I Might Be Too Old for Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Facebook's Graph Search.

On Sunday, I turned 30.

That’s not too old, I tell myself, yet the signs of aging are creeping in. Teenagers listen to music that I either haven’t heard of or believe to be mostly terrible. They use slang I don’t recognize, and I imagine my slang would sound to them like “groovy” or “far out” sound to me.

But for the purposes of our tech blog, the most notable sign is how much more active teens are on Facebook than I am. To hear it from my wife, who works with children and teens at her job, they’re constantly signed in and active, to the point that reaching them by voice call is unreliable. Send them a Facebook message, even during school hours, and they’ll respond right away. (The reality isn’t quite that extreme; according to a Pew survey, most teens communicate through text messages and phone calls more than Facebook, but e-mail is far behind.)

So when Facebook announces a new feature, like Graph Search, I imagine those teens getting the most use out of it. Graph Search lets you look up people, places, photos and other things using natural search queries. Think of it like Google for everything that your friends know; instead of searching the Web for somewhere to eat or something to do, you could just search through the collective wisdom of your network.

Here are some of the example searches on Facebook’s Graph Search home page:

Music my friends likeRestaurants in London my friends have been toPeople who like cycling and are from my hometownPhotos before 1990

Being able to find all that information–and provide your own information for friends–sounds great. But unless you and your pals are putting lots of data in, you’re probably not going to get a lot of data out. I know for sure that I haven’t put much effort into connecting my real life story to Facebook, and as I poke around my network, I see that many of my friends haven’t either. They don’t check in to places they visit. They don’t “Like” everything that they actually like. They haven’t uploaded photos from before 1990. Collectively, we haven’t invested in making Graph Search as useful as it could be.

It might be different if I was part of the generation that uses Facebook more often. Though it’s hard to find data on how Likes and check-ins vary by age, younger users tend to have more Facebook friends than older ones, according to Edison Research, so at least they have a bigger base of people to work with. And according to a 2011 study, teens spend more time on the network per day than older users. If posting on Facebook is part of your social circle’s daily life–that is, it’s not just a way to see what old high school buddies are up to–I imagine Graph Search will be a lot more useful.

That’s not to say Graph Search won’t be of any value to someone like me. It could come in handy as a way to sort through photos, for instance. There’s also a chance that Facebook will improve the ways that it picks up on our interests, and integrate frictionless sharing so there’s less work involved in becoming an information source.

But while I plan to keep up with technology for a long time, I realize it’s hard to keep using social networks like a teenager when your friends are getting older too. Facebook isn’t part of my daily life anymore, so I can’t imagine rewiring my habits and turning it into a primary information source, especially if my friends aren’t doing the same.  It’s much easier to rely on the tools I already have, such as traditional search engines and sites like Yelp–just like it’s easy to stop keeping track of popular music or to pick up on new slang.

Graph Search is in “very limited” beta now, and users who want to try it can join the waiting list. I look forward to seeing what I can do with it, even if it’s not really for me. In the meantime, here’s to growing older.

Why Facebook Makes You Feel Bad About Yourself

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

No surprise — those Facebook photos of your friends on vacation or celebrating a birthday party that can make you feel lousy.

Facebook is supposed to envelope us in the warm embrace of our social network, and scanning friends’ pages is supposed to make us feel loved, supported and important (at least in the lives of those we like). But skimming through photos of friends’ life successes can trigger feelings of envy, misery and loneliness as well, according to researchers from two German universities. The scientists studied 600 people who logged time on the social network and discovered that one in three felt worse after visiting the site—especially if they viewed vacation photos. Facebook frequenters who spent time on the site without posting their own content were also more likely to feel dissatisfied.

(MORE: Why You’re More Likely to Remember A Facebook Status Than a Face)

“We were surprised by how many people have a negative experience from Facebook with envy leaving them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry,” study author Hanna Krasnova from the Institute of Information Systems at Berlin’s Humboldt University told Reuters. ”From our observations some of these people will then leave Facebook or at least reduce their use of the site.”

The most common cause of Facebook frustration came from users comparing themselves socially to their peers, while the second most common source of dissatisfaction was “lack of attention” from having fewer comments, likes and general feedback compared to friends.

The study authors note that both men and women feel pressure to portray themselves in the best light to their Facebook friends, but men are more likely to post more self-promotional content in their ”About Me” and “Notes” sections than women, although women are more likely to stress their physical attractiveness and sociability.

(MORE: Who Wields The Most Influence On Facebook?)

The authors write [PDF]:

Overall, however, shared content does not have to be “explicitly boastful” for envy feelings to emerge. In fact, a lonely user might envy numerous birthday wishes his more sociable peer receives on his FB Wall. Equally, a friend’s change in the relationship status from “single” to “in a relationship” might cause emotional havoc for someone undergoing a painful breakup.

So far, it seems that the positive effects of being socially connected supersede the negative consequences of feeling inferior or left out by your circle of friends. But the authors suggest that if the hurtful feelings grow, Facebook and other social media may no longer be a fun way to stay connected with friends, but could become just another source of stress for people.

The research will be presented at an information system conference in Germany in February, called the 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik.

MORE: Pediatricians Should Discuss ‘Facebook Depression’ with Kids

Alexandra Sifferlin is a writer and producer for TIME Healthland. She is a graduate from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism.

Use Facebook? Own an iPhone? Call Your Facebook-Using, iPhone-Owning Friends for Free

iTunes Facebook's Messenger app for iOS.

If you find yourself perpetually blowing through the minutes on your cell phone plan and you spend a lot of time talking to people you’re also friends with on Facebook and those same people happen to own iPhones and they’ve got the Facebook Messenger app installed, there’s a solution.

Facebook has rolled out free voice calling to other Facebook users via its Messenger app for iOS. Both you and your friend will need to have the app installed for this to work, of course, but assuming that’s been taken care of, you’ll be able to make calls to one another using your phone’s cellular data connection or an available Wi-Fi connection (this should work over Wi-Fi for iPad and iPod Touch owners, too). It’s not technically free if you’re paying for your data plan or broadband connection, but none of your voice minutes will be used in the process. BuzzFeed has a simple step-by-step guide here that details how the calls are initiated.

This is not a new trick, mind you. Several other VoIP (voice over internet protocol) services – Skype being the most well-known – can do the same thing, but across platforms (Apple, Android and others) and between different devices. But Facebook has a lot of users, many of whom already use Messenger. And it’s unlikely this feature wouldn’t be rolled out to non-Apple devices sometime in the not too distant future.

The free calling feature has reportedly been available to users in Canada for a while and is now beginning to roll out to users in the U.S. as well.

Facebook launches free calling for all iPhone users in the US [The Verge]

Aamoth handles news, reviews, how-to's and videos as TIME's technology editor. He lives in Boston and has spent more than 15 years in the tech industry.

The ‘Facebook Phone’ Might Already Be Here

WSJFacebook Messenger now allows you to make calls to your Facebook friends.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly quashed rumors that the company is building a phone, calling such a move “wrong strategy.” He said building Facebook’s own mobile phone is “so clearly the wrong strategy for us” during a keynote conversation in September last year.

And yet today, with an update to the Facebook Messenger app, Facebook now effectively has a phone — it’s just duct-taped to a smartphone.

iPhone users today with the Facebook Messenger app can make voice calls to other Facebook users that have the messenger app. The calls work over your wireless network and Wi-Fi.

So, let’s add everything together:

Facebook has an application that lets you search the web for content that’s related to your friends. You can already find pages for movies, games, people and places, and your friends can share that content among themselves. With the introduction of Graph Search, it’s even easier to find that content. For example, you will be able to search “movies my friends in San Francisco like.” Graph Search hasn’t rolled out for mobile devices yet, but Facebook has said it wants to get to it.Facebook has a messaging app that lets you contact your friends with text and media messages. On the Android app, you don’t even need to log into Facebook. You can view the messages at any time from a sorted inbox.The messaging app has the ability to make phone calls. With the update today, you can make voice calls over wireless networks and Wi-Fi.

Steve Jobs at his keynote to unveil the iPhone famously said, “it’s a phone, an iPod, and an Internet Communicator.” The apps collectively might not cover “iPod,” but it certainly hits the other points.

Facebook has essentially built a stealth operating system for the iPhone and Android smartphones.

This might not bother Apple as much, given that it’s primarily a hardware company — but Apple is still keenly concerned with the user experience. Apple runs the risk of losing control of the user experience if everyone is simply spending all their time on the Facebook App.

This is also a concern for Google if Facebook finds ways to convince people they don’t need to use Google to find information. When Graph Search rolls out on mobile (an if and a when accompanies that), it’s at even greater risk, especially on Android phones.

Facebook might not build its own phone, but the ‘Facebook Phone’ certainly appears to be alive and well. It’s just software, not a piece of hardware.

Facebook’s Graph Search Is the Future of Facebook

Facebook

Facebook held a big press event this morning. The company only sent out invitations last week, and when it did, it didn’t disclose the topic. But in a sense, everyone who pays close attention to Facebook has been waiting for this event for most of the site’s history — because the subject was Graph Search, the social network’s first truly serious search feature.

Like other great big Facebook-altering features like Timeline, Graph Search isn’t being unleashed in one fell swoop. It’s a beta for now, and only a minuscule percentage of users will get it immediately. (Everyone else can get on the waitlist at facebook.com/graphsearch.) Still, its arrival in even limited form is an important moment.

Graph Search lets you enter plain-English concepts that tie together multiple things the social network knows about the people who use it: where they live, where they work, where they’ve taken photos and what things they’ve liked. Among the searches Facebook provides as examples are “people who like tennis and live nearby,” “tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends,” “movies liked by people who are film directors” and “friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park.”

The results aren’t Google-style links to external sites — they’re Facebook pages for the people, places and other things that match the query. In theory, at least, this new way to find information is both faster and far more personal than a conventional search engine. The notion that we might end up doing most of our interacting with Facebook by searching rather than browsing seems entirely plausible.

At the press event, Facebook did try to keep everyone’s expectations in check. CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent much of his presentation emphasizing what Graph Search isn’t. He kept saying that it’s not the same thing as “Web search” (or, as most of us tend to call it, Google).

More important, it isn’t a fully fleshed-out idea. This first version helps you find people, photos, interests and places, but there’s lots of stuff on Facebook it doesn’t know about yet. It doesn’t search status updates, for instance, and it’s not hooked into Facebook’s Open Graph, which ties the site together with third-party services like Spotify. It also doesn’t work on Facebook’s mobile apps yet. (Zuckerberg says Facebook’s to-do list for Graph Search should keep the company busy for the next several years.)

It’s not even clear yet just how useful Graph Search’s limited initial features will be. As I scanned the results for the example searches performed by Zuck and his co-presenters, Graph Search honchos Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen, many of them seemed painfully obvious, like a list of friends’ favorite TV shows that contained “well, duh” items such as The Office and Game of Thrones.

The most instantly appealing aspect of Graph Search may be photo search, which looks slick and fun. Without it, I have trouble finding my own snapshots I’ve uploaded, let alone ones from friends or public ones I might like.

If Graph Search fails to come up with any results at all — an outcome that sounds like it might be common — it’ll give you a standard page of Web search results. Those will be powered by Facebook partner and part owner Microsoft, and will be largely the same as the results you’d get if you just conducted the same search on Bing.

When Facebook launches something major, it’s easy to get irrationally exuberant about its potential: the e-mail-like messaging features it introduced in November 2010, which looked like they might be a landmark, didn’t usher in a new era for either Facebook or e-mail after all. But it’s been clear all along that a sophisticated search feature was the biggest missing piece of the Facebook puzzle — the one to let the site tap into everything it knows about a billion people in ways that might be both highly useful and enormously profitable. Now we know that Facebook is at work on that challenge.

Other than allowing for “Sponsored Search” promotional links, Facebook isn’t trying to make money off Graph Search yet. But if it takes off, and people start using Facebook to find restaurants, doctors, travel destinations and much more, it’s tough to imagine a scenario in which the site doesn’t make enormous amounts of money from precisely targeted advertising. It could rival Google as a money machine on a level it hasn’t done to date.

We’re talking Facebook here, so it’s a given that Graph Search is going to be controversial, at least at first. It doesn’t let you see anything you couldn’t have seen otherwise: all privacy settings are respected, and people won’t even show up in results if they haven’t given you access to the relevant facts that would otherwise put them there, such as their employer or location.

But Graph Search will make it a whole lot easier to find out stuff on Facebook. Facts that would otherwise have been buried in a profile or that might have scrolled off into the Timeline’s distant past will be only a search query away. It’ll be fascinating to see how that changes the way people use the service, and whether it rankles a meaningful number of users.

Facebook isn’t introducing any new privacy features related to Graph Search; at today’s event, Zuckerberg simply recapped recent privacy upgrades like the ability to review all your recent activity and adjust settings on the fly. He also said before Graph Search is made widely available, Facebook members will get a prominent message encouraging them to review their privacy choices. I expect that this won’t be enough to pacify privacy advocates and Facebook skeptics — though truth to tell, I think that much of the angst over Facebook privacy issues is overblown. (I’m never clear on why people who dislike Facebook use it at all.)

Me, I’m guardedly optimistic about Graph Search. I use Facebook for things I want to share, not for things I want to hide, so I’m not worried about the privacy implications. And my single biggest beef with the site is that it’s impenetrable: too much of the worthwhile stuff it contains is too hard to uncover. Graph Search could change that.

But it won’t change anything until millions of people get their hands on it. More thoughts to come once I do. For now, I’m reading what Wired’s Steven Levy and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan have to say about all this.

Facebook Graph Search Makes Privacy Seem Selfish

The subtle impact of Facebook Graph Search is that when you share openly, you share for the benefit of mankind. And when you don’t, or share to just a few people, you’re robbing the world of your knowledge, recommendations, and content. The question for each of us now is whether we prioritize our contribution or our privacy.

Facebook’s mission has long been “making the world more open and connected,” but until now, Facebook’s service has been better at connecting us to our friends.

The news feed and Timeline deliver what we post to people who already know us. Sharing was about self-expression — offering up a digital representation of who we are. What we shared could end up helping people, but we got a narcissistic boost from all those Likes and gained social capital in the process. Sharing wasn’t entirely altruistic.

Graph Search creates a potential audience for our content who we’ll never meet. Your Like of a gentle dentist or a tranquil park, your photo of a historic landmark or must-see event could influence decisions of people for the better. But you won’t know that. Your aid falls outside your network to those who stumbled across your donation via Graph Search.

This redefines our relationship with the Facebook share box. There’s suddenly a reason to share even if you can’t immediately foresee how or to who it will be valuable.

Those warm, fuzzy Likes and the chance to make people think you’re an expert might make you share things you thought your friends care about. However, the fear of getting zero Likes and annoying your friends may have discouraged you from sharing things that could assist someone eventually. A broadcast to the news feed was simply the wrong medium for your local dentist recommendation.

But if there were a way to take a quiet action that would be indexed by Graph Search, you might be much more willing to donate your advice and experience to Facebook. The problem is this doesn’t really exist. The closest approximation would be to publicly share something and then hide it from your Timeline. But that won’t actually hide Page Likes from the news feed, and people may not care if their addition to the graph can be pulled by friends who visit their Timeline. They just don’t want it pestering their friends from the homepage. Facebook needs to build this quiet contribution.

Why? Stow the cynicism for a moment and remember there are souls out there who really love to help others. While there are badges and elite status, altruism is the foundation of thriving communities like Yelp and Wikipedia. Not coincidentally, Facebook Graph Search challenges Yelp because it too can attract and offer up recommendations. If Facebook makes it easy to lend a hand, people will. Its graph could flourish, the world might find it truly valuable, and Facebook could turn it into a business that supports further innovation.

–

There is also a potential dark side to Graph Search — a chilling effect on sharing. When Facebook launched the news feed in late 2006, 750,000 of its 12 million users joined a group protesting the feature. They claimed that while all the stories in the news feed were only shown to people their authors allowed, it violated their “privacy through obscurity.” The effort that was required to find something on Facebook before news feed was protection enough. Despite concerns, people eventually grew to cherish the information stream.

Facebook went through another round of grumbling when it launched Timeline. Suddenly old posts could be dug up much more easily. But again, there was a degree of protection from employers, family, and romantic interests thanks to the friction of browsing through years of content in search of something offensive.

When Graph Search rolls out publicly, we may see the same sense of violation, but magnified by the ease of search. Before you might have shared something widely or publicly that might damage your reputation — a drunk photo, a controversial article, a joke in poor taste — but you’d assume its audience would typically be people who got your updates in the news feed.

Graph Search’s efficiency penetrates the armor of friction to discovery. A recruiter doesn’t have to comb years of Timeline. They can search for photos you’ve taken in Cancun. They can search for “people named Josh Constine interested in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.” And soon Facebook plans to index posts, meaning all your status updates and links can be dredged up.

Some people have nothing to hide. But for others whose identities aren’t necessarily aligned with their bosses or their parents, Graph Search could be a nightmare. Others still just don’t care about helping out. They’re not going to go to the trouble of Liking their favorite dentist in case it might assist a friend or a stranger. And finally there are people who just feel uncomfortable sharing so openly.

There’s nothing wrong with being any of these. If you don’t want to contribute, that’s fine, and it’s your choice. But now that Graph Search exists, it’s a choice you have to make.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Facebook Preps Radically Visual Redesign Of The Mobile News Feed

Today, Facebook’s mobile apps look like its website shrunk down. Soon, that could change. I’ve seen first-hand the employee-only iOS app build of an evolved form of Facebook’s mobile news feed, which ditches the empty blue and white chrome for full-screen photo tiles and overlaid text. Reminiscent of Flipboard, Google+ for iPad, and Microsoft Metro, the fresh design could make Facebook’s feed exciting again.

I have no information on when this could be released. It could be announced at Facebook’s big launch event tomorrow, take a few more months, or get scrapped altogether. I don’t know if it could come as a standalone app, an option in the main apps, or be mandatory. But it exists, and I’ve seen it.

Regardless of the exact release date, it’s about time for an aesthetic shake-up of Facebook’s main mobile apps. Facebook for iOS and Android moved from a grid of icons for navigation to the slide-out menu we use today in October 2011. Much of the rest of the app, and the news feed in particular, has looked almost exactly the same for three-and-a-half years.

In that time, the mobile space has gotten a lot more visual. Smartphone cameras and connections have improved. Visual-focused apps like Instagram that minimize chrome in exchange for showing content as big as possible have grown popular. There’s also been an increased interest in design after Path 2.0 set a new standard for beauty in social networking.

Facebook’s attention has been elsewhere. After an admitted misstep with poor-performance HTML5, Facebook concentrated its resources in 2011 to speeding up its iOS and Android apps. It also released several standalone apps including Camera and Poke. Meanwhile, the look of Facebook’s flagship app has languished.

But behind closed doors and on the phones of employees, Facebook has been thinking outside the list-style vertical feed.

This is not a rumor or a “sources say” situation. I’ve seen this app on a phone with my own two eyes. That’s not to say this is going to launch tomorrow (though it could), but Facebook has gone as far as to build a functioning app with this re-imagined design. Things could certainly change before it does launch in some form, but this will give you an idea of how Facebook is experimenting with a design language that’s much different than what it has used to date.

The news feed of the evolved Facebook app I’ve seen creates separate feeds for a few different content types including news and photos. Users navigate between them by swiping sideways on a photo that serves as a header tile filling the top quarter or so of a portrait layout iPhone screen. Below the header is a larger body tile that takes up most of the rest of the screen. From what I saw, it shows one story at a time, with text and who posted it laid on top of a full-screen image.

For example, instead of the screenshot above where most of the screen is taken up with white, blue, and gray chrome and empty space, the app looks like the mock-up below. I’m sorry to the app’s expert designers out there, but I’m no artist. This mockup is just my approximation from memory of the Facebook app I saw (and the icon up top is a mockup of what’s been on Facebook employee homescreens). The real app is much more polished. Still, notice the full-width image instead of a small thumbnail, with the text laid over the image.

The sliding tiles remind me of Microsoft Metro (Windows 8), the focus on imagery evokes the Google+ iPad app, and the over style is similar to Flipboard. Print magazine covers could be an inspiration, where the text and images merge rather than being formally separated. After years of daily news feed reading, some power users may have started to consider it a chore to wade through their streams. The more visual interface could make Facebook feel much more dynamic from day to day.

The existence of the new app, or at least a redesign of the mobile feed, backs up some chatter we’ve heard. When I spoke to Josh Williams, former CEO of Gowalla whose company was acquihired and now heads the Facebook Nearby product, he said there was a lot that Facebook could do in separate feeds for different content types. The app I saw at least has separate feeds for news and photos, and more for videos, music, etc. could be in there, too. A former Facebook employee today said the company will make big changes to the mobile experience and the news feed in 2013. This redesign would certainly constitute big changes.

How Facebook would roll out its starkest change to its mobile interface yet is an important question. People tend to freak out when their ingrained Facebook browsing behavior patterns are changed, and some people have been set in their ways for several years now. Facebook might cause too much drama and risk losing users if people woke up one day to find this visual interface had replaced the classic feed.

Instead, the redesign could be rolled out as an optional news feed interface selectable from the main Facebook app’s navigation menu. Alternatively, Facebook may use its standalone-app-as-guinea-pig strategy. In that case it would release this as a standalone “Feeds” app, and if it proved popular, it might then add it as an optional or mandatory new interface for its main app.

Either way, Facebook is almost nine years old now, and it’s got too much public-market scrutiny to risk another “Students Against Facebook News Feed” protest by forcing such a radical change on everyone at once. In some form or another, though, there’s a new Facebook on the horizon.

TechCrunch will be reporting live from Facebook’s big launch event. Check back tomorrow (Tuesday 1/15) at 10 a.m. PST for our coverage and analysis.

Pulse adds support for social feeds, including Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Pulse adds support for social feeds, including Instagram, Facebook and YouTube data = {blogUrl: "www.engadget.com",v: 250};when = {jquery: lab.scriptBs("jquery"),plugins: lab.scriptBs("plugins"),eng: lab.scriptBs("eng")}; var s265prop9 = ('20428340' !== '') ? 'bsd:20428340' : ''; var postID = '20428340'; var modalMNo = '93319229', modalVideoMNo = '93320648', modalGalleryMNo = '93304207'; when.eng("eng.omni.init", {pfxID:"weg",pageName:document.title,server:"",channel:"us.engadget",pageType:"",linkInternalFilters:"javascript:,engadget.com,joystiq.com,massively.com,tuaw.com,switched.com,techcrunch.com",prop1:"Engadget",prop2:"",prop9:s265prop9,prop12:document.location,prop17:"",prop18:"",prop19:"",prop20:"",mmxgo: true,disablepipath:true,mmxtitle:"us.engadget" + " : "}); adSendTerms('1')adSetMOAT('1');adSetAdURL('/_uac/adpagem.html');lab._script("http://o.aolcdn.com/os/ads/adhesion/js/adhads-min.js").wait(function(){var floatingAd = new AdhesiveAd("10000057",{hideOnSwipe:true});}); EngadgetMenu CESReviewsEventsPodcasts Engadget ShowFeaturesVideosGalleriesStoreTopicsHD Mobile Alt Announcements Cameras Cellphones Desktops Displays Gaming GPS Handhelds Home Entertainment Household Internet Laptops Meta Misc Networking Peripherals Podcasts Robots Portable Audio/Video Science Software Storage Tablets Transportation Wearables Wireless Acer Amazon AMD Apple ASUS AT&T Canon Dell Facebook Google HP HTC Intel Lenovo LG Microsoft Nikon Nintendo Nokia NVIDIA RIM Samsung Sony Sprint T-Mobile Verizon About UsSubscribeLike Engadget@engadgettip uswhen.eng("eng.nav.init")when.eng("eng.tips.init") Pulse adds support for social feeds, including Instagram, Facebook and YouTubeByEdgar AlvarezpostedJan 15th, 2013 at 12:53 AM 0

Pulse has clearly been working hard at polishing off those iOS and Android applications, but it doesn't look as if the reading service is slowing down its maintenance efforts anytime soon. Via blog post, Pulse announced today that it's now letting users browse through their favorite social feeds within the app, with account support added for Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube, Instagram and, of course, Facebook -- much like Flipboard's been doing for a while now. To go along with that, though, the application's photo and video viewers have both been on the receiving end of a minor makeover, which should make for a much better canvas when looking at those pics or vids posted on some of the aforementioned social networks. Never a bad time to be more social, right?

when.eng("eng.perm.init")

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Pulse

Tags: app, application, feeds, Pulse, social

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Top Facebook Designer Aaron Sittig Departs the Social Network

Aaron Sittig, the first designer at Facebook Inc. and a close friend of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, is leaving the company — again.

A Facebook spokesman confirmed Mr. Sittig’s departure on Wednesday: “Aaron was a valuable member of Facebook’s team and we wish him the best of luck.”

Mr. Sittig didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear what he’s leaving Facebook to do.

Mr. Sittig, who led the creation of the now ubiquitous “like” button and introduced friend photo tags, is leaving just two years after rejoining the company as “design strategy lead.” According to one person with knowledge of the matter, Mr. Sittig had become deeply involved in Facebook’s mobile projects over the past year.

Mr. Sittig was one of the earliest employees at Facebook, recruited in 2005 by Sean Parker, the former Facebook president, to help with the fledgling site’s design. Mr. Sittig briefly left the company in 2010, at a time when many early Facebook employees were leaving to build new startups or pursue other opportunities. He returned in February 2011.

In a sign of how close Messrs. Sittig and Zuckerberg have been, the Facebook CEO attended Mr. Sittig’s 2011 wedding.

His departure comes as Facebook ramps up its efforts on mobile. Despite its size, the company’s plans to dominate smartphones is threatened by younger startups, such as Whatsapp, and larger rivals, including Apple and Google, which have the advantage of owning their own operating systems.

Shares of Facebook rose more than 5% to close at $30.59, rising above $30 for the first time in roughly six months.

Facebook Surpasses $30, Ahead of Q4 Earnings

Shares of Facebook Inc. breached the $30 mark on Wednesday, the first time in six months.

The milestone represents a welcome reversal for the social networking company, which struggled last year to convince investors that it could justify a high valuation. In May, Facebook went public at $38 a share in a much-ballyhooed IPO, but its stock price soon got clobbered in the following weeks. The shares hit a low of $17.55 on Sept. 4.

On Wednesday, shares of Facebook rose more than 4% to $30.39. The stock climb comes a day after Facebook sent out invitations to the press for an event next week at its Menlo Park, Calif., campus. The invites simply says, “Come and see what we’re building.”

Facebook declined to comment.

Facebook’s “story is no different,” said Michael Pachter, a Wedbush Securities analyst. “But we see more evidence that all of the things we thought they could do, they are beginning to do.”

Facebook has been on a rollercoaster ride since its May IPO. Prior to going public, the company explicitly warned investors about the outlook for its mobile business in a regulatory filing and separately tried to temper the expectations of equity analysts. Around that time, General Motors revealed it was pulling its advertising dollars from Facebook. The negative signals, compounded by an aggressively sized offering and technical glitches on the day of the IPO, weighed on Facebook’s stock in the ensuing months and the company’s shares hit a nadir of less than $18 in September.

Facebook has since moved aggressively to build its mobile business, with the rollout of new ad products and standalone applications, such as “Poke,” a clone of Snapchat, a popular mobile messenger service.

It has also recently pushed into new verticals, such as e-commerce, through the introduction of its Gifts feature, which encourages members to buy presents for their friends’ special occasions, such as birthdays and engagements. Facebook has started to fold several retail partners into the Gifts service, including Starbucks and online retailer, Fab.

Facebook, which prides itself on its “hacker” culture, is known for constantly introducing and tweaking new features, making it difficult to discern which products will stick and which will be folded. Still, many analysts see the recent experiments as encouraging and a strong signal that Facebook is focused on ferreting out new business opportunities, particularly on mobile.

“Facebook had to go from 0 to 60 in mobile,” said Colin Sebastian, a Robert W. Baird analyst. “They are shifting from a desktop company to a more mobile one. That requires taking more risks.”

Facebook reports its fourth quarter earnings at the end of this month.

Still, several analysts on Wednesday said Facebook continues to face challenges, including questions on how it will improve how it makes money off international users, especially as user growth in developed markets continues to slow.

It’s also unclear if Facebook’s standalone mobile applications, like “Poke, will succeed or cede more ground to startups. Instagram, the photo-sharing application it acquired for nearly a billion dollars last year, recently sparked user outrage after changes were made to Instagram’s terms of service. The company was forced to backtrack on some of those changes, but not before many users abandoned the service for rivals, such as Flickr.

“It is still in the early innings,” Mr. Sebastian said. “Not everything Facebook does is going to be successful.”