In a letter to the two companies, Bureau Director Jessica Rich noted that WhatsApp has made clear privacy promises to consumers, and that both companies have told consumers that after any acquisition, WhatsApp will continue its current privacy practices.
“We want to make clear that, regardless of the acquisition, WhatsApp must continue to honor these promises to consumers. Further, if the acquisition is completed and WhatsApp fails to honor these promises, both companies could be in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act and, potentially, the FTC’s order against Facebook,” the letter states.]]>
That’s exactly what scares the fans of Oculus. They wanted the next great gaming experience, not a communication tool.
That brings us to the dangers in the Oculus deal. Let’s start with the thing not to worry about: the money. Facebook has more cash than it can possibly spend. An acquisition like this is just a way of recycling some of it. It’s kind of like Japan Inc. buying golf courses in the US in the 1980s. They had to do something with the money.
What I’m worried about are the odds that the deal won’t live up to Facebook’s lofty expectations. Let’s start with the risks to Oculus. Very definitely worth the time reading in full.]]>
Nonetheless, Paper was developed in secrecy for more than a year before its surprise unveiling in January. That seems more like Apple’s approach than the internet companies’. Facebook and Google often post new services to the web to see how users respond, before improving them based on large-scale, real-world behaviour.
Mr Grignon says Facebook’s sometime motto of “move fast and break things” sits uncomfortably with many longstanding Apple employees. “It’s a recklessness, in a way, of engineering. It works well for folks like Facebook but Apple engineers going into companies like that can experience a certain level of frustration.”]]>
If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.]]>
“Whatsapp was definitely an exciting product,” he said. “We never made an offer to acquire them. Press reports to the contrary are simply untrue.”
The source of the reports that Google attempted to pick up WhatsApp for $10bn source back to a report by Fortune citing “two separate sources” claiming Google had previously underbid Facebook.
The Information (paywalled) added to the mix that Google CEO Larry Page met with WhatsApp’s leadership just before Facebook’s acquisition went public in a last minute effort to at least keep WhatsApp from selling.
While Pichai explicitly states that Google made no offer to buy WhatsApp, there was certainly smoke signalling a connection prior to Facebook’s acquisition of the firm. Reports surfaced just over a year ago describing talks between Google and WhatsApp over a possible acquisition, but WhatsApp was quick to deny any such talks.]]>
From now on, any emails sent to a users @facebook.com email address — which all Facebook users could claim upon signing up for the social network — will now be automatically forwarded to the default personal email address used to sign up for the site…
It’s not for lack of trying to make it work. Two years ago, Facebook gave users a nudge toward using their Facebook.com email addresses by switching the default settings and displaying those addresses on users’ pages without letting them know beforehand. It did not go over well.]]>
Page was willing to pay more than the $19bn Facebook paid for WhatsApp, according to a new report from Amir Efrati and Jessica Lessin at The Information.
But WhatsApp's founders turned down Google because they believed the only reason Page was bidding on WhatsApp was to keep it out of Facebook's hands.]]>
"It's not necessary that people feel Google or Facebook has done anything bad with data to date. It's what might happen in the future. It's a nebulous fear," said Laura Simpson, global director of McCann Truth Central, during a session on privacy held by Ad Age and IPG at CES in Las Vegas.
By comparison, Amazon topped the list of companies consumers trust with their data, with 73% of respondents citing the e-commerce giant. It's worth noting that a majority of respondents also named Google to this category, but that number fell from 63% in 2011 to 53% in 2013. Twitter is seen as a threat to privacy? ]]>
What does the invasion of Mum, Dad, and the grandparents mean for Facebook? That's harder to discern. Perhaps more advertising opportunities - because the older generation is more accustomed to react favourably to adverts? Or more potential revenue, because that generation has (or used to have) more money?
But the more interesting question is whether this will mean any change in the culture of Facebook. And you get your answer in 2013, when Facebook is "dead" to teens in Europe.]]>
The Melin declaration furthermore says that "to prove to Nokia that he knew the confidential terms of the Apple-Nokia license, Dr. Ahn recited the terms of the license, and even went so far as to tell Nokia that 'all information leaks.' The Apple-Nokia licence was secret, and only provided to Samsung's lawyers for an expert witness to investigate - not for distribution to Samsung. On Thursday we asked Samsung to confirm the details of the meeting. It hasn't responded so far. The judge's statement says the document was marked "Highly Confidential - Attorney Eyes Only" - yet sent to more than 50 Samsung executives without redaction. Samsung's lawyers confirmed that "dozens" of individuals had seen the document, according to the judge's statement. The judge has told Samsung to make Ahn available for interview.]]>
Currently, when you hide something in your News Feed, Facebook begins feeding you less content from that person or page, but the company is working on ways to better understand why you don't want to see a photo, status update, article or advertisement. 'Dislike'.]]>
For example, when I searched my social network for “friends who like ice cream,” Facebook only returned 12 results. Left out was the silent majority who regularly lick cones and never bothered to tell Facebook.
Graph Search also tends to be too literal, often failing to discern the broader meaning of specific data points. For example, a search for “my friends who work at newspapers” returned no results, even though several hundred of my Facebook friends have listed specific newspapers as employers. Latter point is tricky if you don't have structured data. Former point is just, well, life.]]>
The same point, I think, applies to Google Glass. If you spend all day in the Googleplex, thinking googly thoughts about data ingestion and Now and the interest graph, then having 'Google' hovering in front of your eyes instead of rubbing on a phone seems like a really obvious progression. It's a wider musing on the meaning of "customer". But when did Google change from being a company that wanted to send you away from its site to the best search result as fast as possible into one which wanted to wrap itself, Alien-like, around your face all day?]]>
The answer is surprisingly obvious. It’s a fact well-known to advertisers, though it’s not always appreciated by people who use Facebook or even by folks in the Web ad business: Clicks don’t matter. Whether you know it or not—even if you consider yourself skeptical of marketing—the ads you see on Facebook are working. Sponsored messages in your feed are changing your behavior—they’re getting you and your friends to buy certain products instead of others, and that’s happening despite the fact that you’re not clicking, and even if you think you’re ignoring the ads.
This isn’t conjecture. It’s science. It’s based on a remarkable set of in-depth studies that Facebook has conducted to show whether and how its users respond to ads on the site. The studies demonstrate that Facebook ads influence purchases and that clicks don’t matter. ]]>
"We sold a bunch more when we lowered the price," he said in an interview on Monday. "We sold everything we had on that."
It's unclear how many HTC First phones AT&T had in its inventory, and the company wouldn't discuss the actual number. And even if AT&T has sold out of the phone, it is by no means a success. Worth a crouching ovation?]]>
Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as part of their account on Facebook. As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers for their contacts or people with whom they have some connection. This contact information was provided by other people on Facebook and was not necessarily accurate, but was inadvertently included with the contacts of the person using the DYI tool. It really is the world's phone directory.]]>
Or is it that they *are* seeing the messages, but they either:
a) don’t care?
b) aren’t capable of doing anything effective to stop them?
Whatever the explanation, it’s disturbing to continue to see spams and scams spreading so effectively across the world’s most popular social network. There aren't any nekkid pics. The app pretending there are will take a lot of liberties, though.]]>
In Silicon Valley tech companies, typically top engineers — who have an understanding of the product only recorded in their vast brains — and one or two executives make the list. I spent two years at a tech startup that had about 80 people, and the bus number was two, maybe three.
With the way tech is starting to enmesh itself in our lives, I’ve wondered if a sort of bus number existed. How many tech companies are there that, were they to magically evaporate, bring the average person’s life to a significant halt? Which ones would really throw a monkey wrench in the daily fabric of technology? Not behind-the-scene all-stars like NVIDIA, IBM and Intel, but the ones that people associate with their day. Naturally any loss would be filled in by competitors eventually, but there are a few companies whose disappearance would change the game for a significant period of time. (And redefine “first world problems.”) Take note too of his "note for commenters". Golden.]]>
The Trojan, which was first detected in 2007, is only getting more active. According to researchers at the security firm Trend Micro, incidents of Zeus have risen steadily this year and peaked in May. And malicious links to it are now appearing on Facebook. Beware: it seems the "Russian Business Network" is back in, well, business.]]>
Mapping Music on Facebook from Facebook Stories on Vimeo.
More than 110 million songs, albums and radio stations have been played 40 billion times through apps integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph. So what does it look like when millions of sound waves travel through Facebook?Turn that racket down in New York! (Thanks @beardyweirdy666 for the link.)]]>
At the least, I expect an increased emphasis from Google on the virtues of “stock” Android, and an increased push to make that consistent for consumers. This is already underway on both OEM and developer fronts, but Facebook’s lurking presence will force the issue that much harder. Has implications for Apple too.]]>
…Facebook has loudly and confidently entered an arena it has no prior experience in, and has set a clear path to expand its influence at its own pace. Facebook Home will provide a halo effect to current Android users that warms them up to a full-blown “Facebook phone” in the years to come.]]>
Not to see if it was still April Fools Day, but to see if it was somehow still 2011.
Because the content of the presentation was remarkably similar to the launch event we did for Windows Phone two years ago.
When we sat down with a blank sheet of paper and designed Windows Phone, we put three words on the wall to guide the team: “Put People First”.
Those three words were chosen around a pretty powerful but simple insight: People are more important than apps, so phones should be designed around you and the people you care about, not the apps you might use to reach them. Worked out well for Windows Phone, after all. Also, wasn't the launch of Windows Phone in October 2010? The irony is that Facebook is likely to do very well out of its Android launcher.]]>
Now, this being Facebook, nothing really works unless you sign in. The problem is, all of this is pre-release, so it's set up to only work for Facebook employee accounts. Everything is basically packing unintentional always-on DRM, so screenshots are going to be a little sparse. Could this be HTC's revival - or just another phone with Facebook, like the one it released a couple of years ago? Seems though the app and launcher will also work on Samsung's Touchwiz; that means an app that would be front and centre on your phone.]]>
Maybe I'm just cynical. Or maybe there really is nothing new under the sun. But if you ask me, social sites need more content creators - and fewer diligent meme mules ferrying viral junk from point A to point B with their heads down.]]>
When it comes to second-screen advertising, it’s Twitter’s world now and there’s no close second place.
Last year, brands split their focus on Twitter and Facebook with eight mentions each. This year, brands recognize that Twitter is where they need to try to attract the online conversation around one of the world’s biggest events.]]>
People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence. Jan 2013: TechCrunch abandons Facebook logins for comments, saying that engagement is too low *waves to non-Facebook commenters*.]]>
* You can only call other people running Messenger for iOS--which in my case, is only three or four of the people I've chatted with lately. One possible reason: Facebook chats often represent an unwanted intrusion.
* Nobody can call you from outside of Facebook--unlike Google Voice and Skype, which give you a real number reachable from other phones, VoIP or not.
* Unless you're on a mostly-data plan like T-Mobile's (great!) $30 prepaid deal, you probably already have more voice minutes than you'll ever use. Note the use of the word "yet", though.]]>
As part of this switch in focus, from Monday 17 December we will begin directing users who click on a Guardian link within Facebook straight to our website to view articles, so over time all users will no longer be shown the content on a page within Facebook.]]>
In some cases this has the same effect, if someone copies and pastes a URL into Twitter instead of clicking the embedded tweet button. But the data also show the hidden but popular practice of sharing links privately with specific people over email or IM, said Greg Cypes, director of product for AddThis parent company Clearspring Technologies.
“The desire for people to share one-to-one or one-to-few … is much much greater than we originally expected it to be,” Cypes said.]]>
But it's never felt quite right to me. For one, I spent most of the 90s as a teenager in rural Washington and my web was highly, highly social. The social networks you can name aren't the ones that actually send people to sites.]]>
CTO Eric Feng, brought in through a March acquisition, is on his way out. Cofounder Shawn Fanning is no longer day to day at the company.
It's particularly bad news that Feng is leaving because after joining the company in March, he fired everyone who had been working on the startup's tech before. BusinessInsider's version is much more direct than ATD's. Total daily active users: 11,000. Venture capital invested: $13m. (By comparison: Instagram has 11m, though of course that cost a cool billion..)]]>
Zuck’s feat is super impressive, considering the letter is about the size of your average MG Siegler post — 2,178 words according to my Word document word count, if you don’t include Zuckerberg’s signature. It includes the letter, which is extremely long. He may have written it on the phone, but we suspect it was edited on a larger screen. But it points to a key trend: smartphones can be content creation devices for more than trivially short content. (Did he dictate it, we wonder? That would be really interesting.)]]>
In May, the Turkish government announced the new measure would take place in August and thousands of Turks concentrated in some 40 cities and towns around the country. Turkey’s Internet regulator wanted to introduce a selection of filters that users would choose from before browsing the Internet. Also, some words could be banned, such as “blond” and “sister-in-law”. There have been suspicions, which we've been unable to confirm, that Turkey has attempted some internet filtering of content moving in and out of the country.]]>
To take a smaller example, Twitter swapped out co-founder Evan Williams and replaced him with Dick Costolo, someone with no personal stake in the early vision of the network. Has that been a good thing or a bad thing? It has certainly changed the orientation of the company towards revenue-generating models like advertising — a move that appears to be driven primarily by a desire to justify the company’s alleged market value. Would it have been better to stick with a founder as CEO? And if it wasn’t better for Twitter, then why is it better for Facebook? ]]>