Facebook Director of Engineering Lars Rasmussen held an Ask Me Anything session of Reddit on Thursday to talk about Graph Search. Here’s what he had to say about the infrastructure underlying it. Read more »
The web is getting more visual and our communication options now span video, voice and the written word. Technology and the web are breaking down the barriers of distance. Can bandwidth and devices keep up? Read more »
Do you remember the huge controversy when people claimed Instagram wanted to sell your photos? In a court filing, Instagram reiterated a familiar refrain by social media companies that users can take or leave it when it comes to their policies. Read more »
Flash memory and database servers are among possible solutions for online dating sites getting swamped with traffic at peak times such as Valentine’s Day. Read more »
Last time someone was rumored to be interested in buying Opera, the Norwegian browser-maker’s founder voiced his displeasure. But now he’s reduced his holding and could no longer block a sale. Read more »
How do you highlight examples of big corporations’ lobbying proposals being copied, word-for-word, into proposed laws? For EU privacy activists, the answer lies in many eyes. Read more »
Had trouble accessing sites across the internet for a few minutes on Thursday? It’s a good reminder of just how many websites now take advantage of Facebook’s third-party login options when the site experienced a short glitch Thursday evening. Read more »
A survey by the analyst house Ovum has found a similar antipathy towards online tracking on both sides of the Atlantic. And that, they say, could have big implications for big data. Read more »
Facebook has expanded further to a desktop web presensce on Tuesday with the launch of a feed allowing users to like and comment on photos from their followers. But looking to start uploading Instagram photos from your computer? Think again — that process remains mobile. Read more »
In our age of the dual television and smartphone screen, watching Twitter during live events has become intertwined with the actual watching of the broadcast itself. You can always DVR a show for later, but experiencing the Twitter jokes as they happen is something else entirely. Read more »
Opscode credits a huge new customer — Facebook — with helping test out the scalability of the new Private Chef code base. The goal? Scaling big, real big. Read more »
Following the opening of data centers, communities in Oregon, Washington and Virginia have made new policies, built many new homes and prompted environmental activism. Read more »
Facebook and others want to see use cases to better understand how software-defined networking can improve the cloud, so Facebook is testing it out in a sandbox environment. Read more »
Facebook announced Thursday that it’s launching a Facebook Gift Card, a plastic re-loadable card that will allow users to send credits to friends for stores like Target, Sephora, or Olive Garden. The move comes as Facebook look to build out its e-commerce on the site. Read more »
If there was any question about the direction of Facebook going forward, Wednesday’s Q4 earnings put that to rest — Facebook is trying to be a mobile company, and making good gains so far in getting there. Read more »
Facebook released its fourth quarter earnings on Wednesday, beating analyst estimates and making significant gains in mobile, which was an important metric for the company this quarter. Facebook saw mobile daily active users exceed web DAUs for the first time. Read more »
Facebook’s decision to block Yandex’s app for being a ‘search engine’ – something Yandex disputes – is final, so the Russian outfit has pulled back for now. Read more »
When it comes to social video, plenty of people have tried to nail it, but no one’s really succeeded so far. Vine could come closest to making videos easy to upload and share, but will it be the answer to video’s obstacles? Read more »
In his annual letter to shareholders of the seed-stage incubator Betaworks, founder and CEO John Borthwick argues that while closed platforms can be valuable in the short term, open systems and services will ultimately prevail. Read more »
Did you get a mysterious email from Facebook about a lawsuit? You’re eligible for some money but, alas, chances are the lawyers and privacy groups will keep it instead. Here’s the odds. Read more »
It’s always a risk building on top of another technology platform, although building on Facebook’s API has obvious benefits when you’re starting out. But if you pick that route? Be sure to note how quickly the company is changing. Read more »
Facebook clarified its policy toward third-party apps using its platform on Friday, noting that apps using Facebook’s social graph and login need to either make it easy for users to post their activity on those apps back to Facebook, or not compete directly with Facebook. Read more »
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told attendees at the World Economic Forum that the key to the company’s future success is partnering with other players like Apple, Google and Facebook. But is that a future worth betting on? Read more »
Users of Twitter’s video-sharing app Vine will already find the deteriorating relationship between Twitter a Facebook a hindrance as they go to start using the product and have difficulty finding Facebook friends on the app through Vine. Read more »
Twitter has been expanding the idea of what a tweet consists of for some time now, and has just added the ability to include short video clips. But is the service at risk of losing the simplicity that once made it unique? Read more »
AdRoll, a firm that places “retargeted” ads on Facebook had a very good year. Does that provide any hints as to what Facebook will say about its ad earnings next week? Read more at paidContent »
Facebook’s new social-graph search may look like a fairly boring feature of interest only to marketers, but the information it is able to reveal highlights how much we make public without even realizing it. Read more »
Google published its latest report about how often governments are asking for data about individuals. The growth of this type of surveillance means that Facebook should consider publishing a report of its own. Read more »
Evidence of Twitter’s ambition to become a media entity continues to accumulate, but if it wants to fulfil its role as a digital-media player, it is going to have to get a lot better at finding relevant content for its users. Read more at paidContent »
Google spent more than a billion dollars on infrastructure in the fourth quarter, representing the company’s second-biggest quarterly expenditure ever. As it competes against Facebook, Apple, Yelp and Amazon, the company can’t afford to stop building data centers now. Read more »
Interest may be weakening in consumer social media businesses. But social technologies are working their way deeper into enterprise computing, and social media is playing a bigger role across advertising and marketing sectors. Read more »
Apple’s biggest competitors — Facebook, Google and Amazon — are getting really good at finding ways to systematically insert themselves between Apple and its customers. Read more »
Flash storage vendor Violin Memory has acquired appliance maker GridIron Systems to improve performance even more for demanding applications. Even as some are calling for slower flash, Violin thinks speed, cost and reliability don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Read more »
Instagram joined the club of social media companies releasing monthly active user stats, a more helpful metric than general registered users. We broke down the metrics from some of the most popular services, taking a look at how long it’s taken each company to get there. Read more »
A hardware-oriented hackathon at the Open Compute Summit on Wednesday could become a model for similar events on college campuses. Read more »
Facebook is looking at almost all options to address the storage needs of its myriad applications that all have different requirements around performance, scalability and efficiency. Flash can be too fast and hard drives to slow, but Facebook wants something just right. Read more »
Trying to write something that people will remember? Maybe you should consider a short and sweet Facebook status update, rather than posting a photo or more formal text. A new study found that your status updates are more memorable than you might think. Read more »
The Messenger app will get a new button that will allow Facebook friends to call each other over a Wi-Fi or data connection. The update will roll out automatically starting Wednesday. Read more »
Rackspace’s bet on Open Compute has been taken to a new level as the hosting provider has decided to build its own servers — a move it hopes will save it up to 30 percent in costs. Read more »
Facebook’s Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky gave us a brief glimpse into how the new Graph Search works, but kept the lid on details as to how much computing the new search will require. From the looks of it, this is a big infrastructure challenge. Read more »
