When Facebook announced Graph Search earlier this year, the natural question was, “When will this be on mobile?” It appears that Facebook is trying to push more search queries onto its mobile application (instead of apps such as Foursquare and Yelp). As Inside Facebook Editor Brittany Darwell noticed recently, Facebook changed the name of its Nearby feature on its iOS app to Local Search.
Droid does it: Facebook announced a press event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Thursday (April 4), with the invite reading, “Come See Our New Home on Android.”
A startup that creates innovative ways for groups to send money to each other, Akimbo, also enables Facebook users to easily share funds with their friends, with all transfers free of charge and occurring instantly.
Are you an iPhone user who hasn’t posted to Facebook in a bit? Facebook wants to change that. Spark Capital General Partner Bijan Sabet tweeted that Facebook pushed a notification to his iPhone, asking him to post something. According to Mashable, this is something Facebook is testing.
Facebook pushed its latest iOS native application update Monday, giving users the ability to change their cover photo from their phone or tablet. The latest version of the iOS app also improved group messaging features.
Events have been getting plenty of attention from Facebook of late, and now Eventseeker, a new iPhone application from city and event guide provider Wcities, can tap into users’ Facebook profiles and mine information that enables it to suggest events they might be interested in.
Facebook launched iOS application Poke, a timed messaging service that drew heavy comparisons to Snapchat, in December. Now that Poke has been in the App Store for a few months, it’s evident that Snapchat is winning the battle among U.S. iPhone users, according to new figures released by Onavo Insights and published by TechCrunch.
In an effort to clean up the clutter, Facebook introduced a redesigned News Feed Thursday. Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, ironically enough, compared the company’s vision to that of a newspaper. If users just want to see stories about Wall Street, they can flip to the business section. On this new Facebook News Feed, if users just want to see posts from their friends, they can simply select that, and their news feeds will only be populated by their personal connections. Facebook feels that this redesign will make it easier for users to access and read what they want.
Facebook released an update to its iOS application, version 5.5, and the main addition is the ability to make free calls if both users are located in the U.S. or Canada, which the social network added to its Messenger app in January.
Facebook is moving to position itself as the hub of all interest-based communities (Pinterest, Spotify, Foodspotting, and Goodreads, for example) with its open graph platform. The people we follow in these networks are not necessarily our friends, but people whose content interests us. At the end of the day, all of these communities are peer-to-peer. Facebook can reimagine two big peer-to-peer markets with real identity, discovery, and imitation enabled by open graph at the center.
