Every Month 1.39 Billion People connect on Facebook, 700M on WhatsApp and 300M on Instagram!

Facebook’s efforts on smaller screens are paying off big.

More than half a billion Facebook users access the site only from mobile devices, Facebook revealed as part of an earnings presentation Wednesday. The social network has 1.19 billion total mobile monthly active users, as of the end of 2014, up 26% year-over-year.

All that mobile traffic has meant a big advertising windfall for Facebook. The company made $3.59 billion from advertising overall in the fourth quarter of 2014, and 69% of that came from mobile ads rather than their desktop cousins. That means Facebook made nearly $2.5 billion on mobile ads in three months—a 53% improvement year-over-year. It was also the first quarter Facebook’s mobile ad revenue beat the $2 billion mark.

Strong mobile numbers like these are vital for Facebook and other companies with ad-based business models. Internet users are increasingly flocking from browsing on PCs, where banner ads have long reigned, to using mobile browsers and apps, where traditional online ads haven’t worked as well.

Facebook and companies like it have been working hard to figure out how to adjust and make mobile ads that will actually click. The latest of Facebook’s mobile experiments is a platform launched in October that lets brands tap into the social giant’s vast troves of user data to advertise to Facebook users while they’re in other apps.

As an example, a Facebook user playing Candy Crush might get served up an in-game ad for toothpaste based on the user’s Facebook activity. Advertisers benefit from getting access to Facebook’s data, while Facebook increases its ad revenue without putting more ads on its own products. While Facebook’s fourth-quarter numbers are clearly evidence the company’s own mobile app is doing just fine, they’re also a sign this new network is off to a speedy start.

Happy Birthday Facebook: You Won’t Believe How Much Facebook Has Changed in the Last 10 Years!

The Most Important Facebook Redesigns in Its 10-Year History

Ten years ago today, Mark Zuckerberg gave birth to The Facebook and launched an online social revolution in his Harvard dorm room. We all know what happened next—thanks in no small part to an eight-time Academy Award-nominated film. With such humble beginnings, no one could have predicted the wild success (and cries of outrage) the site’s many iterations would bring over the years.

So in honor of Facebook’s tenth birthday, travel with us back to simpler times as we take a look back at the site’s biggest design changes in each year of its existence. Prepare yourself—nostalgia is about to hit hard.

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2004: On February 4, The Facebook goes live on Harvard’s campus before slowly opening itself to other colleges about a month later.

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2005: Dropping the “the,” Facebook.com expands to include high school students and introduces the Photos feature for the very first time.

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2006: Facebook opens it doors to everybody. News Feed also makes its debut, spurring the first of what will soon be seemingly endless debates on privacy settings.

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2007: Despite Facebook Beacon causing major privacy concerns, the site expands to include 50 million users by the end of the year.

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2008: Facebook debuts an iPhone app, Facebook Chat, and long-awaited privacy controls for Friend Lists.

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2009: Users can now “Like” things and are given their own personal Mini Feeds.

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2010: Facebook gets rid of tabs, hits 500 million users, and launches Facebook places before killing it less than a year later.

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2011: Facebook introduces its biggest changes yet with Timeline and the front page News Tickers.

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2012: Facebook increases its focus on visual design with a new, larger photo viewer, but the addition of sponsored stories and Graph Search (once again) upsets users.

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2013: The Facebook you know and love, with a Timeline that now exists in a much less confusing single column.

Source: Gizmodo

 

 

Facebook announces new iPhone app: Paper, coming to App Store next Monday!

The rumors were true: the social networking giant Facebook on Thursday officially announced its brand new social newsreader application for the iPhone. Called Paper (not to be confused with this), the app is scheduled to hit the App Store next Monday, February 3, 2014. The company has released a nice video walkthrough, embedded below the fold, which shows off really nicely done – gorgeously, dare I say – layout, fluidly animated interface and some familiar Flipboard-like gestures…

According to Facebook, Paper combines news articles, videos and photos your friends share on Facebook with human-curated content from traditional news outlets like The New York Times, TIME Magazine or The Huffington Post.

Here’s from Facebook:

Paper is the first product from Facebook Creative Labs, where we’re crafting new apps to support the diverse ways people want to connect and share.

The gestures are heavily reminiscent of Flipboard.

You can quickly swipe through articles left and right, pull down on an article to flip it open like in Flipboard. The beautiful edge-to-edge design ensures that stories take up the entire screen.

Moreover, you can just tilt your device to explore high-resolution photos, scroll through photo albums, enjoy full-screen videos and more. The app also makes it easy to like stories, comment on them and even post your own stories straight to your Facebook Timeline from within the app.

Here, check out the video promo.

The Verge reported that former Apple designer Loren Brichter contributed to the app’s gorgeous interface. And Re/code sat down with Mike Matas, product design lead for Paper, who pitched the app as a cross between newsreaders and content creation tools.

As you start changing the way you’re displaying this content, we hope that it will change the way people think about posting content.

Because the two are obviously really connected. It’s no fun to make a bunch of great stuff if no one ever sees it.

As for curated stuff, you can pick the topics that interest you by browsing more than a dozen themed sections and dragging a desired topic into the main view.

These sections range from photography and sports to food, science and design, and each comes with a “rich mix of content from emerging voices and well-known publications”.

If you’re not interested in reading curated articles, the app lets you just browse your Facebook News Feed instead.

Here, a few highlights:

• Everything responds to your touch so you can pick up or thumb through stories with simple, natural movements
• You can tilt your phone to explore high-resolution panoramic photos from corner to corner, and see faces and other important details up close
• Fullscreen autoplay videos come to life and bring you deep into the action
• Beautifully detailed covers make it easy to spot articles from trusted publishers and decide what to read or watch.· Articles unfold in the app and appear fullscreen for a focused reading experience
• When you’re ready to tell your own story, you know exactly what your post or photo will look like because you see a live preview before you share it

You can learn more about Paper at Facebook’s mini-site.

How do you like the app so far?

Are you going to be giving Paper a whirl come next Monday?

Facebook for iOS update brings video autoplay to the app

Facebook for iOS received an update that will now allow videos to automatically play on your News Feed once you scroll by them on your screen. The update brings Facebook for iOS to version 6.8. The automatic video playing cannot be turned off, but you can make some adjustments. One good piece of news is that while the video will play no matter what, by default the video is mute. So if you don’t feel like being disturbed as you flick through your Facebook News Feed, you won’t hear a thing, unless you want to.

And you are going to want to embrace the ability to mute the volume considering that not only are uploaded videos playing automatically on the screen, but so are advertisements. Hey, Facebook needs to monetize, you know.

Look, we’re willing to let you in on a little back door secret. Facebook would just feel awful if it forced you to use your precious data to watch a video, or even worse, an advertisement. So you can actually disable the auto play video on a cellular network so that it will work only when you’re connected to a Wi-Fi pipeline.

While the auto play feature is only on the iOS version of Facebook, it is expected to come to other platforms as well.

Facebook iOS App Crashing: users unable to update iOS app, Here’s a Fix!

Facebook faced a rather embarrassing issue yesterday. Last evening, a lot of user profiles were inaccessible from the desktop version of the social networking website across the world. Thankfully, the issue did not last very long and has been fixed by Facebook.

While not everyone seemed to be affected by the outage, users trying to access profile pages belonging to others were faced with an error message that showed that they were temporarily unavailable. “Sorry, but this page didn’t load properly,” the error message read. “Please try again.”

 

Multiple attempts later, Facebook did manage to fetch the page but the time taken to do so was noticeably slower. Some users also complained about their News Feed being inaccessible. Here at tech2, we were unable to access profile pages. Another common error that users seemed to be facing read, “The page you requested cannot be displayed right now. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page.”

Facebook, in a statement to The Next Web said that the issue had been fixed at about 11:30PM IST last night. “Earlier today, we experienced an issue that prevented some people from loading Timeline or Pages content for a brief period of time,” a spokesperson said. “We resolved the issue quickly, and content is back to normal. We’re sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused.”

 

Despite this, a quick look at Twitter shows us that Facebook’s woes haven’t ended just yet. A new update of Facebook has been put online on the Apple App Store for iOS devices, but users seem to be complaining about the inability to download it. We were unable to update the app on an iPhone 5. The changelog, funnily enough, reads “bug fixes” for the update. We’ll update the story as and when Facebook fixes the issues.

Solution:

If you can’t update your facebook app, or it’s crashing constantly, please delete the app and re-download it from the app store. It works like a charm.