Facebook glory began to fade?

The report, released an independent monitoring sites showed that the Inside Facebook social networking Facebook has lost 6 million users in the U.S. and 100,000 users in the UK during May 2011.

ICROSSING

Besides the U.S. and the UK, Inside Facebook states that 1.5 million Canadians leave Facebook over May 2011. Overall, however, Facebook users are still growing with a total of users around the world as much as 687 million users. India, the Philippines, and Indonesia became the country with new users in the world.

Is this a sign of Facebook fame began to fade? Responding to the report, the management of Facebook dismiss that Facebook users declined. They argued that, from time to time there has been some research suggesting that Facebook lost users in some areas of the world. In fact, research results were derived from data based on the ads that give facts what the coverage area of ​​advertising on Facebook, not about the overall growth of Facebook users.

"We are pleased with the growth of Facebook users, and more than 50 percent of our active users per day access to Facebook," Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

Adrian Drury, Head of Ovum Research, a market analyst firm, also said that in developed countries like the U.S. and the UK, penetration is already high up so that growth will not be significant. Moreover, not all Facebook users visit the site every day to log in to. (Cash / Rizki Caturini)

source: http://tekno.kompas.com/read/2011/06/15/19564490/Pamor.Facebook.Mulai.Meredup.

Privacy groups push for U.S. Facebook probe

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The privacy flap over Facebook’s new facial recognition service gained some momentum Monday.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and three other advocacy groups today filed a complaint asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to force Facebook to end plans for a new facial recognition service.

U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) quickly threw his weight behind the initiative and called for the FTC to investigate the Facebook service.

“When it comes to users’ privacy, Facebook’s policy should be: ‘Ask for permission, don’t assume it,’” said Markey, co-chairman of the bi-partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, in a statement Monday. “Rather than facial recognition, there should be a Facebook recognition that changing privacy settings without permission is wrong. I encourage the FTC to probe this issue and will continue to closely monitor this issue.”

Facebook has not responded to a request for comment on the complaint or Markey’s statement.

The letter of complaint was filed less than a week after Facebook announced plans to enable facial recognition across its social networking site, which raised the ire of privacy advocates and some users.

The European Union’s data protection regulators were the first to take on the issue, immediately announcing plans to launch an investigation. Authorities in the U.K. and Ireland then disclosed that each is considering their own probe.

Facebook last week said it’s already trying to answer questions from EU regulators, and now may face queries from U.S. officials.

The complaint filed this morning by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse asks that the FTC force Facebook to stop collecting users’ biometric data without their opt-in consent.

The letter alleges that Facebook’s facial recognition feature violates the site’s own privacy policy, and constitutes unfair and deceptive trade practices.

“Facebook possesses the largest collection of photographs of individuals of any corporation in the world,” the letter contends. “According to an extrapolation of photo upload data reported by Facebook, the company now possesses about 60 billion photographs. There is every reason to believe that unless the commission acts promptly, Facebook will routinely automate facial identification and eliminate any pretense of user control over the use of their own images for online identification.”

When Facebook announced the service last week, the company said it’s using facial recognition technology to make it easier for users to tag photos of friends and family members.

The company has been quietly rolling out the new technology to test groups since late last year.

Once in service, Facebook’s system could be able to recognize the faces of its 500 million to 700 million users worldwide.

In just a few weeks, the system will scan all photos posted to Facebook and will provide the names of the people who appear in the frame. All of Facebook’s users will be automatically added to the database.

The facial recognition feature would be automatically turned on. Users who don’t want the service must manually opt out of it.

source: http://www.macworld.com/article/160512/2011/06/privacy_facebook_probe.html

Twitter is the new Facebook

(CNN)  -- Following a whirlwind week and a half of product announcements, you can throw Twitter's attempts to differentiate itself as an "information network" out the window -- there is little doubt the company is now entrenched in serious competition with Facebook for the much grander social networking crown.

After announcing that it would finally be bringing native photo and video sharing to its service on June 1, Twitter's biggest product win to-date came on Tuesday, when Apple announced that iOS 5 would include deep Twitter integration.

By making Twitter the default in apps like Camera, Safari and YouTube, Apple has dictated where content will invariably flow.

That means that the 200 million plus people with iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices (or at least the tens of millions able to upgrade to iOS 5) will have the ability to do things like post photos, videos and links to Twitter with a single tap.

Application developers will also be able to add this type of functionality to their iOS applications, further accelerating the impact of the partnership.

In summarizing the significance of that, my Mashable colleague Jennifer Van Grove wrote, "[Twitter] will soon be the social layer of iOS, enabling users to turn individual actions such as snapping a photo or reading an article into instant social activities."

For Facebook, who has long positioned itself as the social graph of the Web (and in turn mobile), that's a big blow.

Sure, application developers can still build Facebook integration into their iOS apps, but by making Twitter the default in apps like Camera, Safari and YouTube, Apple has dictated where millions of pieces of content will invariably flow.

At the same time, by adding native photo and video sharing and moving people over to its own Web and client experiences, Twitter is positioned like never before to capitalize on that content and keep people on its site, and in turn challenge Facebook where it dominates like no other: Engagement.

At the start of this year, Hitwise reported that the average Facebook user spends an impressive four hours and 35 minutes per month on the site, more than any other property on the Web, and more than double the average Twitter user's monthly two hours and 12 minutes.

But now that Twitter is turning itself into a social network, that could soon change. Instead of creating and consuming photos and videos on third-party sites -- something that's already hugely popular on Twitter and is Facebook's No. 1 time sink -- users will be doing it on Twitter.com.

Add to that the fact that Twitter now owns the most popular third-party client (TweetDeck) and has been systematically eating away at the ecosystem it enabled, and the numbers quickly add up.

The icing on the cake, of course, is the iOS tie-up, which for now gives Twitter priority seating over Facebook with tens of millions of highly engaged mobile users.

Granted, Facebook could also do a deal with Apple before iOS 5 rolls out this fall, but it's unclear what kind of relationship those companies have following last year's contentious split over Ping.

For the moment, Twitter's iOS win is a symbolic victory over Facebook that signals the company's growing ambitions as a social network.

In the long-run, however, it could very much be the partnership that helps move Twitter from Facebook's distant cousin to its arch rival.

source: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/06/10/twitter.facebook.competition/index.html

Is Facebook growth stalling in North America?

(CNN) -- Facebook, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of the social-media world, continues to grow, steaming toward 700 million registered users. But has the site tapped out its potential in America?

Data from blog Inside Facebook says the social-networking site is losing active users in the United States.

The site lost more than 7 million active users in the United States and Canada last month, according to data from Inside Facebook, a blog that tracks the site and its development platform.

Mexico, where Facebook use started later than in the other two, added about 1 million users, according to Inside Facebook's data service. But Facebook's slowing growth in North America raises the question of whether the site has finally found all the users it can in places where it's been around for a while.

Last month was the first time the United States had lost active users in a year, Inside Facebook said, while ups and downs have been more volatile in Canada.

Facebook is questioning the accuracy of the data.

"From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions," said a statement Monday from a Facebook spokesperson. "Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook.

"We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook on any given day."

Facebook reached 687 million users at the beginning of June, according to the stats. But its growth rates appear to be slowing. Facebook gained 11.8 million active montly users in May, compared to 13.9 million in April. More than 20 million users were added during every month last year.

The United Kingdom, Norway and Russia, other countries where Facebook was adapted relatively early in its existence, each dropped by about 100,000 active users in May.

Still, expansion continues as Facebook focuses globally. Major population centers like Brazil, India and Argentina all saw growth of more than 5 percent in May, with Brazil leading the way, jumping from about 17 million users to about 19 million.

Inside Facebook acknowledged that seasonal changes such as college graduation, bugs in the Facebook advertising software or other one-time anomalies can affect data.

But the report does raise questions, they said.

"[B]y the time Facebook reaches around 50% of the total population in a given country (plus or minus, depending on internet access rates in that country), growth generally slows to a halt, as we've noted before," read the post, by Eric Eldon.

"So far, Facebook has been able to make up stalls and losses with big gains in heavily-populated developing countries like Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia."

Moving into China would be one way to insure its goal of reaching 1 billion active users, Eldon wrote. But agreeing to the terms that likely would come from the country's Communist regime might also hurt Facebook's popularity back home.
 

source: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/06/13/facebook.dropping.america/index.html