Facebook’s Instagram Deal Moves One Step Closer: UK’s Office Of Fair Trading Gives It The All-Clear

Facebook has today moved one step closer in its proposed acquisition of photo-sharing app Instagram. The Office of Fair Trading in the UK has given the deal the all-clear.

The announcement was made via an RNS regulatory statement, which briefly says the OFT would not refer the deal to the Competition Commission. A spokesperson for the OFT has given us more detail:

“We examined this in light of them both offering social networking services, looking at potential competition in social networking services, and in the supply of photo apps and whether the merger might result in the merging parties limiting people from others using other apps or other sites,” he said. “In brief we concluded that there are several relatively strong competitors to Instgram which appear to pose a stronger constraint to Instagram than Facebook does.”

[Source: TechCrunch - Read the full story]

Entrepreneur: How I made $10K in one day with Facebook Ads

As a counterpoint to the company that claimed its Facebook Ads didn't work because most clicks came from bots, entrepreneur Brendan Irvine-Broque decided to tell the story of how he used the social network's advertising platform to make five figures in one day.

After deciding to get rid of a record collection consisting of 6,000 vinyl records, Irvine-Broque created a Facebook Event titled "MASSIVE Vinyl Sale in the East Bay!" He then spent $150 to promote it using Facebook Ads, which simply said "6000 Vinyl Records, $3 Each" and pointed to the event. Here's the description in full (sans address):

I used to be a record dealer, specializing in rare and private press LPs and 45s, and have thousands of vinyl records sitting in storage, many of which I've never even seen. It's time to let go of them, and now that it's warm outside, I figured it'd be a good time to setup some tables outside and have folks over to dig through. There are well over 6000 records, including tons of private press of all genres, obscure 12-inch singles, etc. Everything is $3 each, save for 1-2 boxes of heavily discounted rarities. I'll have snacks and drinks, feel free to bring your own too. Lots of good food just up the street in case you get hungry. Hope to see you there!

[Source: cnet - Click to read the full story]

TweetDeck Twitter Security

Oh nooooo what a mess TweetDeck has made of my recent install on a new piece of Apple hardware. After cloning across a previous backup, I logged into TweetDeck (not Twitter) and it pulls all my Twitter & Facebook accounts across. 

 

I respond to an enquiry tweet from someone asking about VizBox.TV (the website I set up, but am no longer with) and TweetDeck responds from the VizBoxTV twitter account. 
I was so furious, the application would not even allow me to delete the tweet. Not having control of the account or the password, this was really weird.

 

What worries me though is a security flaw in TweetDeck. Of course I managed to manually remove the account, so the error cannot re-occur, but imagine if you got your TweetDeck account hacked. Worse than that, what if you restored someones else's Mac from a clone you had made… just one sign in and they would be able to tweet from all your previous accounts. I think an update with some security preferences would be a good idea.