Facebook has paid already $40000 to security experts for reporting bugs in its site.
Just three weeks back, Facebook has announced its Bug Bounty program that rewards Web hackers for finding any flaws on its website. The company said on Monday that within this shot period, it has paid more than $40,000 as reward under this program to those security experts around the world who have identified vulnerabilities on its site.
Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook said, “The program has also been great because it has made our site more secure – by surfacing issues large and small, introducing us to novel attack vectors, and helping us improve lots of corners in our code”.
He also clarified that the company is not just paying $500 for a reported bug but has also offered as much as $5000 for the most serious security holes.
One expert has already received $7000 for flagging six different issues and also the company paid $5000 bounty for one really good report. He didn’t mention if there was a maximum amount and didn’t rule out the criteria for determining when one report is better than another.
Facebook is also dealing with bogus reports from people who were just looking for publicity. The program covers only bugs found on the main Facebook website and doesn’t extend it to third-party apps that work with the website. The company is providing legal protection to these reporters who in course of identifying flaws may have had to break the law.
Facebook has confirmed that it will discontinue one of its online businesses know as ‘Daily Deals’ which was introduced just four months back. These online deals were debuted as trials in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco with the motive of expanding Facebook’s revenue channel beyond advertising and getting a berth in the potential online bargain market. It offers online coupons and discounts from local businesses.
Facebook announcement would certainly provided a measure of relief to coupon sites leaders Groupon and Living Social who can now feel that they have one less major site to compete with and continue to consolidate their position. The decision comes after Groupon reported of going public later this year and Google announced its own ‘offers’ discount program two months back.
According to Facebook official statement, it explains: “After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks. We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We’ve learned a lot from our test, and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses”.
Facebook would still be offering Facebook Ads, Sponsored Stories, Check-In Deals, and Pages to businesses that want to advertise in the social network.
Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Jersey, persuaded by the Secondary Parents Council has filed a suit on Tuesday, against the city of Newark over Mark Zuckerberg highly publicized $100 million gift to the public school system of Newark.
Zuckerberg announce the grant in an appearance on Ophra Winfrey show in the join presence of Mayor of Newark, Cory Booker and New Jersey Governor Christie on September 24, 2010, saying “It’s what best for Newark”.
The lawsuit is calling for greater transparency by demanding the release of correspondence between the city and company executive as well as other key players in the effort to overhaul the public education system. It also states that parents have “a strong interest in insuring that appropriate public officials, rather than private individuals, decide how allocate the donated funds”.
The suit was made since the Newark city failed to offer a lawful response to Secondary Parents Council’s open record request of April 5 and its two extensions.
Mayor’s administration said there was no correspondence between the mayor and Zuckerberg and their demand is too broad and vague. Booker denounced the ACLU lawsuit as a publicity stunt. Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Google’s ad subsidiary, DoubleClick on Wednesday reported that Facebook has reached a massive landmark of 1 trillion page-views per month in June and July respectively. No other website comes any close to the social networking giant’number, even the search engine giant, Google itself.
Though Facebook official membership has not reached one billion figure, but the number of unique visitors who flock Facebook every month is much higher, standing at 870 million. So whether users or non users, there are lot of people visiting the top social networking giant in the world thus reaching 46.9 % of all internet users and indeed making it the single most visited website on the internet.
According to the statistics, in July each visitor has an average 1,150 pageviews of the site, which is completely too high as compared to other sites. It accounts for each single view of a photo, profile or each click of a link by a user leading into Facebook- all counts for Facebook ads. To no wonders, Facebook says that its users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site.
Facebook becomes the first to reached this million million milestone. However, this list doesn’t include adult website, other ad networks, domain that don’t have publicly visible contents or don’t load properly and various Google sites. Following are the data of 10 most visited websites published by Google’s Doubleclick ad unit:
doubleclick ad statistics of 10 most visited websites _ june 2011
On Tuesday, Ticketmaster has announced the integration of Facebook into its interactive seat map. Now you can share venue seat location with Facebook friends, by buying event tickets next to near your Facebook friends and also tag yourself in seats and vice-versa. Yet users has the choice to control who can see where you are located.
This new feature is now live for over 9,000 events on Ticketmaster and Live sites. Buyers need to connect their Facebook account with Ticketmaster whereby a list of friends who are attending the same event and sharing this information appears. The venue’s seat map displays Facebook flags over seats which friends have purchased.
ticketmaster seat map facebook
David Fisch of Facebook said in a statement, “Ticketmaster’s interactive seat map shows the promise of using social technologies to improve the event experience”. The company launched interactive seat maps last year, but the Facebook integration will allow Ticketmaster to build a mini community around each event.
Ticketmaster users accounts for 75% from Facebook net-workers, seat-tagging has real potential to drive up ticket sales and improve the concert going experience for all. And each time a user share information by purchasing tickets via Facebook, it generates an average of $5 in incremental sales.
Fast company reported that, through this social integration the company hopes to “reduce the estimated 40% of live event tickets that go unsold”. After-all, live events experience will be as social online as it is in real life.
Facebook game ‘The Sims Social’ which was launched on August 19 has already attracted 4.7 million players in just 1 week, which has high potential to continue its growth. ‘The Sims Social’ fan page also boasts more than 7 million likes to date.
‘The Sims Social’ is a collaboration of Electronic Arts and Playfish. According to John Earner, GM of Playfish’s London Studios said, “Our deep knowledge of the Facebook gaming platform enables us to continue to enable dynamic new features, quests and game updates on a regular basis so The Sims Social remains fresh and fun”.
Every week, Gamasutra comes up with the fastest-growing Facebook games according to monthly active users (MAU). The top 20 fastest growing Facebook games along with exact MAU counts, are as follows:
The Sims Social, top gainer of the week
‘The Sims Social’ with its high user’s growth has still many stages to climb until it reached the top ladder of the social networking games. As of now, CityVille is on the top list with almost 76,000,000 users, who boasted 22 million users in just 11 days of its launched.
On Tuesday, Facebook has made some changes on the user interface just for good reason. In response to user request to give greater control over sharing their profile page, it announced that it will now let user pre-approve photos before their friends can post with their name attached. It will allow users to share exactly what they want with exactly who they want .
Although, currently you can still remove your friends tag but after being made visible to other users. But now the pre-approval photo tag enables you to approve or reject your friends tag. It will also apply to written post that you are tag in and also for pre-approving what others tag on your own photos and posts.
However, your friends can still add photo of you but what it does affect is whether you name is attached to it or not. Everyone can now tag anyone on Facebook, but the tagged person has to approve before the photo or post pops up on their profile. This new control feature will be on users’ pages, next to the posts and photos they share. The changes will be rolled out by Thursday.
Facebook is also making another change called ‘view profile as’, which makes it easier for users to view how one’s profile looked like to any other users. These new settings are part of Facebook’s move to handle privacy concerns and of course to give users more management over tagged photos and shared profiles.
Miramax is launching the largest-scale Facebook streaming movie venture ever. It has create a new Facebook app called Miramax eXperience, which not only streams movies over Facebook but also features a games that allows people to cast friends in various roles of Miramax movies and unlock bonus contents.
In the first go, Miramax is offering 20 titles in the US, 10 in the UK and Turkey. It is expected to get more movies and add support for more countries soon. Facebook users can rent each title for 30 Facebook credits ($3), which is active for 30 days but the viewing windows is 48 hours once you start to watch. This movies can also be viewed on multiple devices, including TV, computer, smartphone, browser-based player on iPad tablet and Google TV.
Miramax has an earlier struck deals with Amozon, Netflix, Hulu and Apple but the latest streaming venture would help in increasing sales by boosting user interaction since, Facebook is a more social atmosphere.
The app is still in beta version and the company will continue to refine, improve and expand the app for a lot more user functionality. It is now launched only with video-on-demand but the company plans ahead to let users buy movies and store them in a digital locker and access the content anywhere they want across all devices.
There are more than 50 million Facebook users who either mention or interact with a Miramax property, which the company is hoping to rech 150 million users within 18 months. More details about the service can be found at miramax.com
Stunt bird Games is going to launch Pix aquarium Game Maker an upcoming mobile app. It is a Facebook-based game builder that will freak gamer by giving the opportunity to create and explore their own games.
Players can design over every aspect of the game from the background artwork to character’s face to the shape of the the enemy. Players can then save their unique set up and share it with their Facebook friends.
The game centers around uploaded photos or others images by players to play within the game, which certainly is a cool way to include their close friends to share with them. Though the game is not entirely new in the gaming world but probably the first app of its kind for mobile phone and tablet devices.
It is more a creation platform than a game, filled with fun and lots of entertainment. It is a cool concept to be introduce in a social platform like Facebook particularly for youngsters.
As for playing the game, there will be a one time cost of 15 Facebook Credits ($1.50), in order to save your game, after which the players will get updates and modifications whenever they like and can also share with their other Facebook’s friends.
Facebook in course of its design updates has started rolling out the ‘Ticker’ to more users. It is a real-time unfiltered News Feed features on right side of the page which shows all activity from your Facebook friends as it happens. It can be called a ‘mini’ or ‘second’ News Feed.
Ticker will replace the Most Recent filter on the current News Feed. In this update, the main News Feed will make no difference between Top News and Most Recent. Facebook thinks that users are missing out a lot of happenings across their social network and hence Ticker will be integrated side by side with the main News Feed.
Another new option is “This is a highlight”, which temporarily helps in sticking a specific update or status to one’s News Feed. However, it wasn’t clear whether its importance will be part of the update.
The main News Feed will now label as ‘Recent Stories’ which uses advanced algorithms to give only the most interesting and relevant updates (top stories) based on a number of factors, including likes, comments and how often you’ve interacted with those friends. If users click on an update in Ticker, it appears in Recent Stories whereby users can make comment and like the posts.
While Ticker is a mind-blowing live updates containing about everything from: likes, comments, status updates, new photos, updates from pages you’re a fan of, shared web pages, etc. The pair News Feed will definitely give satisfaction to all users.
