Facebook, Social Media News & Practices

A recent Adobe survey sees tablet Internet use overtaking smartphones by next year, with tablet-originated data usage running some ten times faster than that of phones. Will the tablet become the dominant form of web access, and what will the upcoming Olympics do to shake up viewing habits?

Another dollar on that price would see Facebook raising over $15 billion. However, the soon-to-be public company will settle for raising between $13 to $14.7 billion, after publishing an updated S-1 form, making its overall value somewhere between $94 and $100 billion.

Facebook has entered the app game in some style with a new store for browsers, iOS and Android devices to create a new place for developers to sell their games, social apps and other fun.

Facebook is continuing to tune its advertising options in advance of its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO). The company has repeatedly made major changes to its ad services over the last year. In the last two months, Facebook has expanded the beta test of self-service Offers platform to a small number of international brands and most recently, local businesses. Now Facebook is expanding Offers to web-based companies.

Twitter is updating its mobile web interface so that users who connect to the social network via feature phones or other "older" mobile devices can have access to the new version of Twitter which was released in December 2011. Twitter says the new mobile.twitter.com site works at the same speed as the native mobile Twitter apps developed for iPhone and Android, and that it uses one-third less bandwidth than the previous version.

Unless you were at SXSW, live in the Bay area or are really into SoLoMo apps, you’ve probably never heard of Glancee, the ambient location app that Facebook purchased last Friday night.

This week, Facebook took further steps to secure its users by teaming up with McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro and Sophos to offer better protection, which is probably good in light of the new Symantec Internet Security Report. Also this week, TEAM and EntropySoft get together for compliance with Oracle email management, while CDS and Tactical get together to offer e-Discovery services.

Recently, we introduced you to SocialBaker’s Analytics PRO platform. This week, the social media engagement platform announced a social media metric that can be used to better measure a brand’s performance.

Ever wonder what influences consumer activity -- your friends’ posts or the companies you follow on social media? As it turns out, they are both almost equally influential -- or so says a new study by Market Force.

LinkedIn has added an iPad app to go along with newly redesigned iPhone and Android apps. LinkedIn waited even longer than Facebook to finally release an iPad app, but the result is a polished new look for the powerful professional networking tool.

In a half-billion dollar cash deal between two technology titans, Microsoft agreed to sell up to 70% of the patents it recently acquired from storied AOL just two weeks earlier for about twice that sum (US$ 1.056 billion) in cash. Terms of the Microsoft/ Facebook deal include ownership of 650 AOL patents and patent applications, plus access (via license) to the patents and filings that Microsoft will retain. 

Now that most of us have settled into our Timeline for brand pages, it’s time to prepare for the next set of changes Facebook will be rolling out. While nothing has been officially announced, much of what is coming has been revealed, namely updates to Facebook Ads Manager and Offers Analytics.

Dachis Group not only announced that it is officially part of the new Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Platform, but also some new capabilities in its own social analytics platform -- integration with Facebook's Insights API.

Recurrent themes popped up time and again at the Social Media Analytics Summit here in San Francisco, forming a picture of a nice, neat path towards success.

This week Facebook merged two of its marketing programs into a single Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. Today, Webtrends announces that it is a part of that program for not only Apps, but also for Pages and Insights.