|  |  |  | | | | | NYT > Facebook | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | September 23, 2011, 5:14 am By THE NEW YORK TIMES 
On Tuesday, Lydia Polgreen hosted our first live Facebook discussion about India. Ms. Polgreen, The Times's New Delhi-based South Asia correspondent since 2009, answered a series of thoughtful questions from readers on a range of topics, from corruption to Kashmir to H1B visas and more. Below is a transcript of the discussion. Stay tuned for more live Facebook chats in the months to come, and please subscribe to Ms. Polgreen's updates on Facebook, which you can do at facebook.com/lpolgreen. On Twitter, you'll find her at @lpolgreen. View "India Ink" on Storify   | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | By OMID MALEKAN The world of finance is a sophisticated and serious place, full of powerful, serious people and important … uh … serious … ideas. You get the picture. But why take it seriously, all the time? Omid Malekan imagines a comical, off-the-record encounter between two highly influential characters in the news. Animation Software by Xtranormal | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Back in March, a splashy start-up called Color Labs introduced a cellphone app that let people share pictures with friends and strangers nearby. The service seemed to have everything going for it: an accomplished serial entrepreneur at its helm and $41 million in the bank from noted investors like Bain and Sequoia Capital. There was just one thing missing: users.  The new version of Color is built on top of Facebook.
Although 1 million people downloaded the original app, barely 10 percent are still using it, said Bill Nguyen, the perennially chipper chief executive and co-founder of Color. "And that's if I'm lucky." But on Thursday, during f8, Facebook's developer conference in San Francisco, Mr. Nguyen is introducing a fully revamped version of Color. It will retain the same name, but instead of relying on its members to generate pictures to share, it will pull in all of their photos from Facebook and arrange them in a easily browsable format. And as on Facebook, people can "like" and comment on photographs, as well as share them on the app and to the Web site through Color's mobile application. The application will also let users create, edit and share group photo albums — a functionality that Facebook has not yet offered. But the killer feature of the new Color, Mr. Nguyen says, is the ability to let friends "visit" one another through the application, or tune in live and see what their friends are doing at that exact moment. Say, for example, that a friend posts a picture from a Justin Bieber concert. Other friends using the application, or who see the picture on Facebook, can request a "visit" through the application — or permission to begin live-streaming with that friend and see what they're seeing at that moment. Users don't have to be actively using the application to request visits with friends. If someone is bored and curious about what their friend is up to, the application will send a push notification letting the recipient know her friend wants to start a live stream. People can view the live stream through the application, or through Facebook's Web site. In addition, other friends can choose to tune in and watch the broadcast. Color says it built the live streaming architecture itself and incorporated the remaining technology from the first version of Color for the revamped version. It works on both iPhone and Android devices and over both 3G and Wi-Fi networks. The primary reason Color fell flat on its face after it was released, its creators say, was because there weren't enough people using it to make it interesting enough to revisit on a regular basis. "I'd take a picture on Color and what, 20 people could see it?" said Mr. Nguyen. "Now we're talking about access to 750 million users instead of 1 million." The company, which was originally trying to establish its own app-centric, proximity-based social network, scrapped that plan and "decided to build an end-to-end service on Facebook because it has such massive scale and reach," he said. Even if the first version of Color had taken off, Mr. Nguyen said, "it still would have been a drop in the bucket when compared to Facebook." He said the new Color won't interfere with any photo-sharing services that Facebook may eventually roll out, because Color is enabling a new kind of experience between the mobile phone and the Web. He also doesn't think it'll compete with Skype or FaceTime because the application isn't designed for private, one-to-one conversations. "It lets people create their own broadcast network," he said. The new version of Color will remain in private beta testing for a while longer, he said. Eventually, the company will roll out invites to a larger group that includes the users of the original application. Mr. Nguyen, who described himself as a "social recluse," said that he realized that Color needed to be more engaging and more social to lure in new users who would find it rewarding. Ultimately, it's why he thinks this version of the application will succeed. "If we're lucky, we can create a new social norm and a sense of empathy and engagement around what we're doing and how people are sharing," he said. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Nick Bilton/The New York TimesAndy Samberg, a comedian who plays Mark Zuckerberg on Saturday Night Live, opened the Facebook F8 conference.
1:56 p.m. | Updated Adding more announcements from conference. 4:12 p.m. | Updated Yet more updates at end. At Facebook's F8 annual developer conference, the company announced that it was teaming up with media companies like Netflix and Spotify to let users update their feeds with information about what they are listening to, watching and reading. The conference didn't open with any new company announcements but rather with Andy Samberg, a comedian on "Saturday Night Live" who often plays Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder. After he spent several minutes poking fun at Facebook, the real Mark Zuckerberg appeared on stage. Mr. Zuckerberg soon jumped into discussing new features on Facebook. He touted the growth of Facebook in recent years, noting that the company reached a milestone last week "when half a billion people used Facebook in a single day." Mr. Zuckerberg said one of the problems with Facebook is the profile page. Over the years, he said, the profile page has become difficult to navigate, and it is hard to find older posts. To solve this problem, Facebook is releasing a product called Timeline. Mr. Zuckerberg said Timeline "has three pieces: all your stories, all your life and a new way to express who you are." Timeline offers a highly visual view of a user's Facebook profile and organizes content into photos, events and apps, all based on a timeline view that stretches back to the beginning of a user's time on Facebook. Timeline is designed to work on mobile devices too, offering a visually immersed stream. "It's the story of your life," Mr. Zuckerberg said. Mr. Zuckerberg said the company was updating the Open Graph, the company's developer platform. These updates will create "real-time serendipity," allowing people to engage with their friends' activities online beyond just "liking" something. For example, if a friend updates his Facebook status to note that he is listening to a song on Spotify, the online music service, you will be able to click on the link and listen to the song together, at the same time. The Spotify track will also play directly within the Facebook page. But the new developer updates go beyond music to include videos, gaming and news. Facebook has partnered with more than a dozen developers and music platforms including Spotify, iHeartRadio and Rdio. The company's video partners include Netflix, Hulu and Blockbuster. Brett Taylor, Facebook's chief technology officer, appeared on stage to discuss the technical aspects of the new Open Graph. In particular he talked about Graph Rank, which he said acts as a kind of artificial intelligence for Facebook users. Mr. Taylor said Graph Rank will change and organize a user's Timeline view based on a number of criteria, including the time of day and friends' activities. For more from F8, see our posts about a new Facebook photo-sharing app from Color and a partnership with Yahoo News. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Yahoo is making its news more social. 
A new service introduced on Thursday will let users see and share which Yahoo news articles they and their Facebook friends have read. By showing what are essentially recommendations, Yahoo is hoping that people will click on more articles. Friends are more likely to have common interests and would therefore have similar reading tastes, the theory goes. "You'll be able to discover content through the lens of your friends," said Blake Irving, who leads Yahoo's products. The new service was timed to Facebook's F8 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, where Facebook unveiled its latest enhancements. Yahoo's new service comes as the company struggles to revive its business, despite having more than 600 million users globally. Advertising revenue is stagnant and new products have been few and far between over the past year. Earlier this month, Yahoo's board fired Carol A. Bartz, the company's chief executive, after a lackluster two and a half year tenure. A number of suitors interested in buying some or part of Yahoo are circling. Yahoo news is one of the company's crown jewels with more than 80 million unique monthly users, making it the top news site in terms of traffic. Increasingly, however, people are getting their news by sharing links to individual articles through Facebook or Twitter rather than going directly to news sites.
Previously, to share articles with friends, Yahoo users had to cut and paste links in e-mail. To sign up for the new service, users must have a Facebook account. Nearly 85 percent of Yahoo users have one, according to Yahoo. At the top of Yahoo news pages, users will see images of their Facebook friends who are also signed up. Clicking on the images brings up a list of Yahoo news articles that those people have read. Individual articles will be stamped with names of friends who have read them, as in "Steve Smith and two others have read this." Automatic updates on Facebook will also tip off friends to what people are reading. Yahoo executives responded to questions about privacy by emphasizing that users can control what to share, if anything. The service is opt-in, meaning users choose to join, and they can delete articles that would otherwise be shared in their reading list. | | | | | | | | | |  | |  | |  |
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