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

It is about a week since Instagram, the mobile focussed – photo sharing service has announced their Android application launch, but it seems a much bigger deal was brewing behind the scenes. Today Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will acquire Instagram for a billion dollars, but he also went on to explain that Instagram will run as its own seperate company, and keep its mutliple social network roots.

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In what is likely the most anticipated and long awaited document ever received by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Faceboook has officially filed the prospectus for its initial public offering (IPO).

As rumours predicted, the company is looking to raise $5 billion with investment firm Morgan Stanley acting as lead underwriter with Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and the Bank of America taking secondary positions. Should Facebook raise the money, it will be on the shortlist of the biggest tech IPOs in history.

The timeline puts Facebook’s public offering to hit the market in mid-May and now has to enter a mandated quiet period, so it could mean that it’s latest Timeline feature is the last new product users will see from the social network until that period is up.

In terms of actual numbers, Facebook reports that it has 845 million active monthly users. The company made $3.71 billion in revenue, with a cool $1 billion in profit in 2011 which had nearly doubled since 2010. This profit is also many times more than Google when they went public a while back – they “only” showed a profit of $106 million. Also – that $1 Billion dollar in profit was also the exact same number used by Justin Timberlake’s character ambitions in The Social Network, which showed the beginning of Facebook. Coincidence?

Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, owns 28.4% of the company, drawing a $483,000 salary, with a $220,000 bonus in 2011. Facebook credits Zynga with providing 12% of its revenue in 2011. But apparently Zuckerberg is looking to shrink his salary to $1 a year from 2013, just like Steve Jobs did…

Having faced some speculation about who exactly owns what, the SEC website has now presented some hard numbers from the S-1 filing. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns the most equity of anyone – his 1.1 billion Class B shares give him almost a 57 percent stake — about half of which he owns and half of which are owned by others but over which he exercises proxy voting authority. Class A and Class B shares are differentiated by their voting powers among other characteristics with the Class B shares being the most common. Zuckerberg also holds 42.4 million Class A shares which represents a 36.1 percent stake.

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Facebook has slowly started rolling out the new Timeline profile view for all users, in fact I reckon most readers of this site have probably switched to the new view  already (if not, you will be forced to use it pretty soon). Today Facebook launched a pretty great new tool to hype up the new Timeline view, simply called Timeline Movie Maker. They built the app with Definition6, and it could not be easier to use:

Simply head over to http://www.timelinemoviemaker.com/, and if you are logged into Facebook, a simple green button is displayed to generate your own movie based on your Timeline. The App will request your permission to get some of your details and naturally the photos from your timeline. Using the events and locations in your life, a one minute movie is built that is actually pretty exciting to watch.

Right now it is not yet possible to export this video or share it to sites other than Facebook. This is a pretty great way for Facebook to force users to expand their Timeline events and photos. In fact, if you do not have enough details in your timeline, the Movie Maker will not work.

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You might already be accessing your Facebook account more from your phone than your computer, but clearly Mercedes thinks you need Facebook in even more places. At CES, Mercedes Benz is showing off its latest in-vehicle telematics system that will have Facebook access built in.

Obviously driving does not really go with reading your friend’s status updates, but the latest Mercs will instead be integrating into Facebook’s location services. Drivers can search for businesses and friends on the navigation system, which will then search Facebook’s services as well. With Facebook now being built into TVs and other consumer equipment, it was only a matter of time before we would see it land in vehicles. The problem is the implementation.

Safety is of course a concern – but the system does not distract from the existing navigation system. In fact, text entry is impossible once the car is moving. You can however change your status updates with certain preset statements – think “Jim is driving”. Users can also post their destination and route on Facebook – perfect for over sharers. Perhaps more helpful is that the features that enhance the existing navigation system. Instead of only searching for restaurants around you, the few restaurants that your Facebook friends “liked” will be shown first.

It is not only Facebook that is used however – Google and Yelp are included in search results as well. The new Facebook capable telematics system will be available on the latest 2013 SL-class, but also all Mercs that roll out in 2013.

Let us know – do you think it makes sense to have Facebook integration in your car?

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Tweekly.fm, a service that automatically sends an update of your top artists for the week to Twitter and Facebook.

Recently, Spotify (with Sean Parker’s help) got engaged to Facebook. In short, if your Facebook and Spotify accounts are connected, you will see your friends listening to music in the new ‘ticker’ as they are listening to it. A lot of people have wondered, ‘Is this useful?’, ‘Why would I want to see John listening to Backstreet Boys?’.

Before I answer that. A little background. I started Tweekly.fm in Januray of 2009. The goal was simple. I wanted to make a twitter app. I was (and still am) an avid last.fm user, so I thought it would be great to automatically share your music tastes from last.fm to twitter. At that time #musicmonday was still big. People were sharing their music tastes on Twitter every monday. It was great! Where is it now? And what happened?

The biggest culprit is Twitter’s trending algorithm. They changed it to display only novel topics. In other words, because #mm was trending every monday, it wasn’t exactly novel each time. But why didn’t people continue sharing their music tastes despite this? There was no real return. During 2009 there was also quite a rise in websites that offered the ability to tweet your songs to Twitter. I wrote a blog post on this quite a while ago in April of 2010. It was an exciting arena, one in which Tweekly.fm was competing in as well. Of those sites in that blogpost (besides Tweekly.fm), only tweetmysong are above 450 000 in alexa rankings, and blip.fm remaining at the top (because of its built-in network effects). In short, the small ‘sector’ kinda died. Nobody took the effort to tweet a song they are listening to, because not a lot of people took the effort to listen to it. In other words, little return for both people. If someone shares a song with me, it works better if there is context. For me to like the song, there are two big prerequisites: If it is a good friend, who knows my music tastes, I will absorb the effort to listen to the song. However if it is an artist (and genre) I’ve never heard of, I still have to make up my mind about, because my friend shared it with me, and expects some return. In other words, I have to make an effort to form an opinion on the song. “Hey Simon! What did you think of Portugal. The Man?”, “Uh. It is great. I kinda liked the jazzy sections in the song New Orleans”.

If it is from a ‘musical’ stranger, the only context I have is if the person elaborates on the song. “Listen to Nero – Innocence. Epic dubstep in every way”. Now I know it is dubstep and if I am a fan, I would be more willing to accept the opportunity cost of taking the time to listen to it. However, for the person who shared the song, they still need a return. If I liked the song, I must still do more effort to tell the person that I liked it, and once again the interaction rate drops off heavily.

Why is Tweekly.fm still growing? It is automatic and it has context. There is no effort on part of the listener. They just have to consume their music and it will be shared each week to Twitter. The second factor that Tweekly.fm does to a certain degree is context. 3 artists are shared in the update. This means that if people see one artist they like in the tweet, they will be more inclined to click on it. If there are 2 known artists and one unknown artist, they will be even more likely to click on it.

So why is Spotify and Facebook on the right track? Music sharing works best when it is automatic, because it takes no effort on behalf of person sharing the music. They thus expect little, if nothing in return. Any comments on the artists you  listened to is as they would say in marketing terms: a satisfying experience. Same goes for the consumer. They have no expectation to comment on the artists you share, but will be delighted if they find they share music tastes in common.

However, where their system fails, is music discovery. The only context being employed is the user listening to the music. If you know him to listen to cool electronic music tracks, you will be inclined to find out more AS they are listening to it. If you follow what they are listening to, you might pick up a pattern and then be inclined to look up the tracks yourself (“ooh, I know that song! oooh, I know that one as well! Oooh, I better check this one out, I don’t know it”)… But this I feel, is perhaps way too much effort. It beats the purpose of automatic sharing.

Automatic sharing allows serendipitous behaviour to arise, because of the non-effort to share it. In Facebook’s case, it doesn’t clog up the stream, because it occurs in the ticker. That is great. However, if they really want to ramp up music discovery, they need to use music recommendations to explain the context of songs that people are sharing. If Robert Scoble is listening to bluegrass band that I’ve haven’t heard, the system should preferably show context while he is listening to it. Like when Last.fm recommends new artists, they recommend it based on your current library of artists. In other words, it should preferably match up the closest artist I have listened, while also providing other information (such as genre and current position in world charts for example). This way, I can immediately discern context when music is automatically shared.

Who should be doing this? Last.fm. They have the resources and data available to do this. I can already see what my ‘friends’ on there are listening to, but there is no context. They know what I’ve listened to, they should just bring it together. I wrote a script the other day to test this. Of my 87 friends on last.fm, it returned to me the following dataset:

Of my friends who listened to music the current week and based on last.fm’s current music recommendations to me, I should listen to:

[Beirut] => 4 [Skrillex] => 2 [Björk] => 2 [Gold Panda] => 1 [The Wombats] => 1 [Band of Skulls] => 1 [Cut Copy] => 1 [Röyksopp] => 1 [St. Vincent] => 1 [Cults] => 1

It is very slow, because I have to make several API calls, so it is not available for testing (I might upload it github later). So in other words, what the above code says: “Of the artists we recommend you listen to, your friends listened to Beirut, Skrillex, Bjork, Gold Panda, Wombats, Band of Skulls, Cut Copy, Royksopp, St Vincent and the Cults this week”.

So: What it boils down to. Facebook and Spotify are on the right track. Music sharing works best when it is done ‘frictionlessly’, but now it just needs more context. I hope Last.fm gets there before them, but maybe it is just because I am a bit biased.

Looks like Google+ might have some trouble ahead. Recent reports suggest that Google+’s novelty is wearing off as stats point to declining return users to Google+. Be honest – those of you who have signed up for Google+, how many of you still return to it regularly? We are betting not a lot. Compare that to Facebook users who generally tend to visit the site daily, if not multiple times a day.

Once they were enemies, but now Facebook and Twitter have teamed up with each other against Google. While the option to import your tweets into Facebook has been available for quite some time, Facebook will now natively allow users to tweet their Facebook status natively. No plugins needed.

There are some gotchas however. You need to obviously provide Facebook with your Twitter details, and your status updates have to be set to “public” in order to post to Twitter as well.

This is a interesting move by Facebook and Twitter, but I really hope they release some info on its uptake. Our opinion is that most people’s use of Facebook and Twitter vary greatly. Status updates sent on the network is not necessarily meant for the other network. For example, your techie/webby friends might be on Twitter, and your friends (and acquaintances) are on Facebook. This might be the reason for Google+’s recent decline in traffic. And no, the “Circles” feature does not help, it just increases complexity for the average user. (For some great insight into this read Simon‘s great post “Should I use Google+?“)

Right now we do not know when exactly the feature will go live, but expect it soon.

Facebook has updated its iPhone app with a number of new features and privacy improvements, some of which reflect the recent enhancements of the website.

Facebook for iPhone 3.5 now makes sharing with others easier with the added ability of tagging friends, places and posts and sharing external links form a web view. There is also an added new design for profiles and group walls making viewing clearer and simpler. The sharing tool has also been improved to add privacy controls on posts and match the settings on the website.

In addition, a number of bugs have been fixed including those in photo tagging and chat, improved notification speed, easier selection of filters in the news feed and overall improved stability and performance.

Unfortunately, it seems that Facebook has removed the iPad version of the app.

To download the app click here

We all know the deal on Facebook – you get people who use it for simple social networking, and those that click on just about any app or game and become hooked on the platform (much to the dismay of others who have to deal with constant invites). Now Google is also using this method of hooking people to the platform, although it does seem a lot more polished and organized.

Although it is not yet live for everyone (I checked this morning and I am not yet that lucky), Google+ Games will be placed in a fifth button on the top of the screen, and the current catalogue looks pretty great. Most significantly, these games are focussed on sharing your accomplishments within your circles, and the user can cleanly just from the games view to the other Google+ views. You can of course disable games invites in your circles – if you are not yet familiar with Circles, click here to get a proper explanation.  As Google puts it, the games are there when you want them, and gone when you dont. Take a look at this video to see how the games interface will work – very impressive actually.

Google+ Games will have quite a few titles on launch (currently around 16), and includes Angry Birds, Zynga Poker and Sudoko as well. Zynga is the gaming company that has made its fortunes on Facebook with games like Farmville, so its interesting to see them embrace this new platform as well. Google is also inviting developers to jump on board, so expect the platform to grow very quickly. If you happen to be lucky enough to have Google+ games already live on your account, give us your impressions in the comments, OK?

 Update: Looks like Google+ Games has made Facebook sit up and take notice – they have now announced updates to Facebook Games as well, including a new fullscreen view with a ticker screen on the right to monitor your friends and their gaming activity.