Facebook celebrates 9 years results and perspectives for 2013

Facebook celebrates 9 years results and perspectives for 2013

Tuesday, 12 February 2013 / No Comments

Facebook celebrated his ninth birthday. The opportunity to take stock of a very busy year 2012 for the social network, with its IPO, has accelerated the process of monetization. The latest figures released last week show statistics of visits evolving, with profits scaled down. The full report presents other interesting figures for 2012:

    There are 50 million fan pages (more than 10 likes)

    There are 150 billion connections between friends

   350 million photos are uploaded every day

   76 million fake accounts populate the social network 

Regarding the latter figure, two types of accounts are concerned. Accounts "undesirables" that Facebook considered spamming and accounts "misinterpreted" which, to take the example of the report are accounts that should be pages, such as profiles of pets. Most of these fake users for duplicate accounts, of which there are 53 million.

A defined strategy for 2013 

The report filed with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) of 139 pages and also presents the strategy of Facebook for this year 2013. The main axes display:

    Further develop its user community: Facebook displays over one billion active users per month. It remains to conquer markets, including Latin America and Asia, which have ingrained habits on some platforms. An acquisition strategy in the emerging markets is a priority.

    Develop products for a better user experience: Facebook has launched many products in 2012, a large majority of destination marketers . For users, the globalization of Timeline and Open Graph has led to profound changes in the interface. Latest product, the Graph Search , search engine and social semantics. Soon, a new timeline could make its appearance, as well as new statutes .

    Improve the mobile experience: the social network has been widely criticized for its mobile products. With 680 million active users per month on mobile, Facebook's interest to provide quality applications. Recent updates to the iOS and Android applications have significantly improved the fluidity of Facebook on Smartphone, which remained the main criticism made ​​by users. Some even preferred to use the mobile site over the application. With the acquisition of Instagram last August and the development of mobile advertising, it's a safe bet that this will be a major focus in 2013.

    Improve its platform for developers of Open Graph has opened up a range of possibilities for developers, both for applications and websites. New uses have emerged, including the seamless sharing (sharing a kind of automatic) services like Spotify and Deezer, but others have failed to break through, like social readers. Facebook continues its momentum therefore to propose tools and a comprehensive API for developers.

    Improve its offer advertising: Facebook has significantly topped its offer for marketing professionals, with many pub formats. The reach war highlighted the Edge Rank , this algorithm selecting content to be displayed on newsfeeds. Active in both the pages and users, its existence (which is however not new) has aroused awareness of the need to pay to reach a wider audience. Facebook thus continues to evolve its products on all devices (desktop & mobile) to better target their messages more effectively and measure campaigns.

    Improve its infrastructure: Facebook has a huge installed base of hundreds of thousands of servers. Over a billion dollars was spent in 2011 to improve the infrastructure. A new data center is being built in Sweden. These investments are essential to support the load and provide smooth navigation to its users. Note that 10% of this infrastructure is dedicated to protecting the privacy of its members.

The benefit of Facebook is plummeting

The benefit of Facebook is plummeting

Wednesday, 6 February 2013 / No Comments

Facebook closed the year with a net profit of $ 53 million, a far cry from the 1,000 million profit it had in 2011, representing a drop of 90%. The revenues of the largest online social network were around 5090 million, a strong rebound compared to 3710 million in the previous year. Its shares reached a 10% drop in the mail after publishing market accounts, but after the collapse moderated to just over 2%.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the dotcom now rivaling Google, made ​​clear to investors that the company "will continue to invest to achieve its mission" to connect to the world and make Facebook "a stronger company and valuable." At the end of 2012, had 1,060 million users, an increase of 25% in a year. Of these, 618 million were active and 680 million used mobile devices to access the platform.

Facebook shares fall reached $ 17.5 at the beginning of September. From there, rallied in recent weeks to more than $ 32 unit. Went public in May 2012 at a price of $ 38, in a release expected in the Nasdaq stock market will go down in history as a great fiasco. In the first chaotic minutes even paid $ 45.

The sharp rise in the last four months coincided in time with the placing on the market of securities initially restricted to the sale, which were held by employees and early investors. Meanwhile, banks have been raising the target price because they see that has room to grow with the passage of the platform from the PC to the mobile.

In a conference call with analysts to present results, Zuckerberg said Facebook is already "a moving company." In the financial statement notes that 23% of advertising revenues in the fourth quarter came from advertising and wireless devices (306 million dollars), when a quarter before was only 13% and, for the next advertising mobile could corner the 27% of its total revenue.

"We made the big transition," said Zuckerberg. "Now there are more people using Facebook every day than in the desktop computer. Investors are beginning to realize that mobile is a great opportunity for us."

Zuckerberg said that 2013 will be the year of critical investments, which in numbers translates into a 50% increase spending. Aggressiveness which will be moderated along time. A strategy that is reminiscent of Amazon and aims to improve its position in the mobile, where you play with Google's advertising business, mainly.

Facebook launched its own search engine to query content from friends

Facebook launched its own search engine to query content from friends

Tuesday, 5 February 2013 / No Comments

Facebook launched a search engine that will find content more effectively from social network to learn more about the "friends" that have the user in what has been considered a potent challenge to Google LinkedIn, Yelp and other Internet firms. 

"We view Facebook as a great social database" and "like any database, should be able to search within it," said president and co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to launch the new feature in an event organized in Group campus in Menlo Park, California (U.S. West). On this Tuesday was the biggest announcement of the company since its IPO last May. 

The new search engine is to help users better navigate among the large amount of information available on Facebook, which is unavailable in other web browsers like Google.

Unlike traditional search engines, such as Google, Facebook, dubbed "Graph Search", not search the Web, said the founder of the social network, but you can help find some information stored in the network and the contents of the "friends" of the user. 

"Every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience, and most of the content is not public," he said in a statement the Californian company. 

"We built from scratch Graph Search with privacy in mind, and respects the privacy and the hearing of each piece of content on Facebook. Makes things are in a much easier, but you can only see what already has seen elsewhere on Facebook ". 

"There is nothing visible now that were not visible before (on Facebook)," said the founder of the social network. 

                                                            Image credit:Bobb massa

To increase service, Zuckerberg also announced that Facebook will expand its collaboration with Microsoft's search engine, Bing, in a new effort to find content that are hosted outside the social network. 

"I do not necessarily think that many people will come to Facebook to search the web for this, but the truth is that is a very good search engine," he said. 

In addition, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook was negotiating with Google, but that "Microsoft was more likely to do things that were specific to Facebook." 

As a guide, the social network offered examples of what could be the new Graph Search searches ranging from "friends who live in my city" through "people in my hometown who likes climbing," or "friends of friends who have been in Yosemite National Park" to "computer engineers living in San Francisco and like skiing", "people that likes the things I like," or "people of the likes tennis and lives nearby. " 

Facebook on Tuesday also showed how Graph Search can be used to find potential candidates for a job, as friends of the staff engineers at NASA, or restaurant recommendations in what amounts to a direct challenge to other social networks like Linkedin or Yelp. 

An embryonic version of Graph Search designed so that users can search through the language of places, photos, movies and other information shared by their friends began to work for those using Facebook in English in the United States. 

In this sense, Zuckerberg said the new tool is to "give the power and tools to the users to perform any data selection and the ability to launch the search that they want."

However, he added that "we are not indexing the web, we are indexing our map data."

The company said the new feature is a reunion with the origins of the social network, whose primary purpose was to help people make connections. 

"When Facebook first launched, the way that people were used to search more to find out things about people and to make new connections," said a company statement.

Technology analyst Jeff Kagan found that the new Facebook effort is a modest challenge to Google.

"If I were part of Google, Facebook would see this movement as a warning shot.'s Not an immediate attack, but, however, an attack is coming," said Kagan.

"Facebook can transform the world of search engines? If the answer is yes, then yes it is a greater threat to Google," he said. 

For its part, the analyst at Forrester Research said Nate Elliot Facebook initiative aims to retain more users with the social network itself. 

"The worst nightmare of Facebook is a social network static in their data, if users do not add many new friends or connections ... your personal network becomes less and less active over time," said Elliot. 

"But this may be happening already: we have not seen significant growth of user friends recently. Graph Search seems designed to encourage users to add more friends. Whether that means that users' personal networks will change more frequently and become more active, it keeps them coming back to the site, which is vital to the success of Facebook "