Facebook Search

Traffic for facebook has briefly exceeded that of Google in the united states over ]Christmas. This is the first time ever that Facebook has beaten google, and this represents a sea change in search engine marketing and technology. This has lead to some to fear that facebook could be the dominant website in the world.

Some people may think that could actually mean that facebook has effectively dethroned google. The reality, however, is much more complex. The landscape of the internet is changing rapidly. Few people have the ability to predict accurately what’s going to happen next in the internet industry.

According to a news article posted by Financial Times,  Twitter had turned down an acquisition offer proposed by social networking giant Twitter. Twitter which was then a microblogging site way back in 2008 and Facebook acquisition proposal had come back then. In a recent interview by co-founder of the site Biz Stone, he had expressed that they had wanted the site to be popular even though the full business potential of the website still remains largely under utilized. He also added that he didn’t want Twitter to be taken over by another company.

Though Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg had offered 500 million dollars worth of stock in Facebook’s shares, the founders of Twitter didn’t find anything that they wanted in it. The site has been online for more than 4 years now and hasn’t made any profits till date, the post added. The website was created way back in 2006 with a feature that enables users to send messages or rather “tweets” which are 140 characters long. The message sharing and tweeting has gone a long way and  the site is presently a popular social networking site in a way.

If the data provided by data provider Experian Hitwise is true, Facebook has done it again in a row! Facebook has topped as the most searched term on the world wide web across several search engines. It is also to be noted that there were four versions of the term “Facebook” in the top 10 words which accounted for about 3.5% of the search results. “Facebook login” which was at the ninth place in the year 2009 has now moved up in popularity to the second place!

It hasn’t stopped there, an analysis of the search terms also showed that people want to search more about social networking sites and search terms relating to those accounted for about 4.2% of the top 50 searches. Facebook also ranked as the most visited website for the first time in 2010 as it accounted for 8.2% of the web traffic in the US between January and November. Youtube was the third most searched term and followed by Craiglist. Social networking sites have come a far way in just a year and looks like 2010 has been a really good year for these sites after all!

In yet another turn of events with games on the popular social networking site Facebook, FarmVille which once used to the most popular game has now fallen to another game CityVille which was launched by Zynga recently. The new game which aims at making a person a mayor of a city wherein he is vested the responsibilities of building the town and maintaining it, has risen to the first place even after it was launched only very recently. FarmVille which had created a sensation in Facebook is now behind CityVille which has 61.7 million users and CityVille has surpassed FarmVille only after about a month of its launch.

CityVille which was launched by Zynga about a month back was already in the news as it picked up more than 290,000 users in less than a day! The game which is loosely built in the SimCity fashion reached 22 million users in the first week and has reached where it is now in less than a month. As for the game developers, Zynga still remains on the top with over 262 million active users and it would take quite some time for any other developers to catch up with them!!

People have been waiting for quite some time now for the latest service that Facebook is planning to launch- the new mail service which would help them communicate across the internet The email ID’s which would have @facebook.com would soon become a reality and users would be able to send email across different mail services as well just like they can send messages with the Facebook page. The new email service will allow emailing to mail servers like Gmail and Yahoo and email people who aren’t even on Facebook or people who don’t even know what Facebook is !!

The mail service would take care of all the additional features like SMS, chat and Facebook messages as well so that you can communicate with your Facebook friends at the same time without having to switch between screens/windows. This new feature also would include the Social Inbox feature which would map your communication with people and prepare a graph of the people with whom you communicate the most and that would also take care of all spam mails as well. However, Facebook has made this service invite-only for now and only people who have been invited can use the privileged service!

Are you planning on visiting some place, a place where you have not much idea of what is where? Well, I guess you would soon have your Facebook friends help you out if they have been to the same place earlier. In a recent post on the official Facebook blog, officials have revealed that Facebook now has tied up with TripAdvisor a leading travel website which will help people share details of places they have visited and leave the plan that they followed in the trip. So, if you were to plan for a trip to some place where one of your Facebook friends have already been, all you have to do is to login into the TripAdvisor site using your Facebook ID.

Once you are in, you can personalize your travel plan on line with that of your friends and can even see the place which they have recommended to visit. This doesn’t just stop there, Facebook will also include the ‘Cities that I have visited’ app so that you can get to know what places have been before!

Well, the title in itself would have conveyed the meaning and just as it reads, crime is something that can be committed and traced throught Facebook. Though the social networking website has helped cops crack several criminal cases and reopen several which were once considered dead and closed, the fact that the social networking site would help criminals too is something that needs to be given a thought about. Owing to its popularity and the large number of members in it, criminals find it a very convenient place to start off their next burglary operation.

And to explain this I would give you an example how they might approach you. They would first give an add request with a rather good looking gal/guy as their display picture (which of course wouldn’t be them). Once you add them, the operation begings there; they start looking at all your pics and get to know what kind of a person you are in the society and the things you would be having at home if you had posted pics of your home party. Once they get to know that you are a potential target, they start doing their research around your locality and house. Once they are convinced, then they chart out their plan and execute it after getting to know if you’ll be around on a weekend or so.

It is at this juncture that Facebook’s improved privacy settings would help you choose what others will view. So, if you don’t know someone on Facebook, just don’t add them!

Facebook has recently revealed its top trends of 2010, of which it is kind of surprising to see how much the website is ruled by activities of teenagers. The website also revealed that the highest growing trend in 2010 was HMU which is a shorter version of Hit Me Up.

HMU is a very common term used by random school teenagers specially when they want to meet up. Back last year, the most common trend on the website was My Life. As 2009 came to a close, HMU took over from My Life, appearing at over 1600 posts everyday,later reaching to 80,000 posts per day at the end of summer 2010. The frequency of HMU decreased in september 2010 as the schools had started and teenagers were able to meet up only on weekends. Some of the other chart toppers  in trends included movies with Twilight:eclipse and Toy Story 3 being the most talked about movies.Not to forget,Justin Bieber, the only artist who madwe it to the list of top 10 trends of 2010. An interesting thing to see is that teenagers don’t even form the largest demographic. In the beginning of 2010 only 11% users were aged between 13 and 17. These trends highlight the importance of teenagers to facebook,even though they are not the highest number of users. But a lot of status update activities are carried out by teenagers.

The 3 long year partnership between Microsoft and the largest social networking site Facebook is what has made the social networking site an arch rival to Google, it all started with Microsoft once offering to buy the social networking site for $15 billion. In a statement issued by the Fritz Lanman, senior director of acquisitions at Microsoft, the chief executive of Microsoft Steve Ballmer had offered to buy the social networking site way back in 2007. Though Microsoft has refused to comment on the price that they were ready to pay to Mark Zuckerberg for the acquisition, David Kirpatrick in his book “The Facebook Effect” has mentioned that Steve Ballmer had offered Mark Zuckerberg $15 billion for Facebook – the price that Facebook was worth at that time.

Lanman also commented that Microsoft had ideas of buying Facebook then as both Facebook had many things in similar. Eventhough Mark Zuckerberg had turned down the acquisition offer by Microsoft, the next move by Microsoft was investing $240 million in Facebook and announcing the same publicly in October 2007. Since then Facebook and Microsoft are in an effort to give a tough competition to Google, which was once the biggest thing on the internet!

Recent surveys have shown that facebook recently added 10 million active users to its network from Australia alone.This has thus established Australia as Facebook’s most important market in recent times.

According to figures released by the site, the number of users who have atleast logged on,posted comments or shared content has doubled in the past 1 month.Facebook Australia claims 1 of the main reasons for this growth has been the availability of facebook on mobile devices.Figures have also claimed that Australians spend more time on facebook than anyone else. The site has also said that advertisers would be able to reach out to users by their locations from early next year. The introduction of Deals early next year will increase the amount of time engagement by users. In the US, Facebook has already launched an application to allow retailers to provide special offers and deals through the mobile application called Places which is Facebook’s location service which allows people to know the locations of themselves and their friends.Paul Borrud,Facebook’s regional VP for Australia and New Zealand is confident  that large brands like GAP and McDonalds would sign up for these services pretty soon.