Six years ago, Facebook unveiled its Platform service to allow third-party developers to integrate its social graph into their apps. Today, the company has revealed its enormous growth: 550 million people are having social experiences each month and more than 1 billion stories are being shared daily. It also shared insights into Platform’s future and how Parse will be integrated.

At a whiteboarding session, Facebook’s Director of Developer Relations, Doug Purdy, shared a brief history about the Platform. Originally called Facebook Canvas, the service was intended to help the company create a developer ecosystem.

Purdy believed that applications and its experience focused around the user was much better than if it was just focused on the technology. Facebook launched the product to allow third-party developers to tie back into Facebook so that stories and memories can be shared on a user’s Timeline while also integrating data from the social network into their apps.

In the end, Purdy spoke about the future of Facebook Platform and what users and developers could come to expect within the next couple of years. It’s clearly apparent now that Platform has seen incredible success in its short six year history. However, to enhance the social experience, Facebook says that it’s focusing on four key areas:

Identity

Purdy says that Facebook is focusing on ways to bring content and data that users care about into third-party apps and back in order to create a much more personalized experience. The company hopes to achieve this primarily through improvements in its Login with Facebook protocol. Last April, the company launched some updates whereby users were able to better manage what is being shared both with Facebook and also with third-party apps.

This recent Login update was said to be well-received by both users and developers. In the end, Facebook says it’s about giving users more control and trust.

Open Graphs

Facebook says that a lot of its focus will be around the Timeline where it’s believed to have a home for third-party app activity. Users can see the updated timeline now whereby any activity from services around movies, Pinterest, books you read, music, and check-ins, are now displayed on the Timeline. Purdy tells us that because people are living their lives on their mobile device, it’s natural for content to be shared from apps to Facebook. Additionally, he said that it’s an “awesome” surface for discovering things that people are doing.

Ads

Simply having an app isn’t enough — it’s about promotion. Facebook has set out to support developers that tie in to its Platform. It was at this point when Purdy highlighted the company’s mobile app install ads, which it launched in October 2012.

App Services

In an area where Facebook’s acquisition of Parse comes into play, the company is looking to help app developers create a cross-platform experience, so that it’s not only available on Facebook, but also iOS and Android devices. The company shared that while it’s helping to create more cross-platform apps, but also allow users to interact with services across any devices.

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Facebook on Monday announced the release of its native Share Dialog, which lets iOS developers add sharing capabilities from the social network to their app with just one line of code. The feature is now available in the Facebook SDK for iOS, which you can download directly from here.

The Share Dialog also improves upon the iOS 6 share sheet by adding support for publishing Open Graph actions. While app developers will certainly appreciate that adding the functionality only requires one line of code, the real advantage is for users.

The Share Dialog means users can share activity from an app straight to Facebook without needing to login to the social network first. Facebook claims this eliminates one to three extra steps required for login when sharing via the feed dialog.

At the same time, it means Facebook users can tag friends, and overall use a better sharing dialog box from within apps. For users, Facebook says this translates into “a more meaningful and engaging” experience while for developers, the company says it means “even more people connect with your app.”

Ever since introducing the Share button, Facebook has been pushing it as a more expansive version of the Like button. It’s a smart move to keep Likes around while also offering Shares for those users who want to do more than just quickly show they appreciate a piece of content.

At the same time, because the Share button offers so many more options, it works great for spreading Facebook content with the potential of having it go viral. If you’re an app developer, you might want to be part of such an ecosystem, an idea which the company naturally wants to encourage.

In the grand scheme of things, this a small update to the Facebook SDK for iOS (this is version 3.5.1 while 3.5 arrived last month). Still, Facebook likely wants to break it out separately because the company hopes the dropped beta tag will spur some adoption from iOS app developers.

Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

On May 18th, 2012, Facebook went public at a per-share price of $38. The company experienced a brief gain, spiking into the 40s, but ended its first day of trading just a few cents above the set $38 price.

The following days saw the stock decline, under its listing price. The stock would fall as low as $17.55 before it began a period of recovery. As Facebook has grown its income from mobile users, and proven that its desktop market share isn’t transitory, investors have warmed to its shares.

Facebook has since recovered from its lows, and is now closing its first year as a public company at $26.25. That’s a 30.9 percent decline from its IPO price, but is up essentially 50% from its historic, 52 week low. Facebook investors that bought the company when it was mired in the doldrums have done well. Folks who bought on day one have endured nothing but decline, of varying degrees, since their purchase.

In its most recent quarter, Facebook bested revenue expectations, with top line of $1.46 billion. However, it missed forecasted profit by reporting just $0.12 per share in earnings. Facebook price-earnings ratio is remarkably high.

Today, Facebook closed regular trading worth $63.47 billion. When it went public, the company was valued at over $104 billion.

In retrospect, Facebook is now a much larger company, with stronger profits and revenues. And investors are valuing below the price that the market bore when it went public. It’s a lesson worth remembering; what the market will allow in an IPO doesn’t always fully reflect the value of a company.

Zynga and Groupon investors can confirm the idea.

Facebook finds itself in a strong posistion, with plenty of cash, profits, and growing revenues. It’s work in mobile is also to its benefit, at once expanding its core offerings in the space, and also enjoying the quick growth of Instagram, which it wholly owns.

A final note: Instagram’s final purchase price was $715 million. Why not the oft floated $1 billion figure that was offered? The deal had a huge stock component. And as Facebook’s stock fell, so too did the value of the deal.

Market declines regardless, in the past year Facebook’s usership, incomes, user activity are all up and to the right. Botched IPO or not, Facebook is healthy.

 Image EMMANUEL DUNAND for AFP / Getty Images

All relevant data via Google Finance.

There’s a change at the top at Facebook….in Japan, where the company has hired former McDonalds and Boston Consulting Group marketing exec Atsushi Iwashita as its new Managing Director.

The news is reported in Markezine — via Asiajin – although Iwashita, who was most recently CEO at brand consultancy firm Interbrand Japan, is still to update his LinkedIn profile to reflect his new role. The move comes at an interesting time for social networks in the country, as the top sites are refocusing their management to capture young audiences and double-down on mobile.

Local rival Mixi replaced its founder with a new (and notably very young) CEO on Monday. Now 30-year-old Yusuke Asakura will lead the company, becoming only the second CEO in Mixi’s 9-year history.

That change to inject more youth and appeal comes in response to Mixi’s continued decline and Facebook’s growth in Japan. Last September, Facebook overtook Mixi as it hit 15 million monthly active users in the country. That was a significant moment since Japan had been one of the few remaining markets where Facebook was not the dominant network.

Asiajin speculates that the two are near neck-and-neck right now, so there’s still all to play for in the lucrative market, where Twitter is actually the most popular social service (thanks to its simple and efficient mobile experience).

Locally developed messaging app Line has shown the kinds of revenues that social services can make in the country. A whopping 80 percent of the $58 million revenue it made in Q1 2013 came via Japan, and Mixi and Facebook will be aiming to grow their user base and presence on mobile in pursuit of a piece of that pie.

You can also add private social network Path to that list too.

The company launched its Asia-inspired Path 3.0 service, featuring stickers and virtual content popular in the continent, in March having appointed a general manager for Japan/Asia last year. Path has long said that Asia is its fastest growing region, with Japan and Korea two of its key markets.

Headline image via laughingsquid / Flickr

Instagram on Thursday reminded all its users that today is the day its new “Photos of You” section is being turned on for everyone. This means everyone who can currently see your profile is now able to see all the pictures that you have been tagged in.

The feature was first announced two weeks ago but was only available if you chose to opt-in. Now it’s available for everyone, but thankfully you can choose whether photos others add of you appear on your profile automatically or only once you select them.

If you don’t want pictures of you to show up automatically, turn on the option to manually select which photos appear on your profile by following these three steps:

1. Go to your profile and tap the icon for all photos you’re tagged in.
2. Tap the Android menu icon or the iPhone wrench icon in the top-right corner.
3. Tap “Add Manually.”

These instructions remind us that Instagram is still not available for Windows Phone nor BlackBerry. We still think this will change in the coming months, as bringing in more potential users is always more important than adding incremental features like this one:

The new “Photos of You” section is clearly influenced by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company. The world’s largest social network has been keeping track of photos people are tagged in for years. On Instagram though, only the taker of a photo is able to tag people in it, unlike on Facebook where other people can suggest tags of themselves or others.

It’s also one of those features that will be useful whenever Instagram finally decides to offer a full-blown website. There needs to be more on those large screens than just photos and ads.

See also – An inside look at Instagram’s brand new cleaner, more professional logo and Thanks to Facebook Home, HTC First is the first phone to pre-load Instagram

Top Image Credit: Elliot Bennett

Facebook is becoming a mobile company — or rather a “mobile best” one if you believe founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It’s no secret that the company has had its hiccups when it comes to mobile applications, but in a new post on its engineering blog, Facebook reveals a build system that it uses to produce Android apps it calls Buck. Today, that system has gone open source and is available on Github.

Written by Michael Bolin, a software engineer at the social networking company, the post reveals that one of the plights Facebook faced was the inability of the standard set of Android tools to keep up with the company’s growth. It wasn’t until July 2012 that Bolin came up with a working prototype of Buck, what would soon be its newest Android build system.

The idea came up during Bolin’s first hackathon at the company. His objective: Create a build tool that favored the creation of many small modules rather than a handful of large modules. Earlier that year, Facebook had switched from building Webview apps to more native ones on Android. Previously, the company’s engineers had written a plethora of Java code, which just wasn’t able to keep up.

Buck went live a month after the hackathon and based on Bolin’s post, seems to achieve its purpose. A couple of weeks later, all build.xml files were removed from Facebook’s Android repository. In his own words:

It took less time to download Buck’s source code, build it from scratch, and then build the Android app with Buck than it took to build the Android app with Ant. From Day 1, Buck was twice as fast as Ant, cutting Facebook for Android app build times down from 3:40 to 1:30.

The rest of his post is rather technical in nature, but feel free to take a look through if you’re so inclined. Suffice it to say, Buck appears to have helped Facebook streamline all of its Android code and provides a useful design that helps aid in the development of smaller apps.

Here’s a video of Bolin talking about Buck at the Mobile DevCon conference in New York and how it’s now available as open source:

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Facebook on Tuesday announced it has completed rolling out the new sections on its Timeline profiles to everyone. Furthermore, the company says users are now collectively adding almost 200 million items daily.

Two months ago, Facebook debuted the new one-column Timeline. The company emphasized the redesigned sections on user profiles that let people have one place to add items of interest.

Yet everyone realized this was Facebook’s way of admitting the previous two-column design for posts simply wasn’t working. In case you’ve abandoned the service, here’s the new one-column Timeline (posts appear on the right side, and only on the right side, while everything else is on the left):

Content from apps are now more prominent as they have their own sections in the left column of the Timeline and on the About tab. You can add content to the books, music, movies, TV, and fitness sections manually or by choosing to include content from the apps you use. As of today, the music section can play songs Liked by friends with just one click, workouts can be tracked with friends in the fitness section, and you can also rate content directly on people’s Timelines and add ratings from apps:

You can also add an app as a stand-alone section on your Timeline and About page. Each app section gets one or more collections to showcase whatever you want from the app, and developers have the option to configure the data that appears.

The Facebook-owned Instagram app section displays a user’s photos and those they like:

Previously, only top-ranked Open Graph stories and aggregations would appear on a person’s Timeline. Now, when someone adds an app section, it will appear in the same place until they edit its order or visibility.

To add an app as a section, you need to install it and then click the “Add to Profile” button on its app section page. Developers can encourage their users to add their app by linking to it on Web or invoking it on mobile.

If you’re a developer yourself, Facebook has added a new “Collections” tab to help you set up app sections. The company also offers a few best practices:

• Give people a way to add your custom section to timeline: Consider including a URL in your app to give your users a preview of your section and help them decide whether to add it to timeline.
• Choose the right template for your section: Apps with great visual content should use the gallery template to draw people’s attention, and there are also list and map templates.
• Focus on quality and completeness before submitting your section for approval: To make the review process simple, submit your section only after making sure your object images and descriptions are complete and look great from the perspective of your users.

Developers will need to submit collections for review to Facebook. If you’re interested, check out the newly published documentation.

Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Facebook on Monday updated its native iOS app with new photo viewer options, improvements to Places and Events on the iPhone, as well as the new News Feed. You can grab the latest version now from Apple’s App Store.

When viewing a photo, you can now directly save and share it (previously you could only Like, comment on, or tag friends in it). You can also now directly set a photo as your profile picture, though you’ll probably (and hopefully) be using this option a little less frequently than the others.

The next two updates are specifically for the iPhone. Facebook says it has improved Places editing when you’re checking in on Apple’s flagship device and improved the load times for Events. The former will only be useful for those who check in often but faster Events is likely a much-wanted improvement for all.

The full Facebook 6.1 for iOS changelog is as follows:

• Photo viewer button lets you save, share or make profile picture.
• Improved places editing when checking in on iPhone.
• Events load faster on iPhone.

Interestingly, iOS users are reporting that this Facebook update has a beta-like icon. Furthermore, those who have downloaded the latest version of the app are seeing the new News Feed. Given that this isn’t in the changelog, we think the two may be related.

Either way, we have confirmed that both are showing up for us on the iPhone and the iPad.

Here’s the beta icon:

Here’s the new News Feed:

We have contacted Facebook for more information. We will update this article if we hear back.

Update: Facebook pushed out another update to remove the beta icon.

Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

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Microsoft has discovered a new piece of malware in the form of a Google Chrome extension and Firefox add-on that can hijack Facebook accounts. It does not appear that there are equivalent plugins for Internet Explorer nor Safari.

The threat, detected by Microsoft as Trojan:JS/Febipos.A, was first found making the rounds in Brazil. Like other browser plugins, it attempts to keep itself updated with the latest instructions from its malware authors.

The trojan in question checks to see if the current user is logged-in to Facebook. If you are, it attempts to download a configuration file that includes a list of commands. Depending on the file, Microsoft has found the malware is capable of doing any of the following with the user’s Facebook profile: Like a page, share content, post on people’s profiles, comment on other posts, join a group, invite friends to a group, and chat with friends.

Microsoft monitored a Facebook Page that the plugin often posted on and noticed that its Likes and comments increased, suggesting that users are actively installing these plugins. It’s not clear how criminals are getting users to install them, but they are likely using basic social engineering tactics employed in email and social networking spam.

Here is what Microsoft concludes in its analysis:

There may be more to this threat because it can change its messages, URLs, Facebook pages and other activity at any time. In any case, we recommend you always keep your security products updated with the latest definitions to help avoid infection.

In other words, while the threat seems to be currently focused on targeting Facebook users in Brazil (its messages are all written in Brazilian Portuguese), it’s easy to see how the threat could be modified to target more users. The fact that it uses a configuration file shows that the criminals specifically designed it to be modular.

The good news here is that this malware currently isn’t widespread. Nevertheless, you should make a point to only install browser extensions and add-ons from trusted sources such as the Chrome Web Store and Add-ons for Firefox.

See also – Google further secures Chrome against malicious extensions

Top Image Credit: spencereholtaway / Flickr

Microsoft on Friday announced it has once again expanded Bing’s Facebook integration. Not only can you see relevant Facebook posts in the search engine’s social sidebar, but you can now comment on them and Like them as well.

Bing has included Likes, photos, and profile information from Facebook for a while in its social sidebar. At the start of the year, Microsoft added status updates, shared links, and comments for more context. Now it’s letting you interact with said content, all without leaving the Bing search page.

Here’s the commenting feature in action:

Nektarios Ioannides, Bing’s Program Manager, offers an example to explain how this could potentially improve your search experience:

Let’s say I’m searching for Beyoncé tickets because I know she is coming to town soon. I can see that my friend has recently posted that she has an extra ticket to the show. Now without leaving the Bing results page, I comment directly to her post letting her know that I’d love to join her for the concert. I’ve gone from simply browsing to attending a concert in just a few easy steps – all thanks to Bing.

All of this will only work if you connect your Facebook account to Bing. Microsoft has previously promised to “honor all of your existing Facebook privacy settings, nothing is shared automatically, you only see what your friends give you permission to see (though their Facebook settings) so you only share what you want to share.”

Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t shared data in regards to how many Bing users have actually gone and connected their Facebook account to Bing. Either Microsoft is extremely confident that its social search strategy will pay off, or users are actually taking advantage and the company is finding it worth the engineering resources to keep adding more and more Facebook features to Bing. Time will tell.

See also – Microsoft: Facebook’s Graph Search is a “unified search experience” with Bing technology

Top Image credit: Leszek Nowak