The Buffer plugins are available for Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and they also enhance sharing via Buffer with Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Reader, HackerNews, and Reddit. Installing the plugins adds a green Buffer button to users’ Facebook queues.

Buffer allows users to schedule their posts on social networks, and the new plugins bring this capability to status updates, photos, and shared links.

In an email to its users introducing the new browser plugins, as well as a post on its blog, Buffer offered more details:

You can now Buffer your status updates. Is it is too late or too early for any of your friends to see your update? Just Buffer it.

Also, from now on, whenever you click the share button on a picture, you can Buffer it. The best part? It Buffers the actual picture.

If you click the Buffer button on pictures, it will take the picture instead of a link, and you can also share it on Twitter or LinkedIn right away.

And it of course also works when Buffering links you came across on Facebook.

Readers: Have you ever used Buffer or any other app that allows you to schedule your posts on Facebook and other social networks?

source from: allfacebook

The new App Center, which Facebook said will launch in the next few weeks, comes as the company is preparing an initial public offering that would value the company between $77 billion and $96 billion.

A key concern for investors is Facebook’s slowing revenue growth, due in part to the widening trend of consumers accessing its service on smartphones, where Facebook provides limited ads.

In an amended prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Facebook said the popularity of mobile devices has caused its number of daily users to grow faster than the number of ads it is delivering.

Facebook described the number of mobile ads it has recently begun showing to users as “immaterial.”

Facebook makes the vast majority of its revenue from online ads, although it also collects fees when consumers purchase goods from within social apps, such as Zynga’s Farmville.

The App Center will, for the first time, allow software developers to sell apps to consumers directly on Facebook.

Consumers will need to use Facebook Credits, the company’s payment system, to purchase the apps and Facebook will take a 30 percent cut of the revenue as it does with in-app purchases, said Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich.

Facebook is introducing the app service to give software developers additional options, but the company expects in-app purchases to remain more prevalent on the social network, said Lucich.

Apps, ranging from social games to music services, are popular activities on Facebook, the world’s No.1 online social network with roughly 900 million users. According to the company, 200 of the apps that are available on Facebook have more than 1 million users.

The App Center will feature apps that designed for PCs as well as for mobile devices such as Apple Inc iPhones and Android smartphones. If a mobile app requires installation for the mobile device, Facebook said it will direct users to Apple’s App Store or Google Inc’s Play store to download the app.

The App Center will showcase apps based on the quality scores that users give apps and other data Facebook collects, such as how often and how long people use apps. Each user will see a different, customized version of the App Center, rather than one standard version of the App Center.

source from: yahoo

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg did not attend the breakfast pitch at the Four Seasons hotel in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Facebook did not play the video, as it did in New York, after grumblings that not enough time was left for questions from the audience, according to analysts who spoke with Facebook officials.

The Boston event attracted about 200 people, including analysts, hedge fund managers and Will Danoff, who manages the $84 billion Contrafund for Fidelity Investments.

The 8-year-old social network that began as Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room project has indicated an IPO per-share range of $28 to $35, pegging the potential value of the company at $77 billion to $96 billion. Some attendees expressed disappointment that Zuckerberg did not make an appearance, but said they liked having more time to ask questions.

One analyst, who did not want to be named, said no reason was given for Zuckerberg’s absence. Facebook was not available to comment and reporters were not admitted to the presentation.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was present to answer potential investors’ questions, which ranged from the company’s strategy in China to revenue-per-customer trends, attendees said.

The IPO for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook is expected to raise up to $10.6 billion, an amount that would best the debuts of tech companies such as Google Inc while giving it a total stock market value that rivals Amazon.com Inc’s.

On Monday, Facebook kicked off its cross-country IPO roadshow tour in New York, where Zuckerberg showed up wearing a “hoodie” sweatshirt. He also fielded questions, including about its $1 billion purchase of Instagram, a deal that Zuckerberg personally negotiated.

source from: yahoo

Buried in the app center announcement, Facebook also said developers will have the option of offering paid apps, allowing them to charge users flat fees to access their apps via Facebook. The social network referred to this initiative as a beta program, and it said interested developers can sign up here. Further details were not available.

The app center is not live yet — Facebook’s announcement said, “In the coming weeks, people will be able to access the app center on the web and in the iOS and Android Facebook apps” — but developers are getting a head start to prepare, with an app center guide and guidelines already published for their use.

Facebook users will be able to browse through app detail pages, and developers will get a better handle on the perception of their apps due to a new ratings metric in Insights, giving them historical context and breaking down feedback by categories including gender and age.

Here are more details from Facebook’s announcement on its new app center, from its developer blog:

Everything has an app detail page, which helps people see what makes an app unique and lets them install it before going to an app.

Success through the app center is tied to the quality of an app. We use a variety of signals, such as user ratings and engagement, to determine if an app is listed in the app center. To help you monitor user feedback, we are also introducing a new app ratings metric in Insights to report how users rate your app over time.

Well-designed apps that people enjoy will be prominently displayed. Apps that receive poor user ratings or don’t meet the quality guidelines won’t be listed.

The app center is designed to grow mobile apps that use Facebook — whether they’re on iOS, Android, or the mobile Web. From the mobile app center, users can browse apps that are compatible with their device, and if a mobile app requires installation, they will be sent to download the app from the App Store or Google Play.

To grow your mobile app through the app center, your app needs to use Facebook login.

All developers should create an app detail page. The page is required for being listed in the app center, and it will also become the new destination when non-users search for your app on Facebook.

Before creating your app detail page, read the guidelines to ensure that your page does not get removed. App detail pages that are eligible for the app center will be reviewed prior to being listed, and priority will be given to those apps that submit before May 18.

Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps. This is a simple-to-implement payment feature that lets people pay a flat fee to use an app on Facebook.com. If you are interested in the beta program, please sign up to receive more information.

Readers: Do you think the app center will be a helpful resource for you once it is available to the public? And would you consider paying to use apps on Facebook?

source from: allfacebook

According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook’s board of directors was given scant notice of Zuckerberg’s intent to buy photo-sharing service Instagram, only being alerted the morning before the transaction was cemented.

For Facebook, which is 28% controlled by CEO and co-founder Zuckerberg, 27, it would be the social network’s largest acquisition ever and a dramatic departure from its previous strategy to snap up just small startups.

Zuckerberg didn’t bring in the board until the deal was all but done and directors were “told, not consulted” about the decision, a person familiar with the matter told the Journal. A board vote on the move was largely symbolic, the paper said.

In normal circumstances, transactions the size of the Instagram buyout take weeks or even months to develop and are only finalized after scrutiny from lawyers and investment bankers.

However, Zuckerberg and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom hammered out their high-profile agreement over just several days of negotiations at Zuckerberg’s $7 million Palo Alto home, the Journal reported.

In fact, Facebook board member Marc Andreesen was unaware Zuckerberg was even meeting with Systrom when Andreesen showed up at Zuckerberg’s house for a regular meeting Sunday evening.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s widely-respected chief operating officer and a former Google (GOOG: 596.06, -3.24, -0.54%) exec, wasn’t directly involved in the talks but was notified the Thursday before the deal that Zuckerberg planned to push for a deal, the Journal reported.

While this speedy decision process may let companies quickly make strategic moves in the fast-moving social-networking space, it can be tougher in the world of public companies.

Facebook is set to join that world next month in a mega initial public offering that could value the largest social network at a whopping $100 billion.

Zuckerberg apparently didn’t need much help lowering Systrom’s asking price, which stood at $2 billion, the Journal reported.

Pushing for the $1 billion figure, Zuckerberg argued to Systrom that if Facebook would one day be worth $200 billion or more like Google, then 1% of Facebook’s value should be sufficient, the Journal reported.

Instagram, which is just 18 months old and has 35 million users, does not yet generate any revenue, let alone a profit.

source from: foxbusiness

She leaves at that hour in order to enjoy dinner with her family at 6:00 p.m. In fact, she revealed in a recent video interview with Makers.com that she’s been keeping these family-friendly hours since she worked at Google, as vice president of global online sales.

One Wall Street Journal staffer, a new mom herself, took notice and gave a shout-out to Sandberg in a recent blog post.

It’s only now, that she’s “brave enough to talk about it publicly,” Sandberg said about the hours she keeps. “Now I certainly wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t running around giving speeches on it.”

The Journal blogger said that it was refreshing to see Sandberg say this at a time when people are “too scared to be seen anywhere other than in their cubicles (even if they’re shopping on diapers.com), an early signoff is the ultimate corporate taboo. Leaving early signifies that you don’t care, that you’re not getting the job done — or that you don’t love your work.”

All that said, Sandberg also mentioned in the interview that women should not make any compromises to their career aspirations while simply contemplating having children — that such moves could shortchange a woman’s rise to the top.

In fact, she recalls in the interview the urgent message she had for a recent graduating class of Barnard College women in the form of two little words: Be ambitious. “If we don’t correct the ambition gap, we can’t close the achievement gap,” said Sandberg.

But once the kiddies arrive, make the adjustments needed to respect the shifted priorities in life, she encourages. We wonder if this would be permissible at Facebook for the daddies among the worker bees — and would Zuck himself ever trim back on his office hours were he to get married and start growing a family of his own?

However, after all, Sandberg did bring major success to Facebook and is said to be the one who made the once scrappy start-up with promise a profitable machine that raked in money. So why shouldn’t she get to now make her own hours?

“There’s no life-work balance,” Sandberg laughed at one point. “There’s life, and there’s work.”

Of course, what we don’t know is what time Sandberg arrives in the morning.

Readers, does the fact that she leaves work at 5:30 p.m. alter your opinion of Facebook’s COO?

source from: allfacebook

That’s a hefty price tag, especially since the first quarter figure represents nearly half of what Facebook spent in all of 2011, another banner year for the company’s lobbying balance sheet which grew to a hefty $1.35 million.

The irony is that the quarterly report is filed with the U.S. Senate in the midst of what the tech industry is calling Cyber Week, when a number of cybersecurity bills which Facebook has an interest in will be considered by the U.S. House of Representatives.

The quarterly figure just reported by Facebook is almost two-thirds more than the social networking site spentthis time last year. It’s also an enormous leap from the first quarter lobbying spend in 2010 of $41,390.

Since then, of course, Facebook has expanded its Washington office, hiring staff from Capitol Hill as well as expanding its privacy team.

In the past, Facebook’s lobbying records, while steadily growing over time were modest compared to other technology companies. As of this writing, Google’s report has not been filed online. We will try to update this post as more information becomes available.

source from: allfacebook

The debut of the social media mega-company’s shares is expected to be the largest offering ever by a U.S. Internet company, surpassing that of Google (GOOG: 641.24, -7.17, -1.11%) in 2004.

The newspaper, citing a person familiar with the matter, said Facebook halted trading of its shares on the secondary market in preparation for the IPO.

Valuations of shares traded in the secondary market have placed Facebook’s value at an estimated $100 billion.

Facebook filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February to go public. According to its own filings, the social network has 845 million members. Facebook had 2011 revenues of $3.7 billion and earnings of $1 billion.

The Wall Street Journal said it was uncertain what week in May the deal might get done.

source from: foxbusiness

The former assumes 2.35 billion shares remain outstanding and the latter number is based on 2.5 billion shares outstanding. Since the end of last year, we’ve seen both numbers used for the share count.

The previous high closing price for Facebook shares, $44 apiece, occurred February 9.

The company hasn’t said when the shares might begin trading publicly, nor when an opening price might be set, but earlier this week, SharesPost moved the closing date for this auction back three days and told participants this would be the last auction. The private marketplace said that preparations for going public are the reason for the end in trading.

In a related development, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission expedited approval of a filing by attorneys for Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg disclosing his exercise of stock options before the company’s initial public offer.

Facebook hasn’t announced a date for its market opening, nor set a price range for the debut, but many speculate the trading might begin in May. And today’s closing price on SharesPost could inform how much the shares start at when the public offer begins.

With so much of SharesPost’s business over the past year or two consisting of Facebook trades, we’re wondering what the private marketplace will do for transaction fees; the site does suggest that deals may come through involving Bloom Energy, Redfin, Chegg, Kno, Truecar, Solarcity, Recyclebank, Etsy, Linden Lab,eHarmony, Eventbrite, Gilt Groupe, Kaya, Esolar, RightScale,  Powermat, Twitter and XDC, but none of them have the level of interest that Facebook does.

That said, here’s a copy of the email SharesPost sent out a couple of hours after the auction closed.

source from: allfacebook

Okay, brand pages all have timeline, so now what do we do? Well, if you had to create a short list of priorities for your Facebook marketing strategy, focus on two things:People and content.

They go hand in hand. While brands will be able to monitor key phrases, you really can’t automate the creation of words. Any company that expects to compete for time, attention and customers will need to create and measure content.

We encounter brands that lack a consistent infrastructure for creating, controlling and measuring content. Here are three ways to address that:

Appoint A Content Owner

It doesn’t matter what job title you give to this individual but someone in your organization must be the pointperson for content. In a perfect world, this person can speak your brand’s language, speak your best customers’ language and be conversant in technology. Marketing is the best place to look for such a staff member. While this exact skill set may not exist, find the most agile person on your team, or hire someone new.

Get Automated

After you find a human to own the content, make sure you have the capacity to analyze the flood of datacoming your way. Social media is the intersection of human expression and computer algorithms, making natural language processing and predictive analytics critical tools to understand and measure one’s audience. Without it, your company is guessing about social media intelligence.

Focus Metrics On Engagement

Facebook has shifted its focus from fan growth to engagement. That’s creating a dialogue with the right customers, and increasing brand affinity. That’s why brand pages are now structured around fans and their friends. It’s using the network to build build relationships with customers of the greatest value and their respective networks.

Got content? Got people? Then you may have social media intelligence. Without either, you don’t stand a chance.

source from: allfacebook