Hasta La Gadget!

Remember Facebook’s “come and see what we’re building” event? Yeah, that’s today. And the first thing that CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled was a new feature called Graph Search. It essentially will give people the power and tools to take a cut of the graph to form any query they want. However, Zuckerberg was adamant that Graph Search was not the same thing as traditional web search.

Currently, there are 1 billion people, 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections in the Social Graph, and indexing all that content to make it easily searchable is obviously quite a challenge. Zuckerberg says that most of the content on Facebook isn’t public, so users want a way to search for things that have been shared with them. This is where Graph Search comes into play.

Plus, Graph Search will be “privacy aware”, and the platform was built with privacy in mind. Currently, 10% of Facebook’s computing power is spent on privacy, and we’re guessing that will only increase once Graph Search goes live. The biggest difference that Zuckerberg mentions between Graph Search and general web search is that web search just searches for anything and everything related to the search term, while Graph Search is very specific and catered towards the user.

Graph Search is meant to answer very specific questions, like “Who are my friends in Chicago?”, and you can search for other things, like the music your friends listen to, restaurants your friends like, or the movies and TV shows your friends enjoy watching. You can also combine searches, like “friends who live in Chicago and like Breaking Bad.”

In the end, Graph Search is essentially a very-specific way of searching that involves the people who you’re connected with on Facebook, and makes it easy to find friends who share similar interests as you do. The new tool will even let you find a friend of a friend that you met at a party, and Graph Search will let you connect with them right away.

Zuckerberg describes difference between Graph Search and Web Search is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook is at it again, folks. The social network giant is testing out yet another new feature, and this time it’s almost too ridiculous to believe. Facebook is testing a new service that charges you $100 to send a message to a stranger. So, instead of having the message land in their “Other” inbox, it will go straight to their main inbox.

Some Facebook users have been reporting an interesting popup when they attempt to send messages to people outside of their friend network. The popup notes that the message will be filtered to the “Other” inbox of the recipient, but offers to deliver it to the top of the recipient’s inbox for a staggering $100.

Facebook first began experimenting with this kind of option last month when it first introduced filters, including the “Other” folder. In initial tests, the fee was just $1. However, according to Mashable, Facebook confirms the $100 option is part of that test, and they say they’re testing “some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam.”

Mashable reported seeing $100 as the fee to send a message to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but sending messages to other strangers result in the same price, which means that the fee isn’t based on the popularity of the user. However, unless you’re part of the test group, you still can’t send a message to strangers, and there’s no word on when or if the feature will be rolling out. It’s also entirely possible that if the service eventually launched, the fee might change.

[via Mashable]

Facebook testing $100 charge to message strangers is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In September, Facebook‘s shared dropped to their all-time low, leaving some worrying what would come of it all. Now in the few months since then, the company has seen a huge increase of 70-percent, with shares priced at over $30. This is the first time they’ve broke the $30 mark since July 2012, and follows a quarterly revenue increase of 32-percent.

While the increase is good news for the social network, the shares are still lower than they were during the company’s IPO in May – about 20-percent lower, to be precise. Facebook is working hard to get its numbers up across the board, however, with the company making some big changes recently, including the abolition of its voting methods on privacy changes, as well as plans it has in advertisement.

Yesterday, the company made a teasing announcement to “come and see” what it has planned on January 15. No details have been provided about what the event will concern, only that Facebook has been “building” something that it will reveal during the event. Some speculate that it could be a software announcement, while others are still hoping for a Facebook smartphone to be revealed.

In late December, we reported that the social network has been testing a Messages feature that would require users to pay $1 to send a message to a non-friend’s inbox rather than their “Other” folder. Likewise, the company plans to roll out video advertisements to users’ news feeds by this summer, according to some insider sources. The social network seems to have its hands in a little bit of everything at the moment, and thus far, it’s shares are reflecting optimism. Facebook is set to announce it’s Q4 report on January 30.

[via Forbes]

Facebook shares exceed $30 for the first time since July is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Really, the only way to celebrate the 2013 inauguration is with a $47,000 vacation package. Right? Right. But Instagraming and Facebooking your every move can get exhausting when you’re galavanting about. Where is that social media butler? More »

Foursquare rolled out a minor new feature today that lets your Facebook or Twitter friends “like” your Foursquare check-ins even if they’re not connected as your friend on Foursquare. For now on, when you share your Foursquare check-ins with friends on Twitter or Facebook who are also on Foursquare, they’ll be able to like it, regardless of friend status on Foursquare.

Foursquare will even send you a notification whenever someone outside of your Foursquare friend zone likes one of your check-ins. However, these can easily be turned off in the settings if you don’t want your email to get bombarded with pesky notifications — we can’t blame you for not wanting to “know how awesome you are” (Foursquare’s words).

Of course, this dips just ever so slightly into privacy concerns, and the fact that non-friends on Foursquare are able to like your check-ins and statuses, but we’re guessing that since these are people who are your friends on Facebook and Twitter, most users won’t really have a problem with it.

Foursquare recently made some privacy tweaks following the Instagram debacle last month. Foursquare made some changes to their privacy policy, which now says that the service will display users’ full names and giving businesses more customer data by default, though Foursquare points out that extra privacy can be restored with a few settings tweaks.

Foursquare adds “Like” feature to check-ins for users outside of friend zone is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.