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.
While the Facebook applications for iOS and Android are updated with regularity, BlackBerry doesn’t get the same love. The company announced Thursday that the Facebook and Twitter apps for the BlackBerry 10 phone were updated. Now the Facebook app has the technology to let you know if friends are nearby, as well as better photo and event features.
Facebook News Feed Product Manager Jeff Kanter spoke with Brittany Darwell of sister blog Inside Facebook about the social network’s measured approach to mobile advertising.
The mobile and Facebook dating sector welcomed a new potential matchmaker Tuesday in social discovery dating service Canoodle, which officially launched its applications for iOS, Android, and Facebook.
Several existing applications tie location and Facebook together, with Foursquare representing the most prominent example, but Brooklyn-based Onehackmind hopes its public launch of Locist Monday on the iTunes App Store and Google Play takes the combination to the next level.
Facebook has been growing in the way of location tracking, but according to Bloomberg, the company may soon unveil a mobile application that tracks users’ locations, even when the app is not open. Bloomberg reports that the app is designed to let users find friends who are nearby.
For the past few months, Facebook has been brewing a search engine that could change the way people find things. Now Facebook has it, with graph search. To be launched soon, graph search is a friend-based search engine that connects users to places all over the social network via friend recommendations and activity. Users can sign up to get on the wait list to be among the first to try it by clicking here.
Facebook is a great place for connecting with old friends and keeping in touch with family, but it can also be dangerous to both users and their computers. Oversharing, poor security settings, and rampant viruses can cause more problems than you might think. Staying safe on Facebook requires a little thought and a whole lot of self-control.
Ever since Facebook acquired his location-based check-in site, Gowalla, around this time last year, co-founder and CEO Josh Williams (now a product manager of pages, locations, and events at Facebook) has been building the next phase of local-social discovery. Despite a roller-coaster year that brought the check-in industry plenty of ups and downs and a fair share of speculation as to what would come next, the scope of the new location project remained under wraps, until now. Last month, Facebook announced, to much fanfare, the release of a bundle of new and updated features collectively known as Nearby.
Even a casual Facebook user can see that the site has changed dramatically over the past year. On Thursday, Facebook’s developers team took some time to reflect on some of the highlights that made the social network what it is today.
