graphs

Facebook, eBay unveil plans to drive future of commerce

Facebook, the world's largest social-networking platform, is tapping eBay's commerce platform to create new social shopping experiences for hundreds of millions of consumers.

Specifically, eBay is integrating Facebook's new Open Graph 2.0 functionality into its global commerce systems, which come under the umbrella of a new business unit called X.commerce, and include eBay, PayPal, and Magento (which has built shopping sites for 100,000 merchants). The news was announced at Innovate, eBay's developer conference, being held today through Friday in San Francisco.

"Facebook is now linked into the largest commerce ecosystem," Matthew … Read more

Why Netflix, Spotify and others are friending Facebook

Facebook is angling to be the entertainment industry's next taste maker.

While CEO Mark Zuckerberg today wowed the crowd of its F8 developer conference with a nifty looking new Timeline feature, the company's latest vision of how much information others should see, and how it's being shared is the change that will affect users -- and Hollywood -- in the months to come.

For proof, look no further than Facebook's new slew of media partnerships, which include big entertainment names like Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu, along with media outlets like USA Today, The Guardian, and The … Read more

What Facebook announced at F8 today

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook is rolling out some of the biggest changes in its history, unveiling its new Timeline and all-new Open Graph features today, features that will radically change how users display their information, and the way they discover new content.

At F8, Facebook's annual developers conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the two new features. Timeline, he explained, is "the story of your life," significantly altering the way people's information is shown on the world's leading social network, presenting "all your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are," … Read more

Facebook unveils new version of Open Graph

SAN FRANCISCO--After unveiling Timeline at F8 this morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Ticker, a part of the next version of the social network's Open Graph.

Last year, Zuckerberg said, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, a map of all of a user's connections in the world, and made it so users can connect to anything they want in any way they want. But now with the next Open Graph, he said, users will also be able to connect to an order of magnitude more things than ever before using what he called Ticker, a way to express "… Read more

Use your Android as a Wi-Fi optimizer

Optimize your wireless Internet connection with the WiFi Analyzer app for Android. For those of you who may not be networking wizards, this app provides a relatively easy way to analyze the strength of different wireless channels, so you can figure out which to choose for your router.

Before using WiFi Analyzer, you must first understand what a Wi-Fi channel is. A Wi-Fi channel is a range of radio frequencies that a Wi-Fi network uses to communicate with wireless devices. There are a finite number of accessible channels, so when several Wi-Fi networks occupy a small area, channels will often … Read more

Bare-bones graphs

Graphs are a great way to display your data; they tell the story in a way that numbers can't. Grey Olltwit's Graph Maker is an extremely basic program for creating simple graphs. It's not for anyone doing serious research or working with statistics, but if you need to create a bare-bones graph, it might be able to do the job.

The program's interface is plain, but at first it confused us; there's a space to enter the y values for data points, but not the x values. It turns out that the program just uses … Read more

Facebook exec: Google is blocking my book

Last year, Paul Adams rose to prominence as the Google designer who detailed an idea for grouping social contacts that's now the core "circles" feature of Google+.

Since January, though, Adams has been working for Google's social-network rival Facebook, and he's not happy that Google blocked a book called Social Circles he'd written on the subject.

Yesterday--two weeks after Google+ launched--Adams described why he left Google for Facebook. It wasn't because of the book, though.

The main reason I left was that there was an opportunity at Facebook that I felt I couldn't turn down...Having said that, there were other factors that made my decision to leave for a competitor easier. Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, it's very difficult to have your voice heard at a strategic level. Ultimately I felt that although my research formed a cornerstone of the Google social strategy, and I had correctly predicted how other products in the market would play out, I wasn't being listened to when it came to executing that strategy. My peers listened intently, but persuading the leadership was a losing battle. Google values technology, not social science. I also moved because the culture had changed dramatically in the few years I was at Google. It became much more bureaucratic and political.

But the book clearly is a sore point. "Google blocked me from publishing my book," Adams said flatly. … Read more

Google+ faces thorny online identity issues

Google, trying to take a stand with its new social network, requires people to use real-world names on Google+. The real world, though, turns out to be more complex than a simple rule can accommodate.

Now two weeks old and growing like a weed, Google+ is facing issues that became common once the Internet made people's identity into information that can reach potentially anyone on the planet. With Google+ and the Google Profiles service on which it relies, the company is trying to build a service without pseudonyms, anonymous cowards, or impersonation.

"Google Profiles is a product that works best in the identified state. This way you can be certain you're connecting with the right person, and others will have confidence knowing that there is someone real behind the profile they're checking out," according to the Google help files for Google+. "For this reason, Google Profiles requires you to use the name that you commonly go by in daily life."

Most people are known by the name that appears on their driver's license or school registry and probably won't think twice about using that when joining a social network. There are plenty of advantages to that approach: anonymous forums are often degraded by trolling, attacks, and flame wars. Using real names brings some measure of accountability, since your reputation is on the line when you voice an opinion.

But there are acres of gray area, too. Political dissidents may want to avoid persecution. Those who've been harassed may want to avoid more of it. And plenty of people want both online interactions and privacy. … Read more

Study: Google+ population explodes to 10 million

Google+ appears to be in the midst of a population explosion.

A statistical analysis by Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and chief executive of Facebook app maker FamilyLink.com, concludes that the Google+ population reached 7.3 million on Sunday, July 10, and likely will reach 10 million today.

And if Google keeps the Google+ invitation button active, as it has since Sunday, Allen expects Google+ to reach 20 million users by this weekend, he said in a Google+ post late Monday night.

"The user base is growing so quickly that it is challenging for me to keep … Read more