The Google+ Photographer’s Conference took place a few days ago, and there was a panel who answered the question: “What do you want next from G+?” In classic Google style, they set the conference up to include a few people connected remotely via a Hangout. The panel first discussed how Google+ is helping photographers before moving on to more general desires for Google+.
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Facebook Camera App Launches for iOS (TechCrunch)
Facebook began rolling out a standalone photos app Thursday with which users can shoot, filter and share single or sets of photos and scroll through a feed of photos uploaded to Facebook by your friends. Facebook Camera for iOS lets users rapidly pick one or more photos, apply filters, tag friends and locations, add a description and post. Gizmodo iOS users are used to pulling down at the top of apps to refresh a stream, but this action reveals your iPhone’s photo album, instead. This takes getting used to, as does the process of selecting multiple photos to upload or changing your mind and removing one. Wired The product highlights the company’s commitment to its mobile business. But considering Facebook’s recent purchase of the photo-sharing app Instagram, it’s hard not to compare the two. Silicon Valley Mercury News Facebook agreed to acquire Instagram on April 9 for cash and stock then valued at $1 billion, but the value of the stock has widely varied after the Menlo Park, Calif.-headquartered social network went public last week and has experienced volatility on Wall Street. The deal has not closed, and Facebook recently changed wording in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings that indicated it did not expect the acquisition to be complete in the current quarter. Reuters Less than a week after its IPO, Facebook is already facing multiple lawsuits by disgruntled shareholders who claim that the company and its underwriters told only select institutional investors about the social media company’s weakened growth forecast. This is not the first time investors in a hot tech company’s initial public offering have alleged that underwriters favored their regular clients at the expense of the little guys. Read more
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Facebook Faces Shareholder Lawsuits (AP)
Facebook’s fourth day of trading as a public company saw an increase in the company’s stock price and shareholder lawsuits related to the social network’s botched initial public offering. Several shareholders who bought stock in the IPO have filed lawsuits against Facebook, its executives and Morgan Stanley, the IPO’s lead underwriter. Reuters Meanwhile, Facebook is considering a stock-listing proposal put forward by the New York Stock Exchange, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters, in the wake of a disappointing initial public offering last week on the rival NASDAQ bourse. Facebook has exchanged phone calls and emails with NYSE Euronext and are considering their pitch, the source said without elaborating on specifics. CNET Facebook plans to open its first Middle East office in Dubai next week, according to the Associated Press. This United Arab Emirates city is considered the Silicon Valley of the region, so it makes sense that the social network would put its Persian Gulf hub here. The Hill Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday began to look into the debacle of what was supposed to be the social networking company’s crowning achievement. Lawmakers want to know whether institutional investors got a sneak peek at an updated analysis, written just before the initial public offering, that gave a more pessimistic assessment of Facebook’s future revenues. AllFacebook Some Facebook page administrators are seeing messages in the top-right-hand corners of their timeline pages urging them to create Facebook ads and containing a “promote your page” button. Have you seen similar messages on Facebook pages you manage? Mashable A Facebook page and a six-minute video tell the story of a 12-year-old girl whose mother died when she was 3 years old, grew up being abused by her father and bullied on her Facebook page. Eventually, the girl commits suicide. There’s just one problem: this is all fake. Read more
Cloud services are getting bigger and bigger, with media heavyweights like Amazon and Google throwing their versions into the competition. Although Google’s entry isn’t necessarily indicative of the next big thing — Buzz, anyone? — the cloud appears to be here to stay, mostly because of the safety it provides.
“The cloud has eliminated many of the worries about data integrity, security and availability,” said Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of crowdSPRING, a crowdsourcing marketplace. Kimbarovsky says cloud service providers “do a far better job protecting our data than we do in protecting our own data. Even the world’s most sophisticated companies would have difficulty matching the security, accuracy and availability provided by these top vendors.”
Whereas laptops can break down or get stolen, “most cloud providers have sophisticated data backups and redundancy in place,” said Frank Dale, president and CEO of Compendium, a cloud-based content marketing platform. “Solutions delivered through the cloud are updated automatically, so users always have the latest version.”
Read the full article on mediabistro.com to find out 3 more benefits of the cloud.
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Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a host and producer for the Huffington Post, talks about his experience with various social media feeds as he tried to cover the Arab Spring for the Huffington Post. What’s notable about the video is that he identifies the new journalistic experience and it is remarkably fast and requires a great awareness of the various available technologies. He scans Twitter, YouTube and even monitors a few Google+ Hangouts in there to get as much information he can.
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Massachusetts Joins Growing Crowd Probing Facebook IPO (PC Magazine)
Massachusetts regulators on Tuesday issued a subpoena to Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter for Facebook’s initial public offering, in an effort to get answers about reports that some investors and not others were informed of earnings revisions for the company ahead of the IPO. The highly publicized IPO is facing scrutiny from several quarters for possible irregularities that may have occurred before the stock was floated and continued through the first day of trading. AllFacebook The hopes of collectors who sought to own one share of Facebook stock from its initial public offering last week were dashed, as paper stock certificates will not be made available, after all. CNNMoney reported that Computershare, which handles shareholder records for the social network, alerted GiveAShare.com and OneShare late last week that there would be no paper stock certificate. Reuters Facebook has agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleged the site’s “Sponsored Stories” feature publicized users’ “likes” without compensation or the ability to opt out, according to a court document filed on Tuesday. The proposed class action lawsuit, filed in a San Jose, Calif., federal court, could have included nearly one of every three Americans, with billions of dollars in damages, court documents say. PCWorld Facebook’s Timeline profiles may be getting a redesign, but this one probably won’t trigger a backlash. The new Timeline design, spotted by TPM Livewire, condenses the biographical information at the top of the page, so it’s nested within the user’s banner image instead of appearing below. Links to the user’s friends list, photos, locations and likes are tucked neatly underneath the banner, next to the user’s profile picture. Alongside those links, a new button called “Summary” leads to a list of major life events. CNET A federal judge has refused to order a Norwegian website that describes itself as “the number one socializing porn and sex network” to turn over its name to Facebook. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White last week ruled that the court had no jurisdiction because Facebook, which sued in California, had failed to show that the owner of website Faceporn had targeted residents of the state. Read more
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Webby Awards: Steve Jobs Gets Honored, Full List of Winners (CBS News/techtalk)
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was honored Monday with a Webby award for Lifetime Achievement for his work with the Bloomberg media corporation. The award was presented by Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, who reminded the audience that if it wasn’t for Bloomberg’s contribution to financial technology, we wouldn’t have found out the cost of Facebook stock shares until Monday. CNET Nearly a dozen celebrities, politicians and tech luminaries paid tribute to late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs at The Webby Awards show. A video featuring president Barack Obama, former president Bill Clinton and others expressing admiration for Jobs, who died last October, was shown to attendees and streamed over the Web. The Verge Actor Richard Dreyfuss gave a strange and oftentimes discursive speech that began with a jab at Facebook and Google. “If you’re going to take our privacy away from us, why don’t you tell us something private about yourselves,” Dreyfus said to an awkwardly hushed reception. “And if you’re going to change our world, why don’t you pay for it, because it’s theft.” USA Today Instagram won Webby Breakout of the Year, Pinterest took home a social media award, and Facebook scored the People Special Achievement for Social Change honor. In addition, Skype won for Best Social Mobile & Apps. For the complete list of winners, visit WebbyAwards.com Read more
Love it or hate it, or well, ignore it, but Google+ seems to be an important part of Google’s strategy to connect with the web. The service has caught some traction with its Hangouts feature, but other than that there seems to be a few reports that attempt to explain that Google+ is as sparsely attended as a hockey game in Texas. That doesn’t mean the service isn’t offering some compelling features, and the folks at Infographiclabs have put together a list of 20 reasons why you should switch to the emerging social network.
If Google+ had been around when Mark Zuckerberg was still at Harvard, the resulting network might have looked something like So.Cl, a project by the FUSE Labs in Microsoft Research that combines social networking with video chatrooms and search. Launched in beta in 2011, the site opened to the public over the weekend.
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Zuckerberg Weds Longtime Girlfriend, No Word on Prenup (Reuters)
Details of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg’s surprise wedding trickled out on Sunday, but mysteries remained, not least whether there was a prenuptial agreement in place that could affect Zuckerberg’s large stake in the company. Zuckerberg wed his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, on Saturday in the backyard of their modest home in Palo Alto, Calif., with fewer than 100 people in attendance, a Facebook spokesman authorized to speak on behalf of the couple said. CNET However, a woman in India is reportedly divorcing her husband because he committed the cardinal 21st century crime: he didn’t change his Facebook status when they got married. How can a woman trust a man who doesn’t whip out his cell phone the minute the marriage ceremony is over and declare himself to the world? VentureBeat NASDAQ chief executive Robert Greifeld admitted Sunday that the exchange was at fault for some glitches in early trading of Facebook’s IPO but said it had nothing to do with the stock’s uninspired performance. Facebook expected trading to begin at 11 a.m. on Friday, but it did not begin until about 11:30. GigaOM Catching the last five minutes of the Boston University commencement speech by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on WBUR, I was struck by the veiled swipes (pokes?) he took at Facebook. You know, the company that last week launched the most anticipated IPO in years, and that despite NASDAQ glitches and a disappointing finish, wiped Google out of the record books? Yes, that Facebook. CNET A mother wanted to share a picture of her son on Facebook. He lived only eight hours. Facebook removed the image, deeming it “too graphic.” Much later, the company offered an apology and admitted it erred. Read more
