Facebook bought the entire Friendster portfolio of social networking patents earlier this year. The seven patents and eleven patent applications had been transferred to MOL Global when it bought Friendster for about $39.5 million late last year. Facebook then negotiated with MOL to buy the patents in a deal that included advertising, a partnership for payments for virtual goods, and cash, and was valued at $40 million, according to a source familiar with the matter. Record of the transfer, which occurred May 13, can be found here, and the awarded patents are accessible here. Facebook confirmed to VentureBeat that it had been assigned the patents.
Diagram from a Friendster patent covering user compatibility scoring in a social network
The Friendster patents, which date back to the early days of social networking, are incredibly broad. They cover things like making connections on a social network, friend-of-a-friend connections through a social graph, and social media sharing. Friendster had received its first patent back in 2006, when it was already on the decline. At the time, Friendster President Kent Lindstrom told me the company had nearly forgotten it had ever applied for the patents, but added that “We’ll do what we can to protect our intellectual property.” From then on, Friendster frequently mentioned its patents as an asset, but to the best of our knowledge it never actually tried to enforce them.
At $40 million, the Friendster patents are one of Facebook’s largest acquisitions ever, on par with its FriendFeed deal. However, that money is trivial if there’s any chance MOL or someone else would have used the patents against Facebook. Especially with an IPO somewhere in its future, it was important that Facebook remove any shadow of a doubt that someone else had the rights to the intellectual property behind its core technology.
While MOL’s Friendster buy might not be the hottest property ever — the social network’s strongholds in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are quickly being conquered by Facebook if they haven’t been already — the patent deal made MOL its cash back in the span of months.
It’s unlikely that Facebook would use the patents against other companies in the space rather than trying to out-compete them, though it now has the option to wield intellectual property as a weapon. There’s a historical reference for taking patents out of the market; the Six Degrees of Separation patent, obtained by the eponymous failed social networking startup, was bought at auction in 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus — in part to keep it away from Friendster, the market leader at the time.
Minggu, 28 November 2010
Facebook Mobile Site m.facebook.com’s New Home Page Emphasizes Notifications
Facebook has released a new design of its mobile site m.facebook.com, most notably moving notifications, requests, and birthdays above the news feed. The relatively low-bandwidth interface is part of Facebook’s multi-pronged mobile strategy designed to ensure users have access to the service regardless of their handset or the strength of their data connection. M.facebook.com fits between more data intensive mobile applications like Facebook for iPhone and mobile site touch.facebook.com, and the minimal-bandwidth interface 0.facebook.com.
When users visit m.facebook.com they’ll see a trimmed down version of the status publisher above the new notifications, birthdays and requests panel. From here users can respond to friend requests, see that day’s birthdays, and click through links to view all of their latest notifications or their pending event invitations and other requests. This change refocuses the mobile interface on viewing and responding to the actions of others over creating new content.
Below notifications users will see Top News or Most Recent views of their news feed. Options to view only status updates or photos have been relocated behind the See More Stories button at the bottom of the Most Recent feed. There users will also find options to view feeds of only Link, Note, or Event stories — options not available on Facebook.com. Comment and like buttons are now in-line with news feed story timestamps, giving a more streamlined look with less empty white space. At the bottom of the feed is a People You May Know panel similar to the one seen in the right sidebar of the web version of Facebook.com’s home page.
At the bottom of the home page, the Bookmarks panel has been split with Notifications, My Pages, Events, and Photos remaining above the fold; and Links, Notes, Groups, and SMS hidden behind a More button.
This redesign is primarily aesthetic, and doesn’t give m.facebook.com users Places functionality like touch.facebook.com and Facebook for iPhone have. Though some traffic comes from m.facebook.com being used to direct people to download their handset specific Facebook app, m.facebook.com had almost 10 million daily active users and almost 50 million monthly active users by mid August. Keeping this user base engaged through redesigns is important as Facebook waits for them to have access to more full-featured apps and interfaces which increase overall usage.
When users visit m.facebook.com they’ll see a trimmed down version of the status publisher above the new notifications, birthdays and requests panel. From here users can respond to friend requests, see that day’s birthdays, and click through links to view all of their latest notifications or their pending event invitations and other requests. This change refocuses the mobile interface on viewing and responding to the actions of others over creating new content.
Below notifications users will see Top News or Most Recent views of their news feed. Options to view only status updates or photos have been relocated behind the See More Stories button at the bottom of the Most Recent feed. There users will also find options to view feeds of only Link, Note, or Event stories — options not available on Facebook.com. Comment and like buttons are now in-line with news feed story timestamps, giving a more streamlined look with less empty white space. At the bottom of the feed is a People You May Know panel similar to the one seen in the right sidebar of the web version of Facebook.com’s home page.
At the bottom of the home page, the Bookmarks panel has been split with Notifications, My Pages, Events, and Photos remaining above the fold; and Links, Notes, Groups, and SMS hidden behind a More button.
This redesign is primarily aesthetic, and doesn’t give m.facebook.com users Places functionality like touch.facebook.com and Facebook for iPhone have. Though some traffic comes from m.facebook.com being used to direct people to download their handset specific Facebook app, m.facebook.com had almost 10 million daily active users and almost 50 million monthly active users by mid August. Keeping this user base engaged through redesigns is important as Facebook waits for them to have access to more full-featured apps and interfaces which increase overall usage.
Minggu, 21 November 2010
www.m.facebook.com | Signup Facebook Login Page
use facebook mobile You can get a free Facebook Login and signup for an account using your cellphone from this link. You can choose your name and get a new account signed up how to use facebook mobile within minutes at the www.facebook.com site. Anyone is welcome to join this free service that is available in various languages.
m facebook home is a networking services that helps you stay in touch with your friends and family. www.facebook.com has become very popular website facebook login mobile phone among teens and the younger generation - Gen Next. Now this service is accessible using your cellphone how to work facebook.
m facebook home is a networking services that helps you stay in touch with your friends and family. www.facebook.com has become very popular website facebook login mobile phone among teens and the younger generation - Gen Next. Now this service is accessible using your cellphone how to work facebook.
Mobile Site m.facebook.com Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.
Facebook announced today that users of its mobile site m.facebook.com will soon be able to edit their privacy settings, including who sees what they post and granular controls for all of their privacy settings. More than 150 million people are actively use Facebook on mobile devices, often posting status updates and photos. If a user wants to set their status to only be available to friends before making a particularly sensitive post, they’ll soon be able to do this from m.facebook.com. The blog makes no mention of when Facebook’s mobile apps, like Facebook for iPhone, will gain privacy controls.
The mobile site is only part of Facebook’s multi-pronged mobile strategy, which also includes mobile apps and 0.facebook.com, but the addition shows that the company is committed to letting users control their data across platforms. The feature is being rolled out slowly, so it is currently unclear if users will be able to set distribution on a post-by-post basis or only as an overarching setting.
Users will soon be able to access the new mobile privacy controls at m.facebook.com/privacy, or by navigating to Settings->Privacy Settings. There they’ll be able to select who can see the content they share by selecting one of the buckets (Friends Only, Friends of Friends, Everyone, Recommended or Custom) that came along with the new privacy interface released in late May. Recommended is the first option, however, this in fact means sharing posts with everyone, which we noted could be risky since users often post content which could be dangerous or damaging to their credibility if seen by the wrong people.
Users will also have granular privacy control of who sees any of the actions one can take on Facebook. Block lists, public search settings, and basic directory information privacy will also be editable from m.facebook.com.
While users could always use their mobile browsers to change privacy settings by navigating to the slow-loading full site, access from within the mobile interface will increase the likelihood that users take control of who sees their content.
The mobile site is only part of Facebook’s multi-pronged mobile strategy, which also includes mobile apps and 0.facebook.com, but the addition shows that the company is committed to letting users control their data across platforms. The feature is being rolled out slowly, so it is currently unclear if users will be able to set distribution on a post-by-post basis or only as an overarching setting.
Users will soon be able to access the new mobile privacy controls at m.facebook.com/privacy, or by navigating to Settings->Privacy Settings. There they’ll be able to select who can see the content they share by selecting one of the buckets (Friends Only, Friends of Friends, Everyone, Recommended or Custom) that came along with the new privacy interface released in late May. Recommended is the first option, however, this in fact means sharing posts with everyone, which we noted could be risky since users often post content which could be dangerous or damaging to their credibility if seen by the wrong people.
Users will also have granular privacy control of who sees any of the actions one can take on Facebook. Block lists, public search settings, and basic directory information privacy will also be editable from m.facebook.com.
While users could always use their mobile browsers to change privacy settings by navigating to the slow-loading full site, access from within the mobile interface will increase the likelihood that users take control of who sees their content.
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