Tag / Social network

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Facebook hits one billion monthly active users and likens itself to chairs in debut ad campaign

Fresh off the back of announcing that Facebook now serves a billion active users each month, Mark Zuckerberg’s firm also announced their first brand advertisement, produced with Portland-based ad agency Wieden & Kennedy. Set to be shown in 13 countries and translated to 12 languages, the 90 second spot, entitled The Things That Connect Us,  is described as a reflection of what Facebook stands for by W+K.

Facebook’s first commercial ever honors the everyday things that people use to get together and connect – things like chairs, doorbells, bridges, airplanes and Facebook.

Coinciding with the billion user milestone, the company also released a document of statistics regarding the site since launch. The threshold was passed on September 14th at 8:45pm BST, and the site has played host to 140 billion friend connections, 219 billion photos and 1.13 trillion likes, with over 600 million users frequenting from mobile platforms. With such large user numbers, the big challenge for Facebook is to turn this into a large revenue stream, but investors don’t seem entirely convinced – share prices are slipping further today as the slide away from the billion dollar IPO continues.

Via Adrianne Jeffries (Twitter)
Source Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) | Wieden & Kennedy | FB Newsroom
Image Credit Eduardo Saverin (Facebook)

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Myspace teases complete redesign in plan to return to social greatness

In a video posted on Vimeo today, Myspace teased an upcoming redesign that the company claims is an all-new social network built from the ground up. The latest version of the network appears to integrate Facebook and Twitter posts and an active sign-in page confirms that users will be able to sign in to ‘Newspace’ with their existing social accounts. Similar to the network’s recent iterations, music appears to remain the focus to users, but whether this can keep Justin Timberlake’s company afloat remains to be seen. Access to the new Myspace is not open yet, however budding users may request an invite at the teaser page.

Via Joe Simpson (Twitter)
Source Myspace (Vimeo)

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Spool shuts down after Facebook acquisition

Earlier this year we wrote about Spool, an up-and-coming service that promised to take on Readability and Read It Later (now Pocket). Today users were emailed to inform them that the service, still in private beta, was to be shut down immediately despite a $1 million round of funding, but a blog post on the company’s site has made things clearer. The team has confirmed that they will be joining Facebook’s mobile department and issued instructions on how to recover your Spools, but there is no mention on an acquisition figure. Needless to say, we are intrigued as to what Facebook are planning to do with Spool and what the acquisition could mean for the company’s mediocre mobile arm.

Via Josh Constine (Twitter)

We started Spool to make content easy to consume on a mobile device. To accomplish this, we built some very sophisticated technology and developed a deep expertise in mobile software development. We firmly believe that solving these problems will be increasingly important as the world accesses the Internet primarily through mobile devices.

We are proud to announce that today we will be pursuing our vision as a part of Facebook. If you were a Spool user, please read the instructions on retaining your bookmarks.

We are extremely excited to accelerate our vision and help Facebook’s users connect and share with the people in their lives. We wouldn’t be in a position to have this sort of impact without our supporters and the Spool community. Please accept a heartfelt thank you for supporting us and for affording us this opportunity.

Sincerely,
The Spool team

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by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Facebook buys Instagram for $1 billion

In a post on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company has purchased Instagram for $1 billion. Read his post below.

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Google+ opens to teens as Digixav jumps on the bandwagon

Google announced today that anybody old enough to have a Google account may now upgrade to their Facebook-killer of a social network Google+. This is something that we at Digixav have been waiting for since launch, so we hurried over when we heard the news and made ourselves a page. We will do the odd hangout to make podcasts and have lively tech debates and we will find a way for our posts to go into your feeds if you want to put us in a circle. So, if you actually use G+, head on over to our page and +1 us or something. You know you want to.