graphs

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced Graph Search at a press event today at the company's Menlo Park headquarters, billing it as a new way find people, photos, places and interests that are most relevant to Facebook users.

Graph Search is the social network's newest way for users to make sense of its massive base of 1 billion users, 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections. The tool is meant to provide people the answers to their to their questions about people, photos, places, and interests. Zuckerberg said Graph Search is launching to a small number of people … Read more

Earlier this month, Google shared a fascinating statistic. The number of items in the company's Knowledge Graph -- its database of people, places, and things, and the connections between them -- had tripled in size over its first seven months in the wild, to 18 billion facts.

Up until this month, though, those facts were available only in English. It wasn't until December 4 that Google made the Knowledge Graph truly global, by introducing it in seven new languages: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian.

The project to make Knowledge Graph content available in … Read more

Facebook put up a new blog post today, patting itself on the back for Open Graph's role in the success of Playdom's Avengers Alliance game.

The social network said shared stories that linked to the game on people's news feeds and timelines were clicked on 7 million times -- the third-largest source of clicks to the Marvel game -- and users who installed the game after clicking through Open Graph stories made an in-game purchase twice as often as those who joined the game through an invite.

The post also included comments from the game developer about … Read more

Searching for information about medicine on Google? You'll soon find drugs injected into your search results.

Google rolled out an update to search today injects key facts about medicine into the results page. You'll find side effects, warnings, related medications and other information on the right-hand side of the screen. The information comes from a variety of sources including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Library of Medicine and the Department of Veterans Affairs, Google said.

It's the latest development in the Knowledge Graph, Google's growing database of connections between hundreds of millions … Read more

Animoto, the app that turns Facebook photos into slideshow videos, added a highlight reel feature today that lets users create videos based on their most popular photos of the year.

The magic behind the highlight reel is Facebook's Open Graph. Animoto pulls the photos and captions from your profile -- these include ones you posted and those you're tagged in -- based on how many times your friends commented or liked them, or how many people were tagged in it. The videos are set to music and can include text.

The result, Animoto CEO Brad Jefferson said, is … Read more

If Facebook had a tagline for this stage in its evolution, it would be "Made for people by Mark." It flows out of the mission statement -- "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" -- and the co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's iron grip on where Facebook is heading. It also drives Facebook's effort to design stuff, including ads, that its billion-plus customers will really "like," and share with their friends. And, it helps keep the legion of Facebook engineers from getting preoccupied with innovations that … Read more

Showing off its ability to draw music lovers to music apps on its Open Graph, Facebook revealed today that its users have played 62.6 million songs 22 billion times in the last 13 months.

Facebook posted the stats of six music apps on the platform's Open Graph, which lets third-party companies build applications for Facebook. Since the graph launched in September 2011, these apps have seen a lot of social referrals, according to Facebook. The company is reminding developers that it has the ability to put apps in front of users who then share them with their friends, … Read more

Amazon textbook rentals don't scare Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig -- the well funded startup has grand plans of its own that it believes will propel it into a whole new league.

Chegg, which started as a textbook purchase and resale service for students, has set its sights on expanding what Rosensweig calls a "student graph," a social network for students that aids them in college planning and studies, from high school to college graduation and beyond.

The student graph aims to connect students in the Chegg network, similar to Facebook and other social networks. Rosensweig expects that … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Your search results in Google are about to get a big dose of Knowledge, the company announced today at a press breakfast at its San Francisco office.

Google's Knowledge Graph, its "smart" recognition of people, places, and things in search queries, is coming to English-language search results in a big way, starting with a rollout tomorrow.

Integrating the Knowledge Graph The main component of the Knowledge Graph integration will be rolled out in parts, with all English-language searches getting the basic integration. This means that if you're searching for "Chiefs," for … Read more