Hasta La Gadget!

It wasn’t so long ago that Facebook and Zynga were making beautiful music (and money) together, but it seems that each is now looking for a bit of fresh air in the relationship, according to Reuters. A new agreement will give Zynga more freedom to offer games on its own website, while also allowing Facebook to develop its own — though for now, the social network said it “was not in the business of building games and we have no plans to do so.” For its part, Zynga now has the option of opting out of Facebook’s payment mechanism and display ads, according to a recent filing by the Farmville maker. Both companies have seen their share of foibles, lately, but Facebook would perhaps be wise to not let its main dance partner too far out of sight — Zynga still kicks in more than 15 percent of the now-public company’s revenue.

Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Facebook

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Via: Joystiq

Source: Reuters

A couple weeks ago, Facebook began rolling out a new feature on iOS called Photo Sync for a select number of users. It essentially is a service that automatically uploads photos that you take on your phone to a private web album. From there, you can select what photos you want to share with friends and family quickly and easily. Facebook is announcing that the feature will be rolling out to everyone.

The feature will begin rolling out today, so you may not see it right away, but possibly within the next few days. The new service is essentially like Apple’s Photo Stream, where it automatically sends images from your smartphone to a private album in the cloud. Then, you can simply tick a box on each image to make it public and share with friends and family.

The feature will be compatible with both iOS and Android, so most smartphone owners will have access to the new service. However, we’re interested in seeing how popular it’ll get. For those who use Facebook often and enjoy sharing photos on the social network, the new feature will no doubt be of good use.

However, for those who just want a service that automatically uploads photos from your smartphone to the cloud will most likely look elsewhere. Most iOS users will no doubt lean towards iCloud‘s Photo Stream while avid Dropbox users will spring for the could service’s own automatic uploading feature.

Facebook rolls out Photo Sync to easily share photos over the web is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Can’t be bothered with adding photos to your Facebook albums à la carte? Well, Photo Sync has your name all over it. Rolling out today for Android and iOS, the new service automatically sends images from your smartphone (or Galaxy Camera, perhaps?) to a private album in the cloud. Once you’re ready to flip your frames public, simply tick a box on each image to post it. And, because everything’s easier to understand with a fancy promo video, you can learn all about Photo Sync in the dialog-free Facebook montage at the source link below.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile

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Source: Facebook

As we reported earlier, Google+ gets about 100 million active users per month, while Facebook comes in at an impression 1 billion, but if we were to translate that into hours, exactly how much time does one spend on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social networking websites? According to law firm Morrison & Foerster’s Socially Aware Blog, they have managed to gather the relevant data and translated that into hours and minutes, and unsurprisingly it seems that the average user on a monthly basis spends close to 7 hours on Facebook, and a rather meager 3 minutes on Google+. Interestingly though it seems that their data has revealed that on average users spend only 21 minutes a month on Twitter, but we guess that there are some people who prefer tweeting more than they do reading tweets. What do you guys think? Does that sound about right?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google’s Bradley Horowitz does not appear to be a fan of Facebook’s advertising, YouTube Auto-Captions Now Supports 6 European Languages,

If you’re finding yourself waking up to massive amounts of notifications today after a nice afternoon nap, do not fret, it’s just a Facebook bug. What’s actually happening here is that Facebook is, as they’re saying, experiencing a bit of a bug – one that signs users up for Facebook Groups sometimes even when they’d never been a part of those groups in the first place. As a result of this, some users are experiencing massive amounts of notifications from the groups that they up until today had no idea existed.

This bug is currently being worked on by Facebook, but for those of you that want a quick fix: you’ll have to leave each Group one-by-one. The other solution is to go to the little white triangle that sits in the upper right-hand side of your Facebook screen (near your name) and click it – then click Account Settings – then click Notifications. From there you can simply turn off all the Notifications you desire.

Meanwhile there’s one massive complaint thread about the situation, and a statement has been issued by Facebook representatives that reads as follows:

“A bug surfaced last night that caused some users to be re-added to groups that they previously belonged to. We are working to resolve the issue now. In the meantime, we are rolling out a short-term fix for all closed groups that will make the content of those groups inaccessible to the re-added members.” – Facebook Representative

The most concerning thing about this situation should be – for you – the idea that Facebook keeps a record of the groups you’ve been a part of in the past on their social network. This information clearly remains a part of the larger Facebook archive as it’s been proven today with re-ads galore. On the other hand, this should have all become clear as soon as the Facebook Timeline Layout was made solid – Facebook keeps everything.

At the moment there’s no ETA for when this problem is going to be solved, only that assurance that Facebook is making closed groups the priority here with re-stopping this flood. While we see what Facebook does to keep everything neat – let us know if you’ve experienced anything strange today!

[via Slate]

Facebook bug re-adds users to groups they’d long since left is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.