Perhaps you are friends with one. It sits unread in your collection of friends and family. It may seem pretty innocuous, it may purport to speak for someone’s new dog or kitten or even their newborn baby. We’re talking about one of Facebook’s 83 million phony profiles. The BBC points us to Facebook’s SEC filing, which says these accounts are unwanted, no matter how precious: Read More
A Long Island-based startup called Limited Run (formerly Limited Pressing) has raised concerns about Facebook ad rates and accused the company of asking for ad revenue in exchange for a page name swap. Juicy!
On its Facebook page today, Limited Run published an extensive status update explaining why it will be deleting its Facebook account. The company claims that it was charged for ad rate clicks, but that it could only verify where 20 percent of those clicks were coming from. 80 percent of clicks were from users with Javascript disabled–a rare setting for a typical user. Read More
Yesterday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg croaked through Facebook’s first-ever earnings call, reporting the social network’s second quarter results. Investors, whose expectations were already remarkably low, must not have liked what they heard.
The stock fell 13 percent overnight. It got worse from there. The AP just tweeted out that Facebook stock has hit a new low. Read More
Facebook cut the line on its first-ever earnings call not too long ago and, as predicted, Mark Zuckerberg was on the line, as were COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman. Also as predicted, Zuck sounded like Kermit the Frog, albeit a tense Kermie, like if Miss Piggy is asking him difficult questions about monetization and mobile. “Just tried Shazam to ID Zuck’s up/down/up voice. No joy there either,” investor Paul Kedrosky quipped on Twitter.
Meanwhile, when Zuck passed the phone to Ms. Sandberg for her prepared remarks, she sounded closer to the Singularity than we thought. Wired‘s Ryan Tate compared it to an “echo-voiced cyborg.”
Here’s what we learned: Read More
While the world waits to hear Mark Zuckerberg’s do his best Kermit voice on Facebook’s first ever earnings call at 5pm EST today, the market has already spoken. Earlier today the signs were already there, Reuters reported that Facebook shares dropped 7 percent in premarket trading. (After its recent earnings “disaster,” Zynga’s shares opened 40 percent down today.)
However, Facebook’s second quarter earnings, just released online in advance of the call, actually exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. By a hair. As AllThingsD notes, consensus had been that Facebook would post profit of 12 cents a share on revenue of $1.15 billion. However, the company showed profit of 12 cents a share on revenue of $1.15 billion. Business Insider hyperbolically notes that expectations were already “horribly” low, with consensus predicting “utterly miserable,” decelerating ad revenue growth of 19 percent year-over-year. Another sign of Wall Street’s bearishness on the company. Read More
According to a tweet sent out a few moments ago by @CNBC, Facebook has officially named COO Sheryl Sandberg to its board of directors. The Facebook team confirmed the move on their press page. We’d hasten to congratulate the social network on this one, but then we remember that she should’ve been on the board in the first place. C’est la vie.
But maybe the move will satisfy the woman’s group Ultraviolet, which previously held protests to pressure the company into adding a woman to its all-male board. (Turnout was slim.) The group also posted a petition back in April with the same goal. Read More
Apps sure are fun, but you’ve got to watch where you’re leaving your Facebook Connect login credentials. Even the legit ones aren’t 100 percent foolproof.
For example: Just this week, Facebook acquired Israeli facial recognition startup Face.com for $100 million or thereabouts. So we’re not talking about some sloppy teenager throwing together Angry Birds ripoffs–and Read More
In a settlement agreement for a class action lawsuit filed yesterday, Facebook agreed to give users more control of their face. According to the terms of the agreement, which still needs to be approved by the judge, users will now be able to opt-out of having their likeness appear in a type of ad Facebook calls “Sponsored Stories,” says Reuters.
Back in December, Betabeat got a copy of a leaked document that showed how Sponsored Stories would feature the name of friend and the friend’s profile picture and an indication that they “liked” the advertiser in question. The social network thought it had a sweet new revenue stream locked up seeing as users are more likely to click on something when they see their friends’ face attached to it as an endorsement. Read More
After rumors all but confirmed it, Face.com, the Israeli facial recognition startup, finally acknowledged on its blog today that the company has been acquired by Facebook. TechCrunch’s sources estimate that the acquisition price was between $80 million and $100 million, the same figure circulated that month in the Israeli press. The deal was reportedly not part of an acqui-hire to bring Face.com’s staff into the fold, but rather centered around leveraging the company’s technology to help Facebook with mobile photos.
In fact, for the first deployment of its technology, Face.com released an app called KLIK that let users tag Facebook friends in real-time by scanning public photos in your social network and suggesting tags for friends. Once Face.com’s technology is embedded in Facebook, users would theoretically be able get suggestions and tag friends with one click. Read More
Looks like we’re gonna have to add another name to our Facebook Mafia list. Chief technology officer Bret Taylor told Kara Swisher at AllThingsD that he will be leaving the company for an “undetermined startup.” Shortly after, he acknowledged his departure on his Facebook page. (A parting traffic gift, perhaps?) Read More
