Brands can now turn their Facebook timeline into a movie

People managing a Facebook Page can now easily create a movie using photos, videos and status updates from their brands’ Timeline.

Timeline Movie Maker from marketing agency Definition 6 spits out a chronological, one-minute clip after the browser tool “parses nostalgia,” “captures your good side” and “finds I-Remember-Whens” on your Timeline.

Users can customize the movie (see below), picking from a selection of music and replacing any visual element. Admins also can write status updates or messages to sprinkle throughout the video.

Definition 6 collaborated with Facebook on the tool, which originally rolled out in January for everyday Facebook users before becoming available this week for Page administrators.

“Timeline Movie Maker was a great way for people to share the stories of their lives in a creative way,” Paul Hernacki, CTO at Definition 6, told Mashable. “We wanted to bring that experience to brands, further connecting brands with their fans.”

SEE ALSO: Katy Perry Gives New Video the Facebook Timeline Treatment [VIDEO]To make a movie, a brand’s Timeline must have a least 50 public photos. The tool now supports nine languages other than English (Italian, Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Brazilian, Portuguese, Turkish and Russian) and lets users change the text when they share their creations on Facebook.

Definition 6 has no plans to make the videos embeddable. They can be shared only to Facebook.

Full instructions on how to use Timeline Movie Maker are available here.

Taken from:  http://mashable.com/2012/05/24/brands-facebook-timeline/

The five biggest social media fails

The mix of old brands and new media has led to several unfortunate social media mishaps. We take a look back at some of the worst implementations of social media advertising.

With companies constantly looking for new ways to connect to their customers it was inevitable that the globe’s biggest brands would turn to social media sites as a means of promoting their products. Guinness has this month launched a campaign using QR codes on its glasses. QR (Quick Response) codes are square barcodes that can be scanned by a smartphone to direct the user to a website. The feature will supposedly let you update your “Guinness pint-drinking status” on Facebook and get money-off coupons for your next pint. Whilst in theory it seems like a good idea we can’t remember the last time we scanned a QR code, let alone had any interest in updating our “pint-drinking status.”

While Guinness’s scheme might succeed, it feels like a gimmick that is doomed to fail. Here are four other examples of brands trying to grasp social media and failing badly.

Habitat’s Trending Topics
In June 2009 British furniture store Habitat jumped on the Twitter band wagon, utilising the trending topics feature as a way of promoting their £1,000 giveaway. Whilst the majority of the tweets used harmless hashtags such as #TRUE BLOOD and #AT&T Habitat was criticised for using the hashtags #IRAN and #MOUSAVI which pertained to the protested Iranian election result that year. Habitat offered a swift apology and promptly fired the intern responsible for the mishap.

Skittles’ Search Terms
The marketing guys at Mars Incorporated, the producer of Skittles, thought it would be a great idea to let the users of twitter take over the skittles.com homepage, turning it into a list of tweets that had the word “skittles” in them. Whilst, presumably, the team at Mars thought this would lead to a bunch of tweets from users talking about how great skittles were the internet quickly cottoned on to the fact that the website wasn’t being screened by anyone and pounced. Instead of tweets about how great skittles were the website was saturated with hundreds of offensive tweets that incorporated “skittles” in the body of the tweet.

Snickers’ Sponsorship
Another attempt from the marketing team at Mars Incorporated to boost their product sales led to a full blown investigation by the Advertising Standards Agency in 2012 after it emerged the company was paying celebrities to tweet about Snickers.

The move by Mars saw the company paying celebrities such as Rio Ferdinand, Katie Price and Ian Botham to post bizarre “teaser tweets” before finally revealing “You’re not you when you’re hungry” followed by a link to the Snickers website. Twitter users responded by asking things like “Do you really need money that bad” and “I’m not on here to be advertised at.” The company was cleared by the Advertising Standards Agency.

Microsoft’s Facebook Poll
In late 2011 Microsoft’s Windows Phone division decided to run a poll on Facebook to find out “what was the first feature you loved about the Nokia Lumia 800.” Whilst, to the inexperienced internet user, this seems like a great idea, a battle scarred internet veteran would not think to make such a rookie mistake.

As with the Skittles campaign, users of the website quickly realised that they could add their own voting options to the poll and immediately inappropriate options such as “nothing, its s—” and “the mickey-mouse PR that thought it would be great to let people make up options,” began to appear and became some of the most voted on answers.

Taken from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/9285281/The-five-biggest-social-media-fails.html

OoVoo makes Facebook Multi-Person video hangouts possible

Want to host a party with friends right on Facebook? Video chat company ooVoo has rolled out its service to the social networking site, allowing up to 12 friends to chat face-to-face at once.

The company also announced upgrades to its application for iPhone, Android, PC and the web users. The Facebook integration makes the service similar to Google Hangouts, which allows users to video chat in groups of 10 on the search engine giant’s social network Google+.

On the iPad, ooVoo doesn’t just support 12-way calls but also four-way HD video chats — an industry first.

Although the 12-way video chat functionality wasn’t announced until today, ooVoo quietly rolled it out on Facebook over the past few months. Since then, nearly 350,000 people have been using the service.

“We never announced that the product was available in beta form on Facebook, but our users found it anyway — this just reinforces how much of a need and desire to connect with others through social chat,” ooVoo CEO Yuval Baharav told Mashable.

 

SEE ALSO: Google+ Releasing ‘Hangouts on Air’ Feature to All Users 

The integration between platforms is seamless. Even if a friend doesn’t have the ooVoo application, you can send them the web call link to start to the session.

The product news is the company’s first major milestone for ooVoo, which boasts more than 46 million users — up from 19 million in 2010. Although it still trails behind mainstay competitors Skype and iChat, the company has set its sights on further expansion.

“We will be releasing more innovative features in the upcoming months that will allow our users to be even more social online,” Baharav said. “We want ooVoo to be a communications platform that truly becomes a big part of our users’ social lives.”

The news comes just a few weeks after a Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project study found that nearly 40% of Teens Video Chat With Their Friends 40% of all Internet users ages 12 to 17 participate in video chats. Both teen boys and girls enjoy connecting with friends on the Internet to catch up, watch TV together and even do homework.

Taken from: http://mashable.com/2012/05/22/oovoo-facebook/

Facebook denies plans to open up site to under-13s

Facebook has outright denied that it will change its rules and officially allow under-13s to join the social network, following a report claiming the opposite.

Simon Milner, head of policy in Britain for Facebook, had been quoted inThe Sunday Times as saying Facebook had plans to lift the ban.

He told the paper that the decision to allow children to create profiles was still a very early stage.

However, a Facebook spokesman has outright denied that there are any plans to allow children under the age of 13 to join the site.

They told The Telegraph: “We have no idea how The Sunday Times concluded that we are opening up to under-13s from the conversation Simon Milner had with them. All we have said is what we have been saying for months – that minors on Facebook and the internet is an important issue – and we want to work with the broader industry to look at ways of keeping minors safe. The headline …from the Times is no reflection of that conversation.”

This is in stark contrast to comments made by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief, last May, when he argued that children should be allowed to use the social network.

Speaking at a summit on innovation in schools and teaching in Newark, New Jersey, last May, Mr Zuckerberg said that the current age limit would be challenged “at some point”.

Claire Perry, Conservative MP for Devizes, who has campaigned for online safety, said at the time that she “would be very uncomfortable about extending this and I think it’s very, very irresponsible of Facebook to be suggesting it”.

“With close parental supervision all of these social networking sites can be interesting and enjoyable. But I know from my own experience it is all too easy for a young child to get involved in situations that I think are really uncomfortable,” she said.

Facebook’s usual 13-and over age limit elsewhere is dictated by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which became Federal Law in America in 1998. However, current UK legislation does not preclude Facebook from being used by under-13s – but the site’s own terms and conditions do. The US is currently reviewing its COPPA legislation. In Spain, only those children 14-and-over are permitted to use Facebook because of national legislation.

Mr Zuckerberg claimed last year that the educational benefits of using Facebook were so great that children should be allowed to use the site. The site currently closes the accounts of 20,000 underage users per day.

“My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age,” Mr Zuckerberg said. “Because of the [legal] restrictions we haven’t even begun this learning process. If they’re lifted then we’d start to learn what works.”

Mr Milner told The Sunday Times: “There is reputable evidence there are kids under 13 who are lying about their age to get on to Facebook.

“Some seem to be doing it with their parents’ permission and help.

“We have a strict under-13 rule because of legal issues in America and we apply the same rule all over the world.

“But a lot of parents are happy their kids are on it.”

Facebook has been criticised by a range of Government agencies in the past for failing to police its own policies that prevent children from using the site and for not preventing paedophiles from accessing the social network under an alias to groom children.

The NSPCC has emphasised the need for media literacy and online education. Claire Lilly, the charity’s sexual abuse policy advisor, has said: “There have been great benefits brought by the internet but there online bullying is particularly prevalent on social networks.

“The Information Commissioner has said it is about the age of 12 when a child can understand the risks of handing over personal data and we would agree with that. We would like to see safety tools as prominent as possible and social networks should be proactively trying to identify individuals who pose a risk, not just reacting to reports from children.”

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre revealed in 2010 that complaints about grooming and bullying on Facebook had quadrupled in the preceding twelve months.

Facebook’s $38-a-share flotation last week, values the company at $104bn – more than any other company in history has been worth on its market debut.

Taken from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9279448/Facebook-denies-plans-to-open-up-site-to-under-13s.html

Facebook valued at $104bn on record-breaking stock market debut

Facebook’s initial public offering has been one of the most hotly-anticipated in corporate history, and today it lived up to the hype.

The social network priced its flotation at $38 a share, valuing the company at $104bn (£65.8bn) – more than any other US company has been worth on the day of its market debut.

The busines, which was founded by 28-year old Mark Zuckerberg from his dorm room at Harvard University, raised more than $16bn in the process, marking the second biggest initial public offering there has even been. Only Visa’s was larger.

Shares in Facebook are expected to climb even higher when they begin trading on Nasdaq tomorrow, under the FB ticker, as frenzied demand from investors outweighs concerns over the long-term prospects of the business.

Mr Zuckerberg will mark the start of trading by ringing the stock exchange’s bell remotely from his California headquarters, where around a thousand Facebook staff are devoting the night to a “hackathon” – the sessions the social network runs when it wants to quickly develop a new product.

The record flotation came even as some of Facebook’s biggest and earliest investors made last-minute decisions to sell more shares in Thursday’s IPO, fuelling concerns over their faith in the long-term value of the business.

“It indicates that in their minds Facebook has reached a peak, at least in the near-term,” said Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of US research firm PrivCo.

Peter Thiel, the Pay Pal founder who became Facebook’s first outside investor when he ploughed $500,000 into the fledgling business in 2004, had planned to sell 20pc of his stake in the IPO but upped that figure to 50pc at the eleventh hour.

Russian investor Yuri Milner’s investment vehicle, DST Global, was last night preparing to off-load 40pc of his stake, up from the 23pc it had already committed, whilst Goldman Sachs and Tiger Global Management were both preparing to sell as much as half of their shareholdings, up from 23pc and 7pc respectively.

Earlier this month, Facebook warned that a surge in the number of people accessing the social network on their mobiles could damage its long-term revenues, because it has not yet worked out how to monetise that usage effectively.

Taken from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9273583/Facebook-valued-at-104bn-on-record-breaking-stock-market-debut.html

What Twitter’s ‘Do Not Track’ feature will mean for you

Twitter announced Thursday it will take part in “Do Not Track,” a cookie-blocking feature found in Mozilla’s Firefox browser that’s promoted by the Federal Trade Commission. What does that mean for you, the user?

When a Firefox user enables Do Not Track, the browser prevents websites from using cookies to track the user’s behavior and personal information. Do Not Track only works on sites that have signed on to the service — a list which now includes Twitter.

Cookies can be used for many purposes, including storing information that some, including Google, argue makes browsing the web easier (a weather site might remember your postal code, for example). However, some believe that cookie-based tracking is a breach of privacy. Facebook has previously come under fire for following users around non-Facebook sites.

Cookies are also an essential ingredient for websites serving up advertisements based on user’s behavior or location, called “behavioral ads.”

Different sites use cookies for different purposes. According to Twitter’s privacy guide, Twitter uses cookies to learn how users interact with its services, monitor web traffic and improve its products. It will now also use them to suggest new accounts for users to follow based on their interests.

If you enable Do Not Track, you’re opting out of having your data collected for those purposes, making you, your profile and your tweets more anonymous. Wave goodbye to the new account suggestions — but that may be all you’re missing out on.

Do Not Track is, at its core, a trade off. It asks of you: Do you prefer ease of use and customized user suggestions or more anonymity from web services? According to Mozilla, 8.6% of desktop Firefox users and 19% of mobile users are choosing the latter, with nearly half of those users reporting they feel more safe surfing the Internet with Do Not Track enabled.

Update: In a new blog post, Twitter suggests that Do Not Track will only impact suggestions of users to follow. A Twitter spokesperson told Mashable that Do Not Track will have no impact on Twitter’s advertising methods.

For more information on Do Not Track, visit Mozilla’s website.

We reached out to Twitter for further information about Do Not Track. We will update this post with any response.

 Taken from: http://mashable.com/2012/05/17/twitter-do-not-track/

Google revamps search ‘Knowledge Graph’ to provide instant answers

Google is to add more context to search results, in a bid to understand ‘what you mean’ and provide instant answers.

The changes, which roll out in America first and then around the world, will see different options for search queries grouped into likely sets of possibilities.

Writing on the Google Search Blog, Google’s Amit Singhal said that, for instance, the site would now know that a question on the Taj Mahal could be about the Indian mausoleum, the musician or a local restaurant.

The so-called Knowledge Graph will make the site’s algorithms act “more human”, added Mr Singhal.

Earlier this week rival search engine Bing announced that it was going to start to provide information based on a user’s social connections too. Both sites are trying to go beyond the established list of links to other websites. Google’s method will try to provide more information directly on its own pages, and could mean users spend more time on sites where Google derives revenue from advertising. The site previously added personalised results via a programme called ‘Search Plus Your World’.

Mr Singhal said that matching keywords rather than understanding context was no longer enough.

The Knowledge Graph uses approximately 3.5 billion different attributes to organise results. That will allow Google to provide, for instance, specific summary boxes on results related to prominent individuals. A new layout will use space on the right-hand side of Google’s search results page to display the information more effectively, and the experience will be optimised separately for tablets and smartphones.

“The information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him,” claimed Mr Singhal.

A separate new feature will add a list of subjects “people also search for”.

Mr Singhal described the move as a “first baby step” to building a Star Trek-style computer that provides answers. Apple has already started to integrate results from the Wolfram Alpha service, which provides verified results based on data from reputable sources such as the World Health Organisation.

Taken from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9271424/Google-revamps-search-Knowledge-Graph-to-provide-instant-answers.html