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Facebook offered a deep dive into its its News Feed ranking algorithm on Tuesday, expounding on why it moves up old stories and how it picks which stories it thinks you want to see.
Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager in charge of News Feed ranking, explained how Facebook sorts through the "tens of thousands" of potential posts users put on Facebook each day. While there is a median of 1,500 potential stories that a user can see daily, Facebook inserts about 300 based on an algorithm that guesses how interested you will be in a post by factoring users' reactions to previous posts and the users. Each post is given a score and placed depending on that score. The more likes and comments people make, the more data Facebook has to work with...
Read the full story here... Source: CNET
When Facebook checks in with Wall Street for its quarterly review on Wednesday, it will hand in results for mobile advertising for just the fourth time and reveal its first full-year report card on revenue from mobile ads.
By most accounts, Facebook is expected to do well on the mobile front and make close to one-third of its advertising revenue from mobile placements, according to analysts' consensus. It would be a remarkable achievement, one that comes just in the nick of time to save Facebook from a decaying desktop business.
From zero to last-minute hero
RBC Capital Markets is particularly bullish on the subject and expects Facebook to pull in $487 million from mobile, which would be good enough for 34 percent of the firm's projected $1.43 billion second-quarter ad revenue estimate. Goldman Sachs holds a more conservative perspective and is predicting that Facebook will make $425 million in mobile ad revenue.
Whatever the number Facebook reports, it will be a marked improvement from the infinitesimal amount that Facebook made from mobile advertising at this time last year. Then, Facebook said it was bringing in $500,000 per day from mobile ads. Now, Facebook's mobile revenue may come in as high as $5.4 million a day, or up 980 percent from the year ago quarter...
Read the full story here. Source: CNET
While it’s not clear just why the app would do this, or what purpose it has for doing so, the Facebook app for Android is taking your phone number the first time you open it up. Without even logging in, the app takes your number and stores it on the Facebook servers. You don’t need a Facebook account, or even initiate an action within the app. Simply having it and opening it will allow the app to take your phone number.
Norton discovered this security flaw during routine testing they perform on apps for their Mobile Insight security app. According to Norton, their testing methods are sound:
Through automatic and proprietary static and dynamic analysis techniques, Mobile Insight is able to automatically discover malicious applications, privacy risks, and potentially intrusive behavior. Further, Mobile Insight will tell you exactly what risky behavior an application will perform and give you specific, relevant, and actionable information.
-norton
Norton then reached out to Facebook, who claimed to be unaware of the issue. They told Norton they“did not use or process the phone numbers and have deleted them from their servers”, and said they had no knowledge of the issue. Norton also notes that Facebook is not the only app doing this, or even the worst offender. They promise more information on other culprits in coming weeks, but we’re still curious why Facebook would take numbers from a device that wasn’t even logged in. If I were to download the app, then open it to see what it looked like out of curiosity, my number would then be uploaded to the Facebook server.
We’re not ready to call Facebook nefarious on this account. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, even in the face of all their other security flaws, we’ll chalk this up to another error on their part. What this does do is bring into focus app permissions, and how important they are. Perhaps more importantly, how they can be abused by the app publisher, and ignored by users as fine-print.
Source: Android Authority
Secret documents describing the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus have highlighted vulnerabilities in outdated Web encryption used by Facebook and a handful of other U.S. companies.
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA taps into fiber optic cables "upstream" from Internet companies and vacuums up e-mail and other data that "flows past" -- a security vulnerability that "https" Web encryption is intended to guard against.
But Facebook and a few other companies still rely on an encryption technique viewed as many years out of date, which cryptographers say the NSA could penetrate reasonably quickly after intercepting the communications. Facebook uses encryption keys with a length of only 1024 bits, while Web companies including Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Dropbox, and even Myspace have switched to exponentially more secure 2,048-bit keys...
Read the full story here. Source: CNET
Facebook is now letting its 1.11 billion members react to their friends' status updates with photo comments.
The social network said Wednesday that it has started the global release of the new feature, which lets people add photos to comment threads using a new Attach a Photo button. To start, uploads of photo comments will be restricted to the Facebook Web site and mobile site, but simply viewing photo comments will be possible from Facebook's mobile applications, the company said.
Photo comments are a product of one of Facebook's famous hackathons. Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin, one of the developers behind the release, said he was inspired to create the photo comments feature because, "sometimes showing a photo helps me tell a story much better than words alone."
The new addition could transform the social network into a more meme and teen-friendly zone, as photos turn commenting into a more playful activity. Of course, there's also the potential for spam, abuse, and just plain ugly comment threads. But imaginer Baldwin wishes for the best. "I hope this will make threads with friends more expressive and engaging," he said.
Source: CNET
Facebook is inviting members of the press to attend a mystery event on Thursday, June 20 at its Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters, where the company promises to unveil a new product.
The invitation, sent via snail mail according to ABC News, reads: "A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product."
Facebook confirmed the event with CNET but would not provide additional details.
The invite for the product-related event closely trails the social network's release of hashtags, a long overdue feature that finally connects the company to pop culture.
It also comes just days after a developer discovered code that hints at the development of aFacebook RSS reader. A reader release would make for a timely launch as Google Reader isgoing dark on July 1.
Source: CNET
RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. -- Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg isn't overly concerned that teenagers will abandon the giant social network, as a Pew study reported. "We're the leaders in a growing market," she said during an onstage interview at theD: All Things Digital conference here. She acknowledged, though, that teens are using sites such as Tumblr and Twitter more. "We are watching that very carefully," she said.
Sandberg also noted that social networking and other Internet activities still trail TV in terms of time spent. Users on average watch 34 hours of TV a week, compared with 6 hours per week on Facebook. "There is room for people to do different things. All other services continue to grow and we do. We don't think it's a zero-sum game," she said...
Read the full story here. Source: CNET
Facebook's freshman year as a public company played out like an MTV drama in which Mark Zuckerberg was forced to navigate through an awkward accommodation with the rough-and-tumble world of Wall Street.
Even as Wall Street lectured loudly, a preoccupied Zuckerberg was only half listening and seemed more interested in saving the world from a dearth of sharing than worried about quarterly revenue performance. By year's end, though, Zuckerberg had earned his passing grade by demonstrating a masterful understanding of how to make money on mobile. Indeed, Facebook has seemingly weathered the worst even though it was an an uneven year with more than the usual fill of drama, one punctuated by extreme highs and lows...
Read the full story here. Source: CNET
AT&T is planning to discontinue the HTC First, better known as the "Facebook Phone," reports BGR. Released on April 12, the HTC First was touted as the first device to come with Facebook Home preinstalled, a feature that has not enticed buyers to purchase the phone.
When contacted, an AT&T spokesperson gave MacRumors the following statement in regards to BGR's report: "As mentioned previously, we do pricing promotions all the time and have made no decisions on future plans."
The Facebook Home software, which can be installed on a number of Android devices, has also proven to be unpopular with Android users. The app has a two star rating in the Google Play store and has seen just a million downloads since it was released last month...
Read the full story here. Source: Mac Rumours
MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Facebook is releasing a new version of Facebook Home, the social network's software suite for Android, the company announced at its headquarters here Thursday.
The new product will go live on Google Play at 1 p.m. Thursday as an update to the Facebook Android app, but users probably won't see it till about 3 p.m., Facebook said.
Facebook VP of Engineering Cory Ondrejka said the company is planning on several improvements to the product in the coming weeks, but today's update will have bug fixes. Also, for any Android devices that don't support Home, Facebook won't block users who want to transfer Home -- in a process called sideloading -- from supported devices. More than 10,000 people were using this method to get Home on unsupported devices shortly after Home launched, Facebook said...
Read the full story here. Source: CNET