Facebook to expand AI to help prevent suicide

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc. will expand its pattern recognition software to other countries after successful tests in the U.S. to detect users with suicidal intent, the world’s largest social media network said on Monday.

Facebook began testing the software in the United States in March, when the company started scanning the text of Facebook posts and comments for phrases that could be signals of an impending suicide.

Facebook has not disclosed many technical details of the program, but the company said its software searches for certain phrases that could be clues, such as the questions “Are you ok?” and “Can I help?”

If the software detects a potential suicide, it alerts a team of Facebook workers who specialize in handling such reports. The system suggests resources to the user or to friends of the person such as a telephone help line. Facebook workers sometimes call local authorities to intervene.

Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for product management, said the company was beginning to roll out the software outside the United States because the tests have been successful. During the past month, he said, first responders checked on people more than 100 times after Facebook software detected suicidal intent.

Facebook said it tries to have specialist employees available at any hour to call authorities in local languages.

“Speed really matters. We have to get help to people in real time,” Rosen said.

Last year, when Facebook launched live video broadcasting, videos proliferated of violent acts including suicides and murders, presenting a threat to the company’s image. In May Facebook said it would hire 3,000 more people to monitor videos and other content.

Rosen did not name the countries where Facebook was deploying the software, but he said it would eventually be used worldwide except in the European Union due to sensitivities, which he declined to discuss.

Other tech firms also try to prevent suicides. Google’s search engine displays the phone number for a suicide hot line in response to certain searches.

Facebook knows lots about its 2.1 billion users – data that it uses for targeted advertising – but in general the company has not been known previously to systematically scan conversations for patterns of harmful behavior.

One exception is its efforts to spot suspicious conversations between children and adult sexual predators. Facebook sometimes contacts authorities when its automated screens pick up inappropriate language.

But it may be more difficult for tech firms to justify scanning conversations in other situations, said Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor who writes about tech.

“Once you open the door, you might wonder what other kinds of things we would be looking for,” Calo said.

Rosen declined to say if Facebook was considering pattern recognition software in other areas, such as non-sex crimes.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook's Zuckerberg discloses steps to fight fake news

Facebook Inc, facing withering criticism for failing to stem a flood of phony news articles in the run-up to the US presidential election, is taking a series of steps to weed out hoaxes and other types of false information, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Friday evening.

Facebook has long insisted that it is a technology company and not a publisher, and rejects the idea that it should be held responsible for the content that its users circulate on the platform. Just after the election, Zuckerberg said the notion that fake or misleading news on Facebook had helped swing the election to Donald Trump was a "crazy idea."

Zuckerberg then said last Saturday that more than 99 percent of what people see on Facebook is authentic, calling "only a very small amount" fake news and hoaxes.

But in his Friday posting Zuckerberg struck a decidedly different tone. He said Facebook has been working on the issue of misinformation for a long time, calling the problem complex both technically and philosophically.

"While the percentage of misinformation is relatively small, we have much more work ahead on our roadmap," Zuckerberg said.

He outlined a series of steps that were already underway, including greater use of automation to "detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves."

He also said Facebook would make it easier to report false content, work with third-party verification organizations and journalists on fact-checking efforts, and explore posting warning labels on content that has been flagged as false. The company will also try to prevent fake-news providers from making money through its advertising system, as it had previously announced.

Zuckerberg said Facebook must be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or mistakenly restricting accurate content. "We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties," he said.

Facebook historically has relied on users to report links as false and share links to myth-busting sites, including Snopes, to determine if it can confidently classify stories as misinformation, Zuckerberg said. The service has extensive "community standards" on what kinds of content are acceptable.

Facebook faced international outcry earlier this year after it removed an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, a decision that was later reversed. The thorniest content issues are decided by a group of top executives at Facebook, and there have been extensive internal conversations at the company in recent months over content controversies, people familiar with the discussions say.

Among the fake news reports that circulated ahead of the US election were reports erroneously alleging Pope Francis had endorsed Trump and that a federal agent who had been investigating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was found dead.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook gets in game-streaming with Blizzard

SAN FRANCISCO, California – Facebook on Monday announced that it is getting into the eSports game, jumping into the field of video games as spectator sports against Amazon-owned Twitch and Google’s YouTube Gaming.

Later this month, people will be able to use Facebook accounts to log in to Blizzard Entertainment computer games such as “World of Warcraft.”

The move will pave the way for Blizzard game fans to use the leading social network’s Live video service to broadcast play in real time, the companies said in a joint release.

California-based Blizzard, owned by video game publisher Activision, is in the process of creating a “Go Live” feature that would let players stream on-screen action to Facebook timelines, according to the companies.

Blizzard games in line for the Facebook streaming capability included freshly released “Overwatch.”

The collaboration will add social features to Blizzard games while highlighting Facebook as a platform for sharing, viewing and discussing play, the companies said.

“Our collaboration on ‘Overwatch’ demonstrates Facebook’s commitment to partnering with AAA game companies, while further empowering Blizzard gamers to connect and share the content they’re most passionate about with the friends they play with around the world,” said Facebook global games director Leo Olebe.

“Overwatch” is a team-based shooter game played online.

Facebook earlier this year ramped up its challenge to Twitter-owned Periscope with upgrades to the social network’s live video broadcasting feature.

A new featured was added to the Live streaming feature at Facebook to let people “broadcast: to groups at the social network or in scheduled “events.”

Facebook Live launched in the middle of last year and was initially limited to celebrities but recently opened to a wider audience of broadcasters.

- eSports heavyweights -

Getting into the eSports game will pit Facebook against heavyweight rivals including pioneering firm Twitch and popular online video sharing service YouTube, owned by Google-parent Alphabet.

Yahoo Esports launched about two months ago as an online venue for live tournaments, commentary, features, interviews and more tailored for the booming trend of video games as spectator sports.

The rollout of YouTube Gaming in the middle of last year marked the public debut of an online spot where video game lovers can find commentary, live play, on-demand snippets and more.

The online arena for video game channels incorporates the search smarts of Google to surface fresh or must-see content.

US online retail giant Amazon snatched up Twitch and its huge audience for live-streamed gaming in 2014.

The acquisition was one of the largest in Amazon’s history — $970 million in cash for the three-year-old Internet company.

Twitch Interactive streams games being played for non-playing viewers to watch, and hosts gaming events.

It allows viewers to chat with the players and others, lending it some of the qualities of social networking websites, and it also sells advertising to generate income.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook launches real-time sports platform

Facebook Inc is tackling the sports arena with a new platform called Facebook Sports Stadium, which the social media site said will provide real-time updates on games, popular posts from fans, statistics and commentary from experts.

“With 650 million sports fans, Facebook is the world’s largest stadium,” it wrote in a post on Wednesday announcing the feature.

Facebook, which said it had an average 1.01 billion active daily users as of September, reports its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, Jan. 27.

The new service appears to be an effort to encroach on Twitter’s territory. The micro-blogging site has long been a popular destination for so-called “live-tweeting” games.

MichaelAaron Flicker, president of XenoPsi, a New York City-based marketing firm, said the new product is Facebook’s attempt at capturing “in the moment” engagement.

“They don’t have that piece of the puzzle,” Flicker said. “The challenge for Facebook is there are already a lot of communities (like Facebook Sports Stadium). This is not a unique offering.”

Facebook Sports Stadium currently covers only American football games and comes ahead of next month’s Super Bowl, on Feb. 7. But it will support other sports, including basketball and soccer, in the future, Facebook said.

The service can be accessed by searching for an individual game.

source: interaksyon.com

'Facebook DISABLED my account,' says woman named ISIS

MANILA - There's a woman from San Francisco who recently reported that the social media network Facebook disabled – but later reinstated – her account because of her name: Isis.

The name happens to be the same as the popular moniker of ISIS – The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), that is currently hogging the news headlines in the wake of its waves of terror attacks in Paris.

In the Tech News section of the British-published Express (http://www.express.co.uk), Aaron Brown wrote on Wednesday (November 18): "Isis Anchalee claims her profile was removed by Facebook because of her name."

Brown observed that the news comes days after Facebook rolled out the ability to overlay the French flag on users' profile pictures, to show solidarity with France.

 

ISIS is also known as The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), described by various sources as a Wahhabi/Salafi jihadist extremist militant group, self-proclaimed to be a caliphate and Islamic state, led by and mainly composed of Sunni Arabs from Iraq and Syria.

"Isis Anchalee – an engineer based in San Francisco, California – claims Facebook disabled her account because she shares her name with a popular abbreviation for Islamic State," Brown added in his report.

Read it here.

In the wake of the terror implications, Brown noted that Facebook had been "hard at work trying to eradicate the presence of Islamic State, dubbed ISIS, on the hugely popular US social network.

"Unfortunately the San Francisco engineer appears to have been mixed up in its efforts."

Anchalee was reportedly asked to prove her identity three times to Facebook.

"As a result, Facebook has since reinstated Isis Anchalee's profile on the hugely successful social network."

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook ready to spend billions to bring whole world online: Zuckerberg

MEXICO CITY — Facebook Inc is prepared to spend billions of dollars to reach its goal of bringing the Internet to everyone on the planet, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday.

“What we really care about is connecting everyone in the world,” Zuckerberg said at an event in Mexico City hosted by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

“Even if it means that Facebook has to spend billions of dollars over the next decade making this happen, I believe that over the long term its gonna be a good thing for us and for the world.”

Around 3 billion people will have access to the Internet by the end of 2014, according to International Telecommunications Union (ITU) statistics. Almost half that, 1.3 billion people, use Facebook.

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking company, launched its Internet.org project last year to connect billions of people without Internet access in places such as Africa and Asia by working with phone operators.

“I believe that … when everyone is on the Internet all of our businesses and economies will be better,” Zuckerberg said.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook goes down for some users

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc went down briefly for an unknown number of U.S. users on Wednesday afternoon in what appeared to be the latest outage to affect the world’s largest social network.

Several users had earlier reported getting an error message, “unable to connect to the Internet” when attempting to sign in.

Facebook said the log-in problems arose after what it called an infrastructure-configuration adjustment.

“We immediately discovered the issue and fixed it, and everyone should now be able to connect,” a Facebook spokesman said.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook rolls out video ads, aims to capture part of TV-marketing budgets

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc will allow more marketers to run video advertisements on its website, provided the world’s No.1 social network deem them to be of high-enough quality.

Facebook and social media rivals like Twitter are increasingly trying to grab a slice of lucrative TV-marketing budgets as they try to sustain rapid growth. That market is considered crucial to supporting Facebook’s growing market valuation and poses a potential long-term threat to traditional TV networks.

Facebook has moved cautiously to avoid annoying users. Social media players like Twitter are typically careful not to clutter up their users’ pages with unwanted material.

The 15-second video ads, which appear in newsfeeds and will play automatically with sound muted, will become available to a limited number of marketers over the next few months, Facebook said on its official blog on Thursday.

It first tested video ads with a single advertiser in December. Facebook said Thursday that video ads will be available to a “a select group of advertisers,” without details.

The price that marketers pay to run a video ad on Facebook will be determined by the size of the audience as measured by measurement firm Nielsen, Facebook added. Marketers will be able to choose specific times of day for their spots and will be able to target ads according to age and gender.

However, Facebook said it would review the creative quality of any video spots that appear on its website, assessing ads for criteria such as watchability, meaningfulness and “emotional resonance.” Such reviews will be done in partnership with video analytics firm Ace Metrix.

“We’re taking this step in order to maintain high-quality ads on Facebook and to help advertisers understand what’s working to maximize their return on investment,” Facebook said in the post.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook puts focus on photos in new look

MENLO PARK, California — Facebook Inc introduced the biggest change in years to its popular newsfeed on Thursday, with a new look and focus on photos that is expected to make the social network more ad-friendly and may entice users to spend more time on the website.

The changes to the newsfeed, whose look and feel had remained largely unchanged since Facebook’s inception, include a division into several sections, with separate areas for photographs and music.



The newsfeed is the ever-changing stream of photos, videos and comments uploaded from friends, and is the first page most users see upon logging in.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the makeover was part of an effort to position the social network as a “personalized newspaper,” complete with different sections for users to explore.

It comes with a revamped interface that gives more prominence to visual media, such as photos and videos.

The makeover comes roughly a month after Facebook introduced a new social search feature it dubbed “graph search” that makes it easier for the social network’s more than 1 billion users to discover more content on the social network.

The much-needed changes unveiled on Thursday, which standardize the network’s look across different types of desktop and mobile devices, bring Facebook up-to-date as Google+, the much younger social network started by Google Inc, begins to incorporate more video and images.

“This is just going to provide more opportunity for people to click around and stick around,” said Brian Blau, an analyst with industry research firm Gartner, about the revamped newsfeed.

“The newsfeed was kind of outdated. This sort of brings it up to maybe what’s comparable to…their competition, and partner sites that are focusing on media and richness.”

Facebook’s newsfeed is one of three “pillars” of the service, along with search and user profiles.

The updated newsfeed provides more space for the photos and videos that users share on the network, and provides a more consistent look and feel between the version for PCs and for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The changes will begin rolling out in limited fashion from Thursday, Facebook said.

Facebook executives say the updates will help keep organized the increasing jumble of content available on the social network as its user base grows.

The last major update to the feature occurred in September 2011. Since then, the company has incorporated ads directly into the feed and has shifted its focus to creating “mobile-first experiences,” because more people now access the social network from smartphones than from desktop computers.

Facebook vs Google

Marketers will be able to fashion more compelling ads thanks to the increased real estate for photos, said Hussein Fazal, the chief executive of AdParlor, a firm that helps companies advertise on Facebook. “Larger images will result in higher click through-rates, a higher level of engagement and better performance,” Fazal wrote in an email.

Still, analysts say the company needs to tread carefully to avoid inundating users’ various feeds with advertising, as Facebook tries to sustain a rapid pace of growth that helped it debut on public markets at the highest-ever valuation for a technology company.

The world’s largest social network is moving to regain Wall Street’s confidence after its botched IPO last year, addressing concerns about its long-term prospects – many of which center on an industry-wide shift toward the use of mobile devices.

Facebook shares, which are still more than a quarter off their IPO price of $38, closed up 4 percent at $28.57 on Thursday on the Nasdaq.

Facebook and Google, which both got their start on desktop computers, are now managing a transition of their products onto smartphones and tablets, which typically yield less revenue than on PCs.

The two Internet mainstays are also waging a war for revenue in mobile advertising – a market that is still small compared with the traditional desktop but that is growing exponentially.

In terms of overall mobile advertising, Google commanded a 53.5 percent share in 2012, aided by its dominance in search-based ads. Facebook had just 8.4 percent, a distant runner-up, according to estimates from research house eMarketer.

But in terms of mobile display ad sales, Facebook narrowly edges out its rival with 18.4 percent of the market versus Google’s 17 percent, the research outfit estimated.

Pressure on the system

The makeover is partly prompted by complaints about increasing clutter on Facebook’s network.

As Facebook has grown to more than 1 billion users, the amount of content that users and companies post to the website has surged. Facebook users only see a small portion of that content, culled by Facebook’s proprietary algorithm.

In recent months, some companies and users, including entrepreneur Mark Cuban, have grumbled that their content was not getting enough exposure in the newsfeed, because Facebook gives paid ads priority in the newsfeed.

Facebook’s vice president of product, Chris Cox, acknowledged that there was “more pressure on the system” to feature the various content, as Facebook has grown in size.

The additional newsfeeds provide more opportunities for content to appear in front of users. A photos-only feed displays pictures shared by a user’s connections on Facebook as well as on Facebook-owned Instagram and other photo apps that are integrated with the social network.

A revamped version of an existing but little-used Music feed aggregates the songs that a user’s friends are listening to, and includes posts from bands and performers in which a user has expressed an interest.

Facebook also introduced a “Friends Only” feed that displays every message shared by a user’s friends in chronological order — rather than chosen by an algorithm — as well as a “Following” feed that gathers posts from news publishers, celebrities, sports teams and other groups or businesses that a user subscribes to.

“The basic idea is sometimes you want five minutes and you want to see the top stuff, sometimes you want to spend an hour and go through a lot of different stuff,” Cox said in an interview after the event.

The additional feeds could also provide Facebook with more space to offer ads on its newsfeed, though a spokeswoman said the additional news feeds would not initially feature ads.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook to showcase new look for newsfeed on March 7

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc will unveil a new look for its popular “newsfeed” next week, the latest move by the Web company to revamp key elements of its 1 billion member social network.

Facebook will showcase the newsfeed makeover at a media event on March 7 at its Menlo Park, California headquarters, the company said in an emailed invitation to reporters on Friday.

The event will be Facebook’s second high-profile product event this year, following the rollout of its social search feature in January.

Facebook’s newsfeed, which displays an ever-changing stream of the photos, videos and comments uploaded from a user’s network of friends, is one of the three “pillars” of the service, along with search and user profiles, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said.

The last major update to Facebook’s newsfeed was in September 2011. Since then, the company has incorporated ads directly into the feed and the company has shifted its focus to creating “mobile first experiences,” as more people now access the social network every day on mobile devices than on desktop PCs.

The mobile version of Facebook still lacks many of the features available on the PC version, said Brian Blau, an analyst with industry research firm Gartner. “So maybe this is a way to bring some of that together,” he said.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook buys Microsoft ad technology platform

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc said on Thursday it had agreed to buy advertising technology from Microsoft Corp that measures the effectiveness of ads on its website, which should help in its fight with Google Inc for online advertising revenue.

Under the long-rumored transaction, Facebook will purchase the Atlas Advertiser Suite, an ad management and measurement platform that Microsoft took on with its $6.3 billion acquisition of digital ad agency aQuantive in 2007. Facebook did not say how much it paid for the technology.


Unable to make it work for its own purposes, Microsoft wrote off $6.2 billion of the aQuantive deal’s value last year.

Facebook has long been dogged by doubts about the effectiveness of its ads and was embarrassed just days before its initial public offering in May when General Motors Co declared it was pulling the plug on all paid advertising on Facebook’s network.

Since then, Facebook has introduced a number of tools and partnerships to prove to marketers that advertising on its social network delivers enough bang for the buck.

Brian Boland, Facebook’s director of monetization product marketing, said the purchase of Atlas was not a step toward creating a much wider ad network beyond the Facebook site, but analysts believe that is Facebook’s ultimate goal.

“Although the statement announcing the deal focused on Atlas’ measurement tools rather than its ad targeting technology, we expect that Atlas will soon be using Facebook’s data to target sponsorships, in-stream ads, and other rich ad formats across the entire web, and that’s big news,” said Forrester analyst Nate Elliott.

“The question now is how quickly and successfully Facebook can integrate its data with Atlas’ tools, and whether they can avoid a privacy backlash as they do so. History suggests they’ll struggle on both counts,” he said.

Google leads the $15 billion U.S. market for online display ads with 15.4 percent share, according to researcher eMarketer, followed by Facebook with 14.4 percent.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook unveils new privacy controls

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc began rolling out a variety of new privacy controls on Wednesday, the company’s latest effort to address user concerns about who can see their personal information on the world’s largest social network.

New tools introduced on Wednesday will make it easier for Facebook’s members to quickly determine who can view the photos, comments and other information about them that appears on different parts of the website, and to request that any objectionable photos they’re featured in be removed.

A new privacy “shortcut” in the top-right hand corner of the website provides quick access to key controls such as allowing users to manage who can contact them and to block specific people.

The new controls are the latest changes to Facebook’s privacy settings, which have been criticized in the past for being too confusing.

Facebook Director of Product Sam Lessin said the changes were designed to increase users’ comfort level on the social network, which has roughly one billion users.

“When users don’t understand the concepts and controls and hit surprises, they don’t build the confidence they need,” said Lessin.

Facebook, Google Inc and other online companies have faced increasing scrutiny and enforcement from privacy regulators as consumers entrust ever-increasing amounts of information about their personal lives to Web services.

In April, Facebook settled privacy charges with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it had deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. Under the settlement, Facebook is required to get user consent for certain changes to its privacy settings and is subject to 20 years of independent audits.

Facebook’s Lessin said some users don’t understand that the information they post on their Timeline profile page is not the only personal information about them that may be viewable by others. Improvements to Facebook’s so-called Activity Log will make it easier for users to see at a glance all the information that involves them across the social network.

Facebook also said it is changing the way that third-party apps, such as games and music players, get permission to access user data. An app must now provide separate requests to create a personalized service based on a user’s personal information and to post automated messages to the Facebook newsfeed on behalf of a user – previously users agreed to both conditions by approving a single request.

The revamped controls follow proposed changes that Facebook has made to its privacy policy and terms of service. The changes would allow Facebook to integrate user data with that of its recently acquired photo-sharing app Instagram, and would loosen restrictions on how members of the social network can contact other members using the Facebook email system.

Nearly 600,000 Facebook users voted to reject the proposed changes, but the votes fell far short of the roughly 300 million needed for the vote to be binding, under Facebook’s existing rules. The proposed changes also would eliminate any such future votes by Facebook users.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook, Zynga revamp partnership

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc and Zynga Inc severed the cozy ties that once bound the Internet industry’s closest couple, revising a years-old partnership between the two companies.

The two companies reported in regulatory filings on Thursday that they had reached an agreement to amend a deal struck in 2010 that was widely seen as giving Zynga privileged status on the world’s No.1 social network.

Zynga stock fell 12 percent to $2.30 in after-hours trading. Facebook shares were off 5 cents at $27.27.

“Zynga’s favored nation’s status is gone but it seems like it’s been slipping away for a while now,” said PJ McNealy, CEO of Digital World Research.

The new agreement gives Zynga a freer hand to operate a standalone gaming website, but eliminates the San Francisco game publisher’s ability to promote its site on Facebook and to draw users from Facebook’s thriving social network of roughly 1 billion users.

Visitors to Zynga’s gaming website will no longer be able to tap into their network of Facebook friends or post messages about their gaming progress to Facebook.

Zynga games, like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars,” will still be available on Facebook’s social network, but those games will no longer feature cross-promotions directing users to Zynga’s standalone website.

The move underscores the widening gap between the two social networking pioneers, which went public within seven months of each other and have been intimately tied.

In recent quarters, fees from Zynga contributed 15 percent of Facebook’s total revenues, while Zynga relies on Facebook for roughly 80 percent of its revenue.

The 2010 agreement provided a variety of ways for Zynga to meet its monthly user growth targets, including guaranteed promotions of certain Zynga games on Facebook.

“Effective on March 31, 2013, certain provisions related to Web and mobile growth targets and schedules will no longer be applicable,” said a regulatory filing submitted by Zynga on Thursday.

The changes could benefit Zynga’s rivals who have long groused about Zynga receiving preferential treatment.

“There was plenty of speculation Zynga was getting referrals within the Facebook community that other gaming companies weren’t getting which helped drive web traffic to Zynga games,” said Digital World Research’s McNealy.

But he noted that recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm appeared to be helping drive more traffic to Zynga competitors such as Electronic Arts and KixEye.

In July, Zynga executives told analysts that the company’s revenue had plummeted in the second quarter as Facebook tweaked its algorithms, sending fewer gamers to Zynga titles. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, at the time, assured Wall Street that Zynga was “working closely with Facebook to optimize the game ecosystem.”

Both Internet companies have been trying to reduce their inter-dependence, with Zynga starting up its own Zynga.com platform, and Facebook wooing other games developers.

“We have streamlined our terms with Zynga so that Zynga.com’s use of Facebook Platform is governed by the same policies as the rest of the ecosystem,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “We will continue to work with Zynga, just as we do with developers of all sizes.”

Among the myriad terms of their new agreement, Zynga could elect not to collect revenue for games on its own website by solely using Facebook payment system, in which Facebook takes a 30 percent cut.

The game developer could also choose not to display Facebook’s ads on its own site, Zynga.com.

“Wall Street thinks Facebook is booting them off or something bad, but there’s no way this is bad,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “This is at worst neutral and at best good.”

The revised agreement also allows Facebook to develop its own games, according to the filing. A person close to Facebook said the company “was not in the business of building games and we have not plans to do so.”

source: interaksyon.com

Privacy groups ask Facebook to withdraw proposed policy changes

SAN FRANCISCO — Two privacy advocacy groups urged Facebook Inc on Monday to withdraw proposed changes to its terms of service that would allow the company to share user data with recently acquired photo-application Instagram, eliminate a user voting system and loosen email restrictions within the social network.

The changes, which Facebook unveiled on Wednesday, raise privacy risks for users and violate the company’s previous commitments to its roughly 1 billion members, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.

“Facebook’s proposed changes implicate the user privacy and terms of a recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission,” the groups said in a letter to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg that was published on their websites on Monday.

By sharing information with Instagram, the letter said, Facebook could combine user profiles, ending its practice of keeping user information on the two services separate.

Facebook declined to comment on the letter.

In April, Facebook settled privacy charges with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it had deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. Under the settlement, Facebook is required to get user consent for certain changes to its privacy settings and is subject to 20 years of independent audits.

Facebook, Google and other online companies have faced increasing scrutiny and enforcement from privacy regulators as consumers entrust ever-increasing amounts of information about their personal lives to Web services.

Facebook unveiled a variety of proposed changes to its terms of service and data use polices on Wednesday, including a move to scrap a 4-year old process that can allow the social network’s roughly 1 billion users to vote on changes to its policies.

If proposed changes generate more than 7,000 public comments during a seven-day period, Facebook’s current terms of service automatically trigger a vote by users to approve the changes. But the vote is only binding if at least 30 percent of users take part, and two prior votes never reached that threshold.

The latest proposed changes had garnered more than 17,000 comments by late Monday.

Facebook also said last week that it wanted to eliminate a setting for users to control who can contact them on the social network’s email system. The company said it planned to replace the “Who can send you Facebook messages” setting with new filters for managing incoming messages.

That change is likely to increase the amount of unwanted “spam” messages that users receive, the privacy groups warned on Monday.

Facebook’s potential information sharing with Instagram, a photo-sharing service for smartphone users that it bought in October, flows from proposed changes that would allow the company to share information between its own service and other businesses or affiliates it owns.

The change could open the door for Facebook to build unified profiles of its users that include people’s personal data from its social network and from Instagram, similar to recent moves by Google Inc.

In January, Google said it would combine users’ personal information from its various Web services – such as search, email and the Google+ social network – to provide a more customized experience. The unified data policy raised concerns among some privacy advocates and regulators, who said it was an invasion of people’s privacy.

“As our company grows, we acquire businesses that become a legal part of our organization,” Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an emailed statement on Monday.

“Those companies sometimes operate as affiliates. We wanted to clarify that we will share information with our affiliates and vice versa, both to help improve our services and theirs, and to take advantage of storage efficiencies,” Noyes said.

source: interaksyon.com

Zynga plans to build a gamers’ social network

SAN FRANCISCO — Zynga Inc unveiled a social network for gamers dubbed “Zynga with Friends” on Tuesday, hoping to wean itself from a longstanding, symbiotic relationship with Facebook Inc that has shaped two of Silicon Valley’s closely watched Internet companies.

The game publisher, which has been under pressure to reverse a steep slide in stock price in recent months, said its new network will pair gamers with opponents and make features like player profiles, an activity stream and chat available for all users, regardless of whether they play Zynga games on mobile devices or on desktop computers.

Zynga with Friends is “one network, one unified experience, and one social lobby that will for the first time connect all of our players, no matter where they’re playing,” Manuel Bronstein, a senior Zynga executive, told reporters at a press event in the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

“The new social features and services are designed for the sole purpose of bringing more people to play together,” Bronstein said.

Zynga will also provide programming tools to help third-party developers publish online and mobile games based on its own software, executives said, in order to foster a Zynga “ecosystem” that will expand its slate of titles beyond mainstays such as “Farmville” and “Zynga Poker.”

Still, Zynga shares closed nearly 5 percent lower on Tuesday as investors saw little in the announcement – which included the planned social network, as well as a bevy of new game titles – to drive strong long-term growth.

The company announced “FarmVille 2,” a sequel to its megahit resource management title, as well as “Matching with Friends,” an addition to a suite of smartphone games that includes the popular “Words with Friends.”

“One of the worries is that the whole idea of social gaming seems to be waning somewhat,” said Paul Verna, a gaming analyst at eMarketer. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of growth left, and the idea of unveiling another Ville game or FarmVille 2 – I don’t get the sense that’s very exciting to the financial investors.”

Cozy partnership

Zynga’s moves, while long expected, have stirred speculation around the future of its cozy partnership with Facebook, a company that owed 15 percent of its first quarter revenue to fees from Zynga. The two companies also confirmed recently that Facebook has begun showing ads from its inventory inside Zynga games, which are played by some 290 million people.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s reach of close to 1 billion users has helped distribute Zynga’s games and propel the publisher to a dominant position in the social gaming industry, but analysts have warned that Zynga needs to seek greater independence to sustain growth, especially as Facebook’s expansion inevitably slows.

Colin Sebastian, an analyst at R. W. Baird, said the Zynga with Friends network “is a natural step in the right direction as they leverage their technology infrastructure and user base. On one hand it might help them become less dependent on Facebook, but from a practical perspective they will continue to remain dependent on Facebook for quite some time.”

Asked to comment, Facebook issued a statement that betrayed no concern about Zynga’s announcement. “It’s exciting to see Zynga continue to build with Facebook across web and mobile platforms.”

Responding to questions from reporters on Tuesday, Zynga executives took pains to stress that the expansion of its own social network did not threaten its existing relationship with Facebook.

“We’ve had a longstanding agreement with Facebook that we would do these kinds of things,” said Reed Shaffner, Zynga’s director of product. “In no way are we trying to use that to say you have to play on this platform.”

“The idea is that we’ll help you find the best gaming friends anywhere you play,” he added.

Executives said the platform could potentially have as many as 290 million users with some 2.8 billion daily social interactions once it is rolled out, although a launch date was not specified.

Targeting mobile

Zynga acknowledged on Tuesday that it is also trying to boost mobile usage, targeting a small but faster-growing wireless device gaming market that is quickly becoming a crucial battleground for so-called casual or social gaming.

To bolster its mobile offerings, Zynga purchased New York-based game developer OMGPOP for $183 million in March.

The company said Tuesday it will also team up with Atari SA to develop games, but did not elaborate.

Zynga executives said they will provide developers a set of “application programming interfaces” – APIs – to make it easier for them to craft games using Zynga’s software.

“We’re opening our doors today and opening Zynga Partners for Mobile. We are inviting developers from all over the world to come and join our network,” said David Ko, chief mobile officer.

Zynga wants to create an ecosystem with “best-in-class mobile developers and best-in-class mobile games,” Ko said.

The company also announced new titles including ChefVille, a kitchen management game, and The Ville, a game resembling “The Sims” that allows users to build homes and dress their avatars to interact and pursue romantic relationships with other users.

Even so, analysts said Zynga, facing mounting scrutiny from investors, may need to look beyond its familiar repertoire to attract new gamers and keep existing ones hooked.

“One area where they may have disappointed people is, they are not showing any games in development that target a more core gamer, or so-called mid-core gamer,” said Sebastian, the Baird analyst. “That’s something where we’ve seen a lot of growth for Facebook, and that’s potentially a missed opportunity for Zynga.”

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook reveals revenue, profit slide ahead of IPO

SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook Inc reported its first quarter-to-quarter revenue slide in at least two years, a sign that the social network's sizzling growth may be cooling as it prepares to go public in the biggest ever Internet IPO.

The company blamed the first-quarter decline, which surprised some on Wall Street, on seasonal advertising trends.

"It was a faster slowdown than we would have guessed," said Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group.

"No matter how you slice it, for a company that is perceived as growing so rapidly, to slow so much on whatever basis - sequentially or annually - it will be somewhat concerning to investors if faced with a lofty valuation," Wieser said.

Facebook is preparing to raise at least $5 billion in an initial public offering that could value the world's largest social network at up to $100 billion.

"The biggest issue is the realization that Facebook is not going to have an easy time meeting high expectations of the public market," said Jeff Sica, chief investment officer of SICA Wealth Management, which manages more than $1 billion in client assets, real estate and private equity holdings. "It will affect how people look at the IPO."

Investors are still likely to sign up in droves for the IPO; However, growth concerns may make some investors less likely to keep the stock over the long term, he added.

"I'm still encouraging people to participate in the IPO, under the acknowledgement that it could be a bumpy ride," Sica said. "There are high expectations and I hate high expectations."

The company, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard University dorm room in 2004, surpassed 900 million monthly active users in the first quarter and said its full-time staff grew by about 1,100 employees to 3,539 in the past 12 months, according to an updated filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

Facebook also disclosed that it has agreed to pay Instagram $200 million if the company's recent deal to buy the photo-sharing start-up for about $1 billion does not go through.

Facebook said it paid $300 million in cash for Instagram, along with 23 million shares of Class B common stock. It said the fair value of its Class B common stock was $30.89 per share as of January 31.

Spending roughly doubled over the past 12 months, outpacing the 45 percent revenue increase during the period, it said.

Net income slid 12 percent to $205 million in the quarter, from $233 million a year earlier at the rapidly expanding company.

Facebook said its advertising business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue, typically slows down in the first three months of the year. The rapid advertising growth may have "partially masked" such trends to date, and seasonal impacts may be more pronounced in the future, it noted.

Revenue, which totaled $1.06 billion in the three months ended March 31, declined 6 percent from the fourth quarter. It was the first quarter-on-quarter drop since at least 2010.

"It was bound to happen. You are going to see a slowdown," said Anupam Palit, an analyst at GreenCrest Capital LLC, noting that it is harder to double revenue when the base is larger.

But he also said Facebook has not worked out how to make more money in some international markets where it is growing the fastest, such as Brazil, India and the Philippines.

"They have not cracked international markets yet, while others like Google do very well internationally," Palit added.

Apart from slowing growth, Facebook is also grappling with other issues. Yahoo Inc is suing it for patent infringement even as the social networking company tries to beef up its intellectual property arsenal. On Monday, it said it would pay $550 million for hundreds of patents from Microsoft Corp.

Payments hint

Facebook gets most of its revenue from advertising, but has a Payments business centered around Facebook Credits, a virtual currency used mainly to buy virtual goods within social games.

However, the company hinted at a possible an expansion of Facebook Credits into other areas.

Facebook gets a cut of up to 30 percent from virtual goods sales on its platform.

"In the future, if we extend Payments outside of games, the percentage fee we receive from developers may vary," the company said in its IPO filing on Monday.

Some investors expect e-commerce to be a major area of expansion for Facebook. Some industry experts said that if Facebook Credits were used for purchases of physical goods, the company's cut would have to be a lot lower than 30 percent.

source: interaksyon.com