In the days leading up to the Facebook IPO, one thing that pundits loved to harp on was its weakness in the mobile segment. One of the cornerstones of Facebook is its Photos feature, which helped it to gain rapid traction in the first place. However, in the mobile segment, Facebook lacked a compelling app to leverage this advantage. Not only is uploading videos to Facebook through its iPhone and Android apps cumbersome, but viewing it also is a less than pleasant experience. As a result, upstarts like Instagram that made sharing photos from your mobile phone elegant and pain free quickly gained popularity. Zuckerberg himself realized this and went on to shell out a billion dollars to prevent Instagram from falling into its competitors laps.

However, long before Facebook purchased Instagram, it had set about to fix the void in its mobile offering. A team was hard at work to come up with a dedicated Instagramesque photography app. A short while back, Facebook unveiled its creation on the iTunes App Store.

The new app is called Facebook Camera. While Facebook wouldn’t win any awards for the name, it pretty much nails everything about the app. Facebook Camera is Instagram with a few differences. It features multiple photo effects to lend your snaps the ‘artistic’ touch, it enables quick sharing of photos, and it has a photo stream that just contains pics shared by your social graph. Its biggest advantage compared to Instagram is that it supports batch photo upload, which allows you to club multiple related photos together. However, it also has its share of disadvantages. The biggest one is that Facebook Camera doesn’t allow sharing of pics across social networks. No one really expected Facebook to make it easy for you to share your pics on Twitter or Google Plus, but this is still a very real drawback. Also, since the Facebook Camera photo stream includes pics that were not shared through the mobile app, not all photos look as classy as Instagram. Of course, folks who have a strong disdain for the artificial photographs popularized by Instagram will probably appreciate this.

The big question is how does Facebook Camera fit into Facebook’s future strategy. It will directly compete with Facebook’s Instagram, which is the current leader in the mobile social photography app segment. A Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch, “As Mark asserted, we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently, so I anticipate some healthy competition.”

Most people believe that Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram was a defensive move rather than an aggressive one. Zuckerberg didn’t want Google or Twitter to get a boost from Instagram’s existing popularity, so he acquired it. He had to promise to keep it independent, as otherwise Instagram wouldn’t have allowed itself to be taken over by Facebook. However, this also means that Instagram’s social graph is going to remain distinct from Facebook in the foreseeable future. Instagram doesn’t really tie into Facebook, and augment Facebook Photos. Even though Instagram is under Facebook’s control, Zuckerberg will obviously prefer if people used Facebook’s social graph to share photos on the mobile. It will increase the stickiness of the platform, and strengthen the lock that Facebook has on a user. This is probably why Facebook went ahead with the release of Facebook Camera, even after announcing the acquisition of Instagram.

Facebook Camera is currently available for download in the App Store for English speaking countries.

I have seen this stupidity go around in the past where users spread messages saying Facebook will charge for new profiles, and I think the hoax message is spreading again just like those chain email messages where you would die in 7 days if you don’t forward that email or text messages to 10  people in 10 minutes of receiving it.

Such type of messages never killed anyone, unless you consider the tombstone above which is intended for fun. Similarly, you will not gain any advantage by circulating a message to others saying that Facebook is going paid because they invested heavily in the Facebook Timeline which you can’t even remove.

FACEBOOK JUST RELEASED THEIR PRICE GRID FOR MEMBERSHIP. $9.99 PER MONTH FOR GOLD MEMBER SERVICES, $6.99 PER MONTH FOR SILVER MEMBER SERVICES, $3.99 PER MONTH FOR BRONZE MEMBER SERVICES, FREE IF YOU COPY AND PASTE THIS MESSAGE BEFORE MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. WHEN YOU SIGN ON TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL BE PROMPTED FOR PAYMENT INFO…IT IS OFFICIAL IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES. IF YOU COPY THIS ON YOUR WALL YOUR ICON WILL TURN BLUE AND FACEBOOK WILL BE FREE FOR YOU

Trust me, even though Facebook’s IPO is not doing that well, they will hardly make any move to charge users who are their revenue stream and lose more money on their stock.

So just chill out and stop polluting the feeds with such messages. It won’t help you and neither will it help others.

(Image Credit: unknown)

Facebook unveiled the Timeline feature back in September last year, and ever since, I have heard nothing good about it. Although it’s been several months after the release of Timeline, many users continue to hate it and are still looking out for ways to disable or delete it. In the course of time, the Timeline put Facebook into a little trouble when a small venture capital-backed Chicago company Timelines.com, sued the social networking giant for trademark-infringement.

Despite all this, the social networking giant is making an attempt to redesign the highly controversial feature. According to Talking Points Memo, Facebook is testing a new design for the Timeline feature, in which the user’s information like name, occupation, education, and location are placed on top of the cover photo, while the carousel of thumbnail images which include, “Summary”, friends, photos, and others are placed right below the cover photo.

Here’s a screen shot of how the new Timeline feature looks like -

The current Facebook Timeline design -

Although the changes to the Timeline are subtle, it makes the profile layout more presentable. You can notice two new things – “Summary” and “Favorites.”

According to the site, clicking on the “Summary” tab will show a list of the major “Life Events” of the user.  The “Favorites” is perhaps the new name for “Likes”, which shows a list of items that the user has “liked”.

The new design and features are currently being tested out, and has been released only to a few number of users. However, it is still unclear whether the new design will be rolled out to all. If the test is successful and generates positive feedbacks from the test users, then it will be released for all users very soon.

Facebook had its IPO just a few days back with an initial price of $38, however, the stocks tumbled down unexpectedly and are currently trading at around $31 a share. A huge debate over the Internet included that the first of day of Facebook’s share will close anywhere between $45 and $50, however, that didn’t seem to happen.

If you are a current Facebook user who hates the Timeline feature right from the beginning, then let us know your views on the new design (redesign) by posting your comments below.

Holy Zuck!

Following the enormously successful IPO, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has just married his long time girlfriend Priscilla Chan. Minutes ago, Mark updated his Facebook relationship status as “Married”. Zuckerberg tied the knot with his long time girlfriend at a small ceremony in Palo Alto, California, 6 days after his 28th birthday. The couple met at Harvard university and have been together for more than nine years.

According to a report at Washington post, the wedding ceremony of Mark Zuckerberg took place in his residential backyard. Mark has gifted a self designed Ruby to Priscilla in presence of only 100 guests, who thought they have been invited to celebrate her Graduation.

Here is another wedding photo of Mark Zuckerberg (courtesy Boston and AP):

On behalf of the entire team at Techie Buzz, I wish  Mark And Priscilla all the very best.

Facebook just went public with a market cap of $104 Billion and it has already made its first acquisition post IPO. Facebook has acquired Karma, a mobile social gifting app. The exact terms and details of the deal are not yet disclosed but the entire team of Karma with its 16 employees will be joining Facebook post the acquisition.

Karma, founded by Lee Linden and Ben Lewis, has raised $4.5 million from from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Caulfield & Byers, Felicis Ventures, CrunchFund and Obvious Corporation. Karma, a social gifting app lets users decide whether to receive the gift or donate the cost of exact same amount of the gift to charity instead.

From Karma’s blog:

We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook. The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways. As we say … only good things will follow.

Simply put, together we can celebrate life’s important moments in ways we could not before. A word of heartfelt thanks to our partners, customers, and our incredible team for helping us share Karma with so many people.

This acquisition makes sense for Facebook

Facebook, previously, had a feature called Virtual Gifts where Facebook users could send virtual gifts to people in their network. However, Facebook closed it down in favor of Virtual Credits that let third party developers use it as a currency for selling virtual items on the social network. Social gaming platforms like Zynga makes use of these virtual credits to sell in-game goodies to their users. Virtual credit is Facebook’s second only biggest revenue source after Advertising.

Facebook in their S-1 filing stated that Mobile is an increasing risk factor for the company:

We believe this increased usage of Facebook on mobile devices has contributed to the recent trend of our daily active users (DAUs) increasing more rapidly than the increase in the number of ads delivered. If users increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, or if we incur excessive expenses in this effort, our financial performance and ability to grow revenue would be negatively affected.

Although the company company had 488 million monthly average unique users of its mobile products in the month of March, it hasn’t figured out a way to monetize those mobile users yet.  Karma’s founders, Lee Linden and Ben Lewis are experienced in monetizing mobile apps, which might help Facebook in a long run.

If you expect Facebook to stop their acquisition spree here, you might be wrong. Facebook has identified their weakness and now with their $16 Billion of cash they can fix the problem with such acquisitions, if they can’t do it in-house.

Facebook, which is heading for an IPO in next few days is not done with acquisitions yet. Lightbox, a social photo sharing app, has announced on their blog that they have been acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed amount.

Lightbox, the android app, not only let users apply filters to photos like Instagram (Facebook acquired Instagram in April for more than $1 Billion in cash and shares) but also allowed them to store the photos and let them share on other social networking sites. After the acquisition, Facebook will be sun-setting the startup and the team will be joining Facebook. The Android app has already been pulled out from Google Play. Since Facebook will be terminating the app, the acquisitions looks to be made for the team behind the app. Lightbox, a 500 Startups company had raised $1.2 million in funding from 500 Startups, Index Ventures, Accel Partners, and SV Angel.

From Lightbox blog:

Today, we’re happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we’ll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook’s 500+ million mobile users.

This means we’re no longer accepting new signups. If you’re an existing user, you can continue to use Lightbox.com until June 15 and you can download your photos from here.

Facebook is not acquiring the company or any of the user data hosted on Lightbox.com. In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we’ve written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.

Facebook is aiming for an IPO and in its seventh amendment to its S-1, Facebook is offering 50.6m extra shares at a new  price range of $34-$38 per share. The filing also states that high profile Instagram buyout might not close by second quarter of 2012 due to FTC probe, as it expected earlier. Since 2012, Facebook has acquired six startups — including the high profile Instagram buyout, Tagtile, Gazehawk, Sendoid, Glancee and now Lightbox.

As the Internet continues to evolve, it has started becoming available to us on everything from our TVs, mobiles, to tablets. Of late, there are many stories on how mobile surfing is becoming the next big thing. Consider this, how many of us catch up on the latest Facebook news from our cell phones? A lot it seems. Comscore has recently discovered that users access Facebook on the mobile for nearly 7 hours versus 6 hours on the computer.

In fact, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has openly laid out the importance of being able to generate revenue using mobile advertising and promotions in 2012. On his road show to pitch the highly sought after IPO (initial public offering) that is slated for next week, Zuckerberg  has said that Facebook’s key priorities in 2012 are to work on its mobile application, to build stronger ties incorporating its social network with other online apps, and to create a “transformative” advertising experience.

There are claims that the Facebook IPO has been oversubscribed. It will be interesting to see what value Facebook can bring to its investors to make it worth close to $10 billion. Facebook has claimed that its advertising business was generating more revenues as marketers have began spending more. However, this only works when its users access it from their computer browsers.

It has been claimed that social ads would be able to address the problem of revenue generation on its mobile app. These ads are small and better suited for mobile screens. They show you which of your friends “like” certain products. Given the amount of user information that Facebook has already collected, it will allow marketeers to target consumers more effectively.

The true value of any investment is based on its long-term prospects. While Facebook moving on as an IPO is truly ground breaking for this new genre of organizations, it still has to be able to provide more concrete plans on its revenue generation. Having said that, Zuckerberg has made good decisions in the past about Facebook, this may just be another one of those.

Facebook plans to bring in the file-sharing feature to all Facebook Groups as the company made and announcement that it will soon roll out the new file sharing feature to all Groups, enabling members to send and receive files to each other.

The new feature started to roll out yesterday to a small number of Facebook groups, and will eventually be rolled out to all Groups in the next few days, according to Kate Freeman of Mashable. As Freeman got in touch with Facebook, the company said that groups that don’t yet have the file sharing abilities will get it “soon,” perhaps in by next week.

Users can upload files up to 25 MB in size and make the uploaded files available to anyone inside a group, however, music and executable files are not allowed to be uploaded. E-books, comics, and video files are fine up to 25MB.

The restriction to 25MB is to eliminate users from uploading copyrighted video, and also not allowing them to upload music files is probably because the social networking giant seems to be trying to avoid being associated with any disreputable activity like piracy. It is also trying to keep hackers at bay by eliminating executable files from being uploaded.

Like its conventional feature where users can report problems, users can as well be able to report files as a way for the social network to try to prevent sharing of copyrighted or malicious files.

Earlier in April, Facebook launched Groups for Schools, and Facebook did mention about the file sharing feature then. The file sharing service is designed “to make it even easier to share lecture notes, sports schedules, or class assignments,” according to the announcement. Now it pretty much looks like all Groups are getting the feature.

Also Read: Why Facebook Groups is a Powerful Tool for Teachers

Facebook acquired the file-sharing service Drop.io for around $10 million in October 2010, but that didn’t last for a long time. The company had to close down the site’s operations in December in the same year. On that note, Mashable speculates that Facebook will use Drop.io’s services to add a conference calling service to groups, but before predicting anything further, its best that we wait and see on that one.

Image Credits: Mashable

Facebook has unveiled plans to create an app store exclusively for Facebook. This app store called the App Center will run inside the native Facebook apps on the respective platforms. It will offer apps like Pintrest, Spotify, Viddy and many others, all inside the native Facebook app. However, the apps displayed on the store will be coupled with a rating system that will use the existing Facebook Insights platform.

Aaron Brady announced the App Center on the Facebook developers Blog, saying,

In the coming weeks, people will be able to access the App Center on the web and in the iOS and Android Facebook apps. All canvas, mobile and web apps that follow the guidelines can be listed. All developers should start preparing today to make sure their app is included in the launch.

The URL for App Center has been decided as https://www.facebook.com/appcenter. However, the page is unavailable currently. Currently, all apps that wish to make it to Facebook’s App Center are required to use the Facebook login feature. Apps from the Facebook App Center will be linked to the respective native apps on platforms like Android and iOS. For now, the App Center is not hosting or selling any apps. Its primary focus is creating accurate visibility for apps based on user ratings.

More details on the App store can be found at this page.

With so many apps stores around, in order to hit critical mass Facebook’s App Center has to make an offer to developers, an offer that they cannot refuse. Facebook is rightfully venturing out and trying new things, because as far as a user-base is concerned, Facebook is already at its peak. Moreover, existing app stores are vastly disorganized and some rating and review system will create a more competitive platform and bring in the much-needed order.

It’s not just Robert Scoble who faced problems while posting comments on Facebook, I faced the same problem and a few other Facebook users as well. For an unknown reason, Facebook’s automated spam filter stopped my comment from being published and flagged it as “irrelevant or inappropriate” comment.

The problem I faced was when a friend of mine on Facebook shared a scam message about “free online recharge,” and I tried adding the comment — “This is a fake offer.” Facebook blocked me right there from posting the comment with the following message:

This Comment Can’t Be Posted

This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.

Robert Scoble faced the same problem while posting a comment. However, according to Facebook, Scoble’s comment was specifically blocked because of its length, and the length of the comment thread it was on.

When the issue was reported by major blogs, Facebook stated that it is not censoring comments, but the limitation was caused due to Facebook’s automated spam filter system.

Here’s the official statement that Facebook posted -

To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam.

They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.

Scammers usually target long threaded comments to post malicious links and scam messages. The automated spam filter monitors such threads and makes sure that it filters out spammy comments to keep the thread clean and safe. Of course the system also blocks comments that have inappropriate words, but other types of comments that go against positive conversation, which includes some ASCII art are also blocked.

In my case, my comment was blocked either because I used the word “fake,” or maybe because I tried commenting on a spam post. Facebook also mentioned that “the error message made it sound like the message was blocked because of the content of the message, not because it looked spammy.”