The London 2012 Olympic games are upon us.  Today, Facebook and NBC announced a partnership to help bolster interest in both the games and the social network.  The deal will help NBC spread the message about the Olympics though Facebook placements and, in turn, NBC will encourage users to follow along and participate on Facebook. All of the details on the partnership haven't surfaced, but it was made clear that no cash was changing hands -- this is purely a mutually beneficial partnership.  Some things in the works but Facebook will be running "exclusive content" for Olympic fans.   [...]

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AllThingsD is reporting Yahoo has reached a deal with Facebook to drop the patent infringement lawsuit in exchange for expanding their ad and content deal. Kara Swisher, who typically has the inside word on these topics, said the deal was approved this morning by Yahoo’s directors on a telephone meeting. Kara said Yahoo and Facebook will formally announce it "sometime later today." There wil be no cash payments involved in this deal. The specifics of the deal are not clear right now but the main point is Yahoo will drop their patent suit and they will expand their ongoing partnersh [...]

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Historically users chosen a selected email that displays on their profile pages. However, Facebook has recently swept through forcing all displayed email addresses to the @facebook.com option.  The new Facebook messages and email system was launched late 2010, but usage never quite took off. One of the biggest complaints with the change is that it truly changes the way messages are delivered to the user.  The Facebook email addresses send email content directly to the Facebook Message inbox, something that looks nearly identical to traditional Facebook messages. Messages that arrive di [...]

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Bloomberg is reporting that Facebook is preparing to launch a mobile-specific location-based ad product. According to the article Facebook has all-but-confirmed the offering, which the company has been testing for several months and shown to various clients and CMOs. This is apparently just one of several new ad product ideas under development at the social site. Mobile is obviously a critical area for Facebook as large numbers of its users increasingly access their accounts primarily through mobile. Mobile monetization is much weaker than PC ad revenue. It's almost non-existent with onl [...]

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Facebook's CTO for the past three years is stepping down.  Bret Taylor has created a handful of successful products, and is leaving Facebook to start a new venture.  Taylor announced the departure on a public Facebook wall post.  In the post he states that he is "excited to be starting a company with my friend Kevin Gibbs."  No details on what this company is.  This is the first major departure of a Facebook officer post-IPO. Taylor was one of the co-creators of Google Maps and left Google to join Benchmark Capital.  At Benchmark, he teamed up with another former Googler, Jim Norris, [...]

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The Facebook IPO has been a disaster for the social network, not just financially. BrandKeys, a brand and customer engagement consultancy, reports that the networking giant dropped from #1 to #5 in the Social Networking Category in their Customer Loyalty Engagement Index.  The index polls over 49,000 consumers, 83 categories and 600 brands. As recently as February 2012, Facebook was at the top of the Social Networking list.  Since the IPO Facebook has dropped below YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn to 5th place.  Here are the top 10 performers on the Engagement Index: YouTube [...]

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Echoing comments that he made earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook said again on Tuesday that a deeper integration of Facebook into Apple products might be on the way. Cook appeared at the D10 Conference last night and told Walt Mossberg and KaraSwisher that Apple has "great appreciation" and "great respect" for Facebook. When asked why Apple's iOS has very deep Twitter integration, but not the same with Facebook, Cook said, "I think we can do more with them [Facebook] and, so, just stay tuned on this one." He later expanded on that idea: We want to provide customers simple and eleg [...]

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The news keeps getting worse for Facebook. First, the IPO didn't do as well as expected, though it made lots of people at Facebook very wealthy. Then came news that Facebook's underwriters (banks) had to intervene on Friday to keep the stock from falling below the $38 offering price because demand was weaker than expected. On Monday and yesterday Facebook shares fell (well) below $38, erasing about $40 billion in market value. And today the company is being sued by shareholders for failing to disclose that Q2 revenues were going to be weaker than previously expected: $1.11 billion vs. rough [...]

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On Friday Mark Zuckerberg posted one of his most important statuses ever as he posted: "listed a company on NASDAQ."  On Saturday, the day after Facebook's IPO, Mark Zuckerberg may have topped it, at least personally.  One that was simply a relationship change alerting the world of the surprise wedding to his girlfriend of nine-years, Priscilla Chan. The status update had more than one million likes and 731 comments by Monday morning.   The marriage was a surprise as 100 guests were invited to what they thought was Chan's graduation party.  Instead they were hit with the news th [...]

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The Facebook IPO is over. The company went public today with its stock price opening at $38 per share, and when the dust had settled on a record-setting day of trading, Facebook closed at $38.27 per share, just a few cents above where it began. As Greg Sterling wrote today, that's not where a lot of investors had hoped it would finish. But it is where about one-quarter of Marketing Land readers who took part in our survey predicted it would finish. We ran an unscientific poll that was open for almost 24 hours, inviting readers to guess what Facebook's closing share price would be at the [...]

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Facebook will go public tomorrow in what will be the biggest tech IPO ever, and the second largest U.S. IPO of any kind. On Twitter, CNBC has reported that the opening price will be $38 per share. That would allow Facebook to raise more than $16 billion dollars and would value the company at $104 billion. But what will Facebook's closing price be when trading ends on Friday? That's what we want to know from our readers. Use the poll below to take a guess at Facebook's closing price. We've included a couple options below the $38 opening price, several options between $38 and $76 (doubl [...]

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As announced on the Twitter Twitter account and further explained by the New York Times, Twitter becomes another high-profile publisher that supports Do Not Track. The actual "Do Not Track" functionality is accomplished via the browser. Right now the system is voluntary for publishers, who must recognize and respect the user request to opt out of cookies or other tracking. Internet Explorer from Microsoft offers a similar capability. Chrome does not currently support Do Not Track, though Google has said it will in the future. The Federal Trade Commission's CTO, Ed Felten, just mention [...]

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It couldn't have happened at a worse time for Facebook, which has its initial public offering of stock later this week. General Motors has decided to stop advertising on the social networking giant, citing concerns about the site's effectiveness. Meanwhile, a Forrester analyst says other companies are having doubts The GM news comes from a Wall Street Journal report that relies on "people familiar with the matter." It's been confirmed by GM itself in other stories, such as at The Guardian. According to the story, the automotive company will still maintain pages on Facebook -- on whi [...]

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A new poll from AP and CNBC on the eve of the Facebook IPO shows that Americans are ambivalent about the company and that it faces numerous challenges as it seeks to generate more revenue growth from its already massive user base. The AP-CNBC poll was conducted May 3 through May 7. The  survey sample was 1,004 US adults. Among survey respondents 56 percent had a Facebook profile, 40 percent did not and 4 percent didn't know. Google, Apple and Microsoft are viewed more favorably than Facebook. Of the comparison group Twitter was viewed less favorably. The results shift by demographic [...]

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I just watched the full 31-minute Facebook IPO roadshow video. It's an incredibly well-produced -- even at times emotional -- presentation that seeks to cast Facebook in the best light possible to investors or anyone watching it. It's a kind of utopian vision of what Facebook is and aspires to be in the future. However that glossy vision obscures many of the tensions between Facebook marketing and the consumer experience, as well as between personal sharing that is the heart of the culture of Facebook and the data mining and privacy confusion that Consumer Reports has complained about. [...]

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Over the past several months there have been a number of stories about how retailers and brands are shuttering their Facebook stores because no one was paying attention. The outlook would thus appear to be dimming for so-called "F-commerce." However earlier this week shopping site TheFind  launched a social shopping app (soon to be an iPad app too) called Glimpse. It may yet prove to be a model of sorts for commerce on Facebook and social commerce more generally. Some have argued it takes its inspiration from (or copies) Pinterest and seeks to be its rival. It's Pinterest-like in [...]

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Facebook IPO is set now for May 18. Prior to that date Facebook executives will be on a roadshow selling the IPO to brokerages and institutional investors. According to the Journal CEO Mark Zuckerberg "will make some appearance on the roadshow, though he won't attend all meetings." The heavy lifting will be by COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman. It will be a huge IPO, probably "oversubscribed." Investors will be going out of their minds to get in on it (how long the stock is held is another question). Out of the gate the company will [...]

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Just two weeks after Microsoft bought more than 925 patents from AOL, the company is turning around and selling about 650 of them to Facebook. The deal also allows Facebook to license the other AOL patents that it's not buying from Microsoft. According to today's announcement, the sale will cost Facebook about $550 million -- close to half of what Microsoft originally spent on the AOL patents. Microsoft says the sale is motivated by financial reasons. "Today’s agreement with Facebook enables us to recoup over half of our costs while achieving our goals from the AOL auction," says Micr [...]

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The world's largest social networking site is going back to its roots ... well kinda.  When Facebook launched having a college email address was a requirement to join.  Those days are long gone, but they are bringing back email-based verification for a new feature, "Groups For Schools." These new groups are based around a particular school and will have different features and functionality than traditional groups.  The examples used show many suggested groups including pick-up sports games on campus, class based groups, and course based groups.  Of course one must have a specific [...]

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Facebook. Twitter. Google+. Pinterest. Foursquare. LinkedIn. Path. How many of these social networks do you belong to? Do you participate in every day? Every week? Every month? When a new one comes along does your heart leap in anticipation, or sink a little when you realize it’s one more thing to add to your already burgeoning list of chores; one more series of tasks on an already too-long to-do list? As pervasive as social media seems, it’s still early days and there have already been shakeouts. Some of us are old and hoary enough to remember Orkut, to once have thought we’d neve [...]

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