Facebook Home was released this weekend for a select few Android devices, and reviews have been decidedly negative. The app is designed to replace the default home screen on Android devices with a Facebook home screen. This is meant to make using Facebook not only easier, but smoother and more immersive. Cover Feed turns the lock screen into a new feed that gives you updates on what your friends are doing without you having to unlock the phone. Also, one of Home’s coolest features is the Chat Heads. Conversations with people through SMS or Facebook Messenger are marked by floating bubbles with…

In 60 seconds, Nicolas Cage, Angelina Jolie, and their friendly carjacking cohorts can boost a high-dollar ride for sale to their fictional employer/nemesis. This is nothing compared to the things that happen on the web in any given 60 second period. The folks over at ixtract put together a visualization that demonstrates some of the millions of activities that happen on the internet every minute. They include: 12 websites hacked 14 Spotify songs uploaded 20 victims of identity theft 50 blogs created 70 domains registered 100 LinkedIn accounts created 320 Twitter accounts created 411 Facebook…

How desperate are you for your favorite celebrity to read your letter? The Guardian reports the introduction of a new initiative by Facebook that allows users to send a celebrity a message, but at a price. How do they calculate the fee? In this test run in the UK, a Facebook message to a celebrity can run anywhere from 71p to £11, depending on an algorithm that determines the celebrity’s online presence and fan base. Facebook’s new initiative is only in a test phase, running for a small percentage of users. Previous tests in the US included a $1 to contact non-friends and $100 to send a message to…

Facebook has been a promising venue through which to market a local business ever since it reached a high level of popularity back in 2008. Back then, it was just breaking the hundred million user level and was showing signs that it would be able to be business-friendly in contrast to its rival MySpace. Now, it’s 10 times bigger and commands more time of humans than any other website. The problem is that it’s not the easiest marketing platform to master. Unlike Google, Twitter, and other players that are used on a daily basis, Facebook has algorithms that keep businesses from finding success. Google…

Oh, Google and Facebook. Thanks to the two giants of search and social, you can’t really hide very easily anymore. If you have things in your past that you don’t want known, businesses considering hiring you don’t have to hire an investigator to go beyond the standard background check. They simply need to find you online. Your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest – they’re all available. Sure, you can go private or choose not to participate in social media in the first place, but there are challenges with that as well. Since everyone is on social media (at least from certain peoples’…

President Barack Obama’s team is very active on social media. The Facebook page that carries his name has new posts twice a day on average with a mix of hopeful messages, political statements, and personalized views into life at the White House. On Twitter, they post several times a day with links, pictures, and quotes from the President. Google+ is a different story. It was only mildly active during the election campaign. After a peak of 19 posts in August, 2012, it started falling off quickly. In September, there were 11 posts followed by 5 in October. November, the month of the election, saw two…

Forget Apple versus Samsung or even iOS versus Android. The real mobile war is (and always has been) over capturing the attention of the users. We simply didn’t know it until Facebook released Home. Android phones can be turned into Facebook devices with Home. It’s that simple. Rather than being an Android device that has apps, Home makes Facebook the driving force of the device, moving the apps and other features of the phone under the Facebook shell. You’ll be able to get notifications and interact with your Facebook friends from any other app at any point other than during phone calls themselves….

In the digital age, there are plenty of challenges popping up for parents. The ever-connected world opens doors to risks that parents have never had to cope with in the past. The need for digital manners is just one of the major negatives associated with raising children today. Thankfully, it’s not all bad. Opening up lines of communication and bringing together resources across the internet (and thus the scope of human understanding) is a big benefit that many parents can use. Below is a sampling of a thread from Facebook that points to some of the benefits of social media for parents. It wasn’t…

When Facebook rolled out threaded comments last week, there was a clear lack of excitement from most of the social media blogs. It was a news item, nothing more, for most of them. Cool feature, about time, yadayadayada. What the majority of them missed is that this is arguably the most important change that Facebook has made for businesses this year. The touch factor is back. By that, I mean that businesses and organizations now have the ability to interact directly with questions and comments, making the comments made by others more useful and enabling longer comment threads to make much more sense…

Every time a social network makes a change to their layout, design firms around the world groan about how they now have to redo a ton of different artwork. Social media is big business and companies will pay big bucks to look just right on their pages and profiles. Google had a change of their own recently on Google+, including one major change to profile and page layouts that made the cover photo extremely large. This added a new wrinkle to the mix because now pages had different through which they had to operate. The whole cover image isn’t immediately visible when people visit the page, so there are…