NO MORE FARMVILLE ON FACEBOOK...

BY BHARGAV.

Zynga, the social gaming company whose runaway hit FarmVille made it synonymous with Facebook games, is now pulling away from the social network that nurtured it. Starting next week, players will no longer be required to sign up for a Facebook account in order to register on Zynga.com. And Zynga games -- many of which encourage in-game purchases -- will use the gaming company's own currency instead of using Facebook as a payment processor. Facebook takes a 30 percent fee on those transactions. In 2011, Zynga accounted for about 12 percent of Facebook's revenue.

The disengagement is mutual. Facebook plans to withhold certain information about its users' social graphs. For instance, Zynga users will no longer be able to see their Facebook friends who are playing Zynga games but with whom they haven't previously interacted. Although Zynga would prefer to have full access to Facebook user data, moving away from the company's former dependence on a single platform seems the right choice. -- Wall Street Journal

YouTube reaches a billion monthly users.
YouTube says it now has 1 billion monthly users. If YouTube were a country, it would be the third-largest in the world, after China and India. The video service is so powerful and well-known around the world that it's an advertiser's dream: Every one of Advertising Age's top 100 brands has run a campaign on YouTube. -- CNET

Pinterest acquires a recommendation app.
Less than a year after local recommendation app Livestar launched, it has been purchased by Pinterest. Livestar will be shutting down and its engineering team will be joining Pinterest. "We think the Livestar team is a natural fit for Pinterest because of their commitment to inspiring people to do things in their everyday lives through social and expert recommendations," Pinterest said in a statement. 

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INDIA 100 YEARS BACK....

BY BHARGAV.

Treasure in a Shoebox

These 100-yr-old photos of British India were found in a shoebox, documenting a nation in flux. Discover India all over again.

 

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Celebs : With and Without makeup

BY BHARGAV.

They dont always have their pancakes handy to doll up and look good. And some days, just being a plain Jane is the way it goes. Here's a look at Bollywood's leading ladies when their makeup artists take the day off.

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COUNTRIES THAT BLOCK FACEBOOK

BY BHARGAV.

So, which countries block Facebook indeed? According to Wikipedia, there are 6 countries that block Facebook:

1. Bangladesh

2. China

3. Iran

4. Pakistan

5. Uzbekistan

6. Vietnam

Besides the above 6 countries, Syria is also mentioned, but according to Hillary Clinton’s speech at George Washington University on February 15, 2011, Syria just unblocked Facebook a few days ago, so Wikipedia is a little out the date.

As a user in China, it’s painful to play with Facebook since you have to use someVPN services or other anti-censorship tools to get access to the website or even all the third-party applications (such as Hootsuite ), which will take much more time than usual. Even though, I keep login with Facebook often if not everyday, since the internet freedom is so amazing, the friends are so kind.

Hope the countries that block Facebook will be less and less until zero in the near future, such as 2012, the best time I think. 

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Facebook App Makers Struggle With How Fickle Facebook Can Be

BY BHARGAV.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Last spring, the future for Viddy, a video-sharing Facebook app, seemed as sunny as southern California's skies.

Based a block away from Venice Beach, the 30-person startup impressed prospective investors with skyrocketing user growth figures and won funding from them at a $370 million valuation. The tech press hailed it as the "Instagram for video," potentially ripe for a billion-dollar-plus buyout. Justin Bieber wanted to invest — and the pop star eventually did just that.

But this month, the company fired its chief executive, laid off nearly half of its staff and blamed plummeting user numbers on something it once believed to be its ticket to success: Facebook Inc.

"Everyone has known for years that Facebook can be a huge driver of traffic, but Facebook also frequently changes who gets traffic," said Brian O'Malley, a Viddy director and a partner at venture capital firm Battery Ventures, which is an investor in Viddy. "We certainly didn't anticipate the decline."

Viddy's dramatic reversal of fortune is a common tale among builders of software and services that rode the No. 1 social network to viral stardom, only to plummet when Facebook made one of its frequent changes in the way third-party apps can communicate with and solicit customers.

Investors and entrepreneurs say that the unpredictable way that Facebook cuts off apps or suppresses their presence has made them increasingly wary of building companies that rely on Facebook. Some believe Facebook could eventually attract regulatory scrutiny because of its ability to make or break companies that rely on its billion-strong base of users.

Douglas Purdy, Facebook's director of developer products, said the company boosts traffic to apps that prove to be popular and takes it away from those that overwhelm people with notifications or are otherwise abusive or unpopular. In the past year and a half, Facebook has cut down spam complaints by 90 percent, he said.

"We don't want to be in the business of king-making," Purdy said. "In the end, users decide what they care about, and they have control over it. If you're a great developer and you're good at sharing really good content, you're going to get traffic."

He declined to comment on relationships with individual developers.

Developers sympathetic to Facebook say that the company has rightly prioritized its users, who could abandon the network if they feel overwhelmed by solicitations from apps.

"Facebook thinks first and foremost about the user," said Riccardo Zacconi, the chief executive of game maker King.com. "For companies that were relying 100 percent on virality, there's been a negative impact, but it's been a better user experience."

Viral growth occurs when current users recruit other users, by inviting them to join, touting the content or sharing an application.

It is not clear if Viddy and other firms who have partly blamed Facebook for declining fortunes would have run into difficulties eventually anyway as, for example, rivals came out with new products.

HOT STARTUPS

But as consumers spend increasing time on mobile devices, disaffected developers could choose to focus on marketing their apps directly to Apple Inc's App Store and Google Inc's Play market — two platforms that compete with Facebook.

"Facebook is in a platform battle that they're losing right now," said Nabeel Hyatt, a partner at Spark Capital, a venture capital firm that has backed rival social media companies like Twitter and Tumblr. "When we have startup companies coming in and presenting about where they're going to get users, most of those conversations are about iOS and then Android, and then maybe Facebook."

For hot startups, the Facebook platform used to be "the cocktail party you had to be at," Hyatt added. "It's becoming just another cocktail party."

For years, startups like Viddy and news apps like The Washington Post Social Reader used automated messages or posts on its users' Facebook pages to lure other users to install its app. But that put them at the mercy of "EdgeRank," the opaque and closely guarded algorithm that Facebook constantly tweaks to control whether an app's posts are broadly exposed to users.

In financial disclosures, Facebook has warned investors that a fundamental challenge in its business model is finding the balance between the "frequency, prominence and size of ads and other commercial content we display" with its user experience. While Facebook is under intense pressure from Wall Street to turn its massive audience into growth in advertising revenue, a lot of the changes that rattle firms like Viddy seem to be more related to Facebook's attempts to retain users.

Viddy's implosion has been spectacular — it fell from 35 million monthly users at its peak last year to half a million recently, according to Appdata.com, a tracking service.

But the collapse is not unique. Branchout, a business networking service built on top of Facebook, raised $25 million last April from A-list backers including Accel Partners. But now it languishes with just 100,000 monthly users on Facebook, down from a high of 39 million, after Facebook limited the automatic notifications that Branchout used to attract users.

The poster child for fallen Facebook stars has been Zynga Inc, the game publisher that shot to popularity, and a lucrative IPO, with viral Facebook games like FarmVille that distributed a deluge of notifications about virtual farm animals before Facebook clamped down.

Zynga, whose shares are trading two-thirds below its IPO price, has since announced that it would loosen its ties with Facebook and develop its own network for gamers. Zynga declined to comment for this article.

PUSH-AND-PULL

The fate of Facebook apps have drawn attention to the perennial push-and-pull between large technology companies and smaller developers. Like tech industry heavyweights before it, Facebook recognizes it can expand its market power and offer new features by fostering a thriving ecosystem. But those relationships have historically been fraught.

In the 1990s, the Windows operating system rose to dominate personal computing, but its maker Microsoft Corp was accused of favoring its own browser and word processor over its competitors' offerings like Netscape and WordPerfect.

Similarly, Apple Inc's iPhone dominated smartphone sales 15 years later with the help of third-party apps — but it, too, has periodically attracted attention from the Federal Trade Commission over whom and what it lets into its App Store and iTunes platforms. Recently, Twitter has also clashed with some third-party developers.

Facebook first opened its programming interfaces to outside developers in 2007. The company later rolled out log-in credentials for third-party sites and then the powerful "Open Graph" protocol, which gives apps developers access to troves of data.

The company said it expects developers to contribute interesting content - rather than game the system for growth.

"Facebook is a story-telling device," said Purdy, the Facebook executive. "Driving millions and millions of installs is not why we built it."

"There are always going to be players who, for whatever reason, aren't seeing what they want or feel disenfranchised," he added. "But when we look at the totality of the ecosystem, it's never been stronger."

And current and former Facebook employees argue that the company has sought to communicate to its developers that they shouldn't be over-reliant on Facebook.

In Zynga's early years, for example, Facebook employees advised Zynga CEO Mark Pincus on renaming Zynga's highly successful "Texas Hold'em" poker game on Facebook to "Zynga Poker," in order to strengthen Zynga as an independent brand and differentiate it from competing gaming companies, people close to the situation said.

COMPETITIVE PRACTICES

But there are signs that Facebook may not be as collaborative as it once was.

In January, Tom Katis, the chief executive of Voxer, a voice-messaging app that has raised $30 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Intel Capital, received an email from Facebook representatives requesting a phone call. Facebook told Katis that it intended to cut off Voxer, which had used Facebook's log-in credentials for over a year, from accessing Facebook's friends data because it did not share its own data with Facebook - and because Voxer replicated communications features that Facebook wanted to build itself.

Katis has brushed off the incident, saying he is confident Voxer will continue to grow swiftly independent of Facebook.

"We were flattered that Facebook called us a competitor," Katis said. "It's their platform. They can do whatever they want. But it's just another cautionary tale."

Later that month, Facebook blocked Yandex, the Russian search engine, from crawling through its network. Facebook said that those companies took advantage of its network without sharing any information back.

Facebook's Purdy denied the company is being less collaborative, saying it is seeking to have "nuanced and mature" discussions with developers when conflicts arise.

Although there are no indications that the Federal Trade Commission, which has wrestled with Facebook over privacy issues, has looked into its competitive practices, experts broadly say that this is all but assured as Facebook continues to grow.

"One of the issues that Facebook faces that is also true for Google is that it supports so many developers," said David S. Evans, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who has advised Google and Microsoft on antitrust matters. "Just by the law of large numbers, you're going to get complaints. That's a real vulnerability for the big Internet platforms."

For now, developers say they are frustrated mostly because they cannot anticipate the vagaries of Facebook's EdgeRank. Last week, Facebook took the rare step of publicly refuting comments by a New York Times writer who opined that the social network might be artificially suppressing user posts as a way to encourage people to pay to disseminate their posts.

"You have the combination of few tools available to build your business and no clear lines of communication," said the founder of a startup who spoke anonymously because his company still depends on Facebook for its traffic. "Is it worth it for founders today to quit your job, raise a bunch of money, hire a bunch of people, only to get to a point where it's really hard to get viral?"

REAL BUSINESS MODEL

But even if it left some companies in ruins, app makers who take the long view concede that Facebook's crackdown had an unintended benefit: It helped deflate a social media bubble propped up by unsustainable startups.

"You need a real business model now," said Aaron Ginn, an expert in Web traffic development who formerly worked for StumbleUpon, a website discovery app. "You can't rely on viral growth."

Branchout Chief Executive Rick Marini said his company was in the midst of improving its own offering.

"Facebook made several changes to the viral channels and app developers needed to react," Marini said. "For Branchout, the silver lining is that we're focusing more on our product development instead of viral user acquisition."

Meanwhile, a much leaner Viddy consolidated operations under co-founder J.J. Aguhob and released a new version of its iPhone app.

O'Malley, the Viddy investor, said in hindsight, the boom in traffic from Facebook - and the stratospheric investor expectations that followed - set the company on the wrong track.

"With the Facebook traffic and with the larger round, did we lose focus on what was important? Yes," O'Malley said. "If you can get traffic from Facebook, great. But don't bank on it."

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GOOGLE GLASSES ARE COMING:HATS OFF TO GOOGLE

BY BHARGAV.
Google's highly-anticipated augmented reality head-mounted display, still doesn't have a release date, but some lucky few are getting the opportunity to test out the new technology. U.S. residents have the opportunity to pre-order the glasses by tweeting or posting to Google+ what they would do with Project Glass with the hashtag #ifihadglass
Google's techno-glasses offer emails, video chat and even directions over your view of the world.

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youtube facts that you have to know

BY BHARGAV.

50 YouTube Facts & Figures

1. YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005 who were all employees of Paypal
2. YouTube was initially funded by bonuses received following the eBay buy-out of PayPal
3. The founding trio didn’t come up with the YouTube concept straight away. Legend has it that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up,” said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three ultimately decided not to go that route
4. The inspiration for YouTube as we know it today is credited to two different events. The first was Karim’s inability to find footage online of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” and the second when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party due to e-mail attachment limitations
5. The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005
6. The domain name caused a huge misunderstanding for Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment. Its company domain, “utube.com,” was overwhelmed with traffic from people that tried to spell the video site’s name phonetically
7. The first video on YouTube is of one of the co-founders Jawed Karim talking about elephant’s trunks titled “Me at the Zoo” shot at the San Diego Zoo.
8. The first video has received over 4.8 million views
9. Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube in November 2006
10. Google serves over 6 times more videos than its next closest competitor according to Nielsen
11. Google’s auto speech recognition technology translates 51 languages including captions
12. The longest Video ever on YouTube is 48 hours (2 days!)
13. The ‘how to’ video category is the fastest growing vertical on YouTube
14. YouTube has 490 million users worldwide (unique visitors per month)
15. It generates an estimated 92 billion page views each month.
16. The average YouTube user visits the site 14 times per month
17. The average user spends an average of 25 minutes on the site each time they visit.
18. The average user spends 5 hours and 50 minutes per month (not as much as Facebook)
19. Together, we spend 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month. That’s 326,294 years.
20. More than 13 million hours of video were uploaded during 2010 and 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
21. The amount of video uploaded in 2010 is the equivalent of 150,000+ full-length movies in theaters each week
22. More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
23. 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
24. YouTube is localized in 25 countries across 43 languages
25. YouTube’s demographic is broad: 18-54 years old
26. YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010
27. They have signed over 10,000 advertising partners to date, including Disney, Turner, Univision and Channel 4 and Channel 5
28. Hundreds of partners are making six figures a year
29. There are over 7,000 hours of full-length movies and shows on YouTube
30. YouTube is monetizing over 2 billion video views per week globally
31. 94 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers have run campaigns on YouTube and the Google Display Network
32. The number of advertisers using display ads on YouTube increased by 1,000% in the last year
33. YouTube has more HD content than any other online video site
34. 10% of YouTube’s videos are available in HD
35. Automated Content ID (which detects duplicate content to prevent copyright infringements) scans over 100 years of video every day
36. More than 1000 partners are using Content ID, including every major US network broadcaster, movie studio and record label
37. Over a third of YouTube’s total monetized views come from Content ID
38. Over 4 million people are connected and auto-sharing to at least one social network
39. An AutoShared Tweet results in 6 new youtube.com sessions
40. Over 5 million people have found and subscribed to at least one friend on YouTube using friend-finding tools
41. Millions of subscriptions happen each day. Subscriptions allow you to connect with someone you’re interested in—whether it’s a friend, or the NBA—and keep up on their activity on the site.
42. Users like Machinima, MysteryGuitarMan, Fred, collegehumor, and UniversalMusicGroup have millions of subscribers
43. More than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community
44. Millions of videos are favorited every day
45. YouTube mobile gets over 100 million views a day
46. The YouTube player is embedded across tens of millions of websites
47. YouTube says that on average there are more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link
48. The most watched video (that is not a music video) is “Charlie Bit My Finger” with currently 317 million views
49. The most watched music video is Justin Bieber’s “Baby” which currently has over 536 million views
50. In 2009 the US Congress and President YouTube channels were launched

Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/05/09/50-awesome-youtube-facts-and-figures/#DXdTMsKLjloeGWQQ.99 

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