social network

A social networking giant Facebook has purchase a digital book publisher Push Pop for an undisclosed amount of money.

The ebook publisher was co-founded by an ex-Apple employee Mike Matas, who designed UIs and artwork for the company's Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad products.

"Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook," said the company in a statement on its website.

Zynga is launching first game in mainland China in association with Tencent Holdings Ltd in a move to grab a share in the $5.8 billion Chinese games market.

An early version of a game called Zynga City will be released by Zynga on Tencents' open platform, Zynga said in a statement on Monday.

It will be a Chinese version of CityVille, Zynga’s most popular game, featuring Chinese architecture, references to Chinese pop culture, as well as events and contests in the game that will be linked to Chinese holidays and news.

A group of hackers Anonymous decided to launch their own social networking website called AnonPlus. The move comes after Google shut down Anonymous’ Google+ account for community standard violations, reports Mashable.

At the moment there is only a welcome page where AnonPlus explains the main idea of the website.

"This lil info dump of a site is here simply to dispence (sic) info, soon the actual site will go up and you can begin to interact with it," a message on the site notes.

A new study revealed that Facebook is falling in terms of user satisfaction losing thus significant market share to Google+.

American Customers Satisfaction Index (ACSI)/ForeSee Results E-Business Report showed that while Facebook performed well this year compared to the last it still ranked last among all the sites included in the study.

The report author Larry Freed described the Facebook user experience as "poor” saying Facebook has benefitted from "a monopoly of sorts" in the social networking market.

Parents in Britain cannot obtain friendship with their children on the Facebook website, reveals a new survey. 30% of UK parents get rejected when sending Facebook “friend” requests to their children and many of them then use other people's login details in order to keep track of their kids’ activities.

Talking to journalists at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, chairman of Google Inc Eric Schmidt said that the company is open to more co-operation with social-media giants Facebook and Twitter, and believes there is room for multiple social networks as it is launching its another social media project.

Schmidt noted that Google will cooperate fully with U.S. antitrust regulators but will not let the formal probe launched last month distract or disrupt its strategy.

Google Inc terminated inviting users to join its new social networking service just 48 hours after the official launch.

Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said the company had "shut down invite mechanism" for the Google+ service for the night, in a note he posted on Google+ on Wednesday evening.

"Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way," Gundotra wrote.

On Tuesday Google announced the service Google+ as another effort to dethrone Facebook from its crown position in the social media market.

American Express OPEN announced the launch of YourBuzz service that allows small businesses to manage their online presence and learn what is being said about them and their rivals in the social networking sphere. YourBuzz aggregates conversations across such sites as Yelp and CitySearch as well as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. YourBuzz ensures listings are accurate, builds customer relationships, and mitigates the damage that can be done from poor reviews.

American Express is launching a new program to allow its Cardmembers to pay for Facebook Ads by means of Membership Rewards points, the first time in the history rewards are redeemed this way.

With the addition of Membership Rewards points as a payment option, business owners now have a powerful new way to build their businesses through the rapidly growing area of social media advertising.

MySpace has been sold by News Corp for $35 million to an advertising company Specific Media along with the singer Justin Timberlake. It is just a fraction of what News Corp paid for the social networking giant in 2005. At that time MySpace was purchased for $580 million.

Specific Media which deals with digital advertising did not unveil financial details of the deal. The company said that Timberlake would take an ownership stake and serve a "major role" in developing a strategy for Myspace.

A Facebook backed social networking browser RockMelt secured financing of $30 million from two investors. Accel Partners and Khosla Partners joined existing investor Andreesen Horowitz in this latest round, the company and investors said. Accel's Jim Breyer and Khosla's Vinod Khosla will take observer roles on RockMelt's board.

According to a new survey by Harris Interactive Americans still prefer voice phone communication and email over social networking, texting and other messaging modes for reaching out to family, friends and co-workers. The survey polled 2,361 U.S. adults age 18 and over.

61% of the polled said they use other technology when not communicating in person. Of these 85% used voice/phone, 58% used texting, and 56% used email.

Tuesday at the D9 conference organized by the blog AllThingsD, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told that the company tried unsuccessfully to team up with Facebook in a move to tap into the new market.

Schmidt noted that social networking site Facebook had rebuffed its entreaties to do a deal, while acknowledging he had not pushed hard enough to address the rising threat posed by Facebook during his tenure as CEO.

"Three years ago I wrote memos talking about this general problem. I knew that I had to do something and I failed to do it," Schmidt said.

A new research has been recently published by Netpop that reveals 8 in 10 social media users feel “uneasy” or “ambivalent” about sharing personal information on social media sites.

In total the study found this proportion:

42% of social media users are “Uneasies” (concerned about privacy)
38% … are “Ambivalents” (uncertain about privacy)
20% … are “Laissez-Faires” (not concerned about privacy)

It became known that Toyota Motor Corp and cloud computing company Salesforce.com Inc are going to launch a social network service that will help the car owner with their cars. The system will remind the car owners about the maintenance checks and other things.