Has Facebook Finally Mastered Mobile Marketing?

More than anything else, Facebook‘s lack of revenues from mobile advertising led to its acutely disappointing initial public offering of stock last May. It seemed to investors that the company had simply failed to pay attention to the obvious fact that hundreds of millions of its users were accessing the service via smartphones and tablets–where they then saw almost no ads.

How Facebook Briefly Killed the Internet

For a few minutes this evening, Facebook was redirecting users visiting dozens of websites — including Mashable — to cryptic error pages.

The reaction online was pretty much what you'd expect, with — as the The Next Web noted — hashtags like "Facebookmageddon" and "Facebocalypse" common amongst Twitter users.

Facebook Builds Cold Storage Archive for Old Photos

Facebook is building a vast new "cold storage" facility in the US to archive all the messages, photos and other postings that its over billion users do not need every day but want to retain for future reference.

A 16,000-square-foot data centre under construction in Prineville, Oregon, is designed to provide a more efficient home for older and less popular material.

The new cold storage facility will join two existing data centres in Prineville, The Oregonian reported.

Facebook knows you might want to see your old photos again someday. Or scroll back through your Timeline to revisit your posts as an online diary. But storing all those pictures and keeping them immediately available takes a lot of space.

Not in the physical sense, but in the virtual. That means lots of hard drives, lots of storage and lots of energy.

So Facebook is preparing to try out a more efficient storage system at its Prineville "cold storage", for those archival posts that people don't need every day, but that they don't want to lose altogether.

Facebook says 82 per cent of its traffic is focused on just 8 per cent of its photos. Its cold storage facility is designed to create a more efficient way to store those photos that are not in heavy rotation.

The cold storage building is just a skeletal frame now, and a concrete pad. Facebook hopes to have the first of three phases up and running soon.

Each of the three 16,000-square-foot data hubs could hold an exabyte of data, equivalent to 1 million hard drives inside a contemporary personal computer.

The tens of thousands of servers inside the two existing buildings are always on, ready to deliver your pictures and musings to your Facebook friends around the world.

By contrast, most of the computers in the new cold storage facility will be asleep. A few will be alert, awaiting a request for old material and ready to summon the slumbering computers to provide their data.

This material won't reach your computer as quickly as something posted just a few hours ago, but Facebook says it won't take long.

"The principle will be so that it doesn't impact the user experience, so think about a matter of seconds, or milliseconds," said Michael Kirkland, a Facebook communication manager.

Facebook estimates a cold-storage data centre will cost one-third less than its standard data centre (IBN Live).

The Difference In Censorship On Facebook And Twitter

Perhaps this isn’t censorship: in strict terms that refers to what a government insists is allowable or not. But there are indeed considerable differences in the way that Facebook at Twitter police the content on their sites. The difference is most obvious when considering the way in which the sex industry is using both sites:

Sex trade workers have taken to using Facebook and Twitter as a 21st Century phone box by posting calling cards on the networks that show them clearly touting for business.

A Times report found hundreds of public pages being used by prostitutes and escort agencies. In some instances their names, contact details and prices were displayed alongside the type of sex acts they were punting.

In reaction to this Facebook has been pulling down the pages as it finds them. Twitter not so much :

As noted by the Times, violations of Twitter’s terms and conditions only apply where the content is found to have been illegal.

It should be noted that this is all about what is going on in England: where the laws on prostitution and the like are slightly confused. It’s entirely legal to offer sex in return for money: the basic act of prostitution. So stating that one does so is not illegal: presumably this can still be done on Twitter if not on Facebook.

However, a brothel is illegal, as is pimping and so is soliciting: that last making it all rather more complicated. For approaching a potential customer with a view to making them a customer is indeed illegal. And the difference between this and advertising can get somewhat blurred.

I have to admit that I prefer the Twitter approach. Not because I actually use it to boost my sex life in between the urgent searches for cat pictures, but because it seems to me to be the adult way of dealing with such things. Some consenting adults like to do things that I don’t like to do. Well, they’ve as much right to use communications systems to get on with their pleasures as I do to use them to get on with mine. That’s rather what a liberal polity means really. The nannying of content that Facebook does seems more suitable for people dealing with children rather than adults.

This article source from : Forbes.com