Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Part of the Facebook Platform is a new markup language, creatively called “Facebook Markup” and allows developers to build applications fully integrated into the site. Facebook
Markup includes features, such as dynamic information tags, conditional privacy tags, image
caching and Flash. Facebook says that developers can “build anything they want in full, unlimited application pages on Facebook, called the “canvas pages,” and applications also can have a box in users’ profiles and navigation”.
There’s also the benefit of the ‘Social Graph’, as Zuckerberg calls it. New applications will “gain distribution through the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information”. In addition, Facebook claims that “all social networks have two core elements: the social graph and the applications that run on it. Because of the efficient spreading of information through the social graph, existing Facebook applications, such as Photos, have grown to leaders in their categories”.
Zuckerberg says that “The social graph is changing the way the world works. We are at a time in history when more information is available and people are more connected than they ever have been before, and the social graph is at the center of that. The social graph is our base, and we’ve built a framework that is completely optimized for developing social applications within our environment. We believe that there is more value for everyone in letting other people develop applications on top of the base we’ve built than we could ever possibly provide on our own.”
Social networking is clearly in its early stages, grappling with quantities and the varying quality of information, the volume of which available today simply wasn’t available nor anywhere nearly as easily and instantly accessible before the Internet.
MySpace has built up a formidable user base, but Facebook’s open approach to users and developers is a credible challenge that will shake up the world of social networking and only accelerate its development, user interface and both ease and richness of the user experience for all players, as other social networking sites compete with each other for domination in this area, even as some of the players co-operate with each other as Facebook has achieved.
For users of social networking sites, this is the start of a revolution. But for those that have no desire to maintain their own “home page” in cyberspace, already too busy with the rest of their lives, it won’t mean much.
One thing’s for sure: it’s the best chance Facebook has of gaining market share against MySpace, and a great incentive for developers to push the social networking envelope, at least with Facebook users, in new and better ways. And that’s a good thing!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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