By STUART ELLIOTT
The Interpublic Group of Companies, which has owned a tiny stake in Facebook since the days the social networking Web site was just for college students, is selling half its holdings for a hefty profit.
Interpublic, which owns advertising and communications agencies like Deutsch, Initiative, McCann Erickson, Mullen and R/GA, acquired its ownership interest in Facebook in 2006.
The interest, amounting to about 0.5 percent of Facebook’s total shares, was bought for less than $5 million. Facebook agreed to sell the shares to Interpublic in exchange for Interpublic’s agreeing to spend $10 million with Facebook for clients of its agencies.
In a statement released on Monday morning, Michael I. Roth, chairman and chief executive at Interpublic, said the shares that are being sold would bring in “approximately $130 million.”
Interpublic acquired the stake as part of efforts to signal to current and potential clients that it was abreast of what was then the fledgling field of social marketing.
The “strategic relationship” with Facebook enabled Interpublic “to fast-track the growth of our social media offerings,” Mr. Roth said.
“Facebook has since become a part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people around the world,” he added. “Its ubiquity has meant the strategic value of our initial investment has moderated, while the financial value of that stake appreciated significantly.”
As a result, Mr. Roth said, “when an attractive opportunity to divest a portion of our position recently presented itself, we decided that it made sense to do so.”
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday morning, Interpublic said that it would receive $133 million in net cash proceeds for the shares it is selling.
The 8-K filing did not disclose to whom the shares are being sold. Interpublic said that it would record a pre-tax gain of $132 million once the sale is closed.
The money will go toward an existing program under which Interpublic is repurchasing shares of its common stock, the company said. Interpublic also said it would increase the total amount of shares being repurchased by 50 percent, to $450 million from $300 million. Through last Friday, the company said, it had bought back stock valued at $187.6 million, including fees, or about 16.8 million shares.
Interpublic stock was trading on Monday morning at $8.74, up 10 cents or 1.2 percent.
The fact that Interpublic owned a micro-part of Facebook was not a secret; the company had discussed it over the years, most recently at a conference in New York in March for investors and reporters.
At that time, there were estimates that Interpublic’s total stake in Facebook was worth $200 million to $300 million, depending on how Facebook is valued and the
Rabu, 21 September 2011
How to Cross-Post From Twitter to Facebook
By PAUL BOUTIN
A Facebook app, Selective Tweets, can import Twitter posts to your Facebook page if the post has been properly hashtagged.Do you find yourself posting the same thing to both Twitter and Facebook? There’s a simple way to automate that, without cross-posting every single update.
Login to Facebook, and go to the app page for the third-party Selective Tweets app. Enter your Twitter username into the box there, and click Save. Then, go to Twitter and log out. Now log back in. (If you don’t do this, you’ll get an error message telling you to log out the first time you try to cross-post.)
From now on, any Twitter post to which you append the Twitter hashtag #fb at the very end will also appear on your Facebook profile page. If you include a link URL in your update, and Twitter automatically shortens it to a link from the t.co domain, the shortened URL will also appear on your Facebook page.
The best part is that if you don’t bother to add the #fb hashtag, your post won’t go to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook have had cross-posting capability for years, letting you post from either one to the other, but those features require that every single status update goes to both places. That can become annoying to your Facebook friends, to the point where they stop reading you. Judicious use of the #fb tag may make them more attentive to the fewer items that you do cross-post.
A Facebook app, Selective Tweets, can import Twitter posts to your Facebook page if the post has been properly hashtagged.Login to Facebook, and go to the app page for the third-party Selective Tweets app. Enter your Twitter username into the box there, and click Save. Then, go to Twitter and log out. Now log back in. (If you don’t do this, you’ll get an error message telling you to log out the first time you try to cross-post.)
Social Networks
The way people connect digitally.
The best part is that if you don’t bother to add the #fb hashtag, your post won’t go to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook have had cross-posting capability for years, letting you post from either one to the other, but those features require that every single status update goes to both places. That can become annoying to your Facebook friends, to the point where they stop reading you. Judicious use of the #fb tag may make them more attentive to the fewer items that you do cross-post.
Facebook Aims to Simplify Privacy Settings
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Didn’t mean for your boss to see a picture of you on the beach that day you called in sick? Maybe you hadn’t meant for the police to know you were mobilizing your friends to join a public protest? Had you bargained on your high school principal seeing Facebook photographs that they considered so risqué they kicked you off the cheerleading squad?
Sharing online, as social media enthusiasts are learning, can have all sorts of unintended consequences offline.
Now Facebook says it wants to help you get a better grip on what you share. On Tuesday the company revealed changes to its privacy settings that it says are designed to more clearly show who knows what about your life on the Internet. The changes will take effect Thursday.
Every time you post a picture, update your status or add any other content to your Facebook page, you will be able to more easily specify who can see it: friends, everyone on the Internet, or a customized group. These will be indicated by icons that replace the current, more complicated padlock menu.
What is now called “everyone” in those settings will instead be called “public.” Facebook executives say they want to dispel any doubts about what the setting means. If you click “public,” that means anyone who is online can see it, including perfect strangers – or, worse, parents, prospective employers and your ex-wife’s divorce lawyers.
Similar settings will now appear next to other material you have posted, like your work history or photo albums, so you will no longer need to click to pages full of privacy options to change them.
Chris Cox, vice president for product at Facebook, put it this way: “We want to make this stuff unmistakably clear.”
No doubt the company also wants to diminish the possibility of legislation, investigation or litigation stemming from complicated or confusing privacy settings. And with mounting competition from other social networking sites, namely Google+, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications to different sets of friends and acquaintances, Facebook is also keen to keep its customers’ trust.
“Your profile should feel like your home on the Web,” the company said in a blog post. “You should never feel like stuff appears there that you don’t want, and you shouldn’t ever wonder who can see anything that shows up there.”
That includes tagged pictures. The site will now let you approve every picture in which you are tagged before it appears on your profile page. No longer will an unflattering or compromising photograph of you show up there without your consent, though the publisher of the photograph can still post it on his or her own page.
The changes point to some of the company’s growing pains, in which mass appeal can sometimes be a bit of a liability. Facebook is used today by 750 million people all over the world, with varying degrees of knowledge about what it means to have a life online. Company officials say they hope the latest changes will demystify privacy settings and ensure that Facebook users are never “surprised,” as Mr. Cox put it, by what others can see about them.
“We need to offer fine granularity in order to be a universally usable tool,” he added. With the new changes, “it’s more visual and prominent who the audience is.”
Indeed, company officials say feedback from users suggested that pictures work better than words. So now, icons help you select who can see what. “Public” is represented by a globe; “friends” by a pair of heads.
Whether users will find the changes more inviting or simpler remains to be seen -– as does whether they will opt to be more or less private. Facebook declined to share statistics on its users’ current privacy settings.
Didn’t mean for your boss to see a picture of you on the beach that day you called in sick? Maybe you hadn’t meant for the police to know you were mobilizing your friends to join a public protest? Had you bargained on your high school principal seeing Facebook photographs that they considered so risqué they kicked you off the cheerleading squad?
Sharing online, as social media enthusiasts are learning, can have all sorts of unintended consequences offline.
Now Facebook says it wants to help you get a better grip on what you share. On Tuesday the company revealed changes to its privacy settings that it says are designed to more clearly show who knows what about your life on the Internet. The changes will take effect Thursday.
Every time you post a picture, update your status or add any other content to your Facebook page, you will be able to more easily specify who can see it: friends, everyone on the Internet, or a customized group. These will be indicated by icons that replace the current, more complicated padlock menu.
What is now called “everyone” in those settings will instead be called “public.” Facebook executives say they want to dispel any doubts about what the setting means. If you click “public,” that means anyone who is online can see it, including perfect strangers – or, worse, parents, prospective employers and your ex-wife’s divorce lawyers.
Similar settings will now appear next to other material you have posted, like your work history or photo albums, so you will no longer need to click to pages full of privacy options to change them.
Chris Cox, vice president for product at Facebook, put it this way: “We want to make this stuff unmistakably clear.”
No doubt the company also wants to diminish the possibility of legislation, investigation or litigation stemming from complicated or confusing privacy settings. And with mounting competition from other social networking sites, namely Google+, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications to different sets of friends and acquaintances, Facebook is also keen to keep its customers’ trust.
“Your profile should feel like your home on the Web,” the company said in a blog post. “You should never feel like stuff appears there that you don’t want, and you shouldn’t ever wonder who can see anything that shows up there.”
That includes tagged pictures. The site will now let you approve every picture in which you are tagged before it appears on your profile page. No longer will an unflattering or compromising photograph of you show up there without your consent, though the publisher of the photograph can still post it on his or her own page.
“We need to offer fine granularity in order to be a universally usable tool,” he added. With the new changes, “it’s more visual and prominent who the audience is.”
Indeed, company officials say feedback from users suggested that pictures work better than words. So now, icons help you select who can see what. “Public” is represented by a globe; “friends” by a pair of heads.
Whether users will find the changes more inviting or simpler remains to be seen -– as does whether they will opt to be more or less private. Facebook declined to share statistics on its users’ current privacy settings.
Facebook's popularity
by : ey
While the company began as the pet project for a group of Harvard students, today it calls Palo Alto, Calif., home (the company also has an office in New York). Facebook has more than 350 employees, and the benefits package sounds pretty sweet. It includes:
Facebook also claims to be the No. 1 image-sharing service on the Internet, drawing more traffic than the second-, third- and fourth- place sites combined. In terms of image numbers, this means that Facebook receives more than 14 million uploaded images every day. Because there's no limit on how many images a member can upload and new members arrive at Facebook every day, this number will likely continue to rise exponentially.
Since June 2007, when Facebook first allowed third-party developers to create applications, developers have debuted more than 7,000 programs on the Facebook platform. Every day, developers introduce another 100 applications to the site. Facebook estimates that more than 80 percent of all members have used at least one third-party application.
Because it is so popular and heavily trafficked, Facebook requires massive amounts of storage space, both in a digital and physical sense. According to one Facebook employee, the company relies on around 200 memcached servers for production (day-to-day operation of the site) and a few more for developmental purposes [source: Grimm]. "Memcached" stands for memory caching, a method of temporarily storing data. A memcached server temporarily stores information in the server's memory, reducing the need to search a database for information. This decreases the amount of time it takes between a request for information and the delivery of that data.
Facebook also uses custom-built servers for back-end operations and a monitoring system to keep track of all the servers. Servers take up space, so Facebook leases facilities from vendors for server storage. In 2007, Facebook signed an agreement with DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) to lease 10,000 square feet of space in an Ashburn, Va., storage center [source: Data Center Knowledge].
So how does Facebook make enough money to cover its expenses? It generates some revenue by selling web advertising space, but the majority of its funding comes from private investors. According to Facebook, it has received more than $40 million in funding since it launched in 2004.
While the company began as the pet project for a group of Harvard students, today it calls Palo Alto, Calif., home (the company also has an office in New York). Facebook has more than 350 employees, and the benefits package sounds pretty sweet. It includes:
- Medical, dental and vision health plans with no premiums
- 401(k) plan
- Four weeks vacation and eight company holidays
- Free catered breakfast, lunch and dinner every day
- Dry cleaning and laundry services
- An IBM Thinkpad or Apple MacBook Pro -- employee's choice
Facebook also claims to be the No. 1 image-sharing service on the Internet, drawing more traffic than the second-, third- and fourth- place sites combined. In terms of image numbers, this means that Facebook receives more than 14 million uploaded images every day. Because there's no limit on how many images a member can upload and new members arrive at Facebook every day, this number will likely continue to rise exponentially.
Since June 2007, when Facebook first allowed third-party developers to create applications, developers have debuted more than 7,000 programs on the Facebook platform. Every day, developers introduce another 100 applications to the site. Facebook estimates that more than 80 percent of all members have used at least one third-party application.
 Image courtesy FacebookMark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, explains the concept of Facebook's social network. The site has grown from Zuckerburg's vision of connecting the Harvard campus to connecting users across the Internet. |
Because it is so popular and heavily trafficked, Facebook requires massive amounts of storage space, both in a digital and physical sense. According to one Facebook employee, the company relies on around 200 memcached servers for production (day-to-day operation of the site) and a few more for developmental purposes [source: Grimm]. "Memcached" stands for memory caching, a method of temporarily storing data. A memcached server temporarily stores information in the server's memory, reducing the need to search a database for information. This decreases the amount of time it takes between a request for information and the delivery of that data.
Facebook also uses custom-built servers for back-end operations and a monitoring system to keep track of all the servers. Servers take up space, so Facebook leases facilities from vendors for server storage. In 2007, Facebook signed an agreement with DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) to lease 10,000 square feet of space in an Ashburn, Va., storage center [source: Data Center Knowledge].
So how does Facebook make enough money to cover its expenses? It generates some revenue by selling web advertising space, but the majority of its funding comes from private investors. According to Facebook, it has received more than $40 million in funding since it launched in 2004.
Facebook is the world's largest social network
Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press, Via Associated Press
Facebook is the world's largest social network, with 750 million users worldwide as of July 2011.
More than any other company, it is defining what some see as the "social'' era of the Internet, in which connections made among people replace algorithm-driven searches. And its policies, more than any others, seem to be driving the definition of privacy in this new age.
The company, founded in 2004 by a Harvard sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg, began life catering first to Harvard students and then to all high school and college students. It has since evolved into a broadly popular online destination used by both teenagers and adults of all ages. In country after country, Facebook has cemented itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks.
It has also come to be seen as one of the new titans of the Internet, challenging even Google with a vision of a Web tied together through personal relationships and recommendations, rather than by search algorithms. In a major expansion, Facebook has spread itself across other Web sites by offering members the chance to "Like'' something — share it with their network — without leaving the Web page they're on.
Recent Developments
In July 2011, hoping to give its users a more intimate, real-time way to stay in touch, the company introduced video chat in a partnership with Skype, the Internet calling service.
In September 2011 Facebook is expected to unveil a media platform that will allow people to easily share their favorite music, television shows and movies using cloud-based digital music services like Spotify and Rhapsody, effectively making the basic profile page a primary entertainment hub.
By putting them in front of millions of users, Facebook’s new platform could introduce the music services to vast new audiences. But the new plan will ratchet up the competitive pressure on these fledgling services, forcing them to offer more free music as enticements to new users.
According to the media and technology executives, Facebook has made agreements with a number of media companies to develop a way for a user’s profile page to display whatever entertainment he is consuming on those outside services. Links that appear on a widget or tab, or as part of a user’s news feed, would point a curious friend directly to the content.
An Internet Titan
Facebook has increasingly been seen as the only company to pose a threat to Google, which has used its dominant position in search and online ad placement to expand into most corners of the Web.
But as a closed network, Facebook's oceans of content are out of the reach of Google's search engines, and some analysts think the personal recommendations made through Facebook networks could become a rival to the algorithm-based results pioneered by Google.
In one sign of how much Facebook regards Google as a competitor, The Daily Beast reported that in May 2011 Facebook had hired a public relations firm to persuade reporters and privacy advocates to write stories critical of a new Google service, Social Circles.
Privacy is a sore subject for Facebook, which has made a series of stumbles on the subject. With the potential for legal and regulatory clashes growing along with its influence, the company has layered its executive, legal, policy and communications ranks with high-powered politicos from both parties, beefing up its firepower for future battles in Washington and beyond.
Disputed Origins
The company's rise has been marked by strings of controversies. Three other Harvard students maintain that they came up with the original idea and that Mr. Zuckerberg, whom they had hired to write code for the site, stole the idea to create Facebook.
The company has denied the allegations. Another Harvard classmate, Aaron Greenspan, claims that he created the underlying architecture for both companies, but has declined to enter in a legal battle.
"The Social Network," a movie released in 2010 about Facebook’s tumultuous origins, offered up what A.O. Scott called "a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth."
Facebook has strenuously, and Mr. Zuckerberg more quietly, asserted that the portrayal of the company's founding is fiction. And Mr. Zuckerberg disputed the characterization of him in the film, though in a New Yorker magazine profile, he acknowledged having indulged in a bit of sophomoric arrogance.
Privacy Concerns
Privacy worries have bedeviled Facebook since its early days, from the introduction of the endless scroll of data known as the news feed to, most recently, the use of facial recognition technology to identify people in photographs.
At the nub of all those worries, of course, is how much people share on Facebook, with whom and — perhaps most important — how well they understand the potential consequences.
The back and forth between Facebook and its users over privacy is gaining importance as the company's growth continues unabated. Facebook's policies, more than those of any other company, are helping to define standards for privacy in the Internet age.
The company has struggled to find a balance between giving users too little control over privacy and giving them too much, for fear they won’t share much at all. Seeking a happy medium, Facebook announced changes again in August 2011 that it says will help users get a grip on what they share.
Implicit in these changes is the challenge brought on by Facebook’s own success. It is used by 750 million people worldwide, with varying degrees of knowledge about what it means to have a life online. There is the looming prospect that the company will go public, along with the abiding concern about potential government regulation or litigation stemming from privacy issues.
Not least, there is the need for Facebook to cultivate the trust of its users, amid growing competition from Google’s nascent social networking service, Google Plus, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications with different sets of friends and acquaintances.
The Goldman Deal
In January 2011, Facebook raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor in a transaction that valued the company at $50 billion. As part of the deal with Facebook, the bank could raise as much as $1.5 billion from investors for Facebook. The new money gave the company more firepower to steal away valuable employees, develop new products and possibly pursue acquisitions — all without being a publicly traded company. The investment also allowed earlier shareholders, including Facebook employees, to cash out at least some of their stakes.
The investment came as the Securities and Exchange Commission began an inquiry into the increasingly hot private market for shares in Internet companies, including Facebook, Twitter, the gaming site Zynga and LinkedIn, an online professional networking site. Some experts suggest the inquiry is focused on whether certain companies are improperly using the private market to get around public disclosure requirements.
Also in January, catching many off guard, Goldman said that it would limit its Facebook offering to foreign investors, excluding clients in the United States because of worries that the deal could run afoul of securities.
The offering to high-net-worth clients was supposed to have been a triumph for the firm, not the serious embarrassment it became. Goldman has been trying to move past run-ins with regulators, including a $550 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010 over a complex mortgage investment. The Facebook plan raised new questions about whether Goldman tried to push regulatory boundaries once again.
Mr. Zuckerberg had sought to keep close control over the company, spurning a $1 billion offer from Yahoo in 2006 and playing down the idea of a stock offering. But in the wake of the Goldman investment, Facebook said that it will begin reporting its financial results by April 2012, setting the stage for a likely IPO.
Facebook has increasingly been seen as the only company to pose a threat to Google, which has used its dominant position in search and online ad placement to expand into most corners of the Web.
But as a closed network, Facebook's oceans of content are out of the reach of Google's search engines, and some analysts think the personal recommendations made through Facebook networks could become a rival to the algorithm-based results pioneered by Google.
In one sign of how much Facebook regards Google as a competitor, The Daily Beast reported that in May 2011 Facebook had hired a public relations firm to persuade reporters and privacy advocates to write stories critical of a new Google service, Social Circles.
Privacy is a sore subject for Facebook, which has made a series of stumbles on the subject. With the potential for legal and regulatory clashes growing along with its influence, the company has layered its executive, legal, policy and communications ranks with high-powered politicos from both parties, beefing up its firepower for future battles in Washington and beyond.
Disputed Origins
The company's rise has been marked by strings of controversies. Three other Harvard students maintain that they came up with the original idea and that Mr. Zuckerberg, whom they had hired to write code for the site, stole the idea to create Facebook.
The company has denied the allegations. Another Harvard classmate, Aaron Greenspan, claims that he created the underlying architecture for both companies, but has declined to enter in a legal battle.
"The Social Network," a movie released in 2010 about Facebook’s tumultuous origins, offered up what A.O. Scott called "a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth."
Facebook has strenuously, and Mr. Zuckerberg more quietly, asserted that the portrayal of the company's founding is fiction. And Mr. Zuckerberg disputed the characterization of him in the film, though in a New Yorker magazine profile, he acknowledged having indulged in a bit of sophomoric arrogance.
Privacy Concerns
Privacy worries have bedeviled Facebook since its early days, from the introduction of the endless scroll of data known as the news feed to, most recently, the use of facial recognition technology to identify people in photographs.
At the nub of all those worries, of course, is how much people share on Facebook, with whom and — perhaps most important — how well they understand the potential consequences.
The back and forth between Facebook and its users over privacy is gaining importance as the company's growth continues unabated. Facebook's policies, more than those of any other company, are helping to define standards for privacy in the Internet age.
The company has struggled to find a balance between giving users too little control over privacy and giving them too much, for fear they won’t share much at all. Seeking a happy medium, Facebook announced changes again in August 2011 that it says will help users get a grip on what they share.
Implicit in these changes is the challenge brought on by Facebook’s own success. It is used by 750 million people worldwide, with varying degrees of knowledge about what it means to have a life online. There is the looming prospect that the company will go public, along with the abiding concern about potential government regulation or litigation stemming from privacy issues.
Not least, there is the need for Facebook to cultivate the trust of its users, amid growing competition from Google’s nascent social networking service, Google Plus, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications with different sets of friends and acquaintances.
The Goldman Deal
In January 2011, Facebook raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor in a transaction that valued the company at $50 billion. As part of the deal with Facebook, the bank could raise as much as $1.5 billion from investors for Facebook. The new money gave the company more firepower to steal away valuable employees, develop new products and possibly pursue acquisitions — all without being a publicly traded company. The investment also allowed earlier shareholders, including Facebook employees, to cash out at least some of their stakes.
The investment came as the Securities and Exchange Commission began an inquiry into the increasingly hot private market for shares in Internet companies, including Facebook, Twitter, the gaming site Zynga and LinkedIn, an online professional networking site. Some experts suggest the inquiry is focused on whether certain companies are improperly using the private market to get around public disclosure requirements.
Also in January, catching many off guard, Goldman said that it would limit its Facebook offering to foreign investors, excluding clients in the United States because of worries that the deal could run afoul of securities.
The offering to high-net-worth clients was supposed to have been a triumph for the firm, not the serious embarrassment it became. Goldman has been trying to move past run-ins with regulators, including a $550 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010 over a complex mortgage investment. The Facebook plan raised new questions about whether Goldman tried to push regulatory boundaries once again.
Mr. Zuckerberg had sought to keep close control over the company, spurning a $1 billion offer from Yahoo in 2006 and playing down the idea of a stock offering. But in the wake of the Goldman investment, Facebook said that it will begin reporting its financial results by April 2012, setting the stage for a likely IPO.
How Facebook Works
by : ey
You can access Facebook features using a mobile device like a cell phone in three ways: mobile text messages, mobile uploads and mobile Web browsing. Let's take a look at each of these in turn.
Text messages use a standardized mobile text transfer method called Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). SMS allows you to send and receive text messages to services like Web sites, voice-mail systems and e-mail servers. An SMS message can only be up to 160 characters long. The MMS standard is an improvement on SMS, with no size limit to messages (though very large messages require an advanced 3G phone network to transfer through the system). Not all phones have SMS or MMS capabilities.
When you send a text message from your phone to Facebook, the message transmits to a mobile switching center (MSC), which sends the signal to a signal transfer point (STP). From there, the message goes to a short message service center (SMSC), which then sends the text to Facebook. When Facebook sends a message to your phone, the process is reversed. Using text messages, you can look up basic member profile information, send messages (including pokes and wall posts), add friends to your network and interact with some Facebook applications.
Mobile uploads work in a similar way to text messages, but must use MMS. MMS allows you to send not only text, but also sound files, video and images. The transfer method is similar to SMS, but it requires a handheld device compatible with the MMS standard. Because some devices aren't MMS compatible, service providers sometimes build in a feature that alerts a user when he or she has received a multimedia message. The message usually tells the user to visit a Web page link to view the message.
With MMS messages sent from your phone, you can upload photos to your profile -- they'll appear in a special uploaded photos section. You can also upload notes or videos from your phone to your profile. In either case, you must create your multimedia message first, then send it to the appropriate e-mail address.
Your phone must have Web browsing capabilities in order for you to visit Facebook from it. You'll need to direct your phone's browser to m.facebook.com, Facebook's site designed specifically for mobile browsing. To upload notes to Facebook, you send the message to notes@facebook.com. For photos or videos, you send the message to mobile@facebook.com.
Unlike typical Facebook pages, the mobile counterpart's code is in Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML). XHTML is a more restricted language than standard HTML. One of the reasons for this is that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization that develops interoperable technologies for the Web, recognized the need for a Web language that mobile devices could easily interpret. Computers have more resources than mobile devices, and can interpret much more complex Web pages than a cell phone or similar gadget. XHTML helps to level the playing field.
You can access Facebook features using a mobile device like a cell phone in three ways: mobile text messages, mobile uploads and mobile Web browsing. Let's take a look at each of these in turn.
Text messages use a standardized mobile text transfer method called Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). SMS allows you to send and receive text messages to services like Web sites, voice-mail systems and e-mail servers. An SMS message can only be up to 160 characters long. The MMS standard is an improvement on SMS, with no size limit to messages (though very large messages require an advanced 3G phone network to transfer through the system). Not all phones have SMS or MMS capabilities.
Mobile uploads work in a similar way to text messages, but must use MMS. MMS allows you to send not only text, but also sound files, video and images. The transfer method is similar to SMS, but it requires a handheld device compatible with the MMS standard. Because some devices aren't MMS compatible, service providers sometimes build in a feature that alerts a user when he or she has received a multimedia message. The message usually tells the user to visit a Web page link to view the message.
With MMS messages sent from your phone, you can upload photos to your profile -- they'll appear in a special uploaded photos section. You can also upload notes or videos from your phone to your profile. In either case, you must create your multimedia message first, then send it to the appropriate e-mail address.
Unlike typical Facebook pages, the mobile counterpart's code is in Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML). XHTML is a more restricted language than standard HTML. One of the reasons for this is that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization that develops interoperable technologies for the Web, recognized the need for a Web language that mobile devices could easily interpret. Computers have more resources than mobile devices, and can interpret much more complex Web pages than a cell phone or similar gadget. XHTML helps to level the playing field.
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