Facebook doubles release speed of site updates

Facebook is showing no signs of decline following its decision to go public this year. This week alone, we witnessed a lot of things going on in the platform – Facebook Stories, McAfee Social Protection for Facebook, the global expansion of its App Center, and more. But the social networking giant isn’t stopping there. Today, Chuck Rossi of Facebook’s engineering team announced that the team will be rolling out updates to the site twice a day. Rossi noted that the decision came after the opening of Facebook’s new engineering office in London last week and the recent hiring of a release engineer in their New York office.

The New York-based push will provide more power and support to the team as well the capability to move and ship codes as quickly as possible. “When I came to Facebook in 2008, I was the only release engineer, supporting around 100 developers in one location. Now that we’ve added more people and offices around the world, my small team in California (and now New York) is supporting hundreds more developers who are producing 6 times the amount of code per week. We’re making this change to keep our release process as quick and efficient at 1000 engineers as it was at 100,” Rossi said.

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Facebook Adds Save For Later Feature To iOS App

Providing a service similar to that offered and available via a number of other iOS applicationssuch as Instapaper and Pocket. Facebook has this week rolled out a new feature to its iOS application and website, that allows Facebook users to save posts to read at a more convenient time.

Once you have started saving posts within the Facebook iOS application you can browse them as their own feed at a later date, when it’s ore convenient to catch up on their content

To start saving posts to read later within Facebook iOS application simply hold down your finger on the article you would like to save, and a pop-up will appear prompting you to save the article for later.

Once you have read the article you will then need to mark them as “unsave” to remove it from the saved folder. All articles within your saved folder are private and personal to you, and no update is needed to receive the new save feature. You will simply see a notification within your Facebook iOS application as in image above. The save feature is now also available on the main Facebook.com website.

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Facebook Launches app center in India And Six other countries

Facebook App Center is now available to everyone in the US, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK.
It is reportedly said, now the App Center is available on mobile via the Facebook app for iOS and Android, or by accessing Facebook.com on mobile.
It is worth noticing, App Center facilitate Facebook users to find apps on games, fashion, food, fitness, travel, and lifestyle through friends, giving another way to grow apps.
Facebook has launched its App Center early in June with more than 600 social apps. To the reader’s surprise, more than 4,500 apps for Facebook’s timeline have been launched since the f8 developer conference in 2011. Some significant apps on facebook App Centre are Nike+ Running, Stitcher Radio, Ubisoft Ghost Recon Commander, Draw Something, Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Soundcloud, Instagram, etc., along with many games.
Commenting at the launch of App Center in India, Aaron Brady from Facebook has shared her views that the App Center is designed to promote mobile apps that use Facebook – whether they’re on iOS, Android or the mobile web.
Further she added, from the mobile App Center, users can easily 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.
According to Drew Hopkins, Facebook App Center’s Executive, Facebook would be launching the App Center in Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Taiwan and Turkey in the coming weeks.

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Facebook changes users’ email addresses to their own

How many people out there use Facebook as their primary email service? Although the answer is “not many,” Facebook is trying to change that by making its users’ Facebook email addresses the primary ones displayed on their profile pages. Yes, that means people looking at users’ accounts won’t see their Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo accounts anymore and will only see the seldom-used Facebook account. Thankfully, as LifeHacker demonstrates, there is a way to change this: First, go to the “Update Info” button on you profile. From there, scroll down to contact information and click “edit.” All you have to do at this point is change the Facebook email address to “Hidden from Timeline” and then change the primary email address to “Show on Timeline” and voila! The regular email is displayed on your profile again.


Via - Life hacker

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Samsung Denies And Said It Is Not That Samsung is Working On Social Network To Take On Facebook

There are rumors in the Market that samsung is developing facebook competitor. But Samsung denies this and said  "this is not true and the rumor is groundless"

Yesterday, the Korea Times reported that Samsung was to make “a foray into the social network service (SNS) market early next year by introducing a Facebook-like service,” in the hope that it would one day be able to compete with the world’s biggest social network.
According to unnamed Samsung executives cited in the story, the company would build upon its existing Family Story service on various platforms and launch the project — referred to internally as Samsung Facebook — in the first quarter of 2013.
However, it issued an official response via the Samsung Tomorrow website today stating:

There have been inquiries and a few articles claiming that Samsung Electronics is going to offer a Facebook-like service, being developed under a code-name called ‘Samsung Facebook.’ However this is not true and the rumor is groundless.

‘Family Story’ has been available since February 2012 on Samsung Smart TVs, Smartphones, Tablets and the web*. This service, like its name, is a family-oriented convergence service that focuses on sharing and storing families’ special moments.

Samsung does add also note that it is working on upgrading its Family Story but says it is “far from a ‘Samsung Faceboook’ as some are claiming it to be.”
With a dedicated range of social apps on its television, smartphone and tablet products (including its IM app ChatOn) providing similar features to Facebook and other social networks.

Samsung is already in the business of bringing people together, so reports that it would combine its services and roll out a Facebook competitor just seemed a little too far fetched.

Source-GeekyGadgets

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Facebook’s Platform execs travel to Berlin to promote, mingle with startups

This evening, as in right now, Facebook is throwing a little event called Apps & Drinks in hot European startup hub Berlin to schmooze with and promote local companies that have partnered with the social networking giant.
I had a quick chat about what they’re going to be talking about tonight with Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s global Director of Platform Partnerships, and Christian Hernandez, who serves the same role for the EMEA region.
Tonight, Facebook is going to be touting some Berlin-based startups that have integrated with its Platform, and if you’re even mildly interested in the European startup scene, you’re likely to recognize these names: SoundCloud, Amen, Moviepilot.com, EyeEm, Tape.tv, simfy and Readmill are among the names on the list I was cordially sent in lieu of being able to attend the event in person.
Another well-known startup joining the line-up tonight is Ashton Kutcher-backed activity marketplace Gidsy, which is the only one actually debuting a new app leveraging social discovery via Facebook today to boot.
Another one, digital TV platform company Zattoo, is going to introduce its new Facebook Platform-enhanced service at Apps & Drinks tonight, but it will take another few weeks for them to effectively launch it.
So does Facebook actually have an office in Berlin?
Turns out that, yes, they do, but it currently only serves to give 2 public policy employees a desk at this point – most of Facebook’s German operations are run from Hamburg and other European countries.

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Facebook To Acuire Opera Web Browser

Reports are coming in near future Facebook can enter into the Web browsing field by acuiring Opera Web Browser. The move would put Facebook in direct competition with Microsoft and Mozilla, and it would certainly apply increased pressure to Google as well. Opera’s mobile browser has seen strong growth in recent years, however the same cannot be said for its desktop version, which lags far behind Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. A Facebook browser could potentially allow users to stay up to date with their social life using built-in plug-ins and features integrated into the browser’s UI.
Source - Poket-lint

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Facebook introduced its own app store and provides the platform for developers to develop the apps

Facebook introduced its own app store and provides the platform for developers to develop the apps.
Apps offering in a App Center will be accessible upon a web as well as mobile, together with Android as well as iOS devices.
If we consider Facebook is perplexing to take upon Apple as well as Google’s storefronts directly, tatter not. The App Center will be partial of a central Facebook focus as well as send mobile users to their particular storefronts, either it be Apple’s App Store or Google Play.

Driving mobile installs




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.

Create your app detail page today

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.
You can create an app detail page in the App Center section of the Developer App. There you can upload images, provide additional details, and configure the permissions your app requires. Learn more about setting up your app.

Before creating your app detail page, read the guidelines to ensure 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.

 

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Facebook updates its messenger app to make messaging more modern

Facebook updates its messenger app to make messaging more modern.

Product Manager Peter Deng tells “SMS has been around for 20 years, built it was for these T9 phones. We’re focused on leveraging all the capabilities of today’s devices to create a new messaging experience.” He also says these are just the start of app updates designed to make mobile conversations feel more real, as if you had body language cues and more to go by.

Unlike iMessage, which requires that read receipts be explicitly turned on by the receiver, Facebook doesn't provide a way to disable read receipts -- but the company will let users hide their location.

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Facebook adds new features Organ Donar in the facebook timeline

Today Thousands of people around the world need the organ transplant to live more so to help these people Facebook launched new feature called Organ Donar in the facebook timline

Starting today, you can add that you’re an organ donor to your timeline, and share your story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor. If you’re not already registered with your state or national registry and want to be, you’ll find a link to the official donor registrythere as well.

You can find out more information over at Facebook, and there are also details on how it will work with your timeline.

Source:Facebook

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Facebook for BlackBerry updated to 3.0.0.17

Another day, another Facebook for BlackBerry update. Looks like bugs are getting sorted out in this release, as the previous one was the big jump to version 3.0.
Facebook for BlackBerry recently got a visual overhaul with improved compatibility for some of the newest Facebook features: better BBM Connect integration, including sharing a specific post to a BBM contact; an improved interface and UI with easier access to Privacy Settings; improved Facebook Message notifications, including those that haven’t been pushed to the device, based on usage.
If you haven’t already, download Facebook for BlackBerry from the App World.
Via: NerdBerry

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Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion

Facebook is acquiring Instagram for $1 billion, and Instagram’s team will be joining Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg announced the deal in a Facebook post:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.
For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.
We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.
We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.
These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.
This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

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Facebook For iPad Now With Retina Graphics, Still No Timeline

The official Facebook for iPad app has finally been updated with Retina graphics for Apple’s third-gen iPad. Version 4.1.1 of the app is available now with offline chat mode, photo bug fixes, added language support and stability improvements.

What’s New in Version 4.1.1

In this release, we added some features and fixed some bugs so now:
- You can go offline in chat
- The right profile picture appears for everyone
- Your list of friends always includes all your friends
- In sets of photos, your name is displayed correctly
- Photos of people who like Facebook Pages load correctly
- Your friend-request notification only lights up if you have a request
- You can change your language to Czech, Danish, Greek, Indonesian, Malaysian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Portuguese (Portugal) or Thai
- If you’ve got a new Retina iPad, you’ll see a crisp, high resolution interface

Facebook’s Timeline interface has still not been added to the app despite the fact that the iPhone version has supported it for months.
You can download Facebook’s iPad app in the App Store for free.

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Facebook is too friendly; new app helps users make enemies

At its core, Facebook is a social network built on the premise that people want a central location where they can keep track of and interact with all of their friends. With nearly a billion active monthly users, the site’s strategy is seemingly in line with the wants of the masses. One developer seems to think the world’s most popular social network is too bright and cheery, however, and he recently released a Facebook app that looks to rain on users’ parade.
EnemyGraph is a free Facebook app that serves a single purpose: it allows users to name their enemies. With this free app, people can list any entity on Facebook — a person, a company, a group or anything else — as an enemy. And when the label enemy doesn’t quite encapsulate the amount of hatred a user feels toward a particular person or thing, he or she can up the stakes and designate it as an archenemy.
“Most social networks attempt to connect people based on affinities: you like a certain band or film or sports team, I like them, therefore we should be friends,” self-described transmedia artist and technologist Dean Terry, the app’s creator, wrote in a blog post. ”But people are also connected and motivated by things they dislike. Alliances are created, conversations are generated, friendships are stressed, stretched, and/or enhanced.”
EnemyGraph also helps draw attention to differences of opinion between friends on Facebook. “Facebook runs queries to find affinities,” Terry noted. ”EnemyGraph runs what we call dissonance queries. So if you have said you like, say, Portlandia on your profile page, and in our app one of your friends has declared them an ‘enemy’ we will post this ‘dissonance report’ in the app. In other words we point out a difference you have with a friend and offer it up for conversation, as opposed to a similarity. Relationships always include differences, and often these differences are a critical part of the fabric of a friendship. In the country club atmosphere of Facebook and it’s [sic] platform such differences are ignored. It’s not part of their ‘social philosophy.’ ”

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Yahoo files ‘puzzling’ patent lawsuit against Facebook

Yahoo has filed a massive patent infringement lawsuit against its business partner, Facebook, AllThingsD reported on Monday. The search company claims that Facebook’s News Feed, advertising methods, privacy settings and more infringe its patents. “Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” Yahoo’s lawsuit said. The company claims that Facebook has been “free riding” on Yahoo’s intellectual property and royalty payments alone will not be enough. Read on for more.
Yahoo’s 19-page lawsuit covering 10 patents could not come at a worse time for Facebook, as the company moves closer to its IPO, which is expected to reach close to $100 billion. Interestingly enough, Yahoo pulled a similar stunt with Google before the search giants IPO in 2004.
The social networking giant released a statement disagreeing with the Yahoo lawsuit and called it puzzling. “We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation,” the statement read. “Once again, we learned of Yahoo’s decision simultaneously with the media. We will defend ourselves vigorously against these puzzling actions.”

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Facebook releases Interest List feature, turns newsfeed into a personalized newspaper

Facebook has announced a new tool called the Interest List feature which will help you turn your newsfeed into a personalized newspaper. It will be rolled out in the coming weeks and will allow users to curate a list in which they can subscribe to their friends, celebrities, brands, college, industry players and to almost every other section present on the social network.

Interest lists can help you turn Facebook into your own personalized newspaper, with special sections—or feeds—for topics that matter to you. You can find traditional news sections like Business, Sports and Style or get much more personalized—like Tech News, NBA Players, and Art Critics.

Read on to learn how it works…The Interest List feature on Facebook is sort of reminiscent of Twitter’s list feature or Google’s Reader that provides a small digest of your subscribed social news. Its pretty obvious that people have a different perspective for these networks as they take them as, let’s say knowledge oriented sites, places where people actually come up to find out or to read about what’s happening at their favorite companies. Whereas Facebook is by and large is still perceived as leisure network, where people need and literally spend loads of time to do tons of other non-serious stuff such as commenting on wall posts, checking out pictures of their buddies and to mention the least, there are a gazillion gaming apps present on this network.
Facebook is definitely trying to fill up the sections where it has been lacking. With the addition of Interest List feature, Facebook is trying to catch the attention of those who have so far resorted to other networks such as Twitter or Google+ Circles in lieu of getting personalized information. This ‘personalized information’ has been a trending feature and no matter how late Facebook has gotten to incorporate this feature, it is still going to earn itself some respect from its massive user base and of course, advertising dollars.

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Facebook reportedly trying out Open Graph ads

Add caption

Last month Facebook tested a new type of advert called featured stories, which allowed companies to publish your likes in the form of ads on your news feed. Now TechCrunchreports that Facebook is running a pilot program to bring the same idea to users that have performed certain actions inside Facebook apps. "Open Graph" actions, as Facebook calls them, are an extension of the site's "like" paradigm, and can be any verb, such as "listen," "watch," or "read." Companies can now take a group of friends that say, listened to an album from a particular artist through a Facebook app, and target ads at that group based on the artist, record label, or music service.

Facebook's developer site mentions this action targeting specifically in certain advertising APIs, so although this is a limited trial, it seems likely that they're preparing to push these services, or a variant of them, to the masses at some point soon. This latest progression of Facebook's push for social marketing further blurs the lines between ads and social sharing. In other words, for marketers, it's probably a dream come true.

Via-Techchrunch

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Facebook launches widescreen photo viewer similar to Google+

Likely developed as a companion to the widescreen photos displayed on Facebook Timeline, Zuckerberg and company are bringing a fresh look to Facebook photos with a new overlay design.



Rolling out gradually to Facebook users, the social network is launching a new version of the photo viewer that allows pictures to be displayed at a significantly larger resolution than previous designs. On a typical 15″ laptop, pictures display as large as 960 pixels wide and 720 pixels tall. After the user clicks on a photo, the new interface launches and covers the entire screen with the photo as well as a white space on the right side. Users can like, share or comment on the photo on the right side of the screen. In addition, Facebook is rotating out advertisements underneath the comments as well as sponsored stories.

In order to navigate through a typical Facebook album, the user hovers the mouse over the picture. Two arrows on the left and right side of the picture appear, thus the user can click the arrows to view all pictures in the album. Also appearing on the picture during a mouse hover action, a clear “Like” button can be clicked at the bottom of the picture as well as a tagging button to include names of friends in the picture. In addition, a link to the full album appears at the bottom of the screen which leads to Facebook’s standard album view.

Seeing how this is the first major new feature to come out of the social network since the IPO announcement, the inclusion of the ads within the new photo viewer is likely indicative of Facebook’s efforts to monetize the site more effectively. While the ad placements are currently static when clicking through pictures within the album, Facebook could alter the ad rotation frequency to change upon each new picture and drastically increase ad impressions.

The concept of the photo display is remarkably similar to the basic outline of the Google+ lightbox overlay, but there are several key differences in functionality and design. The Google+ overlay completely blacks out the screen behind the picture rather than the dark gray, translucent overlay that Facebook uses. Also absent from Facebook’s concept, Google+ offers a wide array of photo editing tools such as rotation and color correction within the overlay interface and allows the user tocreate an Internet meme out of any picture within a Google+ feed. In addition, the Google+ interface includes an option to view the photo’s EXIF data to determine the camera that took the picture as well as a link to download a full size version of the original photo.



Photographer Thomas Hawk posted a comparison of the two photo overlay designs earlier today as well as links to comments from both Facebook fans and Google+ followers. Hawk stated “It’s better than the old Facebook lightbox. It’s still not as good as Google+’s which still has a larger photo — but along with the new much larger photo thumbnails in the Timeline view, it’s a step in the right direction.” Hawk also mentioned that Facebook should improve the cropping tool within the Facebook Timeline.

Related to Facebook photos, the social network has also recently received negative attention for keeping user-deleted photos on Facebook servers for years beyond the original deletion date. According to an investigation by Ars Technica, writer Jacqui Cheng was still able to reach direct links of photos that were deleted during 2009. As detailed by Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens, he stated “We have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted within 45 days of the removal request being received.” However, this process is not expected to be completely finished for another few months.

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Letter from Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook was not originally founded to be a company

Anyone who’s seen The Social Network probably knows the Hollywood version of how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. Now with the real-world social network planning to go public (reportedly valued between $75-$100 billion), it is time for Zuckerberg to tell his potential shareholders why they should invest in Facebook. And he does that in an almost Google-like ‘Don’t be evil’ manner in the S1 prospectus the company filed today. Zuckerberg has his moments in a letter the company included in the filing. Take this for instance, “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” Or this, “Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company.” My favorite bit, however is where he write about ‘The Hacker Way’ – the culture at Facebook and the mantra “Code wins arguments.” Read on for the entire letter.

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG
Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.
We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.
At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.
Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.
Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.
Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.
People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.
We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.
We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.
We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.
As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.
One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.
Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.
In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.
We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.
We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.
By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.
Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.
Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.
Our Mission and Our Business
As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.
I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.
Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.
Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.
By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.
This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.
The Hacker Way
As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.
The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.
The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.
Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.
Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”
Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.
To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.
To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.
The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:
Focus on Impact
If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.
Move Fast
Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.
Be Bold
Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.
Be Open
We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.
Build Social Value
Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.
Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

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Facebook to launch IPO, could start at $5 billion and grow, grow, grow

Facebook are now expected to raise $5 billion in a preliminary IPO prospectus on Wednesday morning. This is much less than expected, but could balloon out from here based on investor demand "according to sources close to the deal," reports the International Financing Review.


The smaller deal is reportedly reflecting a decision to start with a conservative base, before deciding whether to increase. Facebook has chosen to hire five bookrunners including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and JP Morgan. This list could grow, also.



Facebook are expected to finalise the IPO process by May, if everything goes right with the registration process with the SEC. It has been reported that Facebook have been "unusually guarded" about the process for selecting banks involved in the underwriting syndicate. Obviously because this would be not only a stressful move, but a very strategic move for their future growth.

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