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Facebook's Graph Search is Incomplete

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 17:51:49 +0100

According to Facebook's new search feature, only two of my 526 friends like cats. Judging by the number of cat photos filling my feed every day, this is obviously not accurate ... read the FULL STORY.

Former Engadget editor-in-chief quits Instagram, Facebook

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 23:33:41 +0100

Ryan Block, the former editor in chief of Engadget and the co-founder of Gdgt wasn’t upset by Instagram tweaks that may have led millions to leave, nor was he bothered by the concerns about privacy that have dogged social networking giant for years ... FULL STORY.

Instagram users snap over photo selling to advertisers

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 23:35:32 +0100

Facebook is the focus of a new protest after altering the terms of service on its photo-sharing site Instagram, allowing the social networking service to sell photos people have uploaded or related information.
It’s hard to tell whether Instagram will experience a massive outflow of users, but the backlash has been plentiful and harsh. F ULL STORY.

Facebook lists user phone numbers for all to see

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 05:53:25 +0100

There's no easy way to look up someone's mobile-phone number. White pages? Nope. Directory assistance? Uh-uh.

It's something that drives telemarketers and pollsters crazy, as there are millions of people, especially young ones, who don't have any landlines and can't easily be reached by strangers.

But it turns out Facebook has been openly listing mobile numbers all along, as Indian security researcher Suriya Prakash discovered recently.

Needless to say, he wasn't happy about it.

"I would consider my most 'personal' data saved on Facebook to be my mobile number as it is somewhat of a bridge interlinking both my personal and online life," Prakash explained in a blog posting this past Thursday. "I would not like people I don't want getting a hold of it."

Prakash had earlier told Facebook about his discovery, but the company told him there were no security issues involved as the rate of queries from a particular source would be limited as a guard against automated attacks.

Prakash found that that was true for the desktop version of Facebook, but not the mobile one.

[11 Facebook Privacy Steps to Take Now]

Try it yourself

To use Prakash's method, log into Facebook on a desktop browser, copy this URL and paste it into the address bar:http://m.facebook.com/search/?query=123456789

Then substitute a Facebook friend's mobile number for the number string and hit "Enter." (Be sure to include the country code prefix — "1" for the U.S. and Canada, "44" for Britain, "33" France and so on.)

If your Facebook friend has listed his mobile number on Facebook, or if he's got a Facebook app on his smartphone, it'll show right up. In many cases, it works for "friends of friends" and for total strangers.

Why? As Prakash found, the default Facebook privacy setting for "Who can look you up using the email address or phone number you provided?" is "Everyone."

(To see it yourself, click on the downward facing arrow next to the "Home" button in the upper-right corner of your Facebook page, then click "Edit Settings" next to "How You Connect.")

Contacted by TechNewsDaily, a Facebook representative said this was a feature, not a flaw.

"The ability to search for a person by phone number is intentional behavior and not a bug in Facebook," the representative wrote in an email.

"By default, your privacy settings allow everyone to find you with search and friend finder using the contact info you have provided, such as your email address and phone number. You can modify these settings at any time from the Privacy Settings page.

"Facebook has developed an extensive system for preventing the malicious usage of our search functionality and the scenario described by the researcher was indeed rate-limited and eventually blocked. We are constantly updating these systems to improve their effectiveness and address new kinds of attacks."

Gold mine of information

Until yesterday (Oct. 8), a savvy telemarketer could have created a computer script generating possible mobile-phone numbers, then harvested whatever real names were matched to them through Facebook.

To prove it, Prakash did exactly that, running through thousands of possible mobile numbers in India and in New York City. (Unlike the rest of North America, New York an area code dedicated to mobile numbers.)

You can see a small subset — 850 names — of Prakash's results here. If you've got a New York mobile number in the format (917) 5x2-xxxx, you may even be on it.

Another researcher, Tyler Borland, wrote an even faster script that looked up 10 numbers at once.

"I was able to verify data for 1 phone number every second," Borland told Computerworld.

With a botnet of 100,000 hijacked computers, Prakash estimated, the entire Facebook mobile-phone-listing database could have been harvested in a few days.

Facebook tweaked its settings to limit the number of responses it would give to a specific IP address. But the method still works manually.

TechNewsDaily was able to find the mobile numbers of four strangers, all of whom had presumably not tweaked their default privacy settings, by slowly running through a list of 20 possible New York numbers.

Stumbling into it

Prakash discovered this Facebook feature after he noticed that his smartphone Facebook app suggested adding friends from his phone's contact list, based on his contacts' mobile-phone numbers.

In fact, he could see his contacts' profile photos and link to their Facebook profiles, even without having "friended" them on Facebook.

"What it does is that it compares the contact list from your phone to the FB database to see if you have any friends that are in your contacts but not on your Facebook account," he wrote. "I also later figured out that simply 'searching' a person's phone number (including country code) will show you their account."

TechNewsDaily

Facebook to charge users to ‘promote’ posts to friends

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:40:09 +0100

Facebook wants you to advertise … to your friends.

The world’s largest social network, which announced Thursday that it has crossed the billion-user mark, has struggled to make money from its enormous pool of users. The solution: Turning individual users into advertisers.

“I thought it was a joke at first, to be honest,” explained Cameron Yuill, founder of digital media technology company AdGent. “Now they’re going to charge me $7 to tell my friends something?”

Facebook announced Wednesday that Joe Sixpack will soon be able to ensure that you're reading his messages, thanks to an expansion of the Promoted Posts program, which lets businesses pay anywhere from a few dollars to a few thousand to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Facebookers see your posts.

“As part of a test starting today, people in the U.S. can promote personal posts to their friends on Facebook,” explained Abhishek Doshi, a software engineer, on Facebook’s website. “When you promote a post -- whether it’s wedding photos, a garage sale, or big news -- you bump it higher in news feed so your friends and subscribers are more likely to notice it.”

Some tech experts expressed dismay at the idea, fearing an explosion of unwanted content “pinned” to the top of your Facebook page. Others accused Facebook of taking advantage of a situation that it created.

“[This is] a new low in the network’s accelerating user experience implosion,” wrote Matt Silverman on Mashable. He argued that the algorithm that determines which posts show up at the top of your page also determines which posts rarely make it up there -- and the social networking giant is now abusing the algorithm it created, something economists term “artificial scarcity.”

“Essentially, the network is ‘hiding’ your updates from friends, and then turning around to say, ‘Hey, if you want friends to see your updates, you could pay us!’”

“Facebook is rigging the game,” he added.

Representatives of Facebook did not respond to FoxNews.com requests for more information. But other experts said the “big change” was anything but new. Social media sites have been putting your friends to work for years, explained Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research.

“The idea of companies deriving revenue by capitalizing on consumers marketing to other friends is nothing new,” Rubin told FoxNews.com. “There's certainly some risk of members finding promoted posts annoying, but it merely ups the ante for people to think more about how they share,” he said.

Promoted Posts might be the company’s best bet to change the trajectory of its stock, said Yuill. The price of FB sank from an IPO high of $38 to as little as $19; it was trading on Thursday for just under $22.

“This is a simple idea that’s going to be wildly successful,” he told FoxNews.com. “Someone has to pay for the free stuff out there, and if the advertisers aren’t it’s going to be users.”

Facebook said initial testing for the service occurred in New Zealand. Yuill, who is himself from Australia, noted that the choice of venue was an interesting one.

“New Zealand is notoriously tight fisted. If you can get the Kiwis to pay for it, the rest of the world will too!”

What you get for your money remains to be seen, however. Chris Dessi, a social media expert and CEO of Silverback Social, said one recent experiment with promoted posts was far from successful. Sure, it resulted in tremendous traffic -- from Indonesia.

“Why would Facebook promote my post to people in Indonesia?,” he wrote on Social Media Today.

“Looking at my demographics today I can see that Indonesia is in fact, the second most popular country to have liked my page after the USA -- but did they like the page organically or while I was paying Facebook for advertising to grow my Facebook page likes?”

The other issue is cost. How much would you spend to promote a fun run or a charity fund raiser? $7 may cross the line for some, Yuill noted.

“That’s a lot of money to pay to tell your friends something.”

By Jeremy A. Kaplan

Published October 04, 2012

FoxNews.com

Facebook stock falls after Barron's says it's 'still too pricey'

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 03:40:49 +0100

The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Facebook Inc.'s stock fell almost nine per cent Monday after an article in the financial magazine Barron's said it is "still too pricey" despite a sharp decline since its initial public offering.

Though Facebook's stock has plunged since its May IPO, Andrew Bary at Barron's said the stock trades at "high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows."

At issue is the shift of Facebook's massive user base to mobile devices. The company is still figuring out how to advertise to people who use their mobile phones and tablet computers to access the social network. Bary said success in the mobile space is "no sure thing" for the company. Mobile ads must fit into much smaller screens, which doesn't give Facebook "much room to configure ads without alienating users," Bary said.

Facebook also has what Bary called "significant" stock-based compensation expenses. Last year, the company issued $1.4 billion worth of restricted stock and $1 billion so far this year, he noted. Yet technology companies such as Facebook "routinely encourage analysts to ignore stock-based compensation expense -- and most comply. This dubious approach to calculating profits is based on the idea that only cash expenses matter," Bary wrote. "That's a fiction, pure and simple."

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook's stock fell $2.03, or 8.9 per cent, to close at $20.83 on Monday. The company went public on May 18 at a share price of $38, which it has not matched since.

Bary said he thinks Facebook's stock is worth $15, well below its current price even with Monday's drop.

"That would be roughly 24 times projected 2013 profit and six times estimated 2013 revenue of $6 billion, still no bargain price," he wrote.

Facebook declined to comment.

Last week, research firm eMarketer said it expects Google Inc. to surpass Facebook in U.S. display advertising revenue this year. In February, eMarketer predicted Facebook would stay ahead of Google. The social networking company had surpassed Google in 2011. But Facebook's ad revenue has fallen short of the expectations eMarketer set in February.

That said, some analysts are still bullish on Facebook. Last week an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald started coverage of its stock with a "Buy" rating and a target price of $26. The analyst, Youssef Squali, said he's "positive on the stock long-term" despite its botched IPO and the worry that Facebook's stock will be held down as employees become eligible to sell their stock in the coming months.

"We see significant opportunities ahead of Facebook, largely from brands moving online seeking mass reach and user engagement and from the explosion of mobile advertising in the next 2-5 years," Squali said in a note to investors.

Facebook Co-Founder Moskovitz's Daily Stock Sales

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:48:37 +0100

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has been selling 150,000 shares of Facebook stock a day out of the hundreds of millions that he owns. So far, he has shed 1.35 million shares for proceeds of $26.2 million, at prices ranging from $18.79 to $20.08. Moskovitz was Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate when they founded Facebook in 2004. Moskovitz, 28, left Facebook in 2008 and started Asana, whose software helps manage projects. He has been disclosing the sales every three days. He did not sell any stock in Facebook's IPO. Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. Here's a look at his daily sales, average prices and ranges and proceeds for the day:

— Aug. 17: 150,000 shares, ($19.95 to $20.08), $3 million
— Aug. 20: 150,000 shares, ($18.79 to $20.03), $2.92 million
— Aug. 21: 150,000 shares, ($19.09 to $19.95), $2.91 million
— Aug. 22: 150,000 shares, ($19 to $19.52), $2.9 million
— Aug. 23: 150,000 shares, ($19.37 to $19.73), $2.93 million
— Aug. 24: 150,000 shares, ($19.26 to $19.66), $2.92 million
— Aug. 27: 150,000 shares, ($19.10 to $19.49), $2.88 million
— Aug. 28: 150,000 shares, ($19 to $19.37), $2.89 million
— Aug. 29: 150,000 shares, ($19.08 to $19.37), $2.88 million.

Peter Thiel Sells Almost All His Facebook Stock

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 02:55:50 +0100

Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s earliest investors, has taken advantage of the expiration of a lock-up period last week and has sold 22.3 million shares — almost all the stock he owns in the company — according to documents filed with the SEC. The sale, at a price of around $20, means Thiel netted about $446 million and now has another 1.3 million shares left. Thiel was one of many investors to take advantage of last Thursday’s lock-up expiration. The end of that first lock-up period freed up a total of 271 million shares. Predictably, Facebook’s share price fell at the time, hitting a new low of $19.69. Facebook’s stock closed at $20.01 on Monday and was up slightly in afterhours.

Facebook Stock Plunges To New Low

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:04:35 +0100

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook's stock plunged to a new low Thursday as some of the social networking leader's early backers got their first chance to sell their shares since the company's initial public offering went awry.

Analysts interpreted the unusually high trading volume as a clear sign that at least a few of the insiders were seizing on a fresh selling opportunity. That is stirring a debate over whether they're simply locking in long-awaited gains on investments made many years ago or bailing out of a company that has lost its luster.

A breakdown on just how many major Facebook Inc. shareholders sold their stock probably won't be available until next week at the earliest. Securities regulations give them at least three business days before they have to disclose such transactions.

The information is important "because if you are an investor who has been sitting on the sidelines waiting for a good time to buy the stock, you might decide to stay on the sidelines for a little longer after seeing which insiders decided to sell their stock," CapStone Investments analyst Rory Maher said.

All told, investors who owned a combined 271 million Facebook shares could have sold their holdings Thursday with the expiration of a ban known as a lock-up period. The restrictions were imposed on a group of venture capitalists, companies and Silicon Valley cognoscente who invested in Facebook during its formative years and sold some of their holdings three months ago when the company went public at $38.

The highly anticipated IPO had valued the company at $104 billion, similar to those of Amazon.com Inc. and PepsiCo Inc.

The shares have plunged by nearly 50 percent since then amid concerns about whether Facebook is destined to become a passing fancy and worries about whether it will be able to sell more advertising on mobile devices as users gravitate there.

Facebook' stock traded as low as $19.69 before bouncing back slightly. The shares closed Thursday at $19.87, down $1.33, or more than 6 percent. The previous low during the day was $19.82 and the previous low for a close was $20.04, both reached Aug. 2

More than 156 million shares were traded, more than five times the stock's average volume over the past month. Trading in the overall market was lighter than usual.

The Facebook investors eligible to sell their shares Thursday included venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners; investment banker Goldman Sachs Group; software maker Microsoft Corp.; Zynga Inc. CEO Marc Pincus; LinkedIn Corp. Chairman Reid Hoffman; and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel.

If there was mass selling within this group, Facebook's stock could decline further because the market would be flooded with nearly two-thirds more shares.

Given that most of these investors put their money into Facebook five to eight years ago, they probably were eager to sell, said Sam Hamadeh, the CEO of PrivCo, a research firm that follows privately held companies.

"A lot of people have been waiting," he said. "Facebook was expected to go public a long time ago."

Despite the sharp drop in Facebook's market value during the past three months, the early investors can still reap huge windfalls by selling at the current price.

For instance, Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004, the year CEO Mark Zuckerberg began the site in a Harvard dorm room.

After selling 16.8 million shares for $640 million at the time of the initial public offering in May, Thiel still owned nearly 28 million shares worth about $560 million at Thursday's trading prices.

Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook in 2005. The firm sold nearly 58 million shares for $2.2 billion as part of Facebook's IPO and still owned nearly 144 million shares worth about $2.9 billion.

It wasn't known how many of those shares could have been sold Thursday, and whether any of them were.

Because those investors had put up little compared with the shares' value today, "you can understand why they would want to take some of their money off the table now," Maher said. "But at the same time, you have to wonder if they're thinking that Facebook isn't much of a bargain anymore."

Hamadeh believes the venture capitalists who invested in Facebook realize it's a "fool's game" to wait for a better price on the stock.

On the flip side, other key investors seem unlikely to sell additional shares right away. Microsoft, which invested $240 million in Facebook in 2007, relies on Facebook's social network to help bring more traffic to its Bing search engine, making it less likely that it would risk antagonizing Facebook executives by bailing out. The software company also doesn't need the money, as it is already is sitting on $63 billion in cash.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment Thursday.

The selling shackles will come off of an additional 1.66 billion locked-up Facebook shares during the next nine months to place more potential pressure on the stock. One of the biggest tests will come in November when about 1.2 billion insider shares will be eligible for sale.

The freed-up shares will include those owned by Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO and founder who sold 30 million shares for $1.1 billion in the May IPO to cover his taxes.

Other Internet companies that have gone public in the past year have been hit hard by the expiration of their lock-up periods.

On Tuesday, shares of online reviews service Angie's List suffered their biggest one-day drop so far and closed at a new low following the expiration of a similar ban. The price dropped, even though there was no word on whether any of the major investors had dumped their shares.

LinkedIn, which runs a professional networking version of Facebook, also took a big hit when restrictions on insider selling lifted last November. Its shares sank to their trading low of $55.98 after the lock-up period expired, but have since rebounded strongly. The shares closed at $103.99 Thursday, more than twice its IPO price of $45.

It appears some investors believe Facebook's stock price is nearing its low point, at least until the next lock-up periods end this fall.

Short sellers, a type of investor that bets certain stocks will fall, had been intensifying their focus on Facebook since the company's July 26 report of disappointing revenue growth during the second quarter. To wager against a company, short sellers must borrow the stock of other investors and then make money by paying back the shares at a lower price.

The amount of borrowed Facebook shares had spiked from about 70 million before Facebook's second-quarter earnings report to about 92 million at the end of Thursday's trading, said Tim Smith, senior vice president of SunGard Astecs Analytics, which tracks short-selling activity.

But sentiments started to shift Thursday as the volume of shares being returned to the lenders outstripped the number being borrowed, Smith said. The cost to borrow Facebook shares also has been declining, a sign that short-selling demand is waning.

"Facebook's stock might be finally bumping along its bottom," Smith said.

Considering the heavy trading volume, Facebook's stock would have fallen more dramatically if buyers hadn't stepped in, said Louise Yamada, a technical analyst who runs her own research firm.

She suspects Facebook insiders are being careful not to flood the market with stock. "They're smart enough to know if they sell at the same time, the stock would fall," Yamada said.

It has been a rough run for Facebook. After one of the most-anticipated IPOs in history, Facebook had perhaps the most-botched stock market debut as glitches marred its first day of trading. Things have gotten progressively worse as Facebook's market value has plunged by about $49 billion.

The downfall stems from doubts about Facebook's ability to fend off intensifying competition from Internet search leader Google Inc. while trying to develop a plan for increasing the amount of revenue that it brings in from a worldwide audience of 955 million users.

The uncertainty means Facebook's stock is likely to be volatile until the end of the year when the majority of the lockups expire. Hamadeh views the end of those selling constraints as a "dark cloud on the horizon."

"There is no way around it. It'll be painful," he said. "But hopefully once that selling pressure is gone, it will find its floor and could be a basis for a more stable stock through 2013."

AP Business Writer Bernard Condon in New York contributed to this story.

FTC settles Facebook privacy complaint

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 01:03:14 +0100

The trade commission says that Facebook must now submit to biennial privacy audits and obtain users' express consent before sharing information.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has inked a final settlement with Facebook over the company's privacy practices.

Under terms of the settlement, Facebook has agreed to provide users with "clear and prominent notice" anytime their information is shared. But before that can happen, Facebook must obtain its users' "express consent" before sharing any information that exists outside the auspices of its privacy settings. In addition, the agency will force Facebook to maintain a "comprehensive privacy program," and subject its service to biennial privacy audits.

The FTC first announced the settlement with Facebook back in November. Following that, the government organization gave the public time to comment. Today's announcement marks an official end to the investigation, and will now force Facebook to comply. If it doesn't, the company could be subject to civil penalties of up to $16,000 for each violation of the order.

The agency kicked off its investigation into Facebook's privacy practices back in 2009 after several watchdogs filed a complaint charging the social network with exposing information users had previously set to private. Facebook also claimed that third-party apps access to user information would be limited to what was necessary to operate. However, the apps were able to access nearly all of the users' personal data, the FTC reported in its findings.

The FTC yesterday settled its another privacy complaint it launched against Google over the search company's alleged user tracking in Apple's Safari browser. Unlike the Facebook settlement, Google was hit with a $22.5 million fine -- the largest ever for violation of the agency's order.

As with the Google deal, the FTC says that its settlement with Facebook is in the public's interest. However, the agency made it clear that if Facebook doesn't adhere to its order, it will take action.

"We intend to monitor closely Facebook's compliance with the order, and will not hesitate to seek civil penalties for any violations," the agency's commissioners wrote today in a joint statement.

"We are pleased that the settlement, which was announced last November, has received final approval," Facebook told CNET in an e-mailed statement. Don Reisinger CNET.