Upset that you won’t be able to know the joys of your friends’ floating, disembodied heads on your screen, iPhone users? Fret no more, because while you won’t be getting the entire Facebook Home experience, the Chat Heads feature should be hitting iOS devices sometime later today. More »
When Facebook announced its new Facebook Home launch screen alternative earlier this month, it was quite obvious why Android was the only mobile platform getting the new launcher — it’s openness provides Facebook to easily implement Home on various Android devices. However, it’s rumored that Facebook is currently in talks with Apple to bring Facebook Home to iOS, but we’re not sure if it’ll be possible.
Actually, it’s quite possible, but Apple probably won’t allow it. Apple likes to keep things uniform across their platform, and they’ve received plenty of criticism over that because of the “closed ecosystem” surrounding iOS. Then again, we can’t blame Apple for not allowing Facebook Home onto iOS. We’d be pretty upset too if someone came in and practically replaced our proprietary messaging service with Facebook’s own Chat Heads, and all that good stuff.
Bloomberg reports that Facebook and Apple are discussing the possibility of bringing Facebook Home to iOS. The two companies have had a decent general relationship in the past, but we’re not sure if it’s at the level that will bring Facebook Home to Apple’s mobile platform. However, it’s reported these talks actually aren’t even taking place, according to The Next Web.
In any case, whether there are talks or not, we’d be surprised if Apple allowed Facebook Home in the first place. Facebook wouldn’t be able to simply submit an app for Home to iTunes, mostly because Home is really an app to begin with, so the social networking giant would have to create a partnership with Apple in order to bring Home to iOS, but the likelihood is slim at this point.
Facebook Home rumored for iPhone, probably won’t happen is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Don’t you just hate it when you have multiple tabs open and all of a sudden you hear music playing from one of the tabs and you don’t know which one? If you say yes, then chances are you’re not a huge fan of video ads – actually the better question is, is there anyone who loves video ads to begin with? Well according to a report on AdAge, it has been reported that Facebook is currently in talks with various agencies to help secure video ad partners in upcoming video ads that the social network plans to debut in June/July.
It seems that Facebook plans to insert these video ads in the news feed of its users and will play up to 3 video ads a day. AdAge reports that assuming Facebook manages to sell all of its advertising inventory for video ads, they could be making up to $4 million a day! While that sounds like great news for the social media giant, we’re not sure the same could be said for its users who might otherwise find the ads extremely annoying, not to mention inconvenient especially when trying to surf Facebook discreetly at work or in school. What do you guys think of this?
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook Launches Online Safety Campaign With 19 Attorney Generals, Malware Infected Results In Search Five Times More Common From Bing Than Google, 
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“The [story behind the history of Home] was about making an experience that flows through friends and people. We saw three ways that we could do this. One, we could go and build an operating system. Second, we could dig into Android deeply in order to see how we could we fundamentally change / fork Android to make it different. Or, we could build an app to make it different.” Those were the words just spoken by Cory Ondrejka — the director of mobile engineering at Facebook — here at D: Dive Into Mobile in NYC. This, in fact, confirms that Facebook not only gave thought to actually crafting its own operating system in order to usher Facebook Home into the world, but moved forward with prototypes.
Host Kara Swisher asked the duo how far along things actually got, to which Ondrejka replied: “The OS path was the least fleshed-out of the paths. Mark [Zuckerberg] talked on launch day that he wanted to build something for everyone. It’s hard to get to the type of scale that’s necessary for us [when building an OS]. We wanted Home in front of hundreds of millions of people — even a successful OS would only give that experience to a few of them.”
The two continued to talk about Facebook’s internal shift into mobile. At this point, the company has broken down most every wall between desktop and mobile, and Home is the first major product to ship under this new scenario. “You can see the engines throttling up,” Schroepfer said, speaking of how fast updates will soon be coming to iOS, Android and beyond. In fact, he confirmed that the first major update to Home was coming “during the second week of May,” while international users will start to get Home access on select Android phones today. And, while Facebookers have been testing Home on tablets, it wants to truly nail the experience on phones first before pushing it elsewhere.
Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Facebook
According to Ad Age’s unnamed sources, Facebook is preparing to launch an invasive-sounding ad program this summer through its news feed. Alongside the left and right spaces outside of the news feed, the company is reportedly planning four 15-second autoplay video ads that’ll target women over 30, women under 30, men over 30, and men under 30 (so, uh, expect lots of super general advertisers we’d guess — toilet paper and Coca-Cola, for example). While potentially invasive, the ads are also potentially extremely lucrative; Facebook is apparently seeking near $1 million per day, per advertiser. That’s a cool $4 million (roughly) per day, with the potential risk of pushing away the billions of people enabling such an incredibly high ad rate.
Facebook’s had a strange history with advertising, occasionally amending rules that angered the social network’s users (such as targeting marketing based on browsing history). The California-based internet company also outright paused its mobile ad network program last December, citing internal prioritization of other products. As you might’ve guessed, Facebook reps declined to comment on this report, so it’s probably best to reserve your outrage until there’s some solid confirmation.
Filed under: Software, Facebook
Source: Ad Age
Ever felt you can’t quite match up to the people you follow on Twitter? While you’re tweeting about that lunchtime cheese sandwich, their feeds are full of elegant witticisms, important-sounding conferences and bungee jumps. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault – your Twitter friends are just more interesting than you. More »
First, the bad news. Facebook Home isn’t coming to iOS anytime soon due to the underlying technologies that restrict the way apps interact with the iPhone’s operating system. Now, the good news: Facebook is pushing an update to its iOS app right now that’ll add support for chat heads. Mike Schroepfer, CTO and vice president of engineering at Facebook, just announced the news here at D: Dive Into Mobile, and if all goes well, you should see the update hit your own device later in the day.
According to Schroepfer: “The goal from the beginning was to get this experience into everyone’s hands. As part of that, we’re shortly going to announce an update to our iOS app that’ll add chat heads. Multiple messages, multiple threads, same design, etc. You have to be within the app — that’s a limitation of iOS. You can’t draw across other apps when you aren’t in the app.”
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Facebook
According to Bloomberg, Facebook is currently in talks with Apple to bring Facebook Home to the iPhone. Mind you, that doesn’t mean we should expect Facebook Home to actually come to the iPhone (as that seemingly wouldn’t jive with Apple’s MO) but it does show Facebook’s obvious desire to bring more Facebooking to more phones. More »
Facebook has over 1 billion users of all ages from all around the world. The social network is quite popular with teens, despite recent reports claiming that teenagers are now bored of Facebook. Privacy on the network as well as off it has always been a concern, and Facebook’s rather complex privacy settings aren’t exactly easy for everyone to figure out. In a bid to make user’s lives and data more private on Facebook and on the internet in general, the social network has teamed up with the National Association of Attorney Generals to educate their teen users and their parents how privacy online can effectively be managed.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says that they hope to “ensure that young people make safe, smart and responsible choices online.” Starting tomorrow, 19 different state attorney generals and Sheryl will release a public service announcement for the respective states, along with a video called “What you can Do to Control Your Information.” The names of these 19 states haven’t been divulged, but it is said that more states will be coming on board in the near future.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Malware Infected Results In Search Five Times More Common From Bing Than Google, Greenland Kicks The Pirate Bay Out After Just Two Days, 
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Those of you were currently attempting to build a social media empire in Pet Society, The Sims Social and SimCity Social on Facebook can just stop playing those games right about now as EA has announced it will be pulling the plug for those titles on June 14. EA claims the reason for the closing of these three titles is due to each game failing to maintain a significant audience.
EA issued a statement to its fans in reference to the upcoming closure of Pet Society, The Sims Social and SimCity Social:
Today we are informing players of the difficult decision to retire some of our Facebook games: The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society.
After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off. For people who have seen other recent shutdowns of social games, perhaps this is not surprising.
EA will continue to deliver popular titles for Facebook, most notably games from PopCap, including Bejeweled Blitz, Solitaire Blitz and the recently announced Plants vs. Zombies Adventures.
It’s interesting to see games published onto Facebook by EA haven’t been performing as well as PopCap published games. This just goes to show the EA-acquired company seems to know more about its social media audience better than EA does.
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