Fazny Zavahir: Facebook’s Android App Sucked Because “Obnoxious” Google Bought The Developer

Today at their mobile event in Palo Alto, CA, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed something interesting and rather humorous. It’s no secret that Facebook’s Android app has long been sort of a lame little cousin to their excellent iPhone app. But do you know why? Well it’s mostly Google’s fault. You see, they acquired the developer Facebook had hired to make the app.

“Yeah, I thought that was obnoxious,” Zuckerberg said today when we asked him about it following the event. Everyone in the room burst out in laughter at that.

Zuckerberg said it was a really small shop that Facebook had contracted to make the app — he was quickly corrected that it was actually more like one developer. “But it was the main thing they were working on. It wasn’t like it was some shop and that’s why Google had to buy them,” Zuckerberg continued, clearly still holding a bit of a grudge about it.

“Obviously, it wasn’t a huge deal. But it definitely set us back for a while,” he noted. Zuckerberg said that they worked out an arrangement to use the code the developer had written for the app up until then, but that he obviously couldn’t work on it anymore. ”It was kind of frustrating.”

Previously, it was thought that Google was actually helping Facebook to build their Android app — after the social network indicated it wasn’t a priority. But this makes more sense as to why it was so bad for so long — Google screwed over Facebook on it.

Robert Scoble recorded the entire conversation, so you can hear it in Zuckerberg’s own words here (it’s about 32:20 in).

Facebook is finally building the Android app in house now. And they actually updated it today which a range of new features to match the other versions available.

Fazny Zavahir: Facebook Deals: Hands On

 

Facebook has released a new Deals service for Facebook Mobile, which will adapt the “social graph” into something a little more down-to-earth, money.

How does it work? We were given a walkthrough at Facebook’s mobile event at its Palo Alto, headquarters, where the company also introduced its single sign-in process and enhancements to its location API.

Facebook’s new Deals program is tied closely to its mobile application. “Obviously, mobile is huge, location is huge,” Erick Tseng, Facebook’s mobile chief said in an interview following the press conference.

Facebook employees demonstrated the new Deals on an iPhone, although the service should be available on both Android and iOS devices.

When a user checks in to Facebook, he or she can look for a list of “nearby places,” some of which may or may not have a yellow price tag or sticky to the right of them. That’s a deal, and you can click on it to open it up. There are four kinds of deals: individual deals, loyalty deals, friend deals, and charity deals. There’s even a UI that shows “punches” on a virtual card for loyalty deals, Facebook says, with discounts for those users who bring new friends and customers.

The employee who demonstrated the Deals application to me (she asked not to be named) said that she wasn’t sure if there will be other colors of icons for other types of deals, to easily distinguish between them.

Businesses can access the Deal workflow on just a single page, Facebook said. The business can choose what kind of deal to set up, then add up to two lines of description text describing the deal.

It’s really up to the individual merchant to determine what sort of offer each customer receives. Individual deals will likely be on the order of offering a customer a discount or freebie on a particular item. Loyalty deals will use the “punch card” UI, offering a customer a free sandwich, for example, for every ten he buys from a given location. And charity deals will be just that: donations to charity, based on certain conditions.

The friend deals are probably the most intriguing. Merchants constantly want to attract new business, and a good way to do that is to incent an existing user to bring along a few friends. A Facebook employee described an example of a restaurant providing a free appetizer to a group of four or five people.

Interestingly, there is no barcode or icon to push; users simply click on the deal to redeem it, and show it to the cashier. The only reason for doing so, apparently, is to validate the deal in case there are a limited number of discounts available. Businesses will need to brief their employees on what deals are available. (I wonder if anyone will attempt to defraud their coffee shop by creating a wallpaper with a fake Facebook Deals ad?)

Facebook will launch Deals with 22 partners, and will be opened to 20,000 small businesses across the United States. (A full list of the current deals is here. Obviously, it’s going to up to the individual merchants to provide the Deals “content” that’s going to make the program a success.

Facebook also revealed some select promotions: On an undisclosed upcoming day, the first 10,000 to check in at The Gap will receive a free pair of blue jeans, Facebook executives said. North Face will also give $1 to charity for any user who checks in at a store and at a national park. Alamo Drafthouse, a chain of theaters in Texas, will add a dedicated pint glass for its Facebook friends, and provide a screening to the theater that gathers the most fans. The Palms Hotel will give a third night free for those who book two nights, and the Golden State Warriors will invite friends to a special post-game meet-and-greet for those fans who check in at the game.

Conspicuously absent from the launch was FourSquare, which pioneered location-based marketing, but appears to be in a head-to-head battle against Facebook’s Places and now its Mobile program. Interestingly, Facebook mobile chief Erick Tsieng spoke glowingly about SCVNGR, another location-based service that has made gaming a priority, rather than discounts. Significant? Maybe so.

With a concentration of tech-savvy businesses clustered in San Francisco and along the Peninsula, I’d expect local vendors to quickly adopt Deals for their own promotions. If they do, expect to see clusters of young tech workers gathered at corners, peering down at their smartphones as they evaluate their lunch options.

Fazny Zavahir: Facebook opens Places app to thousands of retailers

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is going Places with retailers.Barely two months after diving into the fledgling location-based-services market, the social-media giant has made the mobile “check-in” application available to major merchants and thousands of small and midsize businesses in the USA.Facebook Deals is designed to connect users of Facebook Places to deals and specials from the likes of 24 Hour Fitness, Gap and Palms Casino Resort. Deals is only available through Facebook’s iPhone app or via touch.facebook.com. Android users can now check into Places but not Deals.”Millions of people are living their lives (through Places), and merchants wanted to get involved,” says Emily White, director for local at Facebook.She declined to say how many of Facebook’s 200 million active mobile users are on Places.The service is an extension of Places, which lets smartphone owners with Facebook accounts share their exact location and find the whereabouts of friends. Only this time, they will be notified of discounts and deals at selected merchants nearby.Some 23 major merchants and up to 20,000 small and midsize businesses, ranging from restaurants to coffee shops, are part of the initial program, White says.Bill Quinn, senior vice president of merchandising at 24 Hour Fitness, says Deals is accessible at its 420 gyms nationwide.Facebook Deals not only “accelerates” the company’s big presence on mobile devices, it is “very significant” for marketers, retailers and local businesses, says Greg Sterling, an independent analyst who closely follows Facebook.”Generally, I think people will respond positively to it,” Sterling says. “Coupons have become one of the most desirable forms of mobile advertising from a consumer perspective.”Millions of smartphone owners are using Places, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others to shop, communicate, socialize and play games.Such services are vying for a slice of revenue for mobile advertising, which is expected to zoom in the U.S. to $3.1 billion in 2013 from $320 million in 2009, according to market researcher BIA/Kelsey.Facebook is expected to collect $1.28 billion in worldwide advertising revenue this year, up from $665 million in 2009, researcher eMarketer says.Still, some Facebook members may be uneasy about their privacy with the launch of Deals — as they have been with previous new Facebook features, Sterling says.

Fazny Zavahir: Google ‘mortified’ that Street View cars scarfed up e-mail, passwords; privacy criticism intensifies

It turns out Google’s Street View cars found out more about Internet users than previously acknowledged. Last Friday, the company said the cars, which roam the world taking pictures for its location-based applications, scarfed up e-mail addresses, URLs and passwords from residential Wi-Fi networks they passed by in dozens of countries.

And while Google said it was “mortified” by its discovery, apologized again, and announced some measures to beef up privacy awareness within its ranks, the admission could expose the company to greater global scrutiny, fines and potential lawsuits, experts said.

Over the weekend, the British government launched a fresh investigation into the Street Cars data breach. Italy demanded that Google give residents several days notice before its cars roam their neighborhoods, Reuters reported. Regulators in France, Germany and Spain have begun inverstigations of their own. More than 30 state attorneys general in the United States also have launched a joint probe. And Epic, a privacy advocacy group, urged the Federal Communications Commission to initiate a breach of privacy investigation of Wi-Fi communications networks.

Last May, Google said its Street View cars accidentally picked up some unencrypted information about Wi-Fi networks it was also tracking with the cars.

In Friday’s blog post, the company said the fragments of Internet user data the cars had picked up included entire e-mail addresses, Web page URLs and passwords.

“We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologize again for the fact that we collected it in the first place,” wrote Alan Eustace, a senior vice president of engineering and research.

The announcement paralleled similar findings by Canadian privacy authorities, who conducted their own investigation of Street View. Google said Friday that it will beef up training on privacy and had promoted Alma Witten, previously head of privacy engineering, to also lead privacy efforts over product management.

“We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users,” Eustace said.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the company has never used the information it gathered from Wi-Fi networks for any Google product.

Some privacy advocates say Google’s admission highlights a common attitude among high-tech firms that rush to get out new technologies without enough consideration of how consumers may be harmed in the process.

“First they said they didn’t gather data; then they said they did, but it was only fragments; and today they finally admit entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords,” said John Simpson, director of consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. “Maybe some Google executives are beginning to get it: privacy matters. The reality, though, is that the company’s entire culture needs to change.”

Fazny Zavahir: Facebook Investor Mail.ru Seeks $876 Million in IPO

Mail.ru, partly owned by billionaire Alisher Usmanov, seen here, and South Africa’s Naspers Ltd., is offering 31.62 million shares shares in the form of global depository receipts for $23.70 to $27.70 each, according to a regulatory filing today.

Mail.ru Group Ltd., a Russian Internet company with stakes in Facebook Inc. and Zynga Game Network Inc., is seeking as much as $876 million in an initial public offering in London.

Mail.ru, partly owned by billionaire Alisher Usmanov and South Africa’s Naspers Ltd., is offering 31.62 million shares shares in the form of global depository receipts for $23.70 to $27.70 each, according to a regulatory filing today. The company will sell 3 million new shares while existing shareholders including the company’s founders will sell the rest, according to a term sheet for the sale obtained by Bloomberg News.

“It’s the only way to get exposure to Facebook so it might attract a broad range of investors,” Michael Kart, a managing partner at Moscow-based investment firm Marshall Spectrum Ltd., which is considering investing in the listing, said in a phone interview. “This is a sector which is not available on the market which means the placement will probably be at a premium to western firms like Google and Yahoo.”

Russian companies are planning the biggest wave of IPOs since before the credit crisis as record-low bond yields stoke investor appetite for higher returns from equities. O’Key Group SA, Russia’s third-biggest food retailer, is planning to raise $540 million in London this year, while Severstal’s gold unit, Nord Gold NV, may seek $1 billion, three people familiar with the talks said Oct. 19.

The company will use primary proceeds to partly fund the $112.5 million acquisition of a further 7.5 stake in Russian social network service vKontakte, Mail.ru said in the statement. It will own 32.49 percent of the service after the transaction.

Mail.ru revenue may jump 51 percent this year to $301 million, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the IPO managers. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization are likely to rise 70 percent to $104 million, according to Goldman Sachs, which owns 1 percent of Mail.ru.

Mail.ru founders Gregory Finger, Yuri Milner and Mikhail Vinchel will be selling shares in the IPO.

Moscow-based Mail.ru holds 2.4 percent in Facebook, 5.1 percent in Groupon Inc. and 1.5 percent in Zynga Game Network, according to an Oct. 11 statement. The three stakes may be worth a total of $900 million, more than double their combined book value of $340 million, Goldman Sachs analysts estimated.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Russia’s state-run VTB Capital are also managing the IPO. The banks will take orders for the IPO from today through the week starting Nov. 8, terms show.

Google Fights Facebook, Microsoft in Social Search

Google is preparing to pick up the gauntlet Microsoft Bing and Facebook threw down with their social search arrangement. Google CEO Eric Schmidt doesn’t like private data deals.

Microsoft and Facebook have temporarily one-upped Google in social search with their new integration but, Google isn’t going quietly.

Facebook Oct. 13 agreed to open its data feeds to let Microsoft’s Bing search engine index and serve profile information and Liked Results in relevant situations.

The integration goes well beyond what Google has done with its own Social Search functionality, which lacks a large, cohesive network of user data.

The Facebook-Bing deal, then, is a big stepping stone to boosting social advertising, IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds told eWEEK.

“[Bing] can leverage the social info it lacked to keep people on their sites longer, with more exposure to ad inventory and the business it generates.”

Google recognizes this as much as any other company. On Google’s third-quarter earnings call Oct. 14, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked about how Google will capture signals in social search without accessing to data feeds similar to the deal Bing has struck with Facebook.

Schmidt paused a few seconds and noted that Google is careful about how its signals are assembled, but said there “are ways in which we could do that.”

“We also have in development other ways in which people can give us that sort of information that can make it even more personal,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt was clearly referring to Google’s supposed Google Me project to socialize its search and Web service properties in many layers.

If that sounds like a veiled challenge to Bing and Facebook, it is. Schmidt has made no secret about Google’s disdain for one-to-one arrangements where one company cedes data to another but not to the Web at large. He’s also intimated he would like access to Facebook’s data.

“There is always a concern that large, private collections of the data are not accessible to Web search engines,” Schmidt said.

“We’ve take the position in a religious and business perspective that the world is better off if you take the info you’re assemlbing and make it searchable, it provides a larger audience and drives more traffic to your site.”

Unfortunately for Google, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is hardly in a rush to release Facebook data to any more search engines at this point.

That puts Google on the outside looking in, Altimer Group analyst Charlene Li told eWEEK.

“This is not a knock-out punch to Google, but it is significant that they are not the leaders in social search – Bing + Facebook are,” Li said.

“Although [Bing] don’t have the mass and scale to have an impact on Google, the fact that they have already gained ground over the past year is indicative that Google has vulnerabilities.”

Another scary prospect for Google about the Facebook-Bing thing: Both Bing officials and Zuckerberg himself noted this new social search functionality is just a first step toward making search more useful, personalized and relevant using searcher’s social graphs.  

“As more people collect, post, share and add more “likes” and social content, the value of social search will improve,” .
 

Fazny Zavahir | Skype integrates Facebook news feed and phonebook into latest client

Skype 5.0 for Windows has just been released with a slew of improvements and feature additions, most significant of which is the inclusion of a Facebook tab that allows users to SMS, chat or call their Facebook friends via Skype right from the News Feed.

Skype’s Facebook integration is both sophisticated and sleek, and brings your Facebook experience inside Skype. Skype now offers a gateway to immediately call, text or chat with your Facebook contacts.

Facebook and Skype play nice inside the new Skype Home area of the application. Click the home icon and you’ll get the expanded Skype Home area, which is just a personal dashboard with news, alerts and a digest of mood messages. The new Facebook tab lives in this area, and this is where you can go to view your Facebook News Feed and Phonebook inside Skype.

The Facebook News Feed option will display a digest of activity nearly identical to what you would see if you were on Facebook, except that below each status update there are two noticeable Skype buttons: SMS or Call. The buttons appear if Facebook friends have included their phone number in their Facebook profile.

If the friend is a mutual connection on Skype, you’ll also have the option to initiate a free Skype call. And, if the Facebook friend is not already a Skype connection, but both of you are on Skype at the same time, the same free Skype call option is visible and an additional plus button will show up so you can add the Facebook friend as a Skype contact.

Skype’s News Feed integrations are great for initiating spontaneous contact around real-time updates, but you can also toggle over to the Facebook Phonebook section — a.k.a your Facebook contact list — should you want a more direct way to search for and reach specific friends.

These features are significant, but Skype’s latest 5.0 release includes way more than Facebook — there’s improved 10-way group video calling, much enhanced contact lists, more emphasis on profiles and a completely retooled user experience.

Video calling, for instance, now includes a “dynamic view” option that automatically positions the person speaking in the larger video window. In addition, Skype promises improved (and still free) 10-way group video calling, and the company has released an automatic recovery feature that will get disconnected audio and video chatters back up and running in seconds.

Contact lists got a face lift with the prominent inclusion of photos, and members will be now nudged to add a photo to their profile. Profile photos will factor into the search experience, which should make it easier for members to better find and add their friends to Skype.

Ultimately, these big changes point to Skype’s designs to be more than a secondary utility, and instead the primary connector between friends, family and our social contacts. Unfortunately, we Mac users will have to wait patiently for these features to make their way to us. Skype makes no promises on timing, but does tell Mashable that a similar Mac version is coming soon.

Fazny Zavahir | Microsoft, Facebook Announce Integrated Social Search

Bing searches will include pictures of Facebook friends next to the web pages that they recommend.

Facebook, which is drawing closer to Microsoft as competition with Google heats up, is making it possible for Microsoft to display in web search results the recommendations of a person’s Facebook friends.The new capability, introduced Wednesday, marks an expansion of the partnership between Microsoft and Facebook. Microsoft is the exclusive web search provider on the social network.

Facebook users who use Bing or web search within the site will get with results the pictures of friends next to web pages they recommend. The Facebook results will be gathered from what people have indicated they “like” on the social network.

“Your friends have liked lots of things all over the web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend’s profile to see which restaurants they like, we’re bringing everything together in one place,” Bret Taylor, chief technology officer for Facebook, said in the company’s blog.

In addition, Microsoft and Facebook are improving results when people search for other people. Searching for a person on Bing will include crawling through the friends of friends on Facebook to look for mutual connections. Bing will also make it possible to add such people as Facebook friends directly from the search engine.

Microsoft and Facebook plan to roll out the new features in the U.S. over the coming weeks. The new features are worthwhile enhancements to Bing, but are not a game-changer, Ray Valdes, analyst for Gartner, said in an e-mail to InformationWeek. “This alone won’t change the dynamics of search engine competition between Bing and Google,” Valdes said. “Google will remain dominant, although likely Bing will gain a bit — especially if it keeps following up with additional improvements.”

The real importance, according to Valdes, is the “emerging strategic conflict” between Facebook and Google, which are gradually encroaching in each other’s turf. Google Buzz, launched in February, was an attempt by Google to turn its Gmail email service into a social communication hub. While that effort failed to take off, Google is expected to make another attempt at online social networking soon.

In the meantime, Facebook is growing in importance. The site in August dislodged Google as the top online destination in the U.S., with Americans spending more time virtually visiting friends than they did on all of Google’s sites combined, according to ComScore.

“Google has made mistakes in the social arena in the past, but has tremendous resources that it is marshaling for a new assault on this market territory,” Valdes said. “For Facebook to hold on to its leadership position in the face of the challenge from Google, it needs to make more alliances such as the one with Microsoft.”

As the market in online social networking matures, companies in leading positions stand to make much more money from advertising. Linking ads to search results that include the recommendations of friends is considered a powerful marketing tool.

Fazny Zavahir | Twitter Expects To Reach 1 Billion Users

Facebook has set the same goal of achieving a billion users, but has a large head start on the microblogging site.

 

Twitter, currently the world’s third largest social network, expects to reach 1 billion users, site co-founder Evan Williams told attendees of a San Francisco conference on Monday.

Williams did not, however, provide any timeframe for when the microblogging site — which has fewer account holders than Facebook and MySpace — will hit this number. After reporting in July it has 500 million active account holders, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed Facebook would reach 1 billion members.

It could be a while before Twitter arrives at that ambitious mark, based on the most recent statistics from Google Adplanner. Today, Twitter has 98 million users, according to the third-quarter social media update, up only 2 million, or 2.08%, from the prior quarter. In the first quarter of 2010, Twitter had 80 million users, and grew to 96 million users by the end of the second quarter, Google Adplanner found. There are more than 165 million registered users, according to Twitter.

“Twitter will get to a billion members,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO said at an event at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco when asked about Facebook’s target for customers.

These members will not necessarily be the same people who open up a Facebook account, he said. Twitter signs up more people each week than the entire population of his home state of Nebraska, said Williams, estimating that figure at about 1.8 million every week.

Twitter users send more than 100 million tweets daily. The company has expanded its promoted tweets and promoted trends advertising services to more businesses. Coca-Cola and Virgin were among the early adopters who beta-tested the program.

Co-founder Biz Stone joined Williams onstage at the event, and discussed Twitter’s new design which debuted last month.