Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speaks with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit about features we can expect from the social-networking site.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO--Two of the biggest rumors about big, upcoming Facebook products--an ad network and a payment transaction platform--won't be making a big splash anytime soon, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a talk on Wednesday afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit.
"We're asked it all the time," Sandberg said on the question of whether Facebook would be launching an ad network for external Web sites using the Facebook Connect universal-login product. "We focus on building products for users and we think about the monetization later. And I'm not saying that in a cute way, because we are very focused on monetization."
Then there are the reports that Facebook will be launching a PayPal-like transaction system or large-scale virtual currency, a rumor that's been floating around literally for years. "There's a lot of speculation on payments, and (we) don't want to fuel the speculation," Sandberg said in her talk on Wednesday. She did say that Facebook processes payments internally for advertisers buying up inventory ("We needed people to be able to buy ads internationally," she explained) and that it's playing around with the "credits" system that it uses in its "gift shop" feature.
"We are doing some testing with a couple of developers to see if they can use credits in apps they have," Sandberg said. "That's all we're talking about right now. We're in a learning phase."
Some potential customers have hinted that Facebook may have already gotten too big to deploy such a product. When asked about the idea of a Facebook payment system, John Cahill, the CEO of teen virtual-world Meez, told CNET News earlier this week that he's skeptical about its potential.
"The bigger the social network, the harder it is for a currency," Cahill said. "I've spent some time in the payments space and the real-world currency space, and rolling out a payment system that can be used by millions of people is very, very difficult. If you get it wrong, you can destroy your community."
But Facebook is dipping one toe after another into the virtual-goods pool. Earlier on Wednesday, the New York Times broke the story that Facebook would be letting members gift songs to one another through a partnership with music service Lala. This would be the first concrete result of yet another longstanding rumor of a "Facebook music service."
Additionally, Facebook has partnered with a number of nonprofits for charity-focused virtual gifts.
Social photo-sharing site Flickr is adding a long overdue feature this week that lets users assign a name tag to people in photos. While the service is overflowing with photos of sweeping landscapes and close-ups of bug eyeballs, the Yahoo-owned company has noticed that many of its users are simply using it to share shots of friends and family, and that the existing tag tools were not made with people in mind.
The new system has been designed as a hybrid of the original tagging tools and Flickr's notes feature, all wrapped up into one. Users can tag a Flickr friend or contact in the shot, as well as draw a box around them, which looks and acts just like it does when creating a note so that when users mouse over a photo, they can see who a person is by what box they're in.
An identical system was introduced by rival photo service Photobucket back in late 2007, but there's a big difference between the two: Flickr's system is designed for the Flickr community alone whereas Photobucket's would let users link a people tag to any social-networking profile of their choosing. Flickr's implementation might be a little more limiting, but it makes a better case to join the service and fill out one's profile.
People tags look just the notes feature, except they double as normal tags too.
(Credit: Yahoo / CNET)Privacy and notifications
Each time a user is added, they get a notification through Flickr's inter-service messaging and via e-mail. Their friends get notified too, although this happens in Flickr's user activity stream which each user sees whenever they go to Flickr's home screen. Users can also see all the photos of themselves on Flickr in one central location, including on their profile--just like on Facebook and MySpace.
Of course users won't necessarily be able to add themselves, or others to every shot, and that's by design. In a call with CNET News on Wednesday Matthew Rothenberg, who is Flickr's head of product strategy and management, said that the privacy controls protect all three parties: the person who shot the photo, the person in the photo, and the person who added the photo to Flickr. And for anyone to tag another user in a shot, their permissions have to line up with the wishes of the two others.
Feel like de-tagging yourself from every photo you've ever been tagged in on Flickr? There's a big red button for that.
(Credit: CNET)On top of this three-way permission control system, there's also a way to globally set whether people can add you to shots, and what kind of relationship they need to have with you to do it. This includes an ejector seat-like button that can de-tag you from every photo you've been tagged in all at once, as well as a security measure that won't let anyone tag you in a photo once you've already de-tagged yourself.
Workflow and facial recognition potential
When adding someone to a shot, Flickr's people-tagging tool offers up suggestions from your contact list as you type.
(Credit: Yahoo / CNET)A major difference between Flickr's people-tagging system compared to Facebook's is that there isn't an engine built in that can remember and suggest the last few people you were tagging in any given photo set. Rothenberg says this could be added later on, but that Flickr's auto-complete is fast enough for it not to be an issue when users are looking up a friend's add to name it. In most cases you simply need to type just two letters to narrow it down to a shortlist of the person you're looking for.
The system has also been set up so that you don't need to enter any special people-tagging mode to start tagging friends--you can just double click on someone in the shot for it to come up with the people-tagging option.
Power users are not left out either. If you don't want to go through photos one at a time, you can just skip to Flickr's batch organization tool. This isn't automated like some of the facial recognition software tools we've recently looked at, which can give you suggestions of people it thinks might be in your photos. But it makes it a whole lot easier to go back and people tag (or de-tag) hundreds of your old photos all at once. This can be useful if you're trying to convert a photo set with one person into a batch of name tags.
Speaking of facial recognition, to be clear, it's not a part of Flickr's people-tagging system (yet). But just because it's not, doesn't mean third-party programs won't be able to tap into Flickr to do it. Rothenberg said that like any Flickr feature, people tags are being added into the API, and should be deployed for application makers to use in just a few weeks. That could be good news for sites like Face.com and Polar Rose, which will be able to do some of the people-tagging magic they've done for Facebook using Flickr's community instead.
The new people-tagging feature could be arriving for some as soon as Wednesday, but like with other new Flickr features it may take up to a day or two to migrate through Flickr's servers.
SAN FRANCISCO--More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day, Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer said in a talk Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit here.
Mike Schroepfer
Some 2 billion pieces of content are shared every week, and 2 billion photos are uploaded each month--1.2 million served per second on a "peak day," he said. Five billion calls to Facebook's application program interface (API) were made on Tuesday. It's huge: Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering, was focused on talking about the challenges of scaling a social network to the more than 300 million active users it has today.
One of the big challenges is that Facebook's home page news feeds have to be able to process 50 million operations per second. "We took a piece of open source software, Memcache, customized it, and deployed it," Schroepfer said as he discussed how the company keeps its home pages streamlined. "We were able to scale Memcache to five times its original performance."
He talked a bit about the company's culture, too.
"Move fast, break stuff" is one of Facebook's engineering tenets, Schroepfer explained. "Sometimes we push bugs. Sometimes we push products that people don't like." Those missteps, he said, are necessary for constant innovation. Some poorly-received modifications to the home page, for example, are about to be phased out.
The company also believes in accomplishing a lot with small teams, Schroepfer said. That's something some Facebook users might not think is such a good thing: Earlier this month a downed database at Facebook temporarily disabled about 150,000 accounts, and many took well over a week to come back. The company's chief operating officer admitted later that its response had been "too slow."
Gartner analyst David Cearley
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)ORLANDO, Fla.--Cloud computing isn't going to be vapor much longer, Gartner said Tuesday.
The general idea--shared computing services accessible over the Internet that can expand or contract on demand--topped Gartner's list of the 10 top technologies that information technology personnel need to plan for. It's complicated, poses security risks, and computing technology companies are latching onto the buzzword in droves, but the phenomenon should be taken seriously, said analyst Dave Cearley here at the Gartner Symposium.
Gartner's top trends to watch.
(Credit: Gartner)Specifically, companies should figure out what cloud services might give them value, how to write applications that run on cloud services, and whether they should build their own private clouds that use Internet-style networking technology within a company's firewall.
Cloud computing takes several forms, from the nuts and bolts of Amazon Web Services to the more finished foundation of Google App Engine to the full-on application of Salesforce.com. Companies should figure out what if any of those approaches are most suited to their challenges, Gartner said.
Gartner analyst Carl Claunch
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)The advice came as part of a talk on top trends coming in 2010 that companies should incorporate into their strategic planning, if not necessarily their own computer systems. The full list of 10: 1. cloud computing; 2. advanced analytics; 3. client computing; 4. IT for green; 5. reshaping the data center; 6. social computing; 7. security--activity monitoring; 8. flash memory; 9. virtualization for availability; and 10. mobile applications.
Second on the list is virtualization--not just in the broad sense of technology that lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, where it's become a fixture in data centers, but as a means to keep computing services up and running despite computer failures, said analyst Carl Claunch.
Virtual machines can be moved from one physical machine to another today. Later, by keeping two machines tightly synchronized, a failure in a primary machine can be eased over rapidly by moving the active service to the backup machine, Claunch said.
"We should start seeing this roll out in the next year or two from vendors," he said.
The Gartner hype cycle takes on the PC.
(Credit: Gartner)For PCs, virtualization is arriving, too.
"Think of applications in bubbles," Cearley said. "They can run on client devices or up on a server," with virtualization providing the encapsulation technology to move the work around. The official corporate computing environment can run side by side with employees' home computing environment.
That, along with cloud computing, enables more freedom for people using PCs.
"We're looking at a time when the specific operating system and device options matter a lot less," Cearley said. "You could use a home PC or a Macintosh with a managed corporate image running on that particular device...We see more companies providing a stipend (for) employee-owned PCs."
Make your data center modular.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Another idea: modular data centers. You don't have set up your IT gear in storage containers, but do divide them into pods that each have their own computing, power, and cooling, Claunch said. That makes it easier to pay as you go, to adapt to new technologies, and to increase energy efficiency by partitioning hot hardware from cooler hardware.
Green IT is important--and changing in its nature. It's not just a matter of buying efficient computers, but also of using computers to increase the efficiency of other parts of the business, Cearley said. For example, analytics can improve the efficiency of transportation of goods.
Next comes applications for mobile devices. "That has great potential for creating different experience or stickiness for your customers," Cearley said.
And mobile x86 processors from Intel and AMD could make software development easier, too, he added.
Social networking will happen internally and externally.
(Credit: Gartner)Social-networking applications, broadly defined, also should be on company radar screens. The technology can take the form of internal corporate social networks, interactions with customers, and use of public services such as Facebook and Twitter.
Companies need to get a handle on what's going on--and potentially business purposes such as understanding how the corporate brand is perceived.
"Social network analysis will be moving from a somewhat arcane discipline to a much more mainstream component of your social computing strategy," Cearley said.
Are Web users going to get tired of paying for kitschy virtual items to pimp out each others' profiles? Social-site creator Ning sure doesn't think so. On Tuesday, it announced the debut of its virtual goods platform, so that network owners can offer virtual profile items for sale (much like Facebook does) and pull in half the revenue generated.
"From giving each other bloody chainsaws to shock troop dog tags, our members are having a blast recognizing each other for their contributions to the Lost Zombies Ning Network," said Scot Leach, founder of the "Lost Zombies" network on Ning, in a release provided by the company. "Creating custom gifts around our shared love of everything zombie adds a new level of fun and excitement for our members."
Some analysts have estimated that the virtual goods market will hit $1 billion this year.
Participating networks' members can buy the gifts for one another and they'll be displayed on the recipient's profiles. Payments are processed with PayPal, and then revenues are split 50-50 between Ning and the site owner after PayPal's transaction fees are taken into account. But while Ning site owners can design the gifts themselves, they won't be able to price them--all will cost 75 "credits," or approximately $1.50--something that might not go over so well with site owners who want to sell really expensive bloody chainsaws.
Ning, which says that a total of 1.6 million "networks" have been created with its technology and counts 36 million active users overall, launched a third-party applications platform last month.
The company was co-founded by Netscape creator Marc Andreessen, who justified a $60 million funding round last year by saying that the company was preparing for an economic "nuclear winter." Or maybe a zombie attack.
This post was expanded at 1:07 p.m. PDT.
#BeatCancer, a charitable campaign that launched at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo, started making its way around the social Web last week. The goal was to set a new Guinness World Record for the most social mentions in a 24-hour period while raising cash for cancer organizations. Users were asked to include the #BeatCancer hash tag in tweets, Facebook status updates, and blog posts.
According to Everywhere, the social-media communications firm behind the charitable event, 209,771 social messages were sent during the 24-hour period ending 9 a.m. PDT on October 18. The campaign tallied more than 100 million impressions. Both figures set new Guinness World Records.
Most importantly, the organization was able to raise more than $70,000 from sponsors eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors Brewing Company. The companies donated one cent for each tweet, status update, or blog post that featured #BeatCancer. There have been more than 620,000 mentions of #BeatCancer as of this writing.
The idea for #BeatCancer came from Everywhere's managing partner and cancer survivor Tamara Knechtel. She said in a statement that her company wanted to use "social media for social good." It looks like she succeeded.
If you're interested in getting in on the #BeatCancer donations, you still can. Everywhere said that it plans to keep the program running. Like before, any tweet, blog-post mention, or Facebook status update containing the #BeatCancer hash tag will send one cent to cancer organizations.
Facebook's Groups feature seemed to have long since taken a backseat to the "fan pages" that the social network has encouraged companies and brands to create. But they're far from obsolete.
In a Monday blog post called "Giving Groups a Stronger Voice," Facebook has announced a number of ways it has improved Groups, to better match the rest of the site and more closely tie to members' activity feeds.
"Group activities, which previously only appeared in the group, will now be delivered to your news feed," the post by Facebook engineer Knot Pipatsrisawat read. These updates will be restricted to those that come from people already on your friends list, which is key, since many groups have thousands--or even millions--of members.
"For example, you now will see a story when your friend uploads photos from a recent party at your high school alumni group, or when one of your friends posts a message on the wall of your pick-up soccer group, saying that there is a special game this week," according to Pipatsrisawat's post.
A look at the new 'Groups' design on Facebook.
(Credit: Facebook)Additionally, the home page of a group has been modified to look more like a regular member profile or fan page, complete with a news feed and "publisher" field. Basically, this gives yet another Facebook feature a dose of the "real-time stream." The blog post adds that this is currently available to a small number of users and will be available more widely "in the coming days."
The updates come as Facebook previews some home page improvements to advertisers. But the Groups redesign is geared toward ordinary users, not brands, Facebook says.
"Groups are for fostering member-to-member collaboration, while Pages remain the best way to broadcast messages to your fans, if you are a business, organization, public figure, or other entity," Pipatsrisawat's post explained.
Meanwhile, the other big player in real-time content, Twitter, started the beta test rollout of its own grouping, or "lists," feature last week. Those are fairly different, though, as Twitter users are encouraged to create their own lists of recommended members that other users can follow with one click.
Guess what? Facebook is tweaking its home page design yet again--something that invariably seems to tick off members at first before they realize they actually don't mind that much. The company seems to have been previewing the new look to advertisers, one of whom forwarded the details along to industry blog Mashable.
It doesn't look too different. The biggest change is that Facebook's home page news feed will now be divided up into "top news" and a more real-time "recent activity" view.
The explanation:
"Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent."
A screenshot from a document that Facebook sent to brand advertisers about an impending redesign.
(Credit: Facebook)Note the mention of birthday reminders. On a given member's birthday, a pop-up version of Facebook's "gifts" application appears on that user's profile so that friends can purchase virtual gifts to display. The "gifts" feature is also currently the center of the fledgling e-commerce plans that Facebook has been bouncing around for quite some time now: It's currently the hub of its "credits" virtual currency, and advertisers can purchase sponsored gifts that members can give to one another. These have also been tested out with a select number of nonprofits.
For users, it sounds like Facebook is correcting some of the changes that members seemed to complain about the most with its last redesign. "Facebook has also put information back into the stream that people have asked for, including photo tags, friend acceptances, relationships, event RSVPs and group memberships," the explanation obtained by Mashable read. Also in there will be information about what a user's friends do on brands' "fan" pages, potentially increasing the exposure for advertisers and marketers looking to jump on the social-ads bandwagon.
Why so much redesigning? Facebook's executive team likes to pitch the company as a living, evolving product. At an event last week in Palo Alto, Calif., Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg underscored Facebook's belief in constant "iteration," a term you'll also often hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg using.
"The great thing about Facebook is (that) we are constantly evolving the site and constantly evolving the usage," she said. "People protested the new home page redesign, but engagement went way up and users continued to grow."
If you're expecting to get updates from celebrities on all their latest movies, you might be disappointed: Hollywood might be trying to curb celebrity use of social networks.
A Hollywood Reporter blog post recently reported that "there's a growing number of studio deals with new language aimed specifically at curbing usage of social-media outlets by actors, execs and other creatives." The studios hope confidential information about the films they're producing won't leak out on major social networks.
The Hollywood Reporter, Esq. blog reported that both Disney and DreamWorks have already added clauses to their talent contracts. A clause from Disney says that the actor should not make information available "via 'interactive media such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other interactive social network or personal blog.'"
Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For its part, DreamWorks said Wednesday that no such clause exists in its talent contracts. "Everyone is allowed to use Twitter and other social networks," a company representative told me in a phone conversation.
It was originally believed that Cameron Diaz and Mike Myers were among the first celebrities to be affected by a reportedly new anti-social-media clause included in talent contracts from major studios.
According to DreamWorks, all of its contracts for anyone involved in a movie feature standard, "boilerplate" language saying the signer cannot mention their work on the movie until the studio has made an official announcement. After that, everyone working on the film (including celebrities), are free to talk about their films on any social-media platform.
In the end, it's not all that surprising that the film industry might be targeting social media. Earlier this year, the National Football League made its social-media policy public. That policy banned tweeting prior, during, and after a game for all players, coaches, referees, and media on-hand.
But whether targeting social networks is really the right move is up for debate. The Hollywood Reporter said that the new clauses might have been a reaction to leaks by celebrities tweeting information before it was supposed to come out. Paula Abdul, the publication said, announced her decision on Twitter to leave "American Idol," surprising Fox executives. Hollywood is trying to limit such leaks going forward.
It's understandable. And Hollywood has always limited what the talent can say about films. But is social media really the best target? Is it not a fine promotional tool? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Updated at 9:43 a.m. Wednesday PDT to include comments from DreamWorks.
ORLANDO, Fla.--OK, IT managers, it's time to loosen up.
That's how analysts advised Gartner Symposium attendees here Monday, arguing that corporate computing departments shouldn't block social networking and that security shouldn't completely lock down communications with the outside world. And even if information technology authorities want to shut down such activity, they can't.
Carol Rozwell, a Gartner vice president
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)"Banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile," said Carol Rozwell, a Gartner vice president. "The world we live in is digitally enabled and socially connected."
The advice reflects the transformation of the information technology world as the Internet steadily pervades more and more corners of everybody's life. Although the Gartner event historically has concerned itself with matters such as justifying the expense of a new enterprise resource management computing system, the broadening show reflects the growing scope of work that IT managers face.
Overall, companies must acknowledge that not everything is under control of their own top-down administration, said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner.
"We're moving from control to greater autonomy," Sondergaard said. Managers also must find an appropriate place on the spectrums of in here vs. out there and owned vs. shared.
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