Facebook is launching its own app download store soon. Today, the company announced its plans to offer the store, titled App Center, on its developer blog page. Facebook said the store will be available "in the coming weeks" to the general public. It will be available for Android and iOS mobile devices, along with the web for PC users. The app store can also be used for existing in-browser Facebook applications.

In advance of the App Center's launch, Facebook is asking potential app creators to make their own app detail page, similar to what Apple has for the iTunes App Store and what Google has for Google Play. The company states, "The page is required for being listed in the App Center, and it will also become the new destination when non-users search for your app on Facebook."

Zynga has launched a beta game portal via its own domain at Zynga.com. This is a significant move for the company, which has so far been delivering games only through social networking sites, in particularly Facebook. The new Zynga.com portal will be the first time the company hosts its games independently and the platform will also host games created by third-party developers.

Investors are happy with Zynga’s decision as they see this shift giving more financial independence to the company. But it may harm Facebook’s upcoming IPO, since the social network revealed in its filing how dependent its revenue has been on Zynga for both generating game-related purchases and increased advertising views. Overall Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue.

Date: January 26, 2012
Place: Lviv, a conference room business center "Technopark", st. Smal-Stotskaya 15, 2nd floor.


On Thursday, January 26th will be another master-class Lviv Startup Club, where you will learn about the features of marketing in Facebook and Twitter.

Today social networks are fully engaged in our lives: their services used by millions of people around the world. Today, for example, the audience of Facebook - 850 million, Twitter - 200 million. These figures are constantly growing and marketers realize that social networks are an excellent platform for their business. The market is constantly SMM zrostaei zatsiakvlenim provides tremendous opportunities for individuals to promote their products and services.

Over the years, Mattel’s iconic Barbie doll has had every hairstyle imaginable, including a bubble beehive, a ‘60s flip and even multi-colored hair extensions. But she’s never been bald.

That may change if the women behind the Facebook page, “Beautiful and Bald Barbie” influence executives at the world’s largest toy company.

“We would like to see a Beautiful and Bald Barbie made to help young girls who suffer from hair loss due to cancer treatments, alopecia or trichotillomania,” reads Jane Bingham and Beckie Sypin’s Facebook page, which has almost 40,000 “likes.” “Many children have some difficulty accepting their mother, sister, aunt, grandparent or friend going from a long haired to a bald.”

Google has recruited the Muppets–a fond icon for many Gen Xers and the stars of a new movie–to promote Google+ Hangouts on TV.

Google, it is now clear, has flung itself headlong into TV advertising, since its first ad that aired during the Super Bowl in 2010.

But just who is Google trying to attract with its campaign–which has included spots on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. To promote Chrome, it has  recruited Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.

None of these shows and artists, except perhaps the World Series, exactly screams out ‘we’re a serious social network.’

Click me baby one more time.

Britney Spears is the first person to get more than 1 million followers on Google+. As of this writing, she had 1.08 million according to Social Statistics. Google's founder, Larry Page, is the second most popular person on Google+ with 926,161 followers. Snoop Dogg comes in third with 930,292 followers.

Spears, who turned 30 this month, has a pretty robust social media presence — she is the fifth-most followed person on Twitter with 11.9 million following her tweets, and 15.7 million fans "like" her Facebook page.

But that doesn't put her anywhere close to the top of Facebook's most popular list. Currently, Eminem is the most "liked" person there with 38.7 million likes.

Facebook is providing a new way for US or Canadian members of the leading online social network to summon help for friends who may be thinking of ending their lives.

A tool rolled out by Facebook lets people report suicidal comments posted by friends, who will immediately be sent email messages urging them to call a hotline or click on a link to start a chat session with a crisis counselor.

A National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will provide free, confidential counseling at any time of day.

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook, has fallen victim to a security glitch in the social networking site which allowed hackers to steal his own personal photographs.
The privacy loophole led to 14 pictures of the 27-year-old, on whom the Oscar-winning film "The Social Network" was based, being posted on the internet.

Most of the pictures were taken inside the $7 million California home he shares with long term girlfriend Priscilla Chan. In one of the photographs the couple are seen wearing matching red aprons in their kitchen.

After announcing its partnership with Facebook in July and bringing powering the service that allowed users of the world’s biggest social network to call each other from in the browser, today the company has confirmed that it will now allow Skype users to make Facebook-to-Facebook calls from within Skype.

Users can now download Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows to enable the new Facebook-calling functionality, providing users with an easy way to call their friends from their Skype client and have them answer in the browser.

Making calls between to your Facebook friends from Skype is easy and only requires you to connect your Skype and Facebook accounts – something you may have already done when the company first announced close integration with the social network.

With the new Mango update to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system now widely available, it looks like we will be getting an updated Mango-based version of the Windows Phone 7 Facebook app. Pocket-Lint.com reports that during Nokia World on Tuesday, it was revealed that the Mango-based Facebook app should be released sometime next week.

The cool thing about the Mango edition of Facebook is that users will have the ability to "deep link" into the app. No, it's not a kinky cyber sex act, it simply means that you will be able to see your Facebook messages and your News Feed on the homepage of your Windows Phone 7 smartphone. So you will be able to quickly see if someone gives you an unwanted Mafia Wars 2 invitation.

After months of rumors and speculation, Facebook launched an updated version of its iOS app on Monday with native iPad support.

Version 4.0 of the Facebook app offers most of the full Facebook experience on the iPad: You can browse your news feed, notifications, and messages; view photos in full-screen; view video clips and send them via AirPlay to your television; chat with friends; and even play games your friends have recommended or recently played.

Management of IT Catalogue has decided to install FaceBook social plug-in to help users share IT Catalogue pages with with their friends at FaceBook. Social plug-in is up and running right now and we may check his work.

"We are trying to make our website as social as we can. The opinion of our users is very important to us, so sharing our content will help to increase not only popularity of our website, but also quality of our content. Our project is always open to suggestions from our users and social networks are one of the methods to contact us" - said manager IT Catalogue Kochina Mayya

Facebook is finally launching its iPad application and will be doing so at Apple’s October 4th event, rumored to be the release of the iPhone 5.

According to Mashable‘s sources, the social network may also introduce its latest iPhone app, potentially revamped in HTML5, at the same event.

The app has been long awaited. In July, iPad-wielding Facebookers were given a taste of what may come when screenshots of the app were leaked. The app has been in development for over a year and just this morning Jeff Verkoeyen, the former iPad app lead engineer, quit out of frustration.

According to informal polls, web traffic statistics and general discussion with a handful of friends, Facebook’s f8 developers conference wasn’t nearly as interesting for non-tech folks. At the very least, it didn’t generate the same level of discussion as an Apple event like I previously described.

Part of that could be because it’s a developer conference (not always the most interesting for people who aren’t developers) that was held in the middle of a working day. On top of that, digesting the Facebook platform changes announced today might be difficult after putting in a full day of work. After all, the company renamed several long-time parts of the site and added tons of new functionality.

For people who didn’t keep up with the f8 news as it broke, we’ve created a round-up of all the new Facebook changes and what they mean.

Facebook is at it again. The social network is tweaking the home pages of its 750 million users, much to the chagrin of some very vocal folks.

The world's largest online social network is expected to announce even more changes on Thursday, when it holds its annual f8 conference in San Francisco for developers who create games and other applications for its site.

The gathering follows a trickle of changes to Facebook in the past few of weeks. Some, such as larger photo displays and a feature that makes it easier to group friends into categories, were met with approval — or at least silence, which in the age of social-media oversharing could well be considered an endorsement.

Mac users have been waiting patiently for Skype to put in Facebook support for their version of the Internet phone service. Today the wait is over as Skype announced on its blog site that the beta version of Skype 5.4 for the Mac is now available for download. As with the previously released 5.5 version of Skype for Windows, Mac OS X users can now check out and use all of the additional Facebook features.

 That includes things like being able to read and post messages on your Facebook news feed from inside the Skype application. The update also allows Mac users to comment and "Like" other friends' news posts, as well as chat with them via Facebook's message system.

Cameron  and Tyler Winklevoss make light of their legal tussle.

Two brothers who were involved in a long-running legal dispute with Facebook have poked fun at their court battle in an advertisement for nuts.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, accusing him of stealing their ideas.

In the ad, one of the twins cracks open a pistachio nut with one hand, and his brother remarks: "That's a good idea."

Dustin Moskovitz left Facebook in 2009 to start his own company, Asana (http://asana.com/), and he hasn't said much publicly about either project since. Since he's a pretty active user of the question-answer site, Quora, somebody asked Moskovitz directly why he left. "To start Asana with [former Facebooker] Justin Rosenstein," wrote Moskovitz in reply. When he took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday, editor Erick Schonfeld asked him about Facebook's early days, his reasons for leaving, and his opinion on Google+. Moskovitz's answers took jabs at everything from The Social Network to Google's business plan.

With over 750 million accounts, Facebook users span nearly every country in the world. This large population can cause communication problems because of the number of different languages everyone speaks. Now, according to Inside Facebook, the social media site has started to roll out a translation feature to help bridge the communication gap between users.

The new “Translate” button sits next to the “Like” button and apparently does a good job of translating not only standard words but also slang phrases. The given example shows a translation of the phrase, “Totally cool” from Hebrew to English. After the post has been translated, the button changes to “Original” so users can see the exact text that was originally entered.

Since launching its "bug bounty" program three weeks ago, Facebook has forked out $40,000 to hackers who detected security flaws on the social networking site.

About fifty people who have successfully identified problems have been acknowledged on Facebook's "whitehat" -- geek-speak for a hacker who is a good guy -- site, and to date, Facebook has paid one individual $7,000 for flagging six issues and $5,000 for a particularly bad flaw, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook and Twitter are to meet with riot-spooked government officials to discuss how social networks can play roles in keeping people safe during civil unrest.
The focus of Thursday's lunchtime meeting with the Home Secretary has shifted from the notion of blocking social networks during riots to how police can use them to inform law-abiding citizens and track down wrong-doers.

"We look forward to meeting with the Home Secretary to explain the measures we have been taking to ensure that Facebook is a safe and positive platform for people in the UK at this challenging time," Facebook said in an email response to an AFP inquiry.
"In recent days we have ensured any credible threats of violence are removed from Facebook and we have been pleased to see the very positive uses millions of people have been making of our service to let friends and family know they are safe and to strengthen their communities," the statement continued.

November 5 could be a very interesting day for a lot of people on the Internet. Today, the well known hacker group Anonymous issued a press release via YouTube that announced that on that date it will stage a hack attack against Facebook. The social networking service has over 750 million registered users worldwide, and has drastically changed the way people communicate and play on the Internet. However, Anonymous claims it will be staging the hack attack because the group has serious concerns with how Facebook allegedly uses the info from its worldwide user base.

Since the leading search engine Google's own social networking site Google+ was launched in June, it has grown a lot and, according to some reports, it will surpass Twitter and LinkedIn as the No. 2 social media network within one year.

About 13 percent of U.S. adults has signed up Google+ and it may reach 22 percent within one year, according to a poll of over a thousand U.S. adults by Bloomberg and YouGov. Twitter's users will rise 3 percent of the U.S. population to 20 percent, LinkedIn's users will increase 2 percent to 20 percent of the U.S. population. However, Facebook may decrease 2 percent to 69 percent.

A fellow by the name of Sanford Wallace, otherwise known as one of the “Spam Kings”, has been charged with 11 federal criminal counts, these counts related to 27 MILLION unsolicited SPAM messages sent via Facebook servers. FBI officials note that Wallace received “substantial revenue” for this so-called “scheme” in which 500,000 Facebook users accounts were compromised. As of August 7th, 2011, Wallace has turned himself into authorities, has pled not guilty, and is free on a $100,000 bond while he faces more than 40 years in prison for his alleged crimes. Lulzsec and Anonymous have been unavailable for comment.

Facebook is facing fresh concerns from German data protection officials that its automatic facial recognition feature may violate European privacy regulations.

Hamburg's Data Protection Agency (DPA) sent a letter to Facebook on Tuesday saying the social networking site should get users' consent before their biometric data, used to enable the tagging feature, is stored, said Johannes Caspar, head of the agency, on Thursday. Although users can opt out of the feature, the DPA contends that the process is unclear, he said.

Facebook enabled the facial recognition feature in December in the U.S. and has now rolled it out in most countries. The system makes suggestions for tags based on faces in other photographs that have been tagged. Users are notified only after they've been tagged.

Facebook said it isn't planning to get into the digital books business, and will use the technology on its site

Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, a start-up that has developed software for creating highly interactive digital books, for an undisclosed amount.

The social networking company said Tuesday that it isn't planning to get into the digital book business, but some of the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook. It did not provide details.

The social networking web service Facebook has launched a new web page dedicated to helping businesses establish a Facebook page and using it to help their organization. The new page was launched only a few days after Google announced that it would continue to delete any businesses or organizations that attempted to establish a page on its new Google+ social networking service.

The new Facebook page shows how to claim and create a Facebook web page designed specifically for business users. It also shows how to create ads that will run on Facebook, how "sponsored stories" can be used to help promote businesses and how to use the pages to communicate with customers. While the actual page doesn't add any new business features to Facebook, it is certainly designed to be a one stop location for new businesses to learn more about Facebook and how to use it for those purposes.

Its code was found within an iPhone app update, and looks to be better-looking and easier to navigate than the iPhone version

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month announced the release of new chat features, including Skype video calling, and mentioned that many more launches would appear in the coming weeks. Now, a Canadian engineering student has found one of the most anticipated launches ahead of its actual release -- the Facebook iPad app.

Marvin Bernal, a Canadian engineering student and iOS enthusiast, discovered the iPad app hidden within the code of Facebook's iPhone app after Facebook released an update to its iPhone app. Version 3.4.4 had some fixes, but Bernal noticed the iPad app code almost immediately and tweeted it for everyone to see.

Facebook king values his own privacy, though not always others!

Possible social network founder Mark Zuckerberg has lost his lofty position as the most popular Google+ user and appears to have dropped out of the rankings altogether.

Zuckerberg was top of the Google+ ratings as late as Tuesday evening, and when we last looked had some 21,213 followers and 39 friends. Today he is nowhere to be seen and has been replaced by Robert Scoble, the man who confirmed to us all that this Zuckerberg was the real Zuckerberg.

"Name drop moment. Zuckerberg just texted me back. Says 'Why are people so surprised that I'd have a Google account?'," said the Scobleizer on his Twitter feed.

Although Google+ is trying to erode some market share, Facebook is by far the most popular social media site on the Internet. In order to continue the dominance, the company has launched a program called “Facebook for Every Phone.” The goal of the project is to give anyone with a phone that supports Java the ability to access the site in order to update statuses and post photos. According to the announcement, the app supports the site's most popular features including news, photos, and inbox. It was also designed to use less bandwidth than other apps, making it more affordable for end users.