Hasta La Gadget!

Retro arcade machines, an on-site print shop tongue-in-cheek known as “the propaganda wing”, and the general feel of a dorm room: it can only be Facebook‘s HQ. The BBC took a video tour around the Silicon Valley headquarters of the social networking company, coming across the usual start-up must-haves of free bikes, meals, and even laundry facilities, wrapped up in a design attitude that attempts to channel Mark Zuckerberg’s more humble origins despite the hundred-billion dollar floatation.

Just as Steve Jobs set up Apple in his garage, Zuckerberg started Facebook back in his dorm room. The idea of the current Facebook HQ being an exploitative “campus” has been kept, despite needing to accomodate far more people. “As we scaled as a company, we felt it was pretty important that we had that direct connection with people around us” Facebook says.

That extends to the artwork, much of which is produced by Facebook’s own staff. “We definitely try and have a more minimal and industrial approach” a spokesperson said of the decoration, which ranges from full-wall murals, graffiti, to punchy quote posters.

Those posters are produced on-site, at Facebook’s own print shop. Not just a bank of heavy-duty printers, but screenprinting tools to turn slogans generated or curated by employees into decoration. “By committing our ideas to paper,” one member of the workshop team says, “it elevates them.”

Distinctive headquarters are making headlines for several companies lately, with Apple’s new space-donut campus expected to open in 2016. Meanwhile, there was a glimpse inside the Googleplex this month, courtesy of a trailer for The Internship, part of which was filmed on location at the Google HQ.

Inside Facebook: Propaganda printing-presses and free food is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook plans on making marketing much more easier for companies. It has announced that its custom audiences tool, which was released back in September to let marketers create more relevant ads for users, has received an update that will help marketers to create better, more targeted ads to attract users with. This tool will combine the help of 4 companies, Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai, to help businesses with their online/offline marketing.

Those companies will dig through data from loyalty programs that users signup for. They will pair the data from the users’ shopping history with the information on their Facebook profiles to find their interests. Facebook’s custom audiences tool also lets businesses target more specific categories to find their target audience. There will be categories like “soda drinkers” or categories for people who bought a specific car model. The companies assure users that marketers will not have access to their private information.

Facebook provides two successful examples of its marketing campaigns. The first is Castle Auto Group. They saw a 24x return on their ad costs when they used a combination of Facebook offers and custom audience categories to deliver ads to both a targeted audience along with their existing audience. The second is Kingnet, a game developer based in Hong Kong, who saw over a 40% decrease in cost-per-installs for its video game. It was able to do so by appealing to a targeted audience rather than random Facebook users.

This new change in marketing strategies should be very beneficial to Facebook’s ad revenue. Facebook,however, wants to assure users that their private information will not be given to marketers. It also says that users will be able to opt-out of ads that they do not like via the ad’s control menu or through the help center. Users will also be able to give feedback on the targeted ads.

[via Facebook]

Facebook makes targeted ads easier for marketers is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook has discovered that its “pages” feature, which allows businesses and websites to share their information with millions of Facebook users, has a slight issue. There were some bugs that were discovered after Facebook launched a “comprehensive engineering audit” on their pages product. The bugs caused the impressions and audience reach reports to return incorrect information to businesses and websites.

Facebook says that while the actual delivery and reach were unaffected, the reports of how many people being reached were under-reported. Fixes for the Facebook system began rolling out on Friday,and will continue rolling out this weekend. Facebook pages should be reporting the correct information starting on Monday.

After the fixes are rolled out, your reported reach should increase compared to previous reports, however there is also a chance that your page’s reach was unaffected by the bug in the first place. Your organic reach should either increase or decrease depending on the number of subscribers to your Facebook page, as well as how often you make a post. For those who purchased a paid-ad campaign through Facebook, there should definitely be an increase in your reports. There has been a change in the metrics extracted from your Facebook page’s reach and impressions. Finally, Facebook has implemented new measures in order to prevent bugs from misreporting your page reach in the future.

Starting Monday, Facebook suggests analyzing your page’s data, including looking at your organic, paid, and viral reach in order to view how affected you were by these bugs. Since the bugs affected Facebook’s logging system, there’s no way Facebook can restore the real data in past posts. Despite this bug affecting your statistics, it might actually be a good thing, because your Facebook page, and your business, could be doing a whole lot better than you had expected.

[via Facebook]

Bugs affect Facebook insights for pages is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook has been spreading voice messaging throughout its mobile apps for awhile, but it’s clear the Palo Alto crew is no longer happy leaving interaction to canned speeches. Following a quiet rollout of live voice calls to Facebook Messenger earlier in the year, a version 5.5 update to Facebook’s core iOS app is giving social networkers a similar chance to talk to each other for free. The only stipulations are that users have the bandwidth to burn and live in either the US or Canada. Otherwise, the interface and functionality are dead ringers for the Messenger equivalents we tried in January. There’s still no word on when full voice calls will reach Android or other platforms, although they typically get feature parity before too long.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Internet, Facebook

Comments

Source: App Store

Facebook added a voice calling option on the Messenger app a short while back and as of today, a new update has brought that to all Facebook for iOS users. Basically, Facebook v5.5 has rolled into the App Store and that has added the free voice calling. This support is available for those in the US and Canada, however until your friends and family update Facebook — you may have some trouble finding someone to call.

Those with Facebook v5.5 on their iPhone or iPad will be able to swipe to the right to access the Chat menu. Once here pick (tap the name of) the friend you want to call and then look for the “i” icon towards the upper right hand corner. Tapping that “i” will take you to the contact info page for that friend and you should see the “Free Call” button. As for that trouble, until your friend has also updated Facebook, that button will be unavailable. That being the case, you could always use the “Timeline” button to send them a message telling them to update and then call you.

Otherwise, along with the voice calling, this update also brought a few additional changes dealing with the button design. Facebook has said the new button design will make it “easy to like, comment and share posts in News Feed.” As to what that actually means, the Like, Comment and Share buttons in the news feed have been tweaked a bit. Additionally, the share button to re-post stories from your News Feed is now available in all languages.

Bottom line here, voice calling is now available for Facebook users who didn’t want to install the stand-alone Messenger app. The update is available by way of the iOS App Store which you can find using this link or by visiting the App Store directly from your iPhone or iPad.

Facebook for iOS update brings voice calling to the US and Canada is written by Robert Nelson & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.