New reports suggest that Facebook is setting its sights on Instagram, and looking to including Instagram style photo filters in a new update its about to roll out to its Facebook application. Facebook is apparently working on the new photo filters and hopes to release the new updates to its application over the coming months in an attempt to draw users away from Instagram.

Two Facebook engineers have disclosed the information about the new photo filters updates and explain that some of the dozen or so photo filters are similar to Instagram like old-style camera lenses and grainy film.

Since its launch less than a year ago its customer base has exploded and there have even been rumours that Facebook at one stage was even considering acquiring Instagram.

Both Instagram and Facebook have declined to comment on the new updates.

In half a decade Facebook has become one of the most successful companies on earth but also, a new survey of US consumers has found, one of the least liked.

The level of Facebook’s unpopularity uncovered by the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) will make difficult reading for its management on a ranking that placed it 15^thfrom bottom of 227 companies across a variety of sectors.

Facebook is now at 66 on the ACSI index, two better than last year, but some way behind YouTube’s and CNN’s 74, Burger King’s 75, Microsoft’s 78 and Google’s 83. The top performers included Amazon and Unilever on 87, Apple on 86, Lexus on 85, and FoxNews on 82.

“Even with this year’s two-point increase, Facebook continues to register as one of the lowest-scoring companies measured by the ACSI,” said the report.

Below it lies a desert of traditionally-disliked companies such as airlines and mobile communications companies. The only company in a similar business to Facebook that scored as poorly was MySpace, which has plummeted so low it now no longer even registers as even being merely unpopular. It seems to have no measurable profile at all.

None of this would probably matter to Facebook or its users if it weren’t for the looming appearance of Google+, which for the first time offers consumers a competitive choice.

“Google is a company that has traditionally received ACSI scores in the 80s—it is among the highest-rated companies in terms of customer satisfaction. If Google can carry over their customer-centric ethos to Google+, Facebook could have serious competition that has the potential to very quickly erode its market share,” the authors conclude.

Facebook has had a difficult year over privacy issues culminating in an Orwellian plot to use PR firm to smear rival Google, a move that won it few admirers.

In the search engine market there seem to be two winners, Google and Bing. Ask.com, Yahoo, and AOL all appear register lower index scores, reflecting their much smaller market share.

Some of the preferences could be related to politics and image as much customer satisfaction; the more liberal HuffingtonPost.com scored a lowly 69 while the sometimes controversial FoxNews.com rated a much better 82.

Although it only measures US consumer opinion, the American Customer Satisfaction Index is calculated by ForeSee Results from 70,000 interviews carried out throughout the year.

The world is already abuzz about Google+, even though it’s not accessible to most. Still, many doubt that anyone, even the mighty one from Mountain View, can catch up to Facebook’s half a billion (at least) active users. Unless, maybe there was a simple way to import your Facebook friends to your Google+ Circles.

Inevitably, there is now an app for that. Actually, it’s a Chrome extension.

Facebook Friend Exporter is the work of developer Mohamed Mansour, a software engineer who works at Blackberry maker Research in Motion, according to his online resume (and his Google+ page), and develops open source tools in his spare time.

The extension wasn’t designed with Google+ in mind. In fact version 1 was released last November, but it has exploded in the past week as the limited number of Google+ beta users have gone searching for ways to port over their entire Facebook world to Google.

Launching years after Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to look at Google as simply playing catch up in the social networking game with the release of its Google+ “field test.” But look back in time and it’s clear that Google has been playing in the social world for years, but never quite put all the pieces together in one place.

Here’s a chronological look at the long path Google has taken to form what could be the next big social network, if the company can pull off the mega-coup of convincing most of the half a billion Facebook users it has a better service.

2004 - Orkut: Google had a social network in place long before your Mom joined Facebook. Orkut was quietly launched more than 7 years ago to compete with Friendster, and it’s stayed quiet in the United States and most of the world, but has become the dominant social network in a few countries, most notably Brazil. Hilariously, it’s still in beta.

By Maxwell Cooter 

Move over Outlook, make way for Twitter and Yammer. The hegemony of email as a business medium is set o be superseded by social networking in the future according to new research from Gartner. The company is predicting that 20 percent of business communication is going to through social networking sites by 2014.

The company said that collaboration was slowly moving to the cloud, and we could expect to see steep growth rates for sales of social networking services – both on-premises and cloud software. Gartner predicted that the percentage of email accounts on cloud services will grow to 10 per cent by year-end 2012, up 7 per cent from 2009.  

“In the past, organisations supported collaboration through email and highly structured applications only,” said Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner. Speaking at the company’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010, she said “Today, social paradigms are converging with email, instant messaging (IM) and presence, creating new collaboration styles. However, a truly collaborative, effective and efficient workplace will not arise until organisations make these capabilities widely available and users become more comfortable with them. Technology is only an enabler; culture is a must for success.

“The rigid distinction between email and social networks will erode,” Basso said. “Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer email capabilities.”

 

New Internet statistics published by Nielsen Internet research for June show that online users are now spending 23% of their Internet time browsing social networks such as Twitter  and Facebook. With less time being spent checking e-mail, reading news sites or viewing traditional online portals such as Yahoo or MSN.

The 23% is an increase of 7 points over the last year and is the single biggest jump of any Nielsen’s online category, and beats time checking e-mail, browsing Web portals, and playing games (playing online games was the second biggest and accounts for 10% of users time)

The new statistics definitely show an increasing trend towards social sites rather than portals and even Google. Google users may visit more often in a day but spend a lot less time on the search engine, choosing to spend hours on social networking sites instead.

via: www.tgdaily.com

 Facebook has launched a new beta service that it hopes will allow you to tap into the huge knowledge base of its users.

The new Facebook ‘Ask Question’ feature has a button on your home page
and allows you to ask a question to all 500 million Facebook users at once for the answer.



You can add photos to your question or even create a poll of answers for people to use. You can also tag your question, allowing you to target users with that interest and hopefully the knowledge to help you out.



Once posted your question is then viewable by anyone on the Internet so just be careful the questions are not too personal.

Similar services have already been in use from Yahoo and a new recently launched system from Ask.com, but with 500 million potential brains to tap into, Facebook hopes this will give them the edge.

Facebook has responded, by saying: ‘In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook…this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook.’

If you haven’t already set your privacy settings within Facecbook it wont help much now anyway as all your details are now in an easy to digest file available for anyone to down.

Bowes says he did the research to show people just how much information Facebook was making publicly available and users should be more carefully to what they are agreeing to show in their Facebook accounts