On Friday Facebook’s new “Home” application launched on the US Play Store, and Facebook obviously had to start marketing it over the weekend. Facebook Home is the social network’s effort to take Android skins to extreme levels of customization. Featuring some really cool ideas like Chatheads, Facebook Home is not an app in the traditional sense.

So what is new about Facebook Home? Instead of the typical Facebook app, Facebook Home will take over your screen from the moment you wake the screen. You instantly see what your friends are sharing, and you can quickly see pictures without unlocking the phone. Because its so tightly integrated into the OS, you will also see things like messages and missed calls from the same interface.

Facebook makes no apologies of the fact that its network is a great way to goof off while at work – and this ad shows Facebook’s employees not really paying attention to their leader, Mark Zuckerberg. Tell us what you think: (more…)

Facebook has moments ago launched Facebook Home which basically turns any modern Android phone into the much vaunted “Facebook Phone” people have been talking about for years. It is essentially a skin (or launcher) that carries some brilliant integration tricks that hooks Facebook into many corners of the Android experience.

Even though HTC did indeed launch a new midrange phone called the “First”, Facebook’s new Home software will eventually also launch for the HTC One X, One X+ and also the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Note 2. The first is just the first (get it?) phone launching with Facebook Home. But Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that it is not Facebook’s strategy to build a dedicated Facebook phone, and they would rather focus on decent integration into the existing Android operating system.

What Zuckerberg made clear is that Facebook’s strategy is about a whole lot more than a dedicated device, and instead harnessing the massive 1 billion users who will slowly but surely move towards smartphones. And with Android’s significant (and ever strengthening) hold on the smartphone market, it was only natural for Facebook to embrace Android. Facebook will also be updating Home on a monthly basis, something that should make many Android fans happy who might not always get too many operating system updates. At least the Facebook skin should now improve over time…

So what is new about Facebook Home? Instead of the typical Facebook app, Facebook Home will take over your screen from the moment you wake the screen. You instantly see what your friends are sharing, and you can quickly see pictures without unlocking the phone. Because its so tightly integrated into the OS, you will also see things like messages and missed calls from the same interface. (more…)

Finally, Facebook has a challenger to Google in search – but with a few very important differences. Mark Zuckerberg yesterday launched the new “Graph Search” feature at the Facebook campus. The new service will enable users to quickly search through photos, friends, places and members interests.

The most scary part of how powerful this search engine will be is the sheer number of users it can use to get results. Right now Graph Search uses 1 billion people’s profiles for data, and a trillion connections between them. For example, if you “Like” a friend’s picture of trail running, Facebook might assume you might like trail running. Build that data out further with things like location info and basic profile details, and then Facebook can quickly link them up for natural language based search questions like:

People: “friends who live in my city,” “people from my hometown who like hiking,” “friends of friends who have been to Kruger National National Park,” “software engineers who live in Cape Town and like skiing,” “people who like things I like,” “people who like tennis and live nearby”

Photos: “photos I like,” “photos of my family,” “photos of my friends before 1999,” “photos of my friends taken in Cape Town,” “photos of the Eiffel Tower”

Places: “restaurants in Johannesburg,” “cities visited by my family,” “Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India,” “tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends,” “restaurants in New York liked by chefs,” “countries my friends have visited”

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One of the early Facebook features that many people got to know was the “Poke” feature. It did not do much – it simply showed a notification on the receiver’s Facebook page. But here we are a few years later, and Facebook has finally given the Poke name something that is of actual use.

Facebook yesterday launched its new Poke app for iOS, which is incredibly simple to use. Just like an instant messenger, you click a friend’s name and start typing, or sending images and video. But Poke has stolen a page from Snapchat in that the message disappears after a pre-set time up to 10 seconds. The receiver also has to hold down the person’s name in order to see the message, which does make it a little more difficult to capture with a screenshot.*

What is also quite interesting about the Poke app is that Mark Zuckerburg was actually very involved in the coding and design of the app. One of the strange little parts of the Poke app is the notification noise – which is a heavily processed voice which says “Poke!”. (more…)

After using Facebook for a few years, it is pretty tough to keep track of all the web services that use your Facebook details. MyPermissions is a great way to quickly see which apps have access to your Facebook profile – and for most users, the list is pretty scary. Remember that odd app within Facebook you used a few years ago? Remember all the sites for which you have used your Facebook login details instead of manually registering?  Yes, they still have your details.

So how do you see what has access to your details? MyPermission has two options – you can scan your apps using an iPhone app, or through the web browser extension. Simply head over to MyPermissions.com, and choose your poison. After running this, I found a list of more than 50 Facebook apps which have access to my details, and more than 20 that can access my Twitter profile. There are plenty more social networks that it can scan for. Even if you think you are pretty stingy in doling out your social network details, you might be surprised at the results: (more…)

24.com just launched a Facebook app that offers users a unique way to engage and connect with the news. So expect News24 stories popping up a whole lot more in your Facebook news feed. In order to read a shared article, users will have to accept the News24 app for their Facebook account.

The app is designed to allow users on the social network to read, share and comment on articles.  It opens up increased engagement around the news as users can see what their friends are reading in real-time and comment on their articles.  The app automatically shares all the articles users are reading on their Timeline and News Feed but they have the option to control their sharing preferences.

The response to the app has been impressive.  Since its launch in mid May, week on week referrals from Facebook have gone up 75% and the total unique story impressions have been 3 587 180.

Says 24.com’s Editor-in-Chief, Jannie Momberg: “The app is currently live for News24 and Sport24 and we plan to roll it out across other platforms around the beginning of July, including: Nuus24, isiZulu24, Parent24, Food24, Wheels24, Fin24, Channel24 and Women24. International trends have shown that news related social apps are proving increasingly popular as friends choose to share and read news that their friends are reading with 25-34 year old’s the fastest adopters.”

“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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