and start hearing whatever that friend plays in real-time. Other friends can also join your group chat listening room where you can discuss and rave over what you’re hearing, just like if you were listening together in person. → Read More
Making the link rounds among designers in Silicon Valley this holiday season is Facebook fan page Glitchr, which tries to mess up Facebook code on purpose.
While I had previously postulated that the page might be run by the venerable Evan Priestley, instead it is run by some Greek dude, Laimona Zakas. Click on any of the links in Glitchr’s posts and they will do anything from bring up random characters to load a second Facebook navigation bar multiple times.
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Over 400,000 sites currently use Facebook’s Comments Box social plugin the company tells me, and as of today they all support an optimized mobile commenting experience. Now you can criticize your least favorite bloggers — I mean participate in intelligent discussion while on the go. Just 10 months after the launch of the revamped plugin, Facebook is starting to creep up on commenting solutions like Disqus which appears on 1.1 million sites. → Read More
About two weeks ago, I couldn’t update my status on Facebook, like it just wouldn’t let me, showing me “Invalid Request” error messages even though my requests are totally valid DAMMIT.
And then just like that the fail stopped and I could update, inexplicably. In my humble experience, I’ve come across so many Facebook bugs I’ve given up on getting frustrated and now just hope they’ll eventually go away. I regularly just straight up don’t receive Messages and can we just talk about how the Like button just doesn’t work. Can we?
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TechCrunch has received a response from Facebook to the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s letter urging the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate Timeline for possible privacy violations. Facebook says it has not violated user privacy or its November settlement with the FTC. That’s because Timeline simply makes historic content more accessible, not visible to anyone who couldn’t already see it. Also, Timeline provides Activity Log for managing the visibility of this content. I agree. Facebook may be bending the rules of privacy, but it hasn’t broken them.
In response to EPIC’s call for an FTC investigation, as reported by Identity Matters, Facebook’s Director of Public Policy Andrew Noyes tells TechCrunch: → Read More
You know what’s cool? When you subconsciously want something and a startup responds to your (unvoiced) requests. Well, mobile photosharing app Instagram has just made a very small tweak that has the potential for huge growth: You can now send your Instagram photos full size to Facebook, and they automatically display “beautifully” in your Facebook Timeline.
Photos shared from Instagram will appear in your Timeline with the original caption that you posted on Instagram, as well as a link to the public Instagram URL.
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The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
In a move which is likely to catapult UK startup Moo onto a new international stage, the company has become the only one to deeply integrate its ‘social business cards’ with the Facebook platform today. Taking pictures from users’ Facebook Timeline information and photography, users will now be able to create 50 personalised business cards for £10/$15. But in a promotion from today Moo is giving away cards to the first 200,000 users, equivalent to 10 million cards. → Read More
